Here, then, are some resources to turn to, provided they aren’t silenced in the year to come, where you can find discourse that cuts against the grain in pursuit of truth, reason, and debate. Some of these places challenge the prevailing narratives, others focus on the promotion of facts over feelings and propaganda, and others simply provide a platform for you to speak your mind. Many of these choices skew to the right, but I’ve endeavored to focus on those that choose analysis and discussion over emotional bomb-throwing.
1. Free-Speech Social Media: Minds.com, MeWe, Parler, Gab
Can’t stand the censorship from the Silicon Valley tech monopolies? You have options. Parler is getting the most press, and it’s a good alternative if you like Twitter.
MeWe is a group-chat-based service whose founder wanted to create a place that didn’t engage in data-mining or algorithmic manipulation — in short, its mission is user privacy.
Minds, my personal favorite, is 100% committed to free speech and functions more or less like Facebook, with a news feed, messaging, and groups. You can use cryptocurrency to buy tokens to boost your own content or to reward good content from other users, the idea being that the best content will bubble to the top. (But you can also use Minds without buying crypto.)
Can’t stand the censorship from the Silicon Valley tech monopolies? You have options. Parler is getting the most press, and it’s a good alternative if you like Twitter.
MeWe is a group-chat-based service whose founder wanted to create a place that didn’t engage in data-mining or algorithmic manipulation — in short, its mission is user privacy.
Minds, my personal favorite, is 100% committed to free speech and functions more or less like Facebook, with a news feed, messaging, and groups. You can use cryptocurrency to buy tokens to boost your own content or to reward good content from other users, the idea being that the best content will bubble to the top. (But you can also use Minds without buying crypto.)
Gab has a reputation for being a seedy haven for racists and other undesirables, but it’s really not that bad. Functionally, it’s a cross between Twitter and Facebook. Its CEO is about as close to a free-speech fundamentalist as you’ll ever find, and he backs it up with the way he runs his site and takes frequent verbal jabs at the censorship-happy Woke Left.
2. Liberty-Minded Points of View: Reason, Tom Woods, Tom Mullen, Foundation for Economic Education, Hoover and Cato, Strike the Root, Attack the System
The Foundation for Economic Education, using libertarian economics as its starting point, offers analytical takes from a unique perspective on contemporary society. Its coverage on COVID policy, the BLM riots, changing urban landscapes, stimulus legislation, and more was among the most enlightening and even-handed commentary during the insanity that was 2020. FEE also touches on other timely social and political trends in a similarly analytical way.
It was through FEE that I found Tom Mullen, a blogger who speaks persuasively against the threats to our liberties and the need for us all to push back. He’s also an original outside-the-box thinker. For example, the article that piqued my interest in his work was a solid argument against the Pledge of Allegiance — not on the usual grounds of violating religious liberty or the irony of compelling schoolkids to recite a supposed statement of freedom, but on the basis that calling the United States “indivisible” runs counter to the spirit of secession that drove the American Revolution.
The American Institute for Economic Research covers similar ground to FEE.
The Hoover Institution, a libertarian-leaning think tank led by Condoleezza Rice, likewise approaches many of the same subjects FEE does, from a public-policy perspective. Ditto for The Cato Institute.
Strike the Root is a daily journal of libertarian/market anarchist thought. Its name comes from Henry David Thoreau, that American icon of individualism and civil disobedience, who once observed that “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
Attack the System, led by Keith Preston, is an advocacy website for the promotion of anarchism and anarchist thought. Preston embraces the idea of pan-secessionism, which is a kind of hyperlocal approach to anarchism, wherein a small group of people might choose to create a community based around any shared interest.
- Reason
- Strike the Root
- Foundation for Economic Education
- American Institute for Economic Research
- Hoover Institution
- Cato Institute
- Tom Woods
- Tom Mullen
- Attack the System
The Foundation for Economic Education, using libertarian economics as its starting point, offers analytical takes from a unique perspective on contemporary society. Its coverage on COVID policy, the BLM riots, changing urban landscapes, stimulus legislation, and more was among the most enlightening and even-handed commentary during the insanity that was 2020. FEE also touches on other timely social and political trends in a similarly analytical way.
It was through FEE that I found Tom Mullen, a blogger who speaks persuasively against the threats to our liberties and the need for us all to push back. He’s also an original outside-the-box thinker. For example, the article that piqued my interest in his work was a solid argument against the Pledge of Allegiance — not on the usual grounds of violating religious liberty or the irony of compelling schoolkids to recite a supposed statement of freedom, but on the basis that calling the United States “indivisible” runs counter to the spirit of secession that drove the American Revolution.
The American Institute for Economic Research covers similar ground to FEE.
The Hoover Institution, a libertarian-leaning think tank led by Condoleezza Rice, likewise approaches many of the same subjects FEE does, from a public-policy perspective. Ditto for The Cato Institute.
