Ann Coulter: Voter Fraud Never Happens! (Except in These 10,000 Cases)

Posted on February 19, 2021 by Luke Ford

Ann writes Dec. 9, 2020 in her syndicated column:

The media have been lying about voter fraud for 20 years. The New York Times and The Washington Post will tell you: Let’s get something straight. There are only two cases of voter fraud in history and they were both Republicans.

NEVER? No voter fraud ever?

Nope!

That’s your first clue they’re lying. Liberals don’t try to say partial-birth abortion never happens. They don’t say black men killing cops never happens. They don’t say immigrants ripping off government programs never happens. Only voter fraud NEVER HAPPENS.

Why does Ann not provide evidence for her assertions? Easy. Because there isn’t any. She’s lying. Nobody expert in voter fraud argues it never happens. The argument is whether or not it is a big problem in American politics.

I have no expertise in voter fraud. I’ve spent about 50 hours reading the primary books on the topic, and that effort apparently provides me with more knowledge than the dozens of right-wing pundits who have claimed or insinuated or repeatedly raised the possibility that voter fraud determined the 2020 American presidential election without providing any compelling evidence. As of this writing, there is no compelling evidence to believe that voter fraud may have decided this election. To claim otherwise, is reckless, because once people believe that such an election may have been fraudulent, they then believe themselves victims and are free from all moral constraints. If you think the system is possibly fixed, you no longer have any allegiance to the system, and more behavior akin to the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill riot is to be expected.

In the past four months, I’ve read six books on voter fraud. I found the first three books that argued voter fraud is not a big problem in American elections far more credible than the three conservative books arguing the opposite (even though my emotional predisposition is in favor of the Republican point of view):

* The Myth of Voter Fraud by Lorraine C. Minnite (2010)
* Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy by Richard Hasen (2020)
* The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown by Richard Hasen (2012)
* If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It by Hugh Hewitt (2012)
* Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy by John Fund (2009)
* Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky (2012)

If voter fraud was as big a problem as Republicans claim, you’d think they’d try to make a serious case. Instead, they put forward buffoons such as Steve Cortes, John Fund, Kris Kobach, and Hans von Spakovsky. How bad is John Fund? In the second paragraph of his 2009 book Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, he writes: “At least eight of the nineteen hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11.”

There was no rational reason for the 9-11 hijackers to register to vote and no evidence that they did so. There is no rational reason for people in general to try to commit vote fraud in America because the penalties they face are severe and the odds that their individual votes will change elections are tiny.

Lorraine C. Minnite wrote in The Myth of Voter Fraud:

Yet the multitude of alternative explanations for any one irregularity are ignored by the media, which gets a story of fraud faxed to them in a press release by a political party and wants to avoid the gigantic public yawn sure to follow a report of simple bureaucratic failure. The press is attracted to the potential scandal, corruption, or a brewing political fight, and reporters avert their eyes from the more reasonable but boring explanation. In so doing, they become part of a party-driven campaign strategy to keep down the vote. To get a sense of how this works, let us look at an oft-repeated allegation of voter fraud made by John Fund, Wall Street Journal columnist and author, who proclaimed in his 2004 book Stealing Elections that several several of the 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote.18 Fund asserts, “At least eight of the nineteen hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11.”19 Fund’s source for this claim is a December 22, 2002, interview he said he conducted with Michael Chertoff, then an assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department Criminal Division.20 Fund provides no other corroborating evidence.

As a regular columnist for a national newspaper, Fund writes stories intended to inflame though his language is never partisan or inflammatory. The care he takes in his regular columns to appear reasonable is evident in his book, in which Fund writes that the hijackers “were actually able to register to vote,” not that they did register to vote or were registered to vote. What does it mean to say someone is “able to register to vote”? Fund echoes previous statements by prominent conservatives that the hijackers or their associates may have been registered to vote. For example, more than a year before Fund says he interviewed Chertoff, Diane Ravitch, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, wrote, “Thus far, no reporter has observed that the hijackers were eligible to vote in state and federal elections, despite the fact that they were not American citizens.” Of course, foreign nationals are not eligible to vote, only citizens are eligible to vote under state law. Senator Christopher “Kit” Bond (R-Mo.) picked up on the idea that our voter registration procedures are so lax that foreign terrorists can successfully apply when he asserted on the floor of the Senate that a Pakistani citizen in Greensboro, North Carolina, “with links to two of the September 11th hijackers was indicted by a federal grand jury for having illegally registered to vote.”21

In person Fund is less careful in parsing his words. He confused what he meant by “able to register to vote” when he appeared on the CNN Lou Dobbs show on October 24, 2004, to promote Stealing Elections. Here is the exchange:

DOBBS: You point out in your book that eight—eight, was it?—of the 19 . . .
FUND: Eight of the 19.
DOBBS:. . . 9/11 hijackers could have registered to vote?
FUND: No, they did register to vote.

Without explicitly stating it, Ravitch and Fund are referring to the fact, known within weeks of the attacks, that some of the 9/11 hijackers had obtained driver’s licenses.22 Ravitch incorrectly implies this made them “eligible” to vote because the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) requires that applicants for driver’s licenses be presented with an opportunity to register to vote. But being presented with an opportunity to register does not make a person eligible to vote. No state creates a right to vote or establishes voter eligibility through possession of a driver’s license. By linking the 9/11 hijackers to the “motor voter” law, one of the very first bills signed into law by President Bill Clinton, over the objection of congressional conservatives, both Ravitch and Fund are talking in code, reinforcing the idea held fervently by right-wing partisans that the NVRA has corrupted democracy by opening the door to voter fraud.

…More recent efforts to confirm Fund’s allegation that some of the 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote in either Virginia or Florida have failed to turn up any supporting evidence at all… Fund provides no evidence from Virginia or Florida elections officials confirming the registration status of any of the hijackers…

Fund’s allegation about the 9/11 hijackers was widely circulated and has had a surprisingly long life given that it is poorly documented and very likely false. For example, in protests on the floor of the House over various border security provisions stripped from the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, U.S. Representatives Ed Royce (R-Calif.), Steven King (R-Iowa), and Sam Johnson (R-Tex.) all repeated Fund’s allegation that eight of the nineteen hijackers were registered to vote.

The lack of scrutiny of voter fraud charges and the ease with which partisans have been able to insert them into the public discourse means that arguments based on demonstrably false information, or no information at all, are entered into the congressional record, sway lawmakers, and are cited by Supreme Court justices as fact. It means pundits who relish the charges and their whiff of scandal will continue to manipulate public understanding.

On the evening of the November 2006 congressional elections, John Fund was a guest on Glenn Beck’s CNN syndicated talk show. Two years had passed since the publication of his book, and because he has yet to be upbraided for any of the misleading information he provides there, Fund must have felt it was safe to again repeat the provocative charge that eight of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote: BECK: OK. To put this into perspective on how bad and out of control our system is—and I don’t think the Republicans or the Democrats really want to fix it—explain how many of the 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote.

FUND: Eight out of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote in either Virginia or Florida. They could have easily voted if they’d wanted to.

BECK: And how did they do that?

FUND: Well, we have something called the motor voter law. You can go into any government office building, any transaction you conduct with them, driver’s license, unemployment, whatever you get the check off, [sic] do you also want to register to vote? All the registrations are on a postcard. There’s no question as to whether you’re a citizen. There’s not [a] question as to whether or not you’re a real, live human being. You’re automatically registered. Our registration rules have a lot of people on there who are dead, don’t exist or registered many times over.29

This is a good example of what I call voter fraud politics, the use of spurious or exaggerated voter fraud allegations to persuade the public about the need for more administrative burdens on the vote. I frame my analysis and case studies to explore the politics of fraud allegations—to ask who are the actors, who are the targets, what are the tactics deployed, and what are the factors that account for their success in maintaining barriers to the vote that disproportionately affect certain Americans?

Brian Lowry writes for Kansascity.com Dec. 14, 2020:

Rick Hasen, an election law professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law said Kansas “never should have even taken the case to the Supreme Court in the first place given Kobach’s utter failure in proving his claims of widespread voter fraud and his inept running of the trial.”

In 2018, after a series of missteps in district court, Kobach was found in contempt and ordered to take six hours of remedial legal training on civil procedure. That gave Schmidt little chance of success when he took over in the case for the appeal.

“The Supreme Court has tolerated a number of laws that make it harder for people to register and vote in the name of preventing voter fraud and giving states the ability to run their elections as they see fit. The Fish case shows there are limits to that,” Hasen said, referencing the ACLU’s client Steven Wayne Fish.

“Disenfranchising tens of thousands of people without proof of fraud goes too far under federal law and the Constitution.”

In a phone call, Kobach rejected the notion that his courtroom performance resulted in the state’s loss at the district court level.

He agreed with Schmidt’s office that the high court’s Monday denial represents the end of the Kansas litigation, but he said that the issue of proof of citizenship could still come before the court in the future if a state outside of the 10th Circuit enacts a similar law and it results in a contradictory ruling.

“There’s nothing more the (Kansas) attorney general’s office can do on the case, but I think the issue is far from over. There were a number of states looking at this in the past few years. I think the 2020 presidential election has raised the focus on election security,” Kobach said.

“The rest of the country has a wide open path ahead of it if more states want to pursue proof of citizenship,” Kobach said, contending that the ruling only affects Kansas and the five other states covered by the 10th Circuit.

