In Defense of Gawker, Sort of

As awful as Gawker is, if you get rid of Gawker they, the left, will probably try (or at least make a more concerted effort) to get rid of Brietbart and other right wing media. A lot of left doesn’t like Gawker too much, either. There was an incident where Gawker management ignored trolling of their feminist site, Jezebel, which I thought was kinda funny. And then there was the incident where Gawker outed Condé Nast CFO David Geithner, which made the left angry. If the left is for ‘gay pride’, why do they want to keep it a secret? Denton doesn’t seem like a SJW kind of guy, even if he pretends to be one, and he’s probably playing these writers for fools, paying them pennies per page-view to write content that earns him millions.

But what you have to understand, also, is that the content or the management of a site isn’t always representative of its readership. Just because a site is staffed by SJWs doesn’t mean all its reader subscribe to a SJW mindset. Maybe people who comment on Gawker also subscribe to a pro-HBD view, too, and probably would agree with a lot of what is written on Taki and other alt-right sites. When I posted comments on The Atlantic, a liberal website, my Grey Enlightenment comments would always get some up-votes. In 2012, everyone assumed Reddit was a hopeless bastion of liberalism, and then the Red Pill/MRA movement, along with the post-2013 SJW backlash, burst on the scene, so even sites that on the surface seem irredeemably liberal often have large pockets of dissent bubbling under the surface. For example, I was on Reddit in early August following the Ferguson melee, and I estimate at least 3/4 of the users were on the side of the police and against ‘black lives matter’. Anti-police comments were summarily downvoted.

Sites such as World Star Hip Hop are broadcasting to millions how the vast majority of incidents involving blacks and police are justified, not discriminatory, with such videos getting thousands of comments in approval from fellow blacks who are tired of being lumped in with the rotten apples of ‘black lives matter’. Fights and pratfalls are also featured, with many comments on Reddit and Imgur about how the ‘victims’ in these videos brought the humiliation upon themselves. Whether it’s protesting against the police and getting dragged while handcuffed, or being caught red-handed as an idiot, if you act like a buffoon and it gets uploaded to video, don’t expect any sympathy from the public. So the pendulum has definitely swung, and even though Reddit’s management, like Gawker, are of the SJW bent, a sizable percentage of its users are not.

After peaking in 2012 with OWS, the left’s grip on online discourse has weakened noticeably, and although the left still has a lot of power in print media and TV, the backlash has even spread to even liberal publications like The Atlantic in an article about how society, whether through ‘trigger warnings’ and ‘Microaggressions’, is coddling an entire generation. The byline calls it ’emotional well-being’, but it’s political correctness at its core. On one hand, you may say, ‘who cares, serves them (these students) right for majoring in useless subjects’, but STEM majors are also subjected to this PC nonsense when taking pre-req courses.

Higher-ed is in itself an insular community, a clique; and, like the unending forever raging online economic debate, the debate over higher education is equally heated, with bloggers, students, and pundits duking it out with teachers and administrators, from MIT to UC Berkeley, and everywhere in between.

Gawker may even help us because when they they mention issues such as #gamergate, out of curiosity their readers come to our sites and maybe a small fraction of them may agree and join the ‘alt-right’ cause. Like when Noah and Scott write blog posts critical of NRx, maybe 90% of their readers will agree, but 10% may see the merits of NRx, possibly becoming regular readers of NRx blogs. And since Noah and Scott have very popular blogs, 10% is still thousands of potential new readers at no cost. I, as well as thousands of others, became aware of NRx not through a NRx blog, but from the infamous Nov. 2013 Techcrunch article about NRx. Techcrunch has a leftist bent, but also a huge audience and great influence. Even on discussions and forums unrelated to politics, a surprisingly large number of people are aware of NRx and HBD, and many covertly support it. Even though media coverage of NRx has generally been negative, any coverage is better than none.

Related: Why the Left Wants Reddit to Fail