Strike the Root is a daily journal of libertarian/market anarchist thought. Its name comes from Henry David Thoreau, that American icon of individualism and civil disobedience, who once observed that “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
Attack the System, led by Keith Preston, is an advocacy website for the promotion of anarchism and anarchist thought. Preston embraces the idea of pan-secessionism, which is a kind of hyperlocal approach to anarchism, wherein a small group of people might choose to create a community based around any shared interest.
And Reason has been the leading magazine of libertarian thought for well over 50 years, tackling everything from culture, tech, civil liberties, and more from a libertarian point of view. It’s been drifting to the left in recent years, but overall it’s still a good, reliable resource.
3. New Discourses: Giving You the Tools to Make Sense of, and Fight, Wokeness
New Discourses pursues “the light of objective truth in subjective darkness.” In other words, it uses Enlightenment-based rationalism and logic to challenge the postmodernism and political correctness of “Critical Social Justice” and the linguistic and psychological manipulation it uses to skew civil discourse. You’ll find thoughtful essays here, along with a full “Social Justice Encyclopedia” to help understand what the Woke mean when they talk about things like being “cisgender,” or how “equity” is far different from “equality.”
The site was founded by James Lindsay, who, along with Peter Bhogossian and Helen Pluckrose, exposed the hollow pseudo-intellectualism of postmodern and critical theory with their “grievance studies affair,” a series of nonsensical research papers submitted to a variety of woke-ish academic journals. Several of the papers — including a 3,000-word excerpt from Hitler’s Mein Kampf rewritten in feminist language — were peer-reviewed and published before their hoax was exposed.
All three of them write for New Discourses. Lindsay is a mathematician, Bhoghossian is a professor at Portland State University, and Pluckrose is the editor of Areo magazine. Lindsay has collaborated with the other two on writing books that tackle the same cultural criticisms addressed on New Discourses and in their hoax-paper project. Lindsay and Pluckrose wrote Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody, while he and Bhogossian worked together on How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide.
New Discourses pursues “the light of objective truth in subjective darkness.” In other words, it uses Enlightenment-based rationalism and logic to challenge the postmodernism and political correctness of “Critical Social Justice” and the linguistic and psychological manipulation it uses to skew civil discourse. You’ll find thoughtful essays here, along with a full “Social Justice Encyclopedia” to help understand what the Woke mean when they talk about things like being “cisgender,” or how “equity” is far different from “equality.”
The site was founded by James Lindsay, who, along with Peter Bhogossian and Helen Pluckrose, exposed the hollow pseudo-intellectualism of postmodern and critical theory with their “grievance studies affair,” a series of nonsensical research papers submitted to a variety of woke-ish academic journals. Several of the papers — including a 3,000-word excerpt from Hitler’s Mein Kampf rewritten in feminist language — were peer-reviewed and published before their hoax was exposed.
All three of them write for New Discourses. Lindsay is a mathematician, Bhoghossian is a professor at Portland State University, and Pluckrose is the editor of Areo magazine. Lindsay has collaborated with the other two on writing books that tackle the same cultural criticisms addressed on New Discourses and in their hoax-paper project. Lindsay and Pluckrose wrote Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody, while he and Bhogossian worked together on How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide.
4. The Online Journals: Quillette, Spiked, UnHerd, Areo
These four journals offer in-depth commentary on politics, current events, and culture from across the political spectrum.
Helen Pluckrose’s Areo comes from a leftist perspective but argues from a place of reason, not emotion, and in the process exposes the authoritarian tendencies of the Woke. Areo takes it name from Areopagitica, the name of John Milton’s essay in defense of free speech.
Claire Lehmann’s Quillette is similar in tone to Areo but is more strongly associated with the Intellectual Dark Web (more on that in a moment). Accordingly, its articles and essays tend to straddle the left-right spectrum a bit more and carry a stronger focus on confronting identity politics. “We respect ideas, even dangerous ones,” the magazine states on its website.
Helen Pluckrose’s Areo comes from a leftist perspective but argues from a place of reason, not emotion, and in the process exposes the authoritarian tendencies of the Woke. Areo takes it name from Areopagitica, the name of John Milton’s essay in defense of free speech.
Claire Lehmann’s Quillette is similar in tone to Areo but is more strongly associated with the Intellectual Dark Web (more on that in a moment). Accordingly, its articles and essays tend to straddle the left-right spectrum a bit more and carry a stronger focus on confronting identity politics. “We respect ideas, even dangerous ones,” the magazine states on its website.
 |
| Claire Lehmann. |
Brendan O’Neill’s Spiked takes on a slightly more combative tone. Its writers have been outspoken critics of draconian COVID policies, especially in the UK, and is generally characterized as libertarian in its editorial tone.