Kobach said that he was involved in Texas’ failed attempt to overturn the presidential election results in four states, serving as an adviser on Texas’ briefs. The court rejected the lawsuit Friday evening.

Kobach said he would not consider Joe Biden to be president-elect until Congress votes to accept the Electoral College results on January 6, but he acknowledged that few opportunities remain for President Donald Trump to contest the election results after Friday’s decision.

Ann writes:

I bet you couldn’t find EVEN ONE!

How about these?

— JOHN ASHCROFT, 2000

John Ashcroft absolutely had a Senate seat stolen from him in 2000 when a state judge ordered polls in heavily Democratic St. Louis to remain open for an extra three hours. Republicans didn’t even hear about it for another hour. Despite an appellate court striking down the ridiculously lawless order, St. Louis was given an extra 3 1/2 hours to kick out tens of thousands of additional votes. Ashcroft lost the election by 49,000 votes.

Twitter: This claim about election fraud is disputed.

Ann is not telling the truth about what happened. Even if she were, a judge ordering polling places to stay open for an extra three hours is not voter fraud. Republicans failing to hear about it for an hour is not voter fraud. None of what Ann presents here is evidence of voter fraud. John Ashcroft did not believe that voter fraud decided the election. The New York Times reported Nov. 9, 2000:

On the day after, the loser, Senator John Ashcroft, the Republican, announced that he would not challenge the results…

Mr. Carnahan won with 50 percent of the vote compared with 48 percent for Mr. Ashcroft. The margin of victory was about 49,000 votes.

Mr. Ashcroft also said today that he would discourage other Republicans from challenging the outcome of Tuesday’s election, something that Republicans had privately said they might do.

”You have to know when people speak with clarity, how to take orders,” Mr. Ashcroft said today, adding that voters had clearly demonstrated their wishes. ”I reject any legal challenge to this election. I will discourage others from challenging the will of the people in the selection of their United States Senator.”

He added: ”I believe the will of the people has been expressed with compassion. The people should be respected and heard.”

…Republicans had considered a legal challenge, contending that the election of a dead man raised constitutional questions. Late Tuesday, some Republicans here also claimed that Democrats had been given an unfair advantage when polls in heavily Democratic St. Louis were kept open 45 minutes later than in the rest of the state.

Circuit Judge Evelyn Baker ordered the voting extension on Tuesday night, saying a lack of voting booths and equipment had deprived some residents of the right to cast ballots. Judge Baker ordered the polls to remain open an additional three hours, but a state appellate court overturned her ruling, and the polls were closed just before 8 p.m.

Ann writes:

— WASHINGTON STATE, 2004

A week after the 2004 Washington state gubernatorial election, Republican Dino Rossi was up by 3,492 votes against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Then Democratic King county began finding “misplaced” ballots, eventually producing more than 10,000 of them.

Hey, guys! I found another box of ballots under the sink!

So that’s another 800 votes for Gregoire.

Oh wait — you’re not going to believe this …

You found more votes?

Bingo! 600 votes for Gregoire.

An examination of the records later showed that about 1,800 more ballots had been cast than there were voters who had requested them.

Notwithstanding the miraculously appearing ballots, Rossi won the recount a few weeks later, but his lead was cut to 42 votes — easily within stealing distance. Democrat Christine Gregoire demanded a hand recount, and that put her ahead by 129 votes, whereupon she was promptly declared the winner.

Washington voters overwhelmingly believed the election had been stolen and wanted a revote. Democrats didn’t care. Nothing was ever done about the flagrant vote fraud. Washington now has 100 percent mail-in-ballots and no Republican has ever again won the governorship.

Twitter: This claim about election fraud is disputed.

We don’t have any evidence that the five American states using exclusively mail-in ballots have a higher percentage of voter fraud than other states. As for this particular election, Wikipedia says:

The Republican Party filed a lawsuit in Chelan County Superior Court contesting the election, but the trial judge ruled against it, citing lack of evidence of deliberate electoral sabotage.[1] Rossi chose not to appeal to the Washington State Supreme Court, formally conceding the election on June 6, 2005…

King County Council Chairman Larry Phillips was at a Democratic Party office in Seattle on Sunday December 12, reviewing a list of voters whose absentee votes had been rejected due to signature problems, when to his surprise he found his own name listed. Phillips said he was certain he had filled out and signed his ballot correctly, and asked the county election officials to investigate the discrepancy. They discovered that Phillips’ signature had somehow failed to be scanned into the election computer system after he submitted his request for an absentee ballot. Election workers claimed that they had received Phillips’ absentee ballot in the mail, but they could not find his signature in the computer system to compare to the one on the ballot envelope, so they mistakenly rejected the ballot instead of following the standard procedure of checking it against the signature of Phillips’ physical voter registration card that was on file. The discovery prompted King County Director of Elections Dean Logan to order his staff to search the computers to see if any other ballots had been incorrectly rejected.

Logan announced on December 13 that 561 absentee ballots in the county had been wrongly rejected due to an administrative error.[14] The next day, workers retrieving voting machines from precinct storage found an additional 12 ballots, bringing the total to 572 newly discovered ballots. Logan admitted the lost ballots were an oversight on the part of his department, and insisted that the found ballots be counted. On December 15, the King County Canvassing Board voted 2-1 in favor of counting the discovered ballots.

Upon examination of the discovered ballots, it was further discovered that, with the exception of two ballots, none of the ballots had been cast by voters whose surnames began with the letters A, B, or C.[15] There was a further search for more ballots, and on December 17, county workers discovered a tray in a warehouse with an additional 162 previously uncounted ballots.[15] All together, 723 uncounted or improperly rejected ballots were discovered in King County during the manual hand recount…

Republican leaders in Washington claimed there were enough disputed votes to change the outcome of the election and filed a lawsuit in Chelan County Superior Court in order to avoid having the case heard in the more liberal Western Washington counties.[21] King County’s election department (the greater Seattle area) was also targeted for how they handled the ballots, including untracked use of a “ballot-on-demand” printing machine. Also, ballots in six counties were discovered after the initial count and included in the recounts, the most being from King County. The judge hearing the lawsuit ruled that the Party did not provide enough evidence that the disputed votes were ineligible votes, or for whom they were cast, to enable the court to overturn the election.

Controversy over the election’s outcome continued after the certification of the hand recount results. The Washington State Republican Party called into question the discrepancy between the list of voters casting ballots in King County (895,660) and the number of ballots reported in the final hand recount (899,199). They claimed that hundreds of votes, including votes by felons,[22] deceased voters,[23] and double voters,[23] were included in the canvass. As an explanation, election officials claimed that they had yet to finalize the list at the time, and argued that discrepancies in the two numbers are common and do not necessarily indicate fraud. As the election officials had expected, once the two lists were completed on January 5, the two numbers were indeed very close to one another. Also on January 5, 2005, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published an article investigating votes in King County apparently cast by dead people.[24] The PI uncovered eight cases of votes attributed to dead people; these included one administrative error, two ballots cast by the spouses of recently deceased voters (one who voted against Gregoire), one case of a husband apparently voting his dead wife’s ballot instead of his own, and a man who legally voted his absentee ballot and then died before election day. One dead woman was marked as having voted in person at the polls.

… On June 6, 2005, Judge John E. Bridges ruled that the Republican party did not provide enough evidence that the disputed votes were ineligible -or for whom they were cast- to overturn the election.[29] Judge Bridges noted that there was evidence that 1,678 votes had been illegally cast throughout the state,[30] but found that the only evidence submitted to show how those votes had been cast were sworn statements from four felons that they had voted for Rossi.[30] He stated that the judiciary should exercise restraint; “unless an election is clearly invalid, when the people have spoken, their verdict should not be disturbed by the court.”[31] Nullifying the election, Bridges said, would be “the ultimate act of judicial egotism and judicial activism.” He also concluded that according to his interpretation of the Washington Administrative Code, “voters who improperly cast provisional ballots should not be disenfranchised.” He also rejected all claims of fraud and the Republican Party’s statistical analysis, concluding that the expert testimony of the Republican party was “not helpful” and that the proportional reduction theory was not supported under any law in the state. Striking another blow against Rossi’s court case, he stated that “the court is more inclined to believe that Gregoire would have prevailed under statistical analysis theory”, rejecting the Rossi campaign’s claim that improperly cast ballots led to Gregoire’s victory.[29]

Bridges did accept the claim that some people voted illegally in the election, but said there was little proof of which candidate benefited from those votes. He ruled that 1,678 illegal votes should be subtracted from the total number of votes cast.[31] Bridges also removed five votes from the final count for two of the candidates: four for Rossi and one for Ruth Bennett.[32] No evidence was brought before the court of any of the illegal votes benefitted Gregoire.[32] The final margin of victory for Gregoire over Rossi was 133 votes…

Judge Bridges’ ruling was seen as a comprehensive defeat for Rossi. The judge admitted nearly every piece of evidence the Republican Party offered and then wrote a thorough, tough opinion rejecting the Republicans’ claims (while criticizing the administration of the election, particularly in King County); Rossi was left with very little legal ground for a successful appeal. After receiving such a negative verdict, Rossi declined to appeal to the State Supreme Court, claiming that the political makeup of the Court would make it impossible for him to win, thereby ending all legal challenges to the election of Gregoire as the Governor of Washington.

I’m not an expert on the 2004 gubernatorial election in Washington State. Neither is Ann Coulter. However, when one reads her account of the election and then reads the more detailed Wikipedia account and related links, it is easy to see that Ann’s story is not compelling.

