Don’t Feed the Enemy

Cars parked outside Joe the Barber’s house in Apalachin, New York, 1957.

2,362 words

How many friends have we over there?
The border guards fight unconvincingly.
Whate’er we do it seems things are arranged.
We always have to feed the enemy.

— Magazine (Howard Devoto), “Feed the Enemy“

I believe it was Pamela Geller who coined the term “enemedia.” She is, of course, a woman with concerns which would not necessarily chime with Counter-Currents readers — of which more later — but, as we used to say in England, in the days when the pubs were still open, a good dart is a good dart.

The mainstream media, legacy media, regime media, call it what you will, are the enemy of anyone on the political Right. They are essentially the paramilitary wing of globalism and its client governments in the same way that the IRA is the paramilitary wing of Irish political party Sinn Féin. They are not in existence to inform you. They despise you, in fact, and part of the point of the media is to remind you of your humiliation in the face of the secular taqiyya that is contemporary corporate Western news content.

They are not working alone. Big tech is the boot-boys, the goon squad, who provide cover for the traditional media and keep the road ahead clear of dissenters, but the fourth estate is now the engine room of the woke crazy train, having gone from speaking truth to power to being told by power what the truth is.

I say big tech is the goon squad, but you won’t see Dorsey or Zuckerberg breaking down doors. The rough stuff is left to the now-compliant police in the countries that interest big tech and their handlers most, as well as the more subtle but rapidly developing Chinese-style social credit system in European countries and North America. Since I wrote recently about the ex-BBC journalist Alex Belfield, hounded by the police for embarrassing what is chillingly called Britain’s “state broadcaster,” we have increasingly seen the penchant the deep state has for using its police to enforce its new categorical imperatives.

However, and as the editor of this very site said after his own politically motivated arrest in Norway, “we have our own media now.” But who are “we,” and how effective can “our own media” be if they are fragmented and internally adversarial? One of the main strengths of the mainstream media is their ideological unity. The truth is not important except as a construct. What is important is the faultless learning of lines from the same script.

Of course, you don’t get journalism with any integrity under the current ideological junta of corporate-controlled content manipulators. Why expect it? What you get is information design. The media are demonstrably Left-wing, and for the Left, truth is not a testamentary record of objective truth, but a moveable feast. It’s like origami. You take the plain piece of paper and make it into whatever you like. So, where does that situate the Right-wing media, if we can even locate them to begin with?

There are no Right-wing mainstream media in the UK and you wouldn’t get a job if you were even suspected of having conservative sympathies, particularly while white. Journalism has changed its requirements. In America, the main TV media channel considers gay sock-puppets such as Don Lemon and Anderson Cooper to be journalists. They are not; they are political activists.

In passing, and although the situation is much the same across Europe and the anglophone Commonwealth countries, an honorable mention goes to Sky News Australia. A random excerpt from this weekend shows this channel’s bullish and conservative nature, refreshing as that is. A Conservative government minister, Nicolle Flint, made a short speech in the Australian parliament in which she discussed the very real problem of Aboriginal rape culture. ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Company, simply stopped their radio broadcast while she spoke, and transmitted 20 seconds of “dead air.” Sky News Australia was all over this in a shot, as they are with “woke” culture generally, and that simply would not happen in the UK. Tucker Carlson might chase it in the US, but, as noted, the UK lacks any genuinely conservative media voice, with the very, very occasional and exceptional conservative perspective from journalists such as Peter Hitchens and Melanie Phillips. Other than these glitches, if you want a Right-wing perspective on events and their consequences, you have no choice but to turn to dissident online media.

However, the plot thickens. Although the media is almost entirely under the control of the Left and their new cultural Marxist commissars, all is not well in the camp. The traditional media have been in gradual decline for some time in terms of sales (and thus advertising revenue), and this is beginning to accelerate. Many newspapers have not found the transition to an online format an easy one to negotiate, and TV ratings for some of the major news providers are, if not exactly in freefall, then on a downward glide.

As refuseniks as different as Greg Gutfeld and Mark Dice noted in the same week, the major American news outlets still need Trump to provide the bilious outrage on which the Left survive, and now he’s gone. Like the supervillain in a comic-book franchise, they are desperately trying to bring him back to life, if only to keep voter attention away from the crazy train gathering speed toward the missing section of the bridge with interim president Joe Biden at the wheel like an Alzheimerian Casey Jones.

It may be that consumers of news are becoming wary and weary of the new orthodoxies faithfully adhered to by journalists: the scriptural edicts of woke, constant anti-white rhetoric, globalism, LGBTQ, the sanctity of blackness, the COVID melodramatics, Islam and its many wonders (not so much the bombs and beheadings and so on), transgenderism and all the other grotesques at the Leftist carnival. The next year could be a defining moment in testing the credibility of the public across a hemisphere.

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This disenchantment, if such it is, is partly due to what we might call “brand constriction,” and the Left may be about to discover this design flaw in their strategies to close down debate. Their own alternative media are painting themselves into a corner as the range of possible, career-extending opinion narrows, and their claim to be in some way a resistance movement tends to fold under questioning when they realize who their allies are. It’s fine and dandy to be a firebrand Leftist online writer, fighting for social justice, “equity,” and the recognition of systemic racism. But it must be somewhat deflating to realize that you agree with the government. Aren’t you supposed to be against The Man rather than sitting on his knee?