Sally Chatterton’s UnHerd is a bit harder to pin down, and that’s by design. Its aim doesn’t seem to be to take a political stance so much as to offer deep analyses of current events, and sometimes to present theoretical ideas that transcend typical left/right stereotypes — hence “un-herd.”
5. The Intellectual Dark Web: Transcending Ideological Borders in Pursuit of Truth and Reason
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| Top, L-R: Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, Christina Hoff Sommers, Ben Shapiro, Debra Soh. Bottom, L-R: Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, Ayaan Hirsh Ali, Jonathan Haidt. |
Eric Weinstein gave the Intellectual Dark Web its name, and Bari Weiss popularized it in a 2018 New York Times piece that framed what the IDW was all about and who made up its ranks.
Weinstein, an investment-firm director, said he was “half-joking” when he came up with the name, following an incident when his brother, Bret, and Bret’s wife, Heather Heying, resigned from Evergreen State University.
Bret Weinstein was an Evergreen State professor who faced a rage mob calling him a racist and demanding he resign — because Weinstein objected to a change in the way Evergreen handled an event asking white professors to leave campus for a day. (Nothing racist about that at all, of course.) He and Heying went on to become a formative part of the IDW, a loose collection of intellectuals and commentators united by their defense of the free exchange of ideas in a culture increasingly hostile to the idea.
The members of the IDW come from across the political spectrum. Most of them have been ostracized in one way or another for challenging the groupthink of the tribes they thought they belonged to. Ben Shapiro, for example, left Breitbart upon seeing that it had become a Trump mouthpiece, and for his efforts he became the target of anti-Semitic bigots. And Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto, took heat for refusing to use preferred pronouns in his classes, arguing that compelled speech is anathema to free speech and academic freedom, more suited to totalitarian regimes than to societies that claim to value liberty.
Bari Weiss herself could be considered an honorary member of the IDW, though to my knowledge she’s never identified as part of it. Her resignation letter from The New York Times cites rampant woke hostility in the newsroom that made her feel targeted and excluded for not perfectly following the prevailing political orthodoxy.
Sam Harris, a critic of religion, was identified in Weiss’ profile as a member of the IDW, even though these days he doesn’t consider himself part of it. He was lumped in after he couldn’t reconcile the Left’s insistence on treating all cultures equally, especially when some of them seemed to him so regressive. In his case, he was a harsher critic of Islam than most of his peers were.
Dave Rubin, now famous for his interview show The Rubin Report, was part of The Young Turks when its head honcho, Cenk Uygur, debated Harris. Rubin felt Uygur treated Harris disrespectfully, and Rubin, himself a critic of Islam, decided to leave the Turks and forge his own path.
Dr. Debra Soh, after writing a column citing research that most children outgrow gender dysphoria, was warned that she’d receive no support from her colleagues and that her tenure wouldn’t protect her. “If you produce findings that the public doesn’t like, you can lose your job,” she said — a fact that rings true today, with social media’s increasingly frequent attacks on any information that challenges the prevailing narratives on COVID and the 2020 election.
Aayan Hirsi Ali, yet another critic of Islam, has been outspoken in her support of self-determination for Muslim women and girls, which has also made her a staunch opponent of such traditions and customs as forced marriage and female genital mutilation — both of which were forced on her. She now heads the AHA Foundation, to help other women and girls avoid the same fate.
Christina Hoff Sommers is a longtime critic of contemporary gender-focused feminism, which she derides for its hostility toward men and its refusal to acknowledge differences between the sexes. She runs a series on YouTube called “Factual Feminist.”
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist from New York University who has done tremendous work in understanding how people of different political persuasions think, why they talk past each other, and what they can do to foster healthy conversations. His book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why one’s ideological opponents think and act the way they do. His Heterodox Academy builds on those ideas, with the aim of expanding viewpoint diversity on college campuses and contributing to healthy and productive debates and disagreements, as opposed to the current trend of shutting down opinions and allowing only one viewpoint to be heard and considered. “[D]iverse viewpoints and open inquiry are critical to research and learning,” the site states.
There are others who are at times considered part of the IDW, including Joe Rogan, but there is no set or agreed-upon roster. Peterson and Weinstein would be on just about everyone’s list, but everyone named here has something constructive to say in the defense of the free exchange of ideas. Peterson, for his part, endeavored to take the IDW’s guiding principles to a wider audience by applying them to a social-media site. The result, Thinkspot, is mostly a collection of deep-dive essays and forums that’s sure to appeal to those who want some intellectual stimulation. Likewise, letter.wiki is a project that allows anyone to engage in discussion through virtual exchanges with thought leaders such as Ali, Heying, Helen Pluckrose, Peter Bhogossian, Claire Lehmann, Abigail Shrier (more on her later), Noam Chomsky, and more.
Fans of the IDW have their own social-media site, too: idw.community, also known as slug.com.
Weinstein, an investment-firm director, said he was “half-joking” when he came up with the name, following an incident when his brother, Bret, and Bret’s wife, Heather Heying, resigned from Evergreen State University.