Ann writes:

— AL FRANKEN, 2008

In 2008, Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota won his 2008 reelection bid against challenger Al Franken by 725 votes. But for weeks after the election, Democratic precincts kept “discovering” new votes for Franken.

Day after day, votes were added to Franken’s column, while votes were taken away from Coleman. Random error would not continually benefit only one side.

On account of Franken’s charisma shield, Barack Obama, who was running for president that year, won hundreds of thousands more votes than Franken in the same election, on the same ticket, in the same state that year. But during the “corrections,” Franken was winning three times as many votes as Obama .

So the Democrats weren’t worried about believability.

Eventually, all these late-discovered ballots put Franken ahead by 312 votes, whereupon he was immediately certified the winner by the George Soros-backed Minnesota secretary of state.

A few years later, we found out that more than 1,000 felons, ineligible to vote, had cast votes in the 2008 Minnesota election. (To state the obvious, felons support Democrats by about 10-1.) There were 113 separate convictions for voter fraud in that election. That’s not easy: In Minnesota, a conviction for voter fraud requires proof that you broke the law knowingly.

More than 100 convictions for something that never happens, way, way back in the prehistoric days of 2008 — who could remember that?

Twitter: This claim about election fraud is disputed.

Wikipedia says:

The 2008 United States Senate election in Minnesota took place on November 4, 2008. After a legal battle lasting over eight months, the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL) candidate, Al Franken, defeated Republican incumbent Norm Coleman in one of the closest elections in the history of the Senate, with Coleman’s Senate predecessor Dean Barkley taking third place. Franken took his oath of office on July 7, 2009, more than half a year after the end of Coleman’s term on January 3, 2009.[1]

When the initial count was completed on November 18, Franken was trailing Coleman by 215 votes.[2][3] The close margin triggered a mandatory recount.[4][5] After reviewing ballots that had been challenged during the recount and counting 953 wrongly rejected absentee ballots, the State Canvassing Board officially certified the recount results with Franken holding a 225-vote lead.[6][7][8]

On January 6, 2009, Coleman’s campaign filed an election contest and on April 13, a three-judge panel dismissed Coleman’s Notice of Contest and ruled that Franken had won the election by 312 votes.[9][10] Coleman’s appeal of the panel’s decision to the Minnesota Supreme Court was unanimously rejected on June 30,[11] and he subsequently conceded the election.

…The court dismissed Coleman’s suit “with prejudice” in its final ruling on April 13, finding that his claims had no merit and ordering the Coleman camp to pay the legal costs associated with Coleman’s failure to disclose information about Pamela Howell, a precinct election judge and witness in the case,[9] which was later determined to amount to $94,783.[91] In the same ruling, the court also rejected Coleman’s claim to exclude 132 missing ballots from the recount total and his request to adjust the results based on Coleman’s allegations of double-counted ballots…

In July 2010, Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group, conducted a study in which they flagged 2,803 voters in the Senate race for examination, including 1,359 they suspected to be ineligible convicted felons in the largely Democratic Minneapolis-St. Paul area.[110][111] Subsequent investigations of Minnesota Majority’s claims by election officials found that many of their allegations were incorrect. Some of the cases that were submitted involved mistaking a legal voter for a felon with the same name, others involved felons who had had their voting rights reinstated after serving their sentences, and others were felons who illegally registered to vote but did not vote in 2008 election.[112][113][114] Ramsey County officials narrowed their investigation to 180 cases, while Hennepin County examined 216 cases.[115]

Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty said, “They [Minnesota Majority] seem to have found credible evidence that many felons who are not supposed to be voting actually voted in the Franken-Coleman election. I suspect they favored Al Franken. I don’t know that, but if that turned out to be true, they may have flipped the election.”[116] Columnist Nick Coleman of the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune called the idea that illegal voting by felons made a difference in the race “unbelievable” and the Minnesota Majority report “good fodder for a right-wing scare campaign.”[117]

As of July 2010, the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office had brought charges against 28 people.[111] In August 2010, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office received for investigation 110 alleged cases of voter fraud during the 2008 election. In October 2010, the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office concluded that there was enough evidence to charge six people for voter fraud. “Three of the suspects face two felony charges. Three other suspects each face one felony charge.”[118] In October 2010, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced that charges would be brought against 43 felons for illegally voting in 2008.

When comparing Ann Coulter’s account of the election with other sources of information referenced in the Wikipedia entry, Ann’s story does not hold up. Throughout her Dec. 10, 2009 column, she shows herself as acting with reckless disregard of the truth.

Posted in America, Voter Fraud | Comments Off on Ann Coulter: Voter Fraud Never Happens! (Except in These 10,000 Cases)

The Malicious Journalist Hypothesis (2-18-21)

Posted on February 18, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 The demonic/malicious worldview, https://mynewbandis.substack.com/p/slate-star-clusterfuck
19:00 Revisiting my falling out with Brundlefly from Sept. 2, 2019, https://rumble.com/vdvf1d-resurrecting-the-old-right-and-falling-out-with-brundlefly.html
1:23:00 Richard Spencer on Jewish intelligence, paranoia, Laura Loomer, https://twitter.com/RichardBSpencer/status/1362503605454921728
1:26:00 What Goes Around Comes Around: Liberaltarian Meltdown at Niskanen Center, https://www.unz.com/isteve/what-goes-around-comes-around-liberaltarian-meltdown/
1:31:00 Richard Spencer on the Capitol Hill riot, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg2fheNCnic
1:40:00 Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo
1:43:00 LEFTIST WENDY’S CUSTOMER ATTACKS ALEX JONES AND REGRETS IT, https://www.bitchute.com/video/Pbbh0kKJ1Ma3/
1:48:30 WSJ: We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April, https://www.wsj.com/articles/well-have-herd-immunity-by-april-11613669731?mod=hp_opin_pos_1
1:53:00 New York principal sends parents pamphlet asking them to rate their ‘whiteness’ and urging them to be ‘white traitors’ who ‘dismantle institutions’, https://archive.is/gx95r#selection-939.0-939.147
1:59:30 Vaush: Free Me From This Suburban Hellscape, https://youtu.be/Oyo_KTU4OXk?t=125
2:03:00 The Past, Present, and Future of Traffic Congestion in Los Angeles, https://www.buzzsprout.com/952522/5559067-the-past-present-and-future-of-traffic-congestion-in-los-angeles
2:16:45 Christopher Anderson on NoFap, https://youtu.be/QKAvG18rAEY
2:20:00 Redbar: Stefan Molyneux is BEGGING FOR CASH in his video “My Brutal Year”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUYK8Fgr5HQ
2:55:20 BILL BURR THREATENS MIKE DAVID FROM REDBAR RADIO
2:58:00 Redbar Reacts: SLOB Tim Dillon BANNED From Airbnb Redbar Radio, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbJODJm2u1Q
3:01:50 Cong. Hank Johnson: Guam will Capsize and Tip Over into the ocean
3:04:00 A Psychological Analysis Of Elliot Rodger by Davis Aurini, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHVdQEpEtfc
3:10:50 Nationalism as a shit magnet

Posted in America | Comments Off on The Malicious Journalist Hypothesis (2-18-21)

The Malicious Journalist Thesis

Posted on February 18, 2021 by Luke Ford

Elizabeth Spiers writes:

* The malicious journalist thesis is the one that was the hardest on my ocular muscles yesterday. Scott Alexander—the figure at the center of the piece—believes this, and has advanced this theory that the journalist who wrote the piece, and perhaps The New York Times institutionally, were out to smear him. To what end, it’s unclear. (A favorite fallacious rationale: clicks! More about that in a bit.) Scott has reconstituted Slate Star Codex as a Substack publication called Astral Codex Ten. In a statement on The New York Times article, which he did not like, to put it mildly, he writes, “The New York Times backed off briefly as I stopped publishing, but I was also warned by people ‘in the know’ that as soon as they got an excuse they would publish something as negative as possible about me, in order to punish me for embarrassing them.”

Only in a bubble as insular and tiny as the SSC community would this theory be even remotely plausible. To put this in context: SSC is influential in a small but powerful corner of the tech industry. It is not, however, a site that most people, even at The New York Times, are aware exists—and certainly, the Times and its journalists are not threatened by its existence. They are not out to destroy the site, or “get” Scott, or punish him. At the risk of puncturing egos: they are not thinking about Scott or the site at all. Even the reporter working on the story has no especial investment in its subject. That reporter is also probably working on six other stories at the same time, thinking about their friends, family, what their kid needs to do in Zoom school tomorrow, the book they want to read, whether Donald Trump will get arrested, whether rats dream of boredom. They do not sit around thinking about how they’re going to “get” people they write about, and when subjects think they do, it’s more a reflection of the subject’s self-perception (or self-importance) and, sometimes, a sprinkling of unadulterated narcissism.

Here I should note that I was a reader of Slate Star Codex and have subscribed to Scott’s Substack. I think it has some meaningful value or I wouldn’t have been a reader. I look forward to reading the Substack. But it is possible to appreciate something without absurdly venerating it.

