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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Geeze I wonder why this guy loves the press :

Personally, I’ve always been treated well by the mainstream press.

This advice of course isn’t going to apply to people who think January 6 was a peaceful protest, Trump really won the 2020 election, mRNA vaccines are dangerous, or that the world is run by a cabal of Satanic pedophiles, because such views, unlike anti-wokeness and anti-masking, don’t have any support in newsrooms or among the kinds of people who become successful journalists.

Wow I wonder how somebody with such bold and brave opinions could find that the media is not that bad after all.

But let's see.

This guy claims that somebody with these opinions could NOT be 'among the kinds of people who become successful journalists'?

What is an example of good journalism according to him?

Vice.

[Let's see what Vice thinks of the Jan 6 protests.](

https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7w743/gavin-mcinnes-wears-proud-boy-colors-again-throws-support-behind-jan-6-defendants)

Gavin McInnes Wears Proud Boy Colors Again, Throws Support Behind Jan. 6 Defendants

Oh my, that sounds like one of these people that could never be successful journalists right there according to Mr Hanania!

(Disclosure: Gavin McInnes was a co-founder of VICE in the mid-1990s. He left the company in 2008 and has had no involvement since then. He founded the Proud Boys in 2016.)

Oh.

I know several people have already pointed out that right-wing journalists are pushed away from the media, but I thought that this part was especially savory.

I have another example of course.

Andrew Anglin who draws millions of people to read his blog.

He writes a dozen article every single day, derivative, not of his own research, usually using the MSM as the source.

Why is Andrew Anglin not sending teams of journalists to report on first-hand information?

Gee I wonder maybe it has to do with him getting banned from social media, all payment processing systems, getting banned from Cloudflare, getting banned from several DNS, getting banned from webhosts...

He would be a successful journalist if he were a leftist, or if the right-wing were in charge.

Currently sitting at 10k followers on twitter a couple months after joining back in.

Part of the problem is that Republicans aren’t very smart, so they can’t pressure the media in effective ways to give them better coverage and do actually do things that can’t be defended like equivocate on who won the 2020 election.

Just smart yourself out of depending on banks and internet access to be a successful media company.

But don't smart yourself too much or they'll put you in jail like Virgil Griffith.

Back in the 2010s they'd just have roasted the guy on a reality tv show like King of the Nerds instead.

Now, let's look at the 'right-wing' media that is allowed to exist.

Ben Shapiro for years has enjoyed great promotion on Youtube, to the extent that left-wingers complain that he was part of the gateway to the altright or the radicalization engine etc... Funnily enough one of my zoomer friends said he was first 'radicalized' by Ben Shapiro.

Here is another example from Reddit, Shapiro has ads on Youtube.

Meanwhile, ever since Gamergate or earlier, a wide range of Youtube streamers can testify that their videos were demonetized, removed, shadowbanned or deamplified. For example Pewdiepie.

The 'Adpocalypse' began over two separate incidents. The first was when it came to light that terrorist groups like Hezbollah were using YouTube to upload and monetize videos promoting terrorism.

The second occurred when Felix 'PewDiePie' Kjellberg made a video that included men he had paid to hold signs that read 'Death to all Jews.' Kjellberg insisted his video was satirical in nature and has since apologized. But since his channel remains the largest on YouTube, and since he was partnered with Disney's Maker Studios at the time and worked closely with YouTube Red on original content, the backlash was intense, and the reverberations were felt throughout the YouTube community.

Now, why is Ben Shapiro allowed to enjoy such an audience on Youtube?

Is it because he is such a consummate professional, expert at SIO?

He didn't do too well against an actual conservative journalist Andrew Neil.

Is it perhaps because his opinions are not actually a threat to the system, much like Hanania's?

['And by the way, I don't give a good damn about the so-called "browning of America."

Color doesn't matter. Ideology does.'](https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/875730927002963968)

Perhaps Susan Wojcicki the CEO of YouTube thinks that she needs some 'conservative' talking heads.

Another example quoted in the MediaMatters link above is PragerU, which has an Israeli intelligence veteran for CEO, on video saying :

Frankly, I think a big thing we’ve changed people’s minds on is Israel. I got a phone call from … Israel’s foreign ministry … they called me. They specifically said “what you guys [PragerU] are doing is probably better than most pro-Israel organizations” because our audience is not Jewish or Israeli, so we’re not called ‘Israel.com.’ We do videos on 52 different topics, and a few of them happen to be on Israel… In no case we’re preaching to the choir on no issue because we have such diverse issues. Yes, we’re always conservative and pro Judeo-Christian, you know, American values, but we have moved a lot of people who have never heard positive things about Israel more towards Israel because of the diversity of our content.