Bret Weinstein was an Evergreen State professor who faced a rage mob calling him a racist and demanding he resign — because Weinstein objected to a change in the way Evergreen handled an event asking white professors to leave campus for a day. (Nothing racist about that at all, of course.) He and Heying went on to become a formative part of the IDW, a loose collection of intellectuals and commentators united by their defense of the free exchange of ideas in a culture increasingly hostile to the idea.
The members of the IDW come from across the political spectrum. Most of them have been ostracized in one way or another for challenging the groupthink of the tribes they thought they belonged to. Ben Shapiro, for example, left Breitbart upon seeing that it had become a Trump mouthpiece, and for his efforts he became the target of anti-Semitic bigots. And Jordan Peterson, a professor at the University of Toronto, took heat for refusing to use preferred pronouns in his classes, arguing that compelled speech is anathema to free speech and academic freedom, more suited to totalitarian regimes than to societies that claim to value liberty.
Bari Weiss herself could be considered an honorary member of the IDW, though to my knowledge she’s never identified as part of it. Her resignation letter from The New York Times cites rampant woke hostility in the newsroom that made her feel targeted and excluded for not perfectly following the prevailing political orthodoxy.
Sam Harris, a critic of religion, was identified in Weiss’ profile as a member of the IDW, even though these days he doesn’t consider himself part of it. He was lumped in after he couldn’t reconcile the Left’s insistence on treating all cultures equally, especially when some of them seemed to him so regressive. In his case, he was a harsher critic of Islam than most of his peers were.
Dave Rubin, now famous for his interview show The Rubin Report, was part of The Young Turks when its head honcho, Cenk Uygur, debated Harris. Rubin felt Uygur treated Harris disrespectfully, and Rubin, himself a critic of Islam, decided to leave the Turks and forge his own path.
Dr. Debra Soh, after writing a column citing research that most children outgrow gender dysphoria, was warned that she’d receive no support from her colleagues and that her tenure wouldn’t protect her. “If you produce findings that the public doesn’t like, you can lose your job,” she said — a fact that rings true today, with social media’s increasingly frequent attacks on any information that challenges the prevailing narratives on COVID and the 2020 election.
Aayan Hirsi Ali, yet another critic of Islam, has been outspoken in her support of self-determination for Muslim women and girls, which has also made her a staunch opponent of such traditions and customs as forced marriage and female genital mutilation — both of which were forced on her. She now heads the AHA Foundation, to help other women and girls avoid the same fate.
Christina Hoff Sommers is a longtime critic of contemporary gender-focused feminism, which she derides for its hostility toward men and its refusal to acknowledge differences between the sexes. She runs a series on YouTube called “Factual Feminist.”
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist from New York University who has done tremendous work in understanding how people of different political persuasions think, why they talk past each other, and what they can do to foster healthy conversations. His book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why one’s ideological opponents think and act the way they do. His Heterodox Academy builds on those ideas, with the aim of expanding viewpoint diversity on college campuses and contributing to healthy and productive debates and disagreements, as opposed to the current trend of shutting down opinions and allowing only one viewpoint to be heard and considered. “[D]iverse viewpoints and open inquiry are critical to research and learning,” the site states.
There are others who are at times considered part of the IDW, including Joe Rogan, but there is no set or agreed-upon roster. Peterson and Weinstein would be on just about everyone’s list, but everyone named here has something constructive to say in the defense of the free exchange of ideas. Peterson, for his part, endeavored to take the IDW’s guiding principles to a wider audience by applying them to a social-media site. The result, Thinkspot, is mostly a collection of deep-dive essays and forums that’s sure to appeal to those who want some intellectual stimulation. Likewise, letter.wiki is a project that allows anyone to engage in discussion through virtual exchanges with thought leaders such as Ali, Heying, Helen Pluckrose, Peter Bhogossian, Claire Lehmann, Abigail Shrier (more on her later), Noam Chomsky, and more.
Fans of the IDW have their own social-media site, too: idw.community, also known as slug.com.
6. Old-School Conservatism and Keeping It Local: Front Porch Republic and Bill Kauffman; Rod Dreher and The American Conservative
Front Porch Republic hosts a series of writers focusing on localism — the concept of shifting our view from national and global concerns to what we’re able to influence on the local scale. Its quiet philosophy harks back to a time when communities were far stronger than they are today and calls for those communitarian values to inform how we approach the world today — including disconnecting from the banal ideas of Red and Blue Americas, turning our backs on the warmongers and central planners, favoring local shops over corporate big boxes, and so on.
Bill Kauffman hasn’t posted anything that I can find in years, but his old columns are still there. I found Kauffman long ago through his excellent book Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists.
Kauffman and Rod Dreher are kindred spirits. I discovered Dreher from his book Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers, and Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America (Or at Least the Republican Party). (Whew.)
