Oct 8, 2025
yikes!
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yikes!
When your heroes disappoint you.
FWIW, she did apologize: https://mobile.twitter.com/ValeriePlame/status/910914329138130944
Here is linked author Phil Geraldi at the same crazy white supremacist source Unz saying the Charlie Hebdo shooting was a Jewish false flag: http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/waving-the-false-flag/
Everyone makes mistakes, but... Plame was a CIA agent, how stupid and racist can they afford to be, in the recent past?
In the second episode, against the backdrop of Luigi Mangione's shooting of the UnitedHealth CEO, Mr. Ron Unz discusses the rapidly worsening wealth gap in the United States over past decades, the widespread societal discontent it has fostered, and the possibility for revolution.
This story has been floating around for a while, but no one seems to have written it up for a post (I tweeted it in February). Well, I believe in exposing bad actors in one's own camp, so he we go. Gregory Cochran coauthored an interesting book, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Acceler
Drama in the HBD fandom.
[pdf=https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Ron_Unz_White_Racialism_in_America_Then_and_Now.pdf]One morning a couple of years ago I received an urgent email from a moderately prominent libertarian figure strongly focused on antiwar issues. He warned me that our publication had been branded a “White Supremacist website” by the Washington Post, and urged me to immediately respond, perhaps by demanding a formal retraction or even taking […]
This is an excellent article, if extremely long. I’ve noticed Ron Unz’s assessment of literally every book is “I thought it was going to be insane but it was actually quite reasonable.”
Well, as someone who’s actually been involved in quite a number of major political campaigns, several of them successful, let me contribute my own perspective…
First, media totally dominates our political world, so much so that there’s no other factor of even remotely comparable importance. Aside from the desire of campaign consultants to get rich, the only reason politicians raise money is to buy media, mostly paid (i.e. ads) but also free (i.e. campaign consultants who can effectively spin reporters and shape the coverage).
Personally, I think the best metaphor I’ve ever encountered for understanding the role of media in politics is found in the Warlock stories of Larry Niven, the noted SF writer. In his framework, mana is the raw power source behind magic, the resource necessary to produce desired effects, much like hydrocarbons that power our industrial civilization. Basically, media is the mana of political campaigns.
So the two, somewhat independent, needs of a political campaign are to acquire sufficient mana and then to shape it effectively. Elected officials, celebrities, and those with connections to major media organs tend to have automatic access to reasonable supplies of mana, but their effectiveness at using it can vary dramatically. Also, in the case of elected officials, they may be used to controlling the mana in their local area, but are often unprepared for the situation elsewhere, where their usual sources of power do not apply.
Candidates who do not start with such a powerful, pre-existing base are faced with drawing sufficient mana for their campaigns to even come into being. If the media doesn’t cover you, then you don’t exist, and your 2% in the national polls would be comparable to that of a fictitious individual provided as a placebo (non-existent individuals with invented names sometimes get 5% or higher support in political polls).
So, how to get mana? Well, one less pleasant way, is to do or say sufficiently outrageous or controversial things that the media covers you. For example, a few weeks ago some unknown individual with no funding paid $200 to file a California ballot initiative mandating the death penalty for all homosexuals, calling it “The Sodomite Suppression Act” or something like that. Normally, random ballot initiatives get zero coverage, but he got lots of ink and maybe some electronic coverage, probably millions of dollars worth of free mana. The problem with this approach is that the mana comes in the form of a massively destructive blast from all directions, which probably doesn’t help you actually get elected. Over the years, various rightwing Republican candidates for president have knowingly or unknowing followed this sort of approach to cope with their lack of funding, without a history of much success. To some extent, the proposed positions of the hypothetical “Fred” represent an attenuated version of this strategy.
Now getting hit by a blast of pure mana isn’t a great recipe for winning a campaign, but it beats having no access to any mana at all, which is the fate of an unknown candidate whose positions are bland or mainstream. And the crucial possibility is that a sufficiently skilled political sorcerer may be able to divert and capture at least a portion of the mana in that blast, reshaping it to power his own defenses and perhaps even a counterattack. This is not easy—indeed it’s *exceptionally* difficult—but pretty much the only option under the circumstances. Thus, suffering a massive, one-sided attack may provide the only slight chance of winning.
If the Opposition largely controls the sources of mana, namely the media, they may realize this, and deliberately avoid providing any visibility to the “dangerous ideas” of their opponent, following the classic “blackout strategy.” Notably, the MSM and the Republicans used this approach quite effectively against the Ron Paul campaign in 2008. (And if your response isn’t sufficiently disciplined, they can shape any slight carelessness into a crushing disaster, as was used against the Howard Dean campaign in 2004.)
One counter-move is to try to take advantage of any ill-discipline among your massively mana-rich opponents. For example, if they’ve decided upon a classic “blackout strategy” but you can provoke a few of them into foolish attacks, that not only provides you some necessary resources, but the chance for easy early victories if their smarter and more powerful elements stick with the blackout.
And the ideal situation is to take positions that *seem* crazy and very vulnerable, thereby drawing the shock and the attacks, but which are actually much stronger and more defensible than realized. Once again, this is *not* easy to pull off.
In political campaigns my own preferred approach has always been a combination of strategic offense and tactical defense, namely trying to quickly occupy a position astride the Opposition lines of supply and communications, thereby almost forcing them to attack lest they risk the entire collapse of their front.
Ron Unz on political campaigns
If the president loves to honor the military, start with the U.S.S. Liberty
The most serious unofficial inquiries have involved former military officers. In 2003, Admiral Thomas Moorer, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, formed an independent commission of inquiry to look into the attack. It produced Loss of Liberty, a documentary that included actual interviews with survivors. The commission, which included Rear Admiral Merlin Staring, Marine General Ray Davis, and Ambassador James Akins, reviewed all documentary evidence in the case and interviewed both survivors and other naval officers who were involved indirectly. They learned that the Liberty had been surveilled by the Israelis for at least eight hours prior to the attack and that the ship was both clearly marked as American and was unmistakable as a uniquely configured and immediately recognizable intelligence collection vessel, not even close to the profile of an Egyptian horse transporter as Israel subsequently claimed. During the carefully planned attack, Israeli used radio jamming in an attempt to prevent the Liberty from radioing its predicament.
Moorer’s commission concluded that Israel had deliberately attacked the Liberty and sought to sink it and kill its entire crew. The crewmen who were killed were “murdered” by Israel while the U.S. should have regarded the attack as an act of war and responded appropriately. The cover-up of what had taken place was ordered by the White House and the fact that the truth about the incident continues to be hidden is a “national disgrace.” In an op-ed Moorer wrote in 2004, he concluded by asking “Did our government put Israel’s interest ahead of our own? If so, why?”
Philip Giraldi
unz.com
Vikings slaughtered their way across Europe and parts of north Africa. They were Germanic pagan sea pirates, just as Arabic Mohammedans were desert pirates. The wars that led to the Christianization of Scandinavian pagans were exactly like, for the same reason as, the wars by Charlemagne against the Continental Saxons and their Germanic allies: to stop endless wars of pirating and rape against Christian peoples. When Germanic pagans were militarily defeated, and only when they were militarily defeated, they converted, and then, and only then, did they begin to produce culture that was not evil. There is the lesson that must be relearned, which is opposite your meaning. So do you write from the vantage or Jew? Mohammedan? Pagan? Atheist? Protestant?
Jake says:January 2, 2020 at 3:58 pm GMT
unz.com