So, the rogue gene in the DNA of the Left is the paucity of their vision. Their motivating ideologies, such as they are, are now complete. We know where the Left is going because they already got there. Thus far and no further. They can’t. They have nowhere to go. They have set out their stall with such precision there is no longer any room for progress.

All together now: White people and their history are evil. Blacks (and their train of supporting-role victim groups) are oppressed and by definition on the side of the angels. And, er, that’s it. Andrew Anglin, intellectually speaking, reads like Thomas Sowell by comparison, and Anglin doesn’t view a paragraph as well-crafted unless he’s called someone a kike or a nigger. 

That is part of the problem, by the way, the dopamine hit some on the Right get from playground abuse. But we’ll get to that.

So, can the Right-wing, dissident media take advantage of this fault line, this chink in the Leftist armor? The phrase “Liberal hivemind” is a familiar one. It is, also, unfortunately, the main clue as to why the Left has such crushing control over Western culture. They not only think identically, but they have also put in place a proxy social credit system that can enforce this conformity. But this too has a built-in fault the Left lacks the intellect to see. They are the masters now, and they did not heed sage advice: be careful what you wish for. If you spent decades at the barricades screaming at the establishment, then find you are the establishment, it may not be long before the great unwashed finger you as poacher turned gamekeeper.

In the UK, certainly, the “establishment” was traditionally, and certainly throughout the period from 1950 to around 1990, perceived as Tory, or Conservative. But those Leftists who believe it still is are like sufferers from Phantom Limb Syndrome, who still feel an amputated arm or leg. The establishment, now in its new livery as the “deep state,” has crossed the floor and is now Left-wing, in some aspects hard Left. This is a weak spot the Right and its fractious and divided media should be exploiting. But we have built-in faults of our own.

Stop me if you have heard this one before, but when Orwell (don’t worry; it’s not 1984) arrived in Spain to aid the fight against Franco, as chronicled in Homage to Catalonia, what appalled him in the first instance were not the appalling conditions or the slim chances of victory, but the squabbling and in-fighting between the supposed allies on the Communist side. Again, I have used this before, but it is a riff worth repeating, and Monty Python’s Life of Brian features briefly sums this up with the rift between the Judaean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea. The dissident Right is in a similar pickle, and for tawdry reasons.

Now, I am an amateur opinion journalist, de facto. I get my features published in various online magazines and occasional dead-wood publications, the only pay I receive coming from these. (No one writes for the dissident media primarily to enrich themselves). That aside, I read 20 to 30 features online daily, and scan-read another 20 or so. A lot of headlines don’t really need further investigation, so there are unread features such as “Blahblah College to vet lecturers’ social media” which don’t really require further inspection or bookmarking unless you wish to source them.

But whether I am reading Breitbart or the Occidental Observer or Taki’s Magazine, watching Paul Joseph Watson or Tucker Carlson or I, Hypocrite, finding something of interest at Russia Today, Gates of Vienna, VDare, Zero Hedge or Guido Fawkes, or chuckling at Mark Dice or Greg Gutfeld, I know that I am looking at different prismatic shades of a spectrum produced by the same light source. Dice and Gutfeld, incidentally, a month after the agreement I mentioned over the media’s need to re-animate Trump, had markedly different positions on Caitlyn Jenner running for California governor. And that agreement followed by a difference of opinion is precisely my point, and what infects Right-wing media discourse.

Many on the Dissident Right, when commenting on or sneering at others of the same persuasion because of tiny doctrinal differences, like church fathers at the Council of Trent, remind me of a conversation about pop music I was once involved in. A pub conversation, many pints in, it was always going to be a good-humored difference of opinion. Band X is better than Band Y, although Band Y’s album A is better than Band X’s supposedly best album, B.

One guy’s opinion genuinely interested me. He launched an impassioned and quite lengthy diatribe against Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Now, I have always liked the song because I was a teenager when it was at number 1 for what seemed like a year and I like early Queen, but I wasn’t interested in this guy’s opinion because I like the band. I asked him not why he hated it, but why he hated it so much. His answer was revealing.

“I hate it,” he said, “because everyone else likes it.”

And that nutshells some on the Dissident Right, most of them commentators rather than writers. One gets the impression they would struggle to flesh out their comments, or the snippy reflux that passes for it, in essay form. “To essay,” after all, means “to try” in old English, and what these people do is at a far remove from any effort. It’s tippy-tap bedroom stuff.

The Right have to do what the Left have signally failed to do: they have to lose the crazies. I am not referring to those with opinions that seem unpalatable. That is what the Right ought to be about. I refer to those who, if they don’t read exactly what corresponds to the reverberations in their own echo chamber, dismiss the writer as gay, or a cuckservative, or a Jew. This is a page torn from the Leftist playbook, neither dignified nor intelligent. The Right has to learn to march together and in the same direction, just not in lockstep.

So what is the solution? It’s not easy to picture the Right-wing media sitting down for a type of dissident Apalachin, although, if they did, two things would be certain: the deep state and its Antifa shock troops would be about as keen for that to happen as state and local authorities were about the original in 1957, and the food would not be as good. But a virtual pow-wow is surely feasible. In the end, you may not like some dissident sites and outlets, but it will repay your time to find the ones who are rowing on the same tide as you. 

We either hang together, or, well, you know the rest.

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