With a title like that, you probably have a good idea of where he’s coming from politically. He’s not a political conservative so much as a cultural one. He’s a senior editor at The American Conservative, which I find to be one of the most thoughtful and literate conservative outposts on the Web. You won’t find an abundance of Trump fans there. The tone is more paleoconservative than anything resembling either Trump’s populism or the modern pro-state, pro-war, pro-corporate Republican Party. And that’s a welcome breath of fresh air that lets The American Conservative sit comfortably next to the localism of Kauffman and Front Porch Republic.
Dreher also blogs here at Substack. Speaking of which…
Front Porch Republic hosts a series of writers focusing on localism — the concept of shifting our view from national and global concerns to what we’re able to influence on the local scale. Its quiet philosophy harks back to a time when communities were far stronger than they are today and calls for those communitarian values to inform how we approach the world today — including disconnecting from the banal ideas of Red and Blue Americas, turning our backs on the warmongers and central planners, favoring local shops over corporate big boxes, and so on.
Bill Kauffman hasn’t posted anything that I can find in years, but his old columns are still there. I found Kauffman long ago through his excellent book Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists.
Kauffman and Rod Dreher are kindred spirits. I discovered Dreher from his book Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers, and Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America (Or at Least the Republican Party). (Whew.)
With a title like that, you probably have a good idea of where he’s coming from politically. He’s not a political conservative so much as a cultural one. He’s a senior editor at The American Conservative, which I find to be one of the most thoughtful and literate conservative outposts on the Web. You won’t find an abundance of Trump fans there. The tone is more paleoconservative than anything resembling either Trump’s populism or the modern pro-state, pro-war, pro-corporate Republican Party. And that’s a welcome breath of fresh air that lets The American Conservative sit comfortably next to the localism of Kauffman and Front Porch Republic.
Dreher also blogs here at Substack. Speaking of which…
7. Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, and Other Noteworthy Residents of Substack
- Glenn Greenwald
- Rod Dreher’s Daily Dreher
- Matt Taibbi’s TK News
- Andrew Sullivan’s The Weekly Dish
- Jordan Schachtel’s The Dossier
 |
| Glenn Greenwald with Edward Snowden. |
Substack rose to prominence in 2020 as a number of big-name writers joined the service. Glenn Greenwald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who brought us the Edward Snowden revelations, left his own company, The Intercept, after his editors refused to let him run an article critical of the media’s coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Andrew Sullivan, similarly, left New York magazine in response to what he called the increasingly hostile reaction to anyone who dared challenge the newsroom’s woke orthodoxy. He’s been calling out the pernicious effects of cancel culture for years — his 2018 article “We All Live on Campus Now” is a brilliant indictment and a warning of things to come.
Substack is richer for their decisions, as are their loyal readers, but their departures speak to just what an alarming state journalism is in today, as promoting an agenda from which no one may deviate has clearly replaced pursuing the truth. And bear in mind that neither Greenwald nor Sullivan has a particularly conservative worldview. People in their own left-leaning tribes made it impossible for either man to continue pursuing his work in an honest and unfettered way. (Matthew Yglesias, similarly, left Vox for Substack because his journalistic independence was rocking the Woke boat.)
Matt Taibbi, another voice from the left, continues to write for Rolling Stone, where he made his name. But he also has a very welcome presence at Substack.
From the other side of the political aisle is Jordan Schachtel, whose Substack page, The Dossier, has offered provocative takes on the COVID narratives that Silicon Valley won’t let you challenge. And Rod Dreher’s page centers on long-form spiritual ruminations, far different from the content he publishes at The American Conservative. It shows another side of Dreher that readers don’t normally see, but it also reminds you of why he was inspired to write his book The Benedict Option.
8. The Unwoke Left: Caity Johnstone, Jimmy Dore, and the Last of a Vanishing Breed
- Alternative Left (blog, Minds, Facebook)
- Caitlin Johnstone
- Jimmy Dore
- John McWhorter
- Conor Friedersdorf
- Writings of J. Todd Ring
- Dissident Voice
- Red Scare Podcast
- CounterPunch
John McWhorter doesn’t appear to have his own Web presence, other than a Twitter account. But you can find him writing for The Atlantic and podcasting for Slate. What I love about him is that he takes no crap from the leftist race hustlers that claim to speak on his behalf. McWhorter, a black man, finds the kind of “anti-racist” critical race theory peddled by the likes of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo to be both demeaning to blacks and just as racist as the racism it claims to confront.
Also at The Atlantic is Conor Friedersdorf, who writes in defense of civil liberties. (He’s also on Twitter.)
Dissident Voice is a consistently harsh critic of the abuses of capitalism without resorting to the woke hatred of America, those who founded it, and the skin color of most of its inhabitants.
