Posted On: Tuesday - March 5th 2024 7:27AM MST
In Topics: Websites Pundits
Since our quitting The Unz Review cold turkey - well, very nearly - the Peak Stupidity reader will have noticed that many of our posts derive from material on The Gateway Pundit site. This is a review, with plenty to say after having spent 1/2 hour to 1 1/2 hr on that site daily for over a month.
This review will read like a sandwich, one made from very tasty bread with some nice Italian meat and provolone cheese, but with a couple of layers of Vegemite spread by some Aussie pranksters or something.
The owner/operator, if you will, of The Gateway Pundit is one Jim Hoft. His name appears on (just guessing) a quarter to half the posts, with other writers that are surely getting paid (I'll explain) posting the rest. What first must be said is that Mr. Hoft and his site are definitely a force for good. A few arguments about his politics could be made - I will - but they are Conservative, timely, encouraging, and with details that will be found written in a biased manner, if written at all, for the Lyin' Press sites.
In general, GP concentrates on American political stories, with only occasional posts on general happenings and stories of worldwide Globalist and anti-Globalist events. Just to compare to The Unz Review, due to it having been my previous go-to site for (some) stories and the entertainment, GP is more down-to-earth and timely. Additionally, there is lots of follow-up to each of the many stories that the site covers.
Very specifically, at this point at least, The Gateway Pundit supports, from various angles, all things Trump and his '24 election win, with discussion of all the efforts to prevent the ctrl-left from cheating him out of it too. Whether you think an election of one guy can solve America's problems or not (spoiler: NOT), Trump is indeed THE BIG STORY. I'd proffer that the reason Trump IS the big story is that the Immigration Invasion is (FINALLY!) the big story. The Gateway Pundit covers the invasion very well. That alone is enough to support our statement that this site is a force for good.
GP is pretty straight with the occasional horrific Financial Stupidity news too. Then there are the posts on the Globalist actions to suppress the middle class all over the formerly 1st World. These posts read very much like The New American out of The John Birch Society, which is a good thing.
You might taste a little of that Vegemite here... on the Israel issue, GP is purely NeoCon. The site has but one opinion on that. I won't get into the issue other than, just as with the Ukraine, to say that the war should not be any business of the US - that includes financial support. However, Gateway Pundit is sane on the Ukraine. I'm not sure how or why it (he - Jim Hoft, really) diverges there, but the opinions on the Ukraine match Peak Stupidity's - the Potomac Regime via NATO has been pushing the Russian Bear into a corner since the end of the Cold War, its minions started this mess in '14, etc. We should STFO, even before one gets into the American taxpayer money blown and corruption that goes with it. I believe GP agrees.
Political views aside now, as a a comparison to The Unz Review, the articles on GP are fairly short and succinct. That'd be just fine were it not for - and here's a thick layer of that nasty black stuff - the site format. It's the ads. They are simply terrible. The front page may be "safe for work", but each story page has huge impossible to ignore pukeworthy ads. The ads take up the page width and are interspersed among chunks of the article.
Above and below are examples of ads next to story headlines, but on the story pages they are worse. I'd ask the reader to check for himself that these ads are not targeted, well to me, anyway. I'm not overweight - I get the same stuff on work computers that flush cookies and browser data. Perhaps the ads are targeted in that the average GP reader is known somehow to be older with many health problems. Still, how many diagrams of the human body, many with people sitting on the toilet or with sectioned abdomens and yellow pustules of body fat on display, are too much? This stuff is simply out of hand on The Gateway Pundit!
Jim Hoft should put a damper on this, as it's really a turn-off. That he doesn't is probably because he's making a ton of money on the ads. That's why I think he must be paying the fellow GP writers, which is admirable, of course. I'm always happy to see alternate media that can support itself.*
Let me move on to the writers and a combination of content and formatting. I've got a few more beefs about the site. Firstly, the display is somewhat sensationalist: BREAKING!:, JUST IN:, DEVELOPING:, EXCLUSIVE!:, SHOCKING!: OK, enough. That's old media stuff that sounds as if from the last century. That's a minor thing and maybe just a unique personal dislike.