Scott is not the first subject who’s unaccustomed to being on the receiving end of journalism who, confronted with a portrayal he didn’t like, attributed all forms of bad faith to the person who produced the portrayal. In fact, it’s pretty common among people who haven’t been profiled before. Even the most generous profiles will include things that the subject doesn’t like. Those are the only things the subject pays attention to. They also often think a journalist is obligated to privilege their version of what’s happening, however self-serving it may be, or however unreliable a narrator they are of their experiences. (And everyone is an unreliable narrator when they articulate their own experiences. No doubt some people reading this will read this essay and note areas where I might be saying things that are self-serving or self-indulgent. We all are, to some extent.)

* negative pieces are not de facto “hit pieces.”

* It makes a lot of people uncomfortable when they can’t control their self-presentation, and this extends to journalistic portrayals. This is especially true of smart people who are accustomed to believing that they can manipulate their own narratives at will via a process of rational self-engineering and diligent application of the right KPIs. People like Balaji, for example. Surely journalism can be gamed and / or nipped in the bud!

I suggest an easier route than summoning an army of bots, oppo researchers, Dark Enlightenment (ironic labeling for whatever that constitutes) warriors, etc., to go after journalists whose work you don’t like: pay careful attention to what you’re afraid they’re going to write, and why you wouldn’t want it to be public. Then apply some rational thinking.

Posted in Journalism | Comments Off on The Malicious Journalist Thesis

Rush Limbaugh, RIP

Posted on February 18, 2021 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Rush’s biggest influence was in teaching regular conservatives to talk back. There had been conservative media organizations before, and of course Buckley and National Review were institutions by the time he became popular in the late ’80s, but Rush felt like a precursor to YouTube comments, bloggers, and frog Twitter. In the same way sixties garage bands or the Ramones taught teenagers around the world that almost anyone could start a rock band, Rush made Americans feel like almost anyone could take on the liberal establishment if they had enough confidence and defiant attitude.

He was funny and irreverent. Never came off as nerdy or stilted, but confident and (this is key) one of the bros. Trump is unthinkable without him.

He had a successful TV show in the ’90s that pulled great ratings, and it only ended because it was too large of a commitment for Rush to make. Rush was such an influence that an entire radio channel – the liberal Air America – was started, and failed, in the 2000s in an attempt to mimic and counter his impact.

The mark of any good teacher is that they help their students become so skilled and confident at learning and noticing on their own that the teacher can come to feel superfluous. A good teacher helps a student become his own teacher. Though many rightfully mourn Rush today there is not a sense, I don’t believe, that the conservative “movement” is in any sense now lost without him. He raised millions of Rushes. If young conservatives don’t know or appreciate his impact it’s because his legacy has been for so long taken for granted.

* Most of us on this site are to the right of Rush. Rush was entertaining and funny but I don’t think he truly understood the danger posed by mass immigration to everything he and we hold dear. On several occasions he said he would support amnesty as long as the recipients could not vote for 20 yrs. IOW, the incubation period for a third world immigrant to become a flag waving American is two decades.

Like so many well known conservatives they truly think all racial groups can be made to be the same given enough time, economic prosperity and set asides. Rush really failed us on immigration.

* I enjoyed listening to Rush in the car until he took a call from an obsequious listener. When that happened I would turn it off and tune back in later. He understood the radio as a theatre. He kept the energy up and didn’t dwell on a topic for too long. You don’t want to listen to someone drone on the radio, even if he’s interesting. That can cause a traffic accident. With the exception of Mark Steyn, his guest hosts are dull. I don’t know what’s going to happen with the program now. I doubt Mark is interested in doing it more once or twice a week.

* Limbaugh seems to have been a good man with his heart in the right place. He most definitely helped our cause – and for that I’m thankful – but he could never move beyond his failed CivNat ideology.

He didn’t need to do more than he did, but it would have been nice if he tried.

* It’s hard to appreciate just what a breath of fresh air Rush Limbaugh was when he first came on the scene. There was no one like him. There were local conservative talkshow hosts even on San Francisco radio stations in the 1980s, but no one had the confidence to say what he thought like Rush did.

Before he went national, he was on KFBK in Sacramento. I seem to recall that KGO in San Francisco gave Rush a trial run, and then afterward had a local host (Pete Wilson, who was also a TV news anchor) take calls from listeners on what they thought of him. He was too much for KGO, but not for KNBR and then KSFO.

He taught his audience a great deal. And he was fun: “Live from New York, it’s Open-Line Friday!”

* Limbaugh supposedly attained a net worth of $600m –estimate seems on the low side. My guess is that zero dollars of that amount will be used to seed/help young White advocates. So , in his life, he extracted billions of dollars from the White community, but to what end beyond his own wealth and comfort? what really is his legacy that provides a vision, actionable steps? Limbaugh has about much relevance as Reagan. Their message to Republicans seems to be that we should invoke an inoffensive nostalgia while bowing to the Left albeit with a lag of 5 years. And stand with Israel.

Self-described conservatives mourn Reagan, or wish that the Reagan of 1966 that swept aside Pat Brown could magically reappear. But what are Reagan’s legacies? The 1969 Abortion Bill. The 1986 Amnesty that turned California blue. Trillions spent fighting a Cold War1 that was already won as the USSR was rusting away, but refusing to fight the domestic cultural war, or the cultural Marxists in the universities –lavishly funded by Republican congresses. Reagan only allowed PJB, then in the prime of his life and one of his early backers as far back as 1978 –if not 1976, to hold a WH position for less than 2 years.

My conclusion is that like WF Buckley and Reagan, Limbaugh holds little in the way of vision for Whites.

* Anyone who needed Rush to teach them to “talk back” after Buckley had been “talking back” on television for decades belongs on the short bus.

Rush was the type of guy who appealed to the sort of excitable, dim-witted boomers whose idea of a profound intellectual argument was referring to a teenaged girl as a dog. What made Rush so successful? He made petty, ignorant, intellectually lazy people feel good about themselves.

Before Rush, Republicans were respectable. The circus on 1/6 would have been unimaginable.

Before Rush, Republicans were the party of Reagan. Now they are the party of Trump. Has that been good for the party? When is the last time Republicans got the most votes in a Presidential election nationally?

Rush opened the door, Trump walked through it.

Think about that in 2024.

* Rush ORIGINALLY was very cold toward NAFTA and suspicious of the effects it would have. He made no secret of this on-air. His audience was similarly ambivalent and there was plenty of white noise.

Then, and this is from sources that have made biographies, Alan Greenspan called Rush in person, told him the trucks and plants in Mexico are ALREADY UP AND RUNNING so shut up and get on board.

A week later, Rush was saying “Let’s send all the stupid people’s jobs down to Mexico.”

Those of us in the Buy America movement of the early 90s knew Greenspan was right. Massive state of the art plants were pouring shit north from Mexico by the mid-80s. It became necessary to legalize what was already de facto. Rush folded like a cheap accordion.

Conservative pundits and white nationalists in one way are totally synoptic: You can always count on them to vigorously pursue the useless while ignoring the crucial.

Rush was a humorist for a certain segment of suburbia. That is all.

* His death is very personal for me because I listened to him for over thirty years. I vividly remember the first time I heard him in 1988 — it was like an epiphany. I had never heard ANYONE say and defend the conservative beliefs that I held (and paid a very high social and financial price for it) on the air, let alone turn my beliefs into an entertaining, financially successful five-day-a-week prime-time crusade.

Limbaugh singlehandedly remade the entire AM radio industry. Before him, there was only the obnoxious and blatantly left-wing Larry King, whom I despised, on at night. Even before that in the 1970s as a kid I remember AM radio was like listening to a funeral — it was horrible.

The ability to drive across the country and listen to Limbaugh continuously as one station faded out and another came in was incredible. He was truly like a best friend that you could always count on. Hit the “scan” button on the radio he would always — always — be there between noon and 3:00. He was a conservative Everyman, and made millions of people like me feel that we were not alone. And he did it all on his own, his way. He was a one-man show. Nobody owned him or ever told him what to do or say if he wanted to keep his job.

He was also far more optimistic about America and the ability to overcome and defeat the Left than I am. His good humor and good cheer and his optimism were some of his best traits.

If he can be criticized, though, it is for being the Eternal Boomer, who never saw the full reality of just how corrupted the GOP Establishment really is, how much Third World immigration is killing this country, how much the Democrats have stoked anti-white race hatred in this country, and how narrow and leftist the ruling clique is. I think Limbaugh was genuinely shocked when he had finally arrived as a truly wealthy man, yet was rejected for ownership of an NFL team and discovered that his wealth could not buy him membership in elite society unless his politics were leftist.

It is fitting that he died before seeing his beloved country degenerate into full-blown communism — or civil war. He was wrong in his belief that “our best days are ahead of us” and that the Constitution can be restored.

It cannot.

The white, working-class people in this country once had faith that they could vote for someone who cared about them — like Trump — and comfort knowing that they could listen to someone who understood them and was one of them, like Limbaugh. Now they have nothing but contemptuous leftist overlords who want to “break their will” for turning on the fucking heat in the winter.

Bad times are coming. VERY bad times.

Thank you, Rush, for staving off the Left as long as you could. At the very least you helped to buy us a bit more time. But our country is as terminal as your diagnosis was.

* One thing I noticed over years of listening to Limbaugh is that a lot of his callers were boomer types who claimed to have been liberal until they started listening to Rush. During the 80’s and 90’s, there was a huge influx of middle aged white boomers ex-hippie sympathizer types into conservatism that helped create the cuckservative phenomenon. Limbaugh was their go to source for information and those were the people who embraced the “Democrats are the real racists” garbage.