Alternative Left, sadly, looks to be fizzling out. As of the beginning of 2021, it appears to still be occasionally active on Facebook, but neither its blog nor its Minds page has been updated in several months. It’s perhaps a poetic sign of the times that a liberal project dedicated to defending free speech, opposing political correctness, and promoting equality over “equity” would be slowly disappearing from the contemporary dialogue.
Along those same lines, I’ll give a conditional recommendation for CounterPunch. The magazine is good at “muckraking,” as its editorial staff likes to put it, but when they’re not exposing systemic corruption, they tend to flail around looking for a target to hit, with sometimes uneven results.
The Red Scare Podcast, hosted by Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, also takes on culture from an unwoke-left point of view.
I’ve placed J. Todd Ring’s blog here, as it seems to be the best fit for his content. He’s not explicitly leftist, but his criticisms of the two-party system and the need for the people to take back power and control from meddlesome central planners, especially during the mess we’re in now, makes his inclusion here sensible.
9. Noam Chomsky. None More Need Be Said.
I could have rolled Noam Chomsky in with the Unwoke Left, but he’s too important of a figure. He needs to stand alone, as the towering intellect of our times that he is.
Chomsky doesn’t have a regular presence online, but the minimalist chomsky.info website includes links to all of his recent written interviews, his videos, and all his books, talks, and lectures. The man has a formidable body of work, and you could start virtually anywhere and come out enlightened on the other end about the realities of our corrupt political system.
I could have rolled Noam Chomsky in with the Unwoke Left, but he’s too important of a figure. He needs to stand alone, as the towering intellect of our times that he is.
Chomsky doesn’t have a regular presence online, but the minimalist chomsky.info website includes links to all of his recent written interviews, his videos, and all his books, talks, and lectures. The man has a formidable body of work, and you could start virtually anywhere and come out enlightened on the other end about the realities of our corrupt political system.
10. Academic and Intellectual Freedom: Mark Crispin Miller, Camille Paglia, Michael Rectenwald, and More
Time and again we hear of university professors who are afraid to speak their minds, lest they be canceled by fragile students who fear threatened by foreign opinions, and the administrators who coddle these students and attack the teachers. Our colleges, once the beacons of free inquiry, are now some of the most hostile institutions to free speech on the planet. If you wonder why cancel culture is so bad, look no further than our places of higher education, because this is where it all started, with campus speech codes in the ’80s and ’90s creating a slippery slope for free expression. “Watch what you say,” seemingly innocuous back then, has metastasized into having your life ruined by puritanical rage mobs.
Consider the case of Mark Crispin Miller, who runs a course on propaganda at New York University. He asked his students to consider how the media used propaganda tactics to sell the public on using masks — something that unequivocally happened, beginning in earnest in July, after the curve was already flattened. Well, one student complained to university administration, claiming that Miller was telling his students not to wear masks. (Not that they need to, but the fact that this kid was propagandized into thinking he needed a mask kind of proves Miller’s point.) Instead of talking to Miller about what really happened, fellow faculty members piled on, demanding an investigation of Miller. Suddenly the pressure was on, with a Mao-like struggle session taking shape around him, implicitly demanding that he recant for something he never even did.
Miller thinks outside the box, as his blog demonstrates. He thinks it’s good to question so-called official narratives, and it is. And for that, he’s being demonized, which says far, far more about his witch-hunting opponents than it does about him. His blog is well worth following for anyone with a shred of intellectual curiosity.
Camille Paglia has been dealing with this nonsense for decades. For challenging the prevailing narratives on feminism and “gender identity,” students demanded that she be fired from her professorship at the University of the Arts and replaced, very specifically, with “a queer person of color.” Because apparently a straight white person wouldn’t be appropriately woke? Anyway, she prevailed in that battle. Sadly, she doesn’t seem to have an online presence, but here’s a lively and wide-ranging video conversation she had with Jordan Peterson:
Time and again we hear of university professors who are afraid to speak their minds, lest they be canceled by fragile students who fear threatened by foreign opinions, and the administrators who coddle these students and attack the teachers. Our colleges, once the beacons of free inquiry, are now some of the most hostile institutions to free speech on the planet. If you wonder why cancel culture is so bad, look no further than our places of higher education, because this is where it all started, with campus speech codes in the ’80s and ’90s creating a slippery slope for free expression. “Watch what you say,” seemingly innocuous back then, has metastasized into having your life ruined by puritanical rage mobs.
Consider the case of Mark Crispin Miller, who runs a course on propaganda at New York University. He asked his students to consider how the media used propaganda tactics to sell the public on using masks — something that unequivocally happened, beginning in earnest in July, after the curve was already flattened. Well, one student complained to university administration, claiming that Miller was telling his students not to wear masks. (Not that they need to, but the fact that this kid was propagandized into thinking he needed a mask kind of proves Miller’s point.) Instead of talking to Miller about what really happened, fellow faculty members piled on, demanding an investigation of Miller. Suddenly the pressure was on, with a Mao-like struggle session taking shape around him, implicitly demanding that he recant for something he never even did.
