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- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
It's Nicholas Fuentes, who I thought I'd give a follow a month or two ago, but then I saw him tweeting vile anti-Israel tropes, and dink! Unfollowed the f***er.
I'm not for punching Nazis, but I don't think top conservatives should be mainstreaming racist goons like this guy, and apparently Fuentes was getting some attention from "alt-right" icons at CPAC, including Faith Goldy, who I like (but who is too close to genuine racists).
In any case, we live in interesting times, as they say.
I just saw this Reuters piece, linked at Mediagazer, "Canada's conservative Rebel Media site down after service cut." And reading it I find that, in addition to Goldy, "Several other contributors have left the online publication over the past week and some prominent conservative Canada politicians have also sought to distance themselves from the site .... The defections include co-founder Brian Lilley, who according to the Globe and Media was uncomfortable with the site's increasing harsh tone and growing association with the likes of white nationalist Richard Spencer."
Oh, ahem, that's pretty major.
So, googling around I see this piece at the Daily Caller, "Rebel Media Implodes" (safe link):
It’s chaos this week at Rebel Media, one of the few conservative media resources available in Canada.
In the last week, the news service has lost at least four employees to resignation and another to a firing while Rebel founder and editor-in-chief Ezra Levant now says he is being blackmailed over alleged misuse of fundraising dollars.
And forget the November cruise where Levant promised up close and personal interaction between Rebel personalities and supporters. Norwegian Cruise Lines is no longer sponsoring the Caribbean voyage, citing the Rebel’s politics being “inconsistent” with their own vision of the world.
New Canadian Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer cancelled a Friday interview with the Rebel, citing in a statement the need to change the “editorial directions” of the news service.
The cancellation just the latest in a series of corporate rebuffs that have hurt Rebel Media’s advertising base.
The trouble all started last weekend when headline reporter Faith Goldy — fired on Thursday — was covering the Charlottesville protest. Her on-scene commentary was perceived as favorable to the white supremacists that leadership candidates in the newly-minted United Conservative Party of Alberta began to complain and insist that the party distance itself from The Rebel.
Levant sent a memo to supporters — and obtained by The Daily Caller — on Tuesday that disaowed any support for the alt-right; but it was not enough to satisfy malcontents within the organization.
Co-founder and commentator Brain Lilley quit on Wednesday. That resignation was followed by the departures of contributors Barbara Kay and John Robson.
Levant announced Thursday that provocative right-wing commentator Gavin McInnes had also left the company.
Now Levant says he is being blackmailed by former British contributor Caolan Robertson, who released a video on Thursday on YouTube that alleges Rebel Media has been conducting dishonest fundraising campaigns for the express purposes of raising money for the organization and increasing into database...
I mentioned this before. If Rebel Media reporters go too far right, hanging out with white supremacists, and so forth, that's too much for Ezra Levant. And it's too much for me.
Faith is pretty righteous. Frankly, I'm surprised she'd go and interview with the Daily Stormer, a KKK/neo-Nazi stronghold. But it is what it is. She'll land on her feet, no doubt.
I fully support this, though. Ezra's totally pro-Israel and anti-racist, just like me.!
In June, Zack Exley, a political organizer and a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, published a report on “Black Pigeon Speaks,” a political commentator on YouTube. In Exley’s judgment, B.P.S. is emblematic of a marginal but ascendant sort of YouTube figure — a type that is becoming a meaningful force in the practice of politics online. B.P.S. has, by any objective standard, a significant and engaged audience; at the moment, he has about 215,000 followers, and his uploads have been viewed more than 25 million times. In an introductory video, he describes himself as something like a pundit or an analyst: “I attempt to make sense out of the increasingly nonsensical world we all share,” he says of his channel. “I try and be only as offensive as I need to be.” His videos are unhurried, heavy on explanation and argument, regularly stretching over the 10-minute mark. And, as Exley notes, his politics skew right. Hard right:
He is a traditionalist in many ways, and is positive about Christianity as a cultural force and foundation of Western civilization, but he is not a Christian. He defies the postwar “fusion” of classical libertarianism and evangelical Christianity. B.P.S. believes in a global conspiracy of central bankers led by the Rothschilds who are driving immigration into predominantly white countries to increase the pool of “debt slaves” and to drive down wages; thinks that “cultural Marxism” is a Jewish conspiracy that is undermining Western civilization; and believes that women being allowed to do whatever they want, including choosing their own mates, is the deathblow to Western civilization.
Like its fellow mega-platforms Twitter and Facebook, YouTube is an enormous engine of cultural production and a host for wildly diverse communities. But like the much smaller Tumblr (which has long been dominated by lively and combative left-wing politics) or 4chan (which has become a virulent and effective hard-right meme factory) YouTube is host to just one dominant native political community: the YouTube right. This community takes the form of a loosely associated group of channels and personalities, connected mostly by shared political instincts and aesthetic sensibilities. They are monologuists, essayists, performers and vloggers who publish frequent dispatches from their living rooms, their studios or the field, inveighing vigorously against the political left and mocking the “mainstream media,” against which they are defined and empowered. They deplore “social justice warriors,” whom they credit with ruining popular culture, conspiring against the populace and helping to undermine “the West.” They are fixated on the subjects of immigration, Islam and political correctness. They seem at times more animated by President Trump’s opponents than by the man himself, with whom they share many priorities, if not a style. Some of their leading figures are associated with larger media companies, like Alex Jones’s Infowars or Ezra Levant’s Rebel Media. Others are independent operators who found their voices in the medium....