There's a lot of such media out there. American exposure to Israel in the media is overwhelmingly positive. And that country gets a lot more media coverage than any other smallish country (prior to Ukraine in 2022-2023).

Another aspect is how tied up at the hip with American intelligence / deep state the media is.

Twitter for example had a lot of former FBI agents working there. But they are not the only ones.

The initial articles covering the January 6 protests said that policemen were killed during the protests.

The only death during the protest was an unarmed, female protestor.

This was known at time of publishing, but it took weeks for the NYT article to show a correction that the one cop who died was not 'bludgeoned' to death but died after the protests in some other location and without really getting hurt by protestors.

Moreover, there is evidence that the protests were directed by people who were working for the federal government, and this is not something that the MSM has been willing to cover much.

The MSM journalists don't even believe their own lies in some cases, as with January 6:

NYT National Security Correspondent, Matthew Rosenberg, contradicts his own January 6 reporting: “There were a ton of FBI informants amongst the people who attacked the Capitol.”

Rosenberg: “It was like, me and two other colleagues who were there [January 6] outside and we were just having fun!”

Rosenberg: “I know I’m supposed to be traumatized, but like, all these colleagues who were in the [Capitol] building and are like ‘Oh my God it was so scary!’ I’m like, ‘f*ck off!’”

Rosenberg: “I’m like come on, it’s not the kind place I can tell someone to man up but I kind of want to be like, ‘dude come on, you were not in any danger.’”

Rosenberg: “These fcking little dweebs who keep going on about their trauma. Shut the fck up. They’re fcking btches.”

Rosenberg: "They were making too big a deal. They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.”

Rosenberg RESPONDS: “Will I stand by those comments? Absolutely.”

The irony with this is that during the Charlottesville protests of 2016, one of the deaths was a female left-wing protestor who was walking on the street in front of stopped cars, when one car ran at moderate speed into the car at the back of the line, which caused the other cars to move and hit her.

The Dailystormer was mainly deplatformed because they made a joke about her being fat.

I don't think any of the media outlets calling the dead female protestor of 2022 an insurrectionist or a terrorist has been deplatformed.

The perpetrator had his time of glory on TV instead of getting several life sentences like James Field.

I think the biggest problem for the media is what they choose to cover.

If a team of scientists makes a discovery, they have guidelines to go out of their way to find a woman or a non-white to talk about it, even if their involvement was very minor.

If they talk about a country that their bosses like, then they say (mostly) positive things, no matter what.

The issue is that this kind of thing can change very fast.

One day we support #MeToo, the next we have to remember the tragedy of Emmett Till.

Here's an example with a NYT journalist writing a hitpiece on Americans who indulge in Russian propaganda, getting their own media's links thrown back at them when asking for source on Ukraine being a corrupt country.

2/2

Another issue is that when needed they are all coordinated to cover up or create urgency.

The joke at the time 'Oh it's Ukraine season? I still have my Covid decorations up'

illustrates this state of affairs, where the American/Western media overwhelmingly talks about the same thing at the same time, to take over the mind of the people.

Then they claim that there is such a thing as democracy, while the majority of people get their opinions fed directly from the same sources, with a handful of billionaires controlling all large corporate media that is allowed to have bank accounts and appear on the internet.

The recent Biden classified documents 'scandal' is another example.

The initial find was on November 2.. Right before the Midterms.

But we did not see it in the media before the end of the election of the speaker of the House.

Compare this to the leak of the Roe v. Wade overturning before the Midterms.

Finally, here is a critique of this article on unz.com.

I will quote just the end:

second opinion, from Paleo Retiree, who worked for decades at a major weekly news magazine. After I wrote about the bronze statue boom of the last third of a century, which I’ve seen with my own eyes all across the country but can’t recall ever reading about in the national press as a subject worthy of art criticism, he responded:

BTW, there’s a surprisingly big world out there of gifted people — architects, painters, composers, poets, etc — creating delightful, solid and beautiful stuff in trad kinds of ways. I’ve met a bunch of them. The reason your average American culturefan isn’t aware of this activity is that the press doesn’t cover it, so you aren’t being told about it. You won’t know about it if you don’t stumble into it yourself.

You can trust me on this, btw: back in the ‘90s I pitched a lot of story ideas about the various New Traditionalisms to a lot of different editors, and 99.9% of the time my ideas were shot down. I had to have had the worst batting average of any arts reporter ever, lol.

You’d think editors of arts sections and arts publications would find such people and developments interesting, and would want to explore them and tell readers and viewers about them. But no: in fact what I found was that the editors and producers (and the people behind them) who run the discussion about the arts in our country aren’t interested in mere reporting, let alone in giving their readers and viewers a fair picture of what’s really going on culturally in the world. They’re interested in dictating terms and promoting agendas. A few scales fell from my eyes. It’s almost like the entire news business generally!