Next, though, is the content of some of the stories. They are less than half, but many of the posts are not about an actual story. They are about someone's reaction** to a story or a reaction to what some politico said. Headline example: "The ladies on The View were shocked into silence after Mr. ABC said THIS. [VIDEO] I made the mistake of clicking a few of these. Sorry, yes, that the ladies of The View were silent for some measurable duration is probably unusual, but this is not a story. I think these "OMG, look at his face when the guy said this!" posts are more from the women writers of the site. (I'll make an effort to get numbers.) This emphasis on reactions includes Elon Musk, who GP sees as some kind of god. "Regarding the Illegal Aliens being flown into the US interior by the hundreds of thousands, Elon Musk tweets back 'Unsustainable!'" "In response to Trump speech, Elon Musk tweets 'Absolutely!'" Really, that's a story?
No, just give me actual events, policy changes, court decisions, action by American patriots, a few speeches by Trump, but not videos of drama that's not even fit for a a Telenovella. The former is still most of the material, and I've learned what to skip, so it's all good...
I knew this would get long, so let me finish with the comment section of The Gateway Pundit. It's not The Unz Review, alas. The comment section, based, I think, on the 3rd-party DISQUS software, is less usable, for the reader at least. The commenters don't get in deep discussions, as on TUR, with dozens of people involved. Occasionally, there are very good 200 word comments, but one won't see much but short statements in reply.
The content of the comments is Conservative. There's some good humor here and there. I'll say that on racial matters, these folks are as based as the next guy, and more so than the writing of the posts themselves is. From what I see, DISQUS must screen out cuss words, but it's not too bad in censoring meaning. The site owner could probably have a say in this, but, with multiple hundreds to thousands of comments often under the few dozen posts added daily, censorship by Jim Hoft, if he wanted to do this, would be an impossibility. (He's no
I won't post comments on GP, thankfully for my time's sake, for a few reasons:
1) I'm not signing up to DISQUS.
2) As I mentioned, hundreds and thousands of comments pile up within hours. That's not a way to get one's voice heard.
3) Compared to TUR, it's just not the same.
One can't read them all, which is for me, a great excuse not to read ANY. However, I'll go through to see if someone make a point that I think should be made. Usually, someone has.
Short summary: I get more real-time news, at least on the Immigration Invasion, Donald Trump, other US politics, etc, then I did on The Unz Review. For Peak Stupidity's sake Gateway Pundit is a much better go-to site. For my entertainment's sake, it's not nearly as good. Still, keep up the good work, Jim Hoft, and thank you.
* This is also in stark comparison to The Unz Review edited and (in small part) written by independently wealthy Ron Unz. There's nothing wrong with that either. Whatever I think of his political opinions, Ron Unz is also a force for good as a stand-up hard-core defender of free speech. Additionally, well, because he doesn't need the money, there are NO ads, NUNCA, on The Unz Review. Alas, don't it always seem to go... you don't know what you've got till it's gone ...
** There is some guy named Victor who is the subject of posts about his reaction to events. I don't KNOW Victor, and I don't care about Victor's reaction to anything, so I never click on these.
Comments:
Hail
Thursday - March 7th 2024 10:57AM MST
PS
RE: People not watching TV, etc., and instead watching Internet "influencers" and Joe Rogan
The data seems to say that these trends are as right as we think they are, but, there is really a complex interaction between "the media" and these Internet-personalities and social-media-personalities and streamers.
A world purely without a "media" (big TV news-channels, big newspapers, etc) could not have sarcastic social-media personalities giving political commentary, because they are generally always reacting to "media" things. And the "media" also uses the Internet people.
It's all a big system, which is more symbiotic than it may seem. The two-way interaction is certainly more bad than good, a lesson I personally really learned with the Corona-Panic of 2020, which itself can be seen as a direct consequence of the interaction.
RE: People not watching TV, etc., and instead watching Internet "influencers" and Joe Rogan
The data seems to say that these trends are as right as we think they are, but, there is really a complex interaction between "the media" and these Internet-personalities and social-media-personalities and streamers.
A world purely without a "media" (big TV news-channels, big newspapers, etc) could not have sarcastic social-media personalities giving political commentary, because they are generally always reacting to "media" things. And the "media" also uses the Internet people.
It's all a big system, which is more symbiotic than it may seem. The two-way interaction is certainly more bad than good, a lesson I personally really learned with the Corona-Panic of 2020, which itself can be seen as a direct consequence of the interaction.
The Alarmist
Wednesday - March 6th 2024 4:04AM MST
PS
I will believe Nuland is politically dead when her head is displayed on a pike on the Roosevelt Bridge.
I will believe Nuland is politically dead when her head is displayed on a pike on the Roosevelt Bridge.
Dieter Kief
Wednesday - March 6th 2024 12:15AM MST
PS
Mr. Hail - the younger ones I know of read no papers at all and don't look TV at all - just streaming services and some influencers - mostly those wioth the funny take on things.