* A few weeks ago, a caller started talking about how immigration was making whites a minority and Limbaugh just hung up on him without refuting any of his points. That is Rush Limbaugh’s political career in a nutshell.

* Limbaugh’s great talent was of course his voice. He was able to take seemingly complex issues and make them appear simple to understand. This is also known as dumbing things down for nine year olds.

I can only abide so much over praising of any one individual. Perhaps the Scots-Irish genes, or a natural American disinterest in verbal fellatio, as it does tend to leave a bad taste in the mouth.

It’s one thing to pay honest tribute to a public, larger than life individual. To entirely gloss over the warts and all at the expense of doing so is asinine, semi-cultic, ridiculous. Four marriages, Federal/State charges of doctor shopping for opioids. Claiming victimhood because the mean, big, bad wibwul NFL (which in fact was quite conservative during this time period) wouldn’t let him purchase a team, and such like. And all for a plutocrat, top one percenter whose main goals in life, aside from flattery and self-aggrandizement, was accumulation of stuff. As far as championing issues of the day that resonate with Middle Americans, (preserving entitlements, raising the minimum wage, of which Ron Unz has heroically taken a strong stand in favor, raising taxes on the wealthy, etc), Limbaugh was never to be found. He was a straight up standard Republican who repeated the party’s talking points verbatim for decades.

“Rush’s biggest influence was in teaching regular conservatives to talk back.”

If you say so. Technically at other times Limbaugh stated that he wasn’t strictly a conservative down the line but a libertarian, but no matter.

“and of course Buckley and National Review were institutions by the time he became popular in the late ’80s,”

Per conservative issues, a la populist America First, National Review has seen better decades.

“but Rush felt like a precursor to YouTube comments, bloggers, and frog Twitter.”

Yep, El Rushbo always did claim to have invented the internet into what it has become.

“Trump is unthinkable without him.”

Uh, no, Trump borrowed heavily from Pat Buchanan, Ross Perrot, and even from Sam Francis. Not Trump in particular, but from those around his first campaign. Trump himself owes more to reality TV like the Kardashians than to anything Rush said on the radio.

“He had a successful TV show in the ’90s that pulled great ratings, and it only ended because it was too large of a commitment for Rush to make.”

Now this is an example of verbal fellatio. And wishful thinking. For most of its 3 yr run, Rush’s TV show was on at wee small hrs of the night. Such luminary ads as “Mint Snuff” comprised the bulk of his advertising. His show was not a success by any means, if properly judged against shows that actually made profits, like the NFL, 60 Minutes, etc.

“A good teacher helps a student become his own teacher. Though many rightfully mourn Rush today there is not a sense, I don’t believe, that the conservative “movement” is in any sense now lost without him.”

Now more than ever, Conservative Inc. is a racket, a grift, a hustle. In that sense, Rush did make a direct contribution to this format. In some ways, he was similar in style to a ’90’s Televangelist, a carny barker who echoes the same 3-4 talking points. “Liberals bad, conservatives good” etc. all while taking the rubes money when they’re not looking.

“If young conservatives don’t know or appreciate his impact”

Actually they probably don’t, as Limbaugh’s demographics skewed 65 and older for the last decade or so. If he was such an all important voice for the Con. movement as a whole, wonder why younger demographics couldn’t be bothered listening to him? Must be the bad liberals preventing people from turning on their radios.

Intellectual honesty requires accuracy be spoken. Since about the time of Bill Clinton’s impeachment (ca. 1998), in the public forum of ideals, Rush Limbaugh has been totally irrelevant. The major policy battles, of which Steve and others have constantly and consistently taken on, Limbaugh wasn’t there to be found. He could easily have used his allegedly and often repeated claim of “20 million weekly listeners” to hammer home week, month, year after year about writing local US representatives to oppose illegal immigration, but chose not to. Instead of carrying water for the GOP as a whole, he could’ve brought up issues like the connection to the 2008 recession and bad economic policies that were implemented by W. Again, he chose not to. “Thou shalt not criticize fellow Republicans.”

Instead, Rush oftentimes chose to criticize policies that would largely benefit ordinary Americans. Attacking the idea of raising the minimum wage, expanding Health Care for most Americans, and other entitlement expansions. Why’d he do that? Because that’s what the GOP’s lawmakers were doing, and he seldom ever directly criticized the GOP.

His famous (or infamous) 2009 speech at CPAC, where he outlined his belief that conservatism needs to be pushed even harder, after all, it hasn’t really been fully implemented no longer resonates with people under the age of 65. The US is not only growing apart politically (and fewer voters self-identify as conservatives compared to, say, 25 yrs ago), it is growing apart economically. “There are two Americas”, is a most apt observation of the current state of affairs, and frankly, El Rushbo couldn’t ever be bothered to get off the golf course and notice that there’s a world outside his self insulated, self isolated 1%. Just ask his former housekeeper, Wilma Cline. At least he had the good sense to hire native born help, or at least at the time of the opioid addiction he did.

Perhaps one day a legitimate, balanced, somewhat more nuanced biography will be published about the self-styled, most dangerous man in America. About a person who simply couldn’t be bothered to look beyond the Maybachs, private jets, fancy cigars, country clubs, to notice that there is another America, and one that doesn’t have as rosy a future as did Boomer Rush. But, as he was on autopilot for the last quarter century, it’s really not a surprise that he was simply AWOL on the problems, and slow, steady decline of what once was an amazing, unique first world nation.

The America Rush spoke of was one that he grew up with during his generation. Unfortunately, that America is rapidly passing out of existence. By around 2040 or so, it is safe to say that that nation that endured decades of Reaganism supply side policies, deregulation, high immigration, outsourcing of jobs, *free trade, will no longer exist in any meaningful productive way.

*(Rush was a big NAFTA supporter, as VP Al Gore in his 1993 CNN debate with Ross Perrot acknowledged, which helped to kill millions of US jobs, hastening the opioid and suicide of lower class white workers. And people wonder why Conservatism Inc. does not have the same number of followers it did decades ago.)

* I think Rush felt an obligation to side consistently with Team Republican, but in recent years he became a lot more skeptical and critical of it. I often felt that he understood a lot more than he would let on, gauging how much his audience wanted–or was ready–to hear. I only listened to him in the car and found a lot of what he had to say to be entry-level conservatism, but every once in awhile he’d come out with a truly penetrating political insight.

I recall listening to him in the 1980s on WABC New York, before he was nationally syndicated. At that time he said some things that indicated to me that he knew what was what. For example, he had a black caller once who told him that white people were scared of what black people would accomplish if they stopped oppressing them. Rush responses was something like, “No, that’s not what white people are scared of. They’re scared that black people won’t ever accomplish much no matter what we do for them.”

In those days Rush was on before Bob Grant, who was forthright about racial issues. That position, along with his acerbic manner, kept Grant from succeeding when he tried to go national. I believe Rush took a lesson from that. Grant was an early victim of cancel culture, losing his slot at WABC when a black listener sent a tape of some of his statements to the station’s management. (Grant’s show was later picked up by WOR.)

* I’ve never heard a broadcast by Limbaugh, and only know of him at second hand from the comments here, but all I can say is that no serious threat to the establishment would be allowed to broadcast to tens of millions of people for over 30 years and amass a fortune of $600m. Even a civic nationalist like Steve Sailer would feel lucky to be briefly interviewed once a year on TV or radio.

Posted in Rush Limbaugh | Comments Off on Rush Limbaugh, RIP

Rush Limbaugh’s Sacramento rise

Posted on February 18, 2021 by Luke Ford

On a 1 to 10, how would you rate your favorite radio hosts? I have not listened to the radio in about five years.

I mainly tuned in to KGO radio during the years I worked in landscaping (1986-1988) and listened to a lot of talk radio. On rare occasions, I tuned in to Rush. My favorite was a week he spent in Washington D.C. interviewing people like Morton Kondracke. I wasn’t as interested in his solo show.

I preferred the more cerebral approach of KABC’s Michael Jackson who had lots of guests.

I’ve never had strong feelings about Rush in any direction (well, I found him a bit much, a bit too cartoonish for my comfort) and I don’t remember people talking about him prior to his going national. I’ve probably spent fewer than 250 hours total listening to him, but many of my friends preferred him to Dennis Prager, which surprised me. It felt to me that Rush catered to a crowd with an average IQ of about 105 while Prager catered to an audience with an average IQ of about 115. However, Rush got the appeal of Donald Trump more than a year before Prager got it.

Prager has said his audience demographics are about 50-50 between men and women while I suspect Rush’s listenership was about 90% male. My Youtube audience according to its analytics is 100% male.

I noticed a dramatic uptick in the quality of his show once Rush began national syndication in 1988.

What made Rush different from every other major talk show host who discussed politics is that you usually felt happier after listening to Rush. By contrast, after listening to Prager or Marc Levin or Sean Hannity or Michael Savage, I usually felt more anger and resentment. Is there any other political talk show host who consistently leaves people happier?

From the Los Angeles Times:

It was 1984, and young Limbaugh had been fired from at least five stations in three cities. He’d even left radio for a few years, and then returned — only to be fired once again after less than a year at KMBZ in Kansas City. At the time, he was “mired in loneliness and aimlessly walking through life,” as he recalled years later.

But a racist joke told on-air halfway across the country would soon set the stage — and, in retrospect, perhaps the tone — for his meteoric rise.