Miller thinks outside the box, as his blog demonstrates. He thinks it’s good to question so-called official narratives, and it is. And for that, he’s being demonized, which says far, far more about his witch-hunting opponents than it does about him. His blog is well worth following for anyone with a shred of intellectual curiosity.
Camille Paglia has been dealing with this nonsense for decades. For challenging the prevailing narratives on feminism and “gender identity,” students demanded that she be fired from her professorship at the University of the Arts and replaced, very specifically, with “a queer person of color.” Because apparently a straight white person wouldn’t be appropriately woke? Anyway, she prevailed in that battle. Sadly, she doesn’t seem to have an online presence, but here’s a lively and wide-ranging video conversation she had with Jordan Peterson:
Her books — especially Sexual Personae — are well worth your time, too.
So are the books from Michael Rectenwald, among them Thought Criminal, Google Archipelago, Springtime for Snowflakes, and Beyond Woke. Like Miller, Rectenwald taught at NYU. Now retired, he was red-pilled by the assaults on academic freedom he encountered on campus. Those experiences led him to become an outspoken critic of intolerant woke culture, both on his website and in his books.
Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, Jordan Peterson, and Jonathan Haidt could just as easily have been included here. Scroll back to the “Intellectual Dark Web” entry for more on these fine scholars.
So are the books from Michael Rectenwald, among them Thought Criminal, Google Archipelago, Springtime for Snowflakes, and Beyond Woke. Like Miller, Rectenwald taught at NYU. Now retired, he was red-pilled by the assaults on academic freedom he encountered on campus. Those experiences led him to become an outspoken critic of intolerant woke culture, both on his website and in his books.
Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, Jordan Peterson, and Jonathan Haidt could just as easily have been included here. Scroll back to the “Intellectual Dark Web” entry for more on these fine scholars.
11. Rising: News and Debate Without the Vitriol
From the left, she’s Krystal Ball. From the right, he’s Saagar Enjeti.
From the left, she’s Krystal Ball. From the right, he’s Saagar Enjeti.
If you remember the glory days of CNN’s Crossfire, you’ll recall how two ideological opponents went head to head, civilly but passionately debating the hot topics of the day. That’s not quite how Rising works, but it still frames the day’s news within both right- and left-leaning perspectives, courtesy of its co-hosts.
Rising, an online program from D.C. paper The Hill, is a news-format show that includes interviews, analysis, and, yes, friendly debate between its co-anchors. Both identifying as populists, Ball and Enjeti co-wrote a book that examined the rise of populist movements on the right and left, personified respectively by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. The Populist’s Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left Are Rising is definitely worth a read, even if corporate woke leftism has at least temporarily supplanted populism in the White House.
12. Flagging Bias and Censorship: Media Research Center, Reclaim the Net, Power Line
- Media Research Center/Brittany Hughes
- Reclaim the Net
- Power Line
Reclaim the Net is a watchdog website that you wish wouldn’t have to be as busy as it is. The people running the site serve up what seems like an endless stream of reports of tech censorship. If you want to know how bad the attacks on online free speech are getting, this is the place to go. You can also sign up for a daily email digest.
I could have placed the Power Line blog elsewhere, but it excels at calling out the hypocrisy in media narratives, such as the recent claims of swamped hospitals to justify lockdowns, the consensus view on 2020 election fraud, or the comparative praise and criticism given to the respective governors of New York and Florida, even though Florida’s COVID numbers are far better and New York is a disaster.
Finally, the Media Research Center, led by Brent Bozell, has been busy exposing media bias since 1987. I was reminded of the MRC’s work in 2020, when I came across a riveting Thanksgiving message from Brittany Hughes, managing editor of MRC-TV, calling on all of us to remember that we are free people. Take a look:
I could have placed the Power Line blog elsewhere, but it excels at calling out the hypocrisy in media narratives, such as the recent claims of swamped hospitals to justify lockdowns, the consensus view on 2020 election fraud, or the comparative praise and criticism given to the respective governors of New York and Florida, even though Florida’s COVID numbers are far better and New York is a disaster.
Finally, the Media Research Center, led by Brent Bozell, has been busy exposing media bias since 1987. I was reminded of the MRC’s work in 2020, when I came across a riveting Thanksgiving message from Brittany Hughes, managing editor of MRC-TV, calling on all of us to remember that we are free people. Take a look:
13. Truth in the Fringes: Unz Review, Taki’s Mag, Lew Rockwell, American Thinker, ZeroHedge
CNNMoney once described ZeroHedge as promoting a “deeply conspiratorial, anti-establishment, and pessimistic view of the world,” as if that was a bad thing. The site’s own tagline borrows from Fight Club: “On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
So that should give you some sense of the content you’ll read at ZeroHedge. In its role as an observer of financial and economic trends, ZeroHedge takes a dim view of government involvement in the markets, particularly the role that central-banking manipulation plays. And it pulls no punches in its criticisms of certain economists, especially perennial hack Paul Krugman.