A young women in her late teens in Switzerland watches Joe Rogan regularly.
Btw. - I have linked a 5 minute Joe Rogan clip at Unz' newslinks section, which is well worth the five minutes.
Chris Rufo says - oh - now spoiler. Rufo is talking - for just five minutes, as I said - with Joe Rogan about the political situation at large and he is very clear and - from his school-community-engagements - lnows a lot of details about the actual situation. Very interesting - and impressive.
Chris Rufo is in this fight to win!
Mr. Hail - the younger ones I know of read no papers at all and don't look TV at all - just streaming services and some influencers - mostly those wioth the funny take on things.
A young women in her late teens in Switzerland watches Joe Rogan regularly.
Btw. - I have linked a 5 minute Joe Rogan clip at Unz' newslinks section, which is well worth the five minutes.
Chris Rufo says - oh - now spoiler. Rufo is talking - for just five minutes, as I said - with Joe Rogan about the political situation at large and he is very clear and - from his school-community-engagements - lnows a lot of details about the actual situation. Very interesting - and impressive.
Chris Rufo is in this fight to win!
Dieter Kief
Wednesday - March 6th 2024 12:08AM MST
PS
True Mod. - they just reported that Israel is giving weapons to Ukraine. I was turned off by the way they wrote about that and was - over appreciative, - hopefully.
Victoria Newland is not necessarily dead, politically, I mean, - she is just not in the media now.
And I know that TGP has Larry Johnson writing about Ukraine - I was so turned off by the reporting of the Israel weapons-gift that I now wonder whether Larry Johnson is still on their ticket.
They should have made the German Taurus shenanigans a big story - as Judge Napolitano does, but they didn't. And their lately hyper-sensible reporting on anti-semitism .a.n.d. about the palestinian case explains for me IN DEPTH what happened to their ads.
(The horrible ads are a strategy to make readers shy away from the site - and there are agencies that are very blindly pro Israel that run these ad-contracts...They also preside over the decision of many firms whether or not there are ads at all at publications like The Gateway Pundit.
True Mod. - they just reported that Israel is giving weapons to Ukraine. I was turned off by the way they wrote about that and was - over appreciative, - hopefully.
Victoria Newland is not necessarily dead, politically, I mean, - she is just not in the media now.
And I know that TGP has Larry Johnson writing about Ukraine - I was so turned off by the reporting of the Israel weapons-gift that I now wonder whether Larry Johnson is still on their ticket.
They should have made the German Taurus shenanigans a big story - as Judge Napolitano does, but they didn't. And their lately hyper-sensible reporting on anti-semitism .a.n.d. about the palestinian case explains for me IN DEPTH what happened to their ads.
(The horrible ads are a strategy to make readers shy away from the site - and there are agencies that are very blindly pro Israel that run these ad-contracts...They also preside over the decision of many firms whether or not there are ads at all at publications like The Gateway Pundit.
Hail
Tuesday - March 5th 2024 8:20PM MST
PS
I appreciate your info and views on Gateway Pundit and Jim Hoft. I guess I cannot disagree with anything specific.
Well, I guess I would say this as a general commentary: I am disappointed that a lot of influential voices are of a type that, as of the 1990s and into the 2000s, say, would have been relegated to the "National Inquirer" tier of publications and approaches to journalism. Jim Hoft and others did not "create" these conditions, of course. So it is not (necessarily) a criticism of him.
This feels like a very quaint criticism now. I am by no means old. But in these kinds of cases, I do wonder if "old" is what I should feel, or what some would see me as. I am old enough to recall The Time Before The Internet, which the teenagers and most people in their twenties today, in the mid-2020s, do not remember much or do not remember at all.
Recall that those born in the early 2000s are now young adults. They were largely "raised" on the Internet; they are used to nothing but this kind of outrage-journalism or even worse (side note --- TikTok is now doing heavy advertising on Fox News, I learned from catching some of the "Super Tuesday" coverage, with a message that TikTokers are patriotic Americans mainly concerned with helping disabled veterans and flying American flags).
The Internet was affecting what journalism was, in ways that few understood when that quaint decade of the 2000s opened, a decade we may now semi-fondly recall, and when most of the features of today's Internet did not exist or were the realm of futurists. Donald Trump's "celebrity" status was locked-in, in the 2000s, with his Apprentice TV show, an "analog" TV show (not "streaming" or something, which did not exist back then; rather, a normal NBC evening-lineup TV show).