The 9-a.m.-to-noon slot at a middle-of-the-pack AM radio station in Sacramento was no aspirant’s idea of a dream job. But the KFBK position was newly vacant and offered Limbaugh one last shot at trying to make it on-air. (The station’s previous morning conservative talk radio host had resigned after a brouhaha over said “joke.”)

Limbaugh found an undeniably fertile audience in liberal California’s capital, where the average listener was “familiar with the workings of government,” as Limbaugh put it, and didn’t need to be cajoled into calling in. “In Kansas City I had some doubts that I could do it well, but here — this is the way it should be,” he told the Sacramento Bee a few weeks after taking the job.

The week that Limbaugh made his Sacramento debut, talk radio veteran David G. Hall — then a new reporter at the station — heard a voice blaring from a speaker as he made his way through an office hallway.

“I stopped cold in my tracks,” Hall recalled to The Times in 2003. He could hear someone “going on and on about Teddy Kennedy and Chappaquiddick. I thought, ‘Oh, this guy’s got a crackpot guest.’ ” But even in its nascent form, the Rush Limbaugh show rarely did guests. The “crackpot” voice was coming from the host’s chair.

It was at KFBK that Limbaugh “began to develop his format: music; wacky, sometimes savage, humor and conservative politics in a town thought to be dominated by liberals,” as The Times reflected in 1991.

Even his signature music, the instrumental opening of the Pretenders’ “My City Was Gone,” dates to his Sacramento show, as do trademark lines like “on the cutting edge of societal evolution” and his decades-long riff about disliking Rio Linda.

One could argue that Limbaugh would ultimately reshape the Republican Party in his own image. But he couldn’t have done it without the commuters of Sacramento, who helped build his national launchpad with their radio dials. One can only wonder how differently the last few decades of American political history might have played out had Limbaugh not found the initial audience needed to propel his career into the stratosphere.

When Limbaugh began his nearly four-year stint at the station, few in the city knew his name. Three years later, he was serving as the grand marshal of the local St. Patrick’s Day parade and his popularity was “virtually unparalleled in Sacramento talk show history,” according to a 1987 Sacramento Bee story. Ratings tripled during his tenure. He also made his debut as TV regular while in Sacramento, with a local news segment in which he faced off against the liberal mayor of Davis.

Bob Baker wrote in the Los Angeles Times Jan. 20, 1991:

Welcome to a world where Howard Cosell’s voice seems to have been grafted to Pat Buchanan’s brain and amplified through the cracked sensibilities of the Stanford Marching Band…

Mister Limbaugh’s neighborhood is the hottest place in talk radio because it is unlike any other spot on the dial, a gag- and bombast-infested, stream-of-consciousness current-events lecture that careens between blood-serious conservative politics and deadpan irreverence. It is a place without any guests, a place where the host is the show, a place where callers play second fiddle, their views meticulously screened to avoid any sluggish or repetitive moments that might bog down the breakneck pace.

The show is so flat-out weird that Limbaugh affably advises new listeners that they’ll require six weeks to understand it. By then, he says, they will be delivered to “the cutting edge of societal evolution.” You will never have to read another newspaper again, he promises, the way a faith healer might. “I will do all your reading, and I will tell you what to think about it.”

…Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, who turned 40 two weeks ago, is a booming-voiced, 6-foot-tall, 320-pound man with thinning hair who lives a relatively hermit-like, computer-nerd existence until show time, when he seems to erupt into the mike. There is supreme grace and confidence to this bluster. Yet Limbaugh was a failure through most of his broadcasting life until he did something Americans still do best. He reinvented himself. Uncomfortable with traditional restrictive radio formats, he developed one that fit his quirky, opinionated nature and appealed to many listeners who found conventional talk radio too predictable or ponderous.

…Limbaugh freely admits just about everything on the air: his divorces (two), his previous firings (way more than two), his weight (a gain of 100 pounds in the past five years), his new home-exercise program (40 minutes on a treadmill at 3.5 m.p.h.), his tendency to perspire heavily, the fact that he hates crowds unless he’s performing in front of them, the fact that he cried in bed the other night watching a tape of “Field of Dreams.”

Yet for all his excesses–indeed, because of them–Limbaugh has sculpted a program that is far more compelling than either the civilized talk-show universe of KABC’s Jackson or the confrontational nether world of “shock radio,” in which audience and guests are routinely assaulted. He brings an almost frightening enthusiasm to the program–a quality that, ironically, makes him seem boorish when he appears on the cooler medium of television. The show reflects not merely Limbaugh’s gotta-keep-busy personality but also his background. He’s a news junkie, a man who overcompensates for being a college dropout by devouring and dissecting all manner of newspapers and magazines–he says he spends three hours reading news and analysis before each day’s show. He’s a radio junkie who started working as a rock ‘n’ roll deejay in the golden, pre-FM days of radio while still a teen-ager and maintains the art of breathlessly pacing a show, cutting from one factlet to another without breaking stride. He’s a political junkie, delighted to interpret everything but the weather in a liberal-versus-conservative context. He’s an attention junkie, a man who looks at his fame with the heartfelt reverence most people reserve for their newborn baby. He’s a control junkie: The show is his, period. Callers who attempt to duplicate the host’s style of ironic humor are reminded never to try it in their homes…

Until the middle of last year, Limbaugh reveled frequently in acidic “gay community updates,” belittling gay activists for besieging America for a cure for AIDS, a problem that was, to Limbaugh’s mind, entirely of their own making. He became, on occasion, the target of protests by AIDS activists. Now, however, you rarely hear the topic.

“I frankly got tired of being identified as a gay basher,” Limbaugh says wearily one evening as he drives through downtown Los Angeles during a week of promotional broadcasts from KFI. He is steering a Jaguar, on loan from a local dealer, enjoying an aimless drive–west down Wilshire, through Brentwood, back east on Sunset–a pleasure beyond his reach in Manhattan, where he does not own a car. He is not enjoying this public notion that forever plagues him, the idea that he is insensitive. He wishes it would go away. Don’t they understand? The gags come so fast to him, and he hates to repress any of them. Why can’t he have his fun, soaring from one political diatribe to another with as many midstream belly laughs as he can muster? Hey, he asks, didn’t you see the recent essay in Esquire, “The Case Against Sensitivity”? That’s just what he’s been saying on the show for months–that “sensitivity” is the new fascism, that you can no longer make fun of “politically correct” groups. What happened to free speech? Why doesn’t everybody lighten up? Why do liberals assume he’s a racist just because he taunts every black leader from Jesse Jackson to David Dinkins? That doesn’t mean he has anything against blacks, he insists.

…In New York, Limbaugh consolidated the call-screening rules that allow the program to sound like what a number of radio consultants have admiringly described as a local show projected across the country. You won’t hear two consecutive calls from the same geographic area. Nor will you hear many of the staples of other right-wing broadcasters. Limbaugh regards them as viruses that kill off the broad audience he craves.

“I don’t want any John Birchers, no one-world-government theories,” he says. “No UFOs, no abortion calls in the context of when life begins, no gun control in the 20-year-old, cliched argument, nothing from people who are going to read anything (on the air), no Bible–faith is a sacred and personal thing. I don’t want devout believers of any religion or cause because they don’t think. I want people who think about things with a passion. And I do not want racists or bigots to feel they have a home on the show. It’s an entertainment show.”

Posted in Radio, Rush Limbaugh | Comments Off on Rush Limbaugh’s Sacramento rise

The Consolation of Philosophy (2-17-21)

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Luke Ford

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Consolation_of_Philosophy
https://twitter.com/Godward16/status/1362130986474102795

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Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021)

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Luke Ford

27:10 Dave Smith on Nick Fuentes
46:50 In A Yugo (Rush Limbaugh song parodies)
1:17:00 Is Sexy Nazi Role Playing OK — as Long as You’re a Proud Jew?, https://forward.com/schmooze/338352/is-sexy-nazi-role-playing-ok-as-long-as-youre-a-proud-jew/
1:19:30 Brian Rosenwald, Talk Radio’s America, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKuUXkzvzZM
1:40:00 The End of America First?, https://www.spreaker.com/user/altright/impeachment-and-af
1:48:00 Can a man turn 180 degrees and renounce fascism?, https://abc6onyourside.com/news/local/can-a-man-turn-180-degrees-and-renounce-fascism
1:52:00 Department of Homeland Security Confirms Neo-Nazi Leader Used to Work For It, https://www.vice.com/en/article/epd7wa/department-of-homeland-security-confirms-neo-nazi-leader-used-to-work-for-it
2:03:00 How Right-Wing Radio Stoked Anger Before the Capitol Siege, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/business/media/conservative-talk-radio-capitol-riots.html
2:13:00 The Narcissist Society (1976) by Christopher Lasch, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1976/09/30/the-narcissist-society/
2:16:00 Joe Biden says blacks, latinos do not know how to get online, https://hotair.com/archives/jazz-shaw/2021/02/17/president-thinks-blacks-hispanics-dont-know-get-online/
2:18:00 Based black guy, Donovan Worland: Richard Spencer CALLED IT, on Biden! Amazing., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2cnB4yJOYM

The Age of Limbaugh


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Limbaugh
https://trad-news.blogspot.com/2021/02/boomercon-icon-rush-limbaugh-dead.html
https://www.city-journal.org/html/real-war-science-14782.html

Posted in America, Rush Limbaugh | Comments Off on Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021)

Cancel Culture From Thomas More To Godward Podcast

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Luke Ford

I suspect that in every society that has ever existed, there have been certain obvious truths you could not say out loud without serious blowback. I don’t think cancel culture is new.