*****
The YouTube right may be comparatively marginal and ragtag, but it’s also comparatively young. If talk radio primed listeners for Trump’s style and anticipated the American right’s current obsessions, the YouTube right is acquainting viewers with a more international message, attuned to a global revival of explicitly race-and-religion-based, blood-and-soil nationalism. Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars, 35, is perhaps the archetypal YouTube-right vlogger; he has nearly a million followers, and his videos have been viewed more than 215 million times. He has in the last month published videos with titles including “Staged Video Shows ‘Refugee’ Fake Drowning,” “Finsbury Mosque Terror: What They’re NOT Telling You,” “The Truth about Refugees” and “Why Leftists Submit to Terror.” The scripts for these videos are straightforward nativist polemics, with a particular focus on Europe — Watson is from Northern England — delivered in a relentlessly insistent tone, and quite close to the camera. Watson posts extended “roasts” of his political villains, as well as rants that betray a peculiar blend of self-taught reaction: against pop culture, broadly, but also against “modern architecture” and “modern art.” If one video sums up what a receptive viewer might take from subscribing to his channel, it’s “Some Cultures are Better than Others.”
RTWT.
I obviously can do without the rank anti-Semitism. Interestingly, though, Ezra Levant has fired a number of his vloggers who've veered too far over into the outwardly racist right (here's looking at you, Lauren Southern). That said, I like Paul Joseph Watson, and Stephen Molyneux, the latter who nearly breeches the line at times, as well.
Whatever. These kind of people are shaking things up, giving voice to a lot of unconventional and politically unpopular opinions. They're helping to beat back radical leftism, and that's a good thing overall.
For all the pre-interview fuss, NBC’s new star exposed the Infowars host for what he is. But the controversy was never really about him.
The censorious powers of the heckler’s veto have evolved now to the point that people are willing to call for the banning and shunning of works of journalism not yet published. Former Fox News Channel and current NBC News anchor Megyn Kelly got the treatment this week as news of her Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly interview with Infowars mainspring Alex Jones, well before it was scheduled to air June 18, made the rounds. At least the Ayatollah Khomeini waited for the publication of Satanic Verses before he issued a fatwa ordering the murder of its author, Salman Rushdie.
Sandy Hook Elementary families implored NBC News to dump the segment because Jones has called the Newtown, Connecticut, school killings a hoax—by actors, not real people—designed, Jones said, to encourage new gun control laws. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio concurred, writing, “Pull the segment.” The NBC affiliate in nearby Hartford refused to air the episode because the “wounds of that day that have yet to heal.” Fleeing from the controversy, advertiser JPMorgan Chase dropped its spots from the show, and the usual voices damned Kelly for giving Jones “a platform.”
Not to be outshone, Jones performed some culture jamming of his own, releasing his own secretly recorded audio of the pre-interview in which Kelly buttered him up. “It’s not going to be some gotcha hit piece, I can promise you that,” Kelly told Jones on the tape. Predictably, Jones made his own call for a boycott, tweeting, “I’m calling for @megynkelly to cancel the airing of our interview for misrepresenting my views on Sandy Hook.”
When Kelly’s show finally aired, she took the mendacious Jones apart in such a textbook manner you had to wonder what all the shouting had been about. The Jones pattern, she said at the segment’s top, is making “reckless accusations followed by equivocations and excuses” when questioned. The two best examples of this are his promotion of the “Pizzagate“ lies about a satanic child porn ring and his wild allegation that Chobani was “importing Migrant Rapists,” as Infowars hyped its report on Twitter. In both cases, lawsuits have forced Jones to retract and apologize for airing these dishonest stories, and yet in conversation with Kelly he still hedges and quibbles like a con artist in an effort to have his conspiracy pizza and keep his yogurt, too. Likewise with the pathetic claims about the Sandy Hook killings. He’s still throwing the see-through drapery of devil’s advocacy to blur the fact that on most subjects he’s talking out of his tinfoil hat.
Short of waterboarding him, I don’t know what more Kelly could have done to expose Jones’ dark methods...
*****
Most viewers extend to broadcasters like Anderson Cooper, Chris Wallace, Jake Tapper and Erin Burnett the sort of goodwill they draw on to tackle fraught topics and subjects that will end up upsetting somebody. Due to her Fox background, Kelly doesn’t command that sort of goodwill—the protests against her show are more about her than they are Alex Jones or Sandy Hook. Kelly’s enemies, places like liberal agitprop outfit Media Matters for America, which has been riding this story hard, would likely be raising a ruckus if she went to work as a Today co-host and did celebrity fluff.
Would the calls for a Kelly boycott be so insistent if a similar technique hadn’t succeeded in driving Fox’s Bill O’Reilly off his network? My guess is that they wouldn’t. Kelly won this round, but she wasn’t the only one to pay the price. If you like edgy, truth-telling journalism, the spirited campaign against her has written a heckler’s veto playbook that future activists and scolds will eventually apply to your preferred anchor, be it Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity. You’ve been warned.
Milo, in Gucci accesories & gold lame backpack, with roses. He returns to @UCDavis after protesters shut down his appearance last night. pic.twitter.com/RYduwTmzvo
Well, apparently there's an "Alt-Right Civil War," which involves some apparently controversial headlining changes to the so-called "DeploraBall," which is some gala for the Internet cult of rightists supporting Donald Trump.