I wonder, Mr. Moderator, what your son's cohort (I understand him to have been born circa 2010) view of journalism is, or is for. Among other worldview-differences with us older people, but this specific question of What is journalism, I think a lot of youths now coming up view it as what social-media influencers do, live-streamer doofuses wandering around in public while making saucy commentary, outrage peddling, and the like.
I don't know what your views on Matt Drudge are, if any, but he was an early example of this, i think.
I appreciate your info and views on Gateway Pundit and Jim Hoft. I guess I cannot disagree with anything specific.
Well, I guess I would say this as a general commentary: I am disappointed that a lot of influential voices are of a type that, as of the 1990s and into the 2000s, say, would have been relegated to the "National Inquirer" tier of publications and approaches to journalism. Jim Hoft and others did not "create" these conditions, of course. So it is not (necessarily) a criticism of him.
This feels like a very quaint criticism now. I am by no means old. But in these kinds of cases, I do wonder if "old" is what I should feel, or what some would see me as. I am old enough to recall The Time Before The Internet, which the teenagers and most people in their twenties today, in the mid-2020s, do not remember much or do not remember at all.
Recall that those born in the early 2000s are now young adults. They were largely "raised" on the Internet; they are used to nothing but this kind of outrage-journalism or even worse (side note --- TikTok is now doing heavy advertising on Fox News, I learned from catching some of the "Super Tuesday" coverage, with a message that TikTokers are patriotic Americans mainly concerned with helping disabled veterans and flying American flags).
The Internet was affecting what journalism was, in ways that few understood when that quaint decade of the 2000s opened, a decade we may now semi-fondly recall, and when most of the features of today's Internet did not exist or were the realm of futurists. Donald Trump's "celebrity" status was locked-in, in the 2000s, with his Apprentice TV show, an "analog" TV show (not "streaming" or something, which did not exist back then; rather, a normal NBC evening-lineup TV show).
I wonder, Mr. Moderator, what your son's cohort (I understand him to have been born circa 2010) view of journalism is, or is for. Among other worldview-differences with us older people, but this specific question of What is journalism, I think a lot of youths now coming up view it as what social-media influencers do, live-streamer doofuses wandering around in public while making saucy commentary, outrage peddling, and the like.
I don't know what your views on Matt Drudge are, if any, but he was an early example of this, i think.
Moderator
Tuesday - March 5th 2024 6:20PM MST
PS: I know you can't be expected to get all American cultural references, Dieter, so just to clarify that's as in "Ding, dong, the witch is dead" from "The Wizard of Oz".
The site writers use the term Neocon a lot. Still, they are pro-Israel, and it seems deeply ingrained.
Alarmist, yeah, ZH is a little more high brow, or was when I used to read it regularly and thoroughly over a decade back. I have not have the problem of that site crashing browsers lately, so I really ought to get there more. Travel Girls, huh? Let us know when you have a good link.
The site writers use the term Neocon a lot. Still, they are pro-Israel, and it seems deeply ingrained.
Alarmist, yeah, ZH is a little more high brow, or was when I used to read it regularly and thoroughly over a decade back. I have not have the problem of that site crashing browsers lately, so I really ought to get there more. Travel Girls, huh? Let us know when you have a good link.
Moderator
Tuesday - March 5th 2024 6:17PM MST
PS: Dieter, Israel may be pro-Ukraine war and GP pro-Israel, but that doesn't make GP pro-Ukraine war. Just as one example from today:
DING DONG: Victoria Nuland Steps Down After Gateway Pundit FOIA Request
Link:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/03/ding-dong-victoria-nuland-steps-down-after-gateway/
In bold in the post: "Victoria Nuland, the architect of the disastrous US Ukraine policy since 2014, will be resigning “in the coming weeks” after Gateway Pundit filed a FOIA request to find out what her role was in the death of US journalist Gonzalo Lira in Ukraine, an outspoken Nuland critic who was subsequently arrested and tortured in Ukraine."
DING DONG: Victoria Nuland Steps Down After Gateway Pundit FOIA Request
Link:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/03/ding-dong-victoria-nuland-steps-down-after-gateway/
In bold in the post: "Victoria Nuland, the architect of the disastrous US Ukraine policy since 2014, will be resigning “in the coming weeks” after Gateway Pundit filed a FOIA request to find out what her role was in the death of US journalist Gonzalo Lira in Ukraine, an outspoken Nuland critic who was subsequently arrested and tortured in Ukraine."