No movie had more of an impact on my childhood as A Man For All Seasons (1966) about Thomas More. I saw him as a brave martyr. Wikipedia notes:

The film and play both depict the final years of Sir Thomas More, the 16th-century Lord Chancellor of England who refused both to sign a letter asking Pope Clement VII to annul Henry VIII of England’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon and to take an Oath of Supremacy declaring Henry VIII Supreme Head of the Church of England….

The title reflects playwright Bolt’s portrayal of More as the ultimate man of conscience, remaining true to his principles and religion under all circumstances and at all times. Bolt borrowed the title from Robert Whittington, a contemporary of More, who in 1520 wrote of him: “More is a man of an angel’s wit and singular learning. I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity. A man for all seasons.”

…Upon receiving his death sentence, More denounces the king’s Supremacy over the Church as illegal, citing the Biblical foundation for the authority of the Papacy over the Church and declaring the alleged Supremacy of the King repugnant to the legal institutions of all Christendom. More further declares that the Church’s immunity to State interference is guaranteed both in Magna Carta and in the King’s own coronation oath. As uproar ensues, the judges pronounce the full sentence according to the standard forms: More is remitted to the Tower and condemned to death by beheading.

The scene switches from the court to the scaffold on Tower Hill, where before his execution More observes custom by pardoning and tipping the executioner before declaring, “I die his Majesty’s good servant, but God’s first.” He kneels at the block and the executioner cuts off his head.

I didn’t realize as a child how many people More had burned at the stake for heresy.

Sometimes in life, we get burned at the stake (metaphorically) and other times we burn others at the stake. Sometimes we’re the concentration camp inmates (metaphorically) and sometimes we’re the guards.

A key insight I developed early in my life was that nothing that was human was foreign to me. With a little work, I could empathize with anyone.

I often find it useful to look at the pain in my life as 100% self-inflicted. I take this perspective not because it is necessarily true, but because it can be useful.

When I compare my experience as a Protestant and my experience as a Jew, it seems like there was 100 times as much veneration of martyrdom in Protestantism. God, after all, in Christianity is portrayed as taking on human flesh so he can come to earth and die on a cross to save humanity from sin. Christianity is romantic religion while Judaism is unromantic religion. Jews don’t tend to extoll martyrdom and the next life as much as Christians do. Jews are more pragmatic. They are more likely to make peace with reality rather than to war against it.

Amazon.com notes: “The essays collected in Persecution and the Art of Writing all deal with one problem—the relation between philosophy and politics. Here, Strauss sets forth the thesis that many philosophers, especially political philosophers, have reacted to the threat of persecution by disguising their most controversial and heterodox ideas.”

Wikipedia:

Strauss’s general argument—rearticulated throughout his subsequent writings (most notably in The City and Man – 1964)—is that prior to the 19th century, Western scholars commonly understood that philosophical writing is not at home in any polity, no matter how liberal. Insofar as it questions conventional wisdom at its roots, philosophy must guard itself especially against those readers who believe themselves authoritative, wise, and liberal defenders of the status quo. In questioning established opinions, or in investigating the principles of morality, philosophers of old found it necessary to convey their messages in an oblique manner. Their “art of writing” was the art of esoteric communication. This is all the more apparent in medieval times, when heterodox political thinkers wrote under the threat of the Inquisition or comparably intransigent tribunals.

Strauss’s argument is not that the medieval writers he studies reserved one exoteric meaning for the many (hoi polloi) and an esoteric or hidden one for the few (hoi aristoi, literally “the best”) but rather that their writings’ respective core meanings extended beyond and were irreducible to their texts’ literal and/or historical dimension.

Explicitly following Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s lead, Strauss indicates that medieval political philosophers, no less than their ancient counterparts, in writing, carefully adapted their wording to the dominant moral views of their time, lest their writings be condemned as heretical or unjust, not by “the many” (who did not read), but by those “few” whom the many regarded as the most righteous guardians of morality: precisely those few righteous personalities would be most inclined to persecute or ostracize anyone who is in the business of exposing the “noble” or “great lie” upon which stands or falls the authority of the few over the many. Strauss thus presents Maimonides “as a closet nonbeliever obfuscating his message for political reasons.”

From Haaretz:

For 30 years, Yehiel De-Nur, a Polish-born Holocaust survivor who wrote under the pseudonym “Ka-Tzetnik,” was tormented by horrific nightmares. Every night, Auschwitz would visit him in his sleep, and he would wake up screaming, drenched in perspiration. His wife, Nina, heard about a Dutch psychiatrist who healed trauma using LSD, and over a period of two years urged her husband to see him. Finally he agreed, and in the summer of 1976 the couple traveled to the city of Leiden, in the Netherlands from Israel, where they lived. They spent a year there.

Ka-Tzetnik’s encounter with Jan Bastiaans was apparently the most meaningful experience of his life, following Auschwitz. “My mind goes numb at the mere thought of Prof. Bastiaans,” he wrote a decade later in his book “Shivitti: A Vision,” first published in full in the weekly newsmagazine Ha’olam Hazeh.

In the book, published in English in 1989 in a translation by Eliyah Nike De-Nur and Lisa Herman, Ka-Tzetnik (the Yiddish acronym used to describe a concentration camp inmate) describes how Bastiaans injected him with the drug and how he was abruptly catapulted from the spacious, pleasant therapy room back into hell, entering the ghetto behind Vevke, the cobbler, when suddenly the cobbler’s bench changes colors “from blinding yellow-green to ultraviolet… elongating like that clock of Salvador Dali’s.” Then, before his eyes, Vevke’s face transmutes into the face of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. The whole of Auschwitz is illuminated by the flames of the bold colors, he writes.

The entire process of treatment is recorded. During the trance, Bastiaans sits next to Ka-Tzetnik and urges him to describe in detail the hallucinations racing through his mind. He also sees to it that the patient does not drown under the horror. Bastiaans tells him that if he hadn’t wakened him he would not have been able to bring him back. You would have remained there, lost in limbo, the psychiatrist tells him.

Five LSD treatments sufficed for Ka-Tzetnik, before he announced that he wanted to go home. The nightmares vanished, and for the first time in 30 years he was able to sleep peacefully. After Leiden, he said, he was no longer the same person he had been before. Under the influence of the treatments, he retracted his famous comment – made when he gave testimony in the Eichmann trial, in 1961 – that Auschwitz was another planet. In an interview to journalist Ram Evron in 1988, he said, “Neither Satan nor God built Auschwitz, but I and you.” In that room in Leiden, he grasped that Auschwitz was the handiwork of human beings, “and it’s Hitler, it wasn’t Satan. He was a person.”

…While the patient was under the influence of the drug, Bastiaans and the clinic staff invoked techniques of psychodrama to stimulate memories and flood the patient emotionally. Bastiaans played Nazi march music for the patients and exposed them to S.S. symbols and effigies of Nazis. He also played roles of characters in situations that the patients had experienced.

“Bastiaans took the role of authority, often it was the role of the caring father but also he might be the camp commander, the person who was feared,” Van Waning explains. “There was always someone supervising in the room, usually a woman. So I might get the role of a mother or sister or a more supporting person. The script wrote itself during the session.”

‘The aim is to live through what happened but also to see it in a larger context, become a ‘witness’ and see that now it was safe.’

So it was a form of improvisation?

“Yes. It all depended on what the patient would reveal. The patient could suddenly say to Bastiaans, ‘You hate me, I can see it in your eyes, you are going to destroy me.’ So within the hallucination, it felt real to him. But the patient might also say, “The way you are looking at me reminds me of the camp commander.’ In that case Bastiaans would not join in ‘being’ that person but ask the patient in what way he was like that person and what kind of feelings that generated. I think that it’s not very fruitful to let the patient identify with these positions completely and for a long time; the aim is to live through what happened but also to see it in a larger context, become a ‘witness’ and see that now it was safe. There is a great risk of re-traumatizing the patient when the patient is taken back into this hell and relives it in that deep, direct sense. It can aggravate the problems, the suffering. So it is important to touch on what happened just enough so that we can be a witness.

Hilary Mantel writes in the second novel of her Wolf Hall trilogy — Bring up the Bodies:

* He finds he cannot think of the dying men at all. Into his mind instead strays the picture of More on the scaffold, seen through the veil of rain: his body, already dead, folding back neatly from the impact of the axe. The cardinal when he fell had no persecutor more relentless than Thomas More. Yet, he thinks, I did not hate him. I exercised my skills to the utmost to persuade him to reconcile with the king. And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.

* He [Thomas Wyatt] will be released, he says. But perhaps not until Anne [Boleyn] is dead.
The hours to that event seem long. Richard hugs him; says, ‘If she had reigned longer she would have given us to the dogs to eat.’
‘If we had let her reign longer, we would have deserved it.’

* The Lord Chancellor says, ‘The truth is so rare and precious that sometimes it must be kept under lock and key.’

Galileo had trouble with the Catholic Church. Notes Wikipedia: “Galileo’s championing of heliocentrism and Copernicanism met with opposition from within the Catholic Church and from some astronomers. The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, which concluded that heliocentrism was “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture”.[9][10][11]

Galileo later defended his views in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632), which appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII and thus alienated both the Pope and the Jesuits, who had both supported Galileo up until this point.[9] He was tried by the Inquisition, found “vehemently suspect of heresy”, and forced to recant. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest.”

