Chris Roberts, American Renaissance, July 29, 2016

Everyone knows the media cannot be trusted. When you poll the American public, trust of the media keeps getting lower and lower. Within the dissident right, trust dips even further, as it should. Here are some reasons why.

“Big Think” is a website focused on “big ideas” from all points of view on a wide range of topics: politics, science, psychology, etc. Since they view themselves as broad and all encompassing, they are careful to include dissenting authors, such as the race-realist scientist Satoshi Kanazawa–though they made sure to cut him off when he wrote something really controversial.

That was bad enough, but then “Big Think” deleted earlier posts he had written for their site. The only way you can find them is by using the “Wayback Machine” internet archive. For example, his satirical piece lambasting his critics, “The Return of the Ugly, Racist, Pseudoscientist with a Small Penis” cannot be found online–unless you put the same URL into the Wayback Machine. His eulogy to J. Philippe Rushton has also disappeared, and can now be found only because it was reposted on American Renaissance. Click the URL for it, and you get an error page. Put that same URL in the Wayback Machine, though, and there it is! Quite the free press we have.

The New Yorker–that paragon of liberal elitism–is no better. In 2007, they published an article by the half-black Malcolm Gladwell in which he claimed, “Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in The Bell Curve, notoriously proposed that Americans with the lowest I.Q.s be sequestered in a ‘high-tech’ version of an Indian reservation.” Of course, that was not true. The Bell Curve opposed treating anyone that way but warned that it could conceivably happen. A torrent of commenters and Steve Sailer’s blog noted the error. Mr. Gladwell later issued a half-hearted apology , saying even though he was wrong, it was ridiculous even to imagine such a thing.

I have had a run-in with the New Yorker as well. Last year it published a long “report” on all those “racists” who support Donald Trump. The author, Evan Osnos, went to Jared Taylor’s house to speak with him and five others, of whom I was one. He painted the group as uniformly pro-Trump, which was not the case. One participant, Erick, explicitly said that he hoped Hillary Clinton became president, saying that things must get worse before they get better. Two others said they were unwilling to endorse the Donald. Yet none of that came through the article, in which we were all painted as paranoid rubes who could not wait for the Trumpenreich.

Caricaturing people they don’t like and deleting past embarrassments are two basic tricks of the hostile media. Sometimes they do both: National Review is a good example. It has taken to besmirching the character of Donald Trump, and his handful of media allies, such as Milo Yiannopoulos, and even just working-class white people generally.

Of course, National Review, isn’t as pure as it pretends to be. It used to publish the likes of Jared Taylor, Peter Brimelow, John Derbyshire, Ann Coulter, Sam Francis, Joe Sobran, Paul Gottfried, and Steve Sailer. In the past, National Review defended racial segregation, opposed Brown vs. Board of Education, and was contemptuous of the civil rights movement. None of that is on their website today.

Most other publications have digitized their archives. The New Republic website has John Dewey’s write-ups about traveling to the USSR available online for free. The Atlantic will let you read essays H.L. Mencken wrote over a hundred years ago. If you get a subscription, The New York Times lets you go back to their humble beginnings in 1851. The National Review website doesn’t seem to have anything earlier than 2000, though it is hard to tell, since their site is so hard to navigate. One wonders why.

So the media work to deceive us. What is to be done? Some have decided deliberately to lie to them to make them look foolish. A master of this is Sam Hyde. Whenever a mass-shooting takes place, he and his followers manage to convince the press that Mr. Hyde himself–a racially conscious white man–is responsible.

The results are often hilarious. Recently, the Spanish-language version of RT reported that the Munich shooter was a German nationalist by the name of “Samuel Hydberg.”

The real perp was Iranian.

Sam Hyde does this frequently, and I can see why. The media are so eager to attribute every shooting to an angry white man, they will jump at the chance, without even nominal fact checking–and Sam Hyde proves it over and over again. Should we not beat them at their own game of deception–making them look even worse in the eyes of people who already hold them in low regard–or is this just more counter-productive trolling that makes us look immature and nihilistic?

While Mr. Hyde is probably the most prominent racial dissident to toy with the media, others play similar tricks. At the most recent American Renaissance conference, one young attendee told a journalist, “There’s more of us than you think. We’re crashing the plane. No survivors.” The initial write-up of this incident portrayed the comment as a threat, but commenters quickly pointed out that it was a quote from the most recent Batman movie. The write-up now contains a tersely worded editor’s note conceding that Talking Points Memo “later learned that this was an adaptation of a line Batman villain Bane says in ‘The Dark Knight Rises.’” I was amused. Racial dissidents are often portrayed as old fuddy-duddies, but it was the young, liberal journalist who failed to catch a reference to one of the most quoted films of the last decade. This made her look foolish and paranoid.

I think “trolling” journalists is useful. I think Mr. Hyde is something of a genius satirist with his “white male shooter” project, even though it must come at some personal cost. I can image what going through a TSA check at airports is like for him. Mr. Hyde gives us an excellent piece of ammunition in a debate: “See how unprofessional and anti-white journalists are? They attribute any shooting to a comic who already has a reputation for duping the media.” The way I see it, the worse they look, the less power they have to smear us.

But American Renaissance is nothing without its commenters, so I look forward to hearing what you think.