The Alarmist
Tuesday - March 5th 2024 12:20PM MST
PS
I dunno ... a bit too mainstream for my tastes, to wit the massive belly ads.
At least Zero Hedge, at least a few years ago, would try to entice me with Travel Girls.
I dunno ... a bit too mainstream for my tastes, to wit the massive belly ads.
At least Zero Hedge, at least a few years ago, would try to entice me with Travel Girls.
Dieter Kief
Tuesday - March 5th 2024 10:41AM MST
PS
PS
they are very much pro Israel lately - and pro the Ukraine war*.
- They figured out a way to - keep afloat in rough waters...
*Israel announced that they'd send weapons to - Ukraine this week - see: Everything fits just fine.
Except for that - I agree. TGP is a great site.
I like not least their special reporter for New Mexico, Arizona and other voter fraud shenanigans Jordan Conradson. Also that they covered the work of True the Vote (Catherine Engelbrecht and Greg Philipps - asee also the interrviews the Hoft brothers did with them - great, hair-rising stuff...).
- I wish there had been more on the Tru the Vote work on the Unz Review - but that would have included old style reporting - which TGP does and the UR prefers rather not to...
PS
they are very much pro Israel lately - and pro the Ukraine war*.
- They figured out a way to - keep afloat in rough waters...
*Israel announced that they'd send weapons to - Ukraine this week - see: Everything fits just fine.
Except for that - I agree. TGP is a great site.
I like not least their special reporter for New Mexico, Arizona and other voter fraud shenanigans Jordan Conradson. Also that they covered the work of True the Vote (Catherine Engelbrecht and Greg Philipps - asee also the interrviews the Hoft brothers did with them - great, hair-rising stuff...).
- I wish there had been more on the Tru the Vote work on the Unz Review - but that would have included old style reporting - which TGP does and the UR prefers rather not to...
-- On Chris Rufo, James Lindsay (and Gateway Pundit) and Winning --
RE: Mr. Kief says "Chris Rufo is in the fight to win"
I have a more negative view on Chris Rufo's motivations and goals. (I wrote some about this on the Steve Sailer blog-comment section a few weeks or so ago, so anyone here highly curious can use the search-function there to find more.)
I would phrase my doubts about Mr. Rufo as a very-simple question. It is this:
What is "winning," for Chris Rufo?
Actually, this simple question could also apply to a lot of the quasi-political Internet-celebrities we have now.
Take James Lindsay. He became quite an Internet-celebrity, for a few years, circa 2020. This is after he entered public awareness in 2018 with his "fake academic papers that pushed Wokeness talking-points to absurd levels and which got published in academic journals" stunt, with two confederates who all used their minor academic positions to help the stunt work. Even in 2024, as far as I know, he is still sort of "milking" that fame.
But James Lindsay's solutions to the political-ideological problems he identifies are actually ridiculous. It's to a level that it makes me think he hasn't even thought much about it. He sounds plausible when critiquing, but one gets slowly horrified to realize that this major public-intellectual on the side of White-Christians, or so we think, actually has no real ideas on the ideal society, except a vague notion of "we should just go back to a liberalism of the 1980s or 1990s liberalism."
Lindsay is by no means an old man but he sometimes sounds like a caricature of someone some decades older than he is, the type of "old man" who, through no fault of his own (through fault of circumstance and the passage of the decades under the bridge) has grown disconnected from relevant politics around him, and is simply arguing from nostalgia.
This, however, does not apply to Chris Rufo. I somehow came to view Chris Rufo as a more-cynical operator than this, who understands the anti-White nature of the Regime and positioned himself to "use" the vast reservoir of quiet pro-White-Christian sentiment but for other goals than in the helping of the beleaguered and demoralized and in-retreat White-Western people of the world. Besides desire for self-promotion (a basic component of that thing called "demagoguery"), Mr. Rufo seems to actively WANT a system that facilitates the simple transfer of Western Civilization and our vast cultural capital and all of it, to high-IQ Asians, at the least sees zero problem with that and seems to even want it outright, for reasons of his own. This is not, for me, what "winning" is.
The same criticisms I have lodged against Lindsay and Rufo here, or similar ones, could also apply well to Gateway Pundit. What is the goal of Gateway Pundit? What is its political vision? What is its ideological program? Its ideal society? Publications like that usually don't have any, being more interested in outrage-peddling, "clickbait" (which means $$$), and "gotcha"-journalism. This is also my criticism of Trump and what the whole Trump movement evolved into, before our eyes, in the late 2010s.