French philosopher Rene Descartes had to find a modus vivendi with the Catholic Church. “Though raised as a Catholic, Descartes, who had been summoned in 1649 to tutor Queen Christina, was regarded with suspicion by many of his theological coreligionists. His theories were viewed as incompatible with the belief of transubstantiation, in which the bread and wine served during the Eucharist become the flesh and blood of Christ.” The Guardian says: “French philosopher was killed by arsenic-laced holy communion wafer after airing ‘heretic’ views, says academic.”

Wikipedia notes: “The Catholic Church prohibited his books in 1663… Descartes steered clear of theological questions, restricting his attention to showing that there is no incompatibility between his metaphysics and theological orthodoxy. He avoided trying to demonstrate theological dogmas metaphysically. When challenged that he had not established the immortality of the soul merely in showing that the soul and the body are distinct substances, for example, he replied, “I do not take it upon myself to try to use the power of human reason to settle any of those matters which depend on the free will of God.””

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Where Do Journalists Come From?

Posted on February 17, 2021 by Luke Ford

Tom Wolfe wrote in his 2012 novel Back to Blood:

People have such a colorful picture of newspaper reporters, don’t they, all these daring types who “break” stories and “uncover” corruption and put themselves in risky situations to get a “scoop.” Robert Redford in All the President’s Men, Burt Lancaster in The Sweet Smell of Success … If you ask me, newspaper reporters are created at age six when they first go to school. In the schoolyard boys immediately divide into two types. Immediately! There are those who have the will to be daring and dominate, and those who don’t have it. Those who don’t, like John Smith here, spend half their early years trying to work out a modus vivendi with those who do… and anything short of subservience will be okay. But there are boys from the weaker side of the divide who grow up with the same dreams as the stronger… and I’m as sure about this as anything in the world: The boy standing before me, John Smith, is one of them. They, too, dream of power, money, fame, and beautiful lovers. Boys like this kid grow up instinctively instinctively realizing that language is an artifact, like a sword or a gun. Used skillfully, it has the power to… well, not so much achieve things as to tear things down—including people… including the boys who came out on the strong side of that sheerly dividing line. Hey, that’s what liberals are! Ideology? Economics? Social justice? Those are nothing but their prom outfits. Their politics were set for life in the schoolyard at age six. They were the weak, and forever after they resented the strong. That’s why so many journalists are liberals! The very same schoolyard events that pushed them toward the written word… pushed them toward “liberalism.” It’s as simple as that! And talk about irony! If you want power through words in journalism, rhetorical genius is not enough. You need content, you need new material, you need… news, in a word… and you have to find it yourself. You, from the weak side, can develop such a craving for new information, you end up doing things that would terrify any strong man from the other side of the divide. You will put yourself in dangerous situations amid dangerous people… with relish . You will go alone, without any form of backup… eagerly! You—you with your weak manner—end up approaching the vilest of the vile with a demand. “You have some information, and I need it. And I deserve it! And I will have it!”

Frederik De Boer writes:

Recently, after months of threats and intimidation tactics, the New York Times published a hit piece about Scott Alexander and his blog SlateStarCodex, by something named Cade Metz. You can read Alexander’s response here.

I’ll cut to the chase. The piece is an expression of a constant dynamic in media and the Times in particular: the establishment media believes that it is the world’s noble and benevolent arbiter of truth, and the kind of people who work for the Times are immensely disdainful of and actively hostile to anyone who seeks to inform or persuade the public who does not write for one of a dozen dusty legacy publications and who did not go to one of 20 or so elite colleges. Scott Alexander built up a large and immensely influential readership completely on his own, writing a blog that, whatever its faults, stepped far outside of the narrow and parochial currents that Very Serious Media refuses to leave. This was a threat, a challenge to people like Cade Metz who think that it is their divine right to be the ones to tell the story. So Metz set out to destroy Alexander, with the full backing of the official paper of crossword addicts and columns about bootstraps and dynamism. I’m sure a lot of ink has been spilled about this story, and more will come. Understand: Cade Metz wrote this story because he had to punish Alexander for writing an influential publication with no backing from the important people. Whatever anyone else says, that is the reality.

Metz, in his usual style of casual condescension and utter capitulation to dominant narratives, writes “many in the tech industry… deeply distrusted the mainstream media and generally preferred discussion to take place on their own terms.”

Boy, I wonder why! Perhaps – this is too crazy to contemplate – perhaps it’s because the mainstream media has been a complete and utter failure in its most basic functions for decades, an absolute cesspit of bad reporting, warmongering, deference to power, coverage slanted towards the interests of the rich and powerful, obsession with meaningless cultural trends and complete disinterest in stories of immense importance, a totally collapsed line between editorial and advertising, a greying workforce that knows less and less about the world and which is utterly resistant to learning…. People really hate the media, and they do because the media sucks at its job. Don’t take my word for it! Of all of the industry’s many pathologies, the funniest is its members’ inability to understand why they’re so hated, given that they have done nothing but fail for my entire adulthood. If the industry engaged in self-reflection, they might figure it out. But… they won’t.

… the New York Times is of course an entirely partisan publication, one which is in utter thrall to the Neera Tanden wing of the Democrat party. It’s the house paper of affluent class-never liberals, the kind of people who give to charity but quietly vote against tax increases in public referendums, the kind of people still will pigeonhole you at a party to insist that they like the Wire more than you do, the kind of people who go from Bowdoin to Teach for America to a year finding themselves by fucking and drugging their way across Echo Park, only to wind up in a Park Slope townhouse that really wasn’t as expensive as you think! and send their kids to private school so that they can concentrate on their careers in UX design and advertising….

Alexander is not one of them. He’s not in the New York media social rat race, so he’s not a part of their culture. He’s not on Slack. He doesn’t tell the same tired, shitty jokes that journalists make on Twitter literally from the minute they get up to the minute they go to bed. He’s not performatively filling his feed with only women writers and artists, because he’s just not that interested in cishet men anymore, man. He doesn’t make references to whatever shithouse bar in Nolita media people used to go to after work to snort coke. He doesn’t use Twitter as an outlet to scream his dedication to BIPOC to the world, knowing this will look good on his resume. He’s not a thirty three year old white person who speaks like a Black teenager, like half the journalists on Twitter. And most importantly, he jumped the line. He didn’t get paid $250 a week by Refinery79 for 60 hours of work for two years to climb the latter. He had the audacity to think that he could circumvent the system and challenge the official narratives.

I used to watch the naked social climbing going on, and it was the source of my disgusted fascination with Media Twitter. The fundamental thing that you need to understand about media Twitter is that it is a somewhat grosser, more explicit version of what media socializing is in real life: an endless, white-knuckled effort in pure careerism and influence trading. You ever see someone in the media announce that they’re changing jobs on Twitter? It is the weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. I guess I understand the need to announce your career changes, but why do people always respond with absurd hyperbole on Twitter? “You are the greatest and best person in the world!” You don’t have their email address? You can’t text your congratulations? If you aren’t close enough to the person to do that, why are you congratulating them at all? And don’t even get me started on launching an independent tweet of your own (being sure to tag them, of course). DM them with your sincere happiness for them! I guarantee it’ll mean more. Do people who work at Geico do this shit?

…It’s a culture that’s full of bizarre rituals that only make sense if you understand that none of it is sincere, that all of it is motivated by the desire for social and professional gain.

You have to understand: most writers are losers, or at least, they secretly think of themselves as losers. They were losers in high school and never got over it and were surprised to learn that they couldn’t get their novel about Facing Adulthood with My Multiracial Friends in Bushwick published and so didn’t get the literary celebrity they felt they deserved. So they dive into the media ecosystem where they are delighted to find exactly what they were looking for: a new high school, a replacement for the one where they were a fucking loser, where this time they’ll be the quarterback, they’ll be the head cheerleader. And so they get up every morning and jockey for rank. They horse trade. They seek favor. They amplify work they don’t really respect because the person who wrote it is more popular or successful than them or both. They pretend that terrible, terrible jokes told by terminally unfunny people are entertaining, because they know the other person will reciprocate.

Anyone with the audacity to write from outside of that world is a target.

You will have noticed an explosion in the use of the terms “conspiracy theory” and “misinformation” lately. Ostensibly a response to the pathetic rump that is QAnon, this is the establishment media grasping at power nakedly. If you haven’t rode the Q train lately and you aren’t on Slack and you don’t tweet incessantly about how fucking deep I May Destroy You is, if you don’t participate in media rituals, if you don’t have a blue checkmark, you’re probably writing misinformation. You may have noticed that many people now cast SubStack as a hive of the alt-right and conspiracy theorists, despite the incredible ideological diversity of the platform. SubStack is a threat to the hegemony of establishment media, and so it must be politically toxic. Joe Rogan is reviled not because he and his guests say some stupid shit – and they do – but because he is immensely popular outside of the official channels, he is decidedly not part of the culture of media or overachiever culture in general, and his show is massively more successful than their terrible podcasts.

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Power and Powerlessness: The Eternal Struggle Over Social Status (2-15-21)

Posted on February 16, 2021 by Luke Ford

https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/tom-wolfe-biography
https://www.cjr.org/public_editor/washington-post-tesla-trump-power.php


https://www.cjr.org/public_editor/washington-post-tesla-trump-power.php

Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboys Dynasty

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