Seeing the market as a rigged casino, courtesy of the Federal Reserve’s meddling, ZeroHedge advocates for investing in precious metals and cryptocurrencies. Once the manipulated market crashes, and ZeroHedge insists it’s just a matter of time, only then will we be able to return to a system of true free-market economics.
None of that tends to make ZeroHedge very popular among its peers in the financial media. But it’s even less popular for its coverage of current events — some aggregated from other sites, and some original content. It’s been banned by PayPal, and Google has kicked ZeroHedge off its ad platform. That’s what happens when you rile the wrong people. But ZeroHedge simply pushes on, mixing its market commentary with equally gloomy takes on current events.
Reality isn’t always pretty, and ZeroHedge owns up to that fact. No sunshine and rainbows here.
But if some people cringe at ZeroHedge, I imagine that their heads would spin if they were to encounter the really outer reaches of the Web. These are the places where you have to separate the wheat from the chaff, but when you do, you’ll find some great authors that pull no punches and dig in deep on current events.
Lew Rockwell’s page, for example, includes writings from the great Paul Craig Roberts, pro-secessionist advocate Kirkpatrick Sale, Lincoln-as-hero debunker Thomas DiLorenzo, bloggers Jon Rappoport and Gary D. Barnett, and many more whom you won’t generally hear about in polite company.
I discovered Allan Stevo through Lew Rockwell’s site. Stevo is one of the most passionate voices you’ll hear in opposition to the worldwide masking hysteria, and his book Face Maks in One Lesson is packed full of persuasive arguments against mandates and ways for ordinary people to push back against them.
Then there’s Taki’s Magazine, headed up by Taki Theodoracopulos. Here you’ll find regular contributions on culture and politics from the likes of Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, and Steve Sailer — the latter of which may offend the sensibilities of those who don’t like to have frank discussions on race.
As you work your way into The Unz Review, led by Ron Unz, and The American Thinker, you might get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content. But poke around long enough, and you’re bound to find something that makes the looking worth the effort. Fred Reed was a favorite find of mine at The Unz Review.
CNNMoney once described ZeroHedge as promoting a “deeply conspiratorial, anti-establishment, and pessimistic view of the world,” as if that was a bad thing. The site’s own tagline borrows from Fight Club: “On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
So that should give you some sense of the content you’ll read at ZeroHedge. In its role as an observer of financial and economic trends, ZeroHedge takes a dim view of government involvement in the markets, particularly the role that central-banking manipulation plays. And it pulls no punches in its criticisms of certain economists, especially perennial hack Paul Krugman.
Seeing the market as a rigged casino, courtesy of the Federal Reserve’s meddling, ZeroHedge advocates for investing in precious metals and cryptocurrencies. Once the manipulated market crashes, and ZeroHedge insists it’s just a matter of time, only then will we be able to return to a system of true free-market economics.
None of that tends to make ZeroHedge very popular among its peers in the financial media. But it’s even less popular for its coverage of current events — some aggregated from other sites, and some original content. It’s been banned by PayPal, and Google has kicked ZeroHedge off its ad platform. That’s what happens when you rile the wrong people. But ZeroHedge simply pushes on, mixing its market commentary with equally gloomy takes on current events.
Reality isn’t always pretty, and ZeroHedge owns up to that fact. No sunshine and rainbows here.
But if some people cringe at ZeroHedge, I imagine that their heads would spin if they were to encounter the really outer reaches of the Web. These are the places where you have to separate the wheat from the chaff, but when you do, you’ll find some great authors that pull no punches and dig in deep on current events.
Lew Rockwell’s page, for example, includes writings from the great Paul Craig Roberts, pro-secessionist advocate Kirkpatrick Sale, Lincoln-as-hero debunker Thomas DiLorenzo, bloggers Jon Rappoport and Gary D. Barnett, and many more whom you won’t generally hear about in polite company.
I discovered Allan Stevo through Lew Rockwell’s site. Stevo is one of the most passionate voices you’ll hear in opposition to the worldwide masking hysteria, and his book Face Maks in One Lesson is packed full of persuasive arguments against mandates and ways for ordinary people to push back against them.
Then there’s Taki’s Magazine, headed up by Taki Theodoracopulos. Here you’ll find regular contributions on culture and politics from the likes of Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, and Steve Sailer — the latter of which may offend the sensibilities of those who don’t like to have frank discussions on race.
As you work your way into The Unz Review, led by Ron Unz, and The American Thinker, you might get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content. But poke around long enough, and you’re bound to find something that makes the looking worth the effort. Fred Reed was a favorite find of mine at The Unz Review.
14. Inconvenient Truth Bombs: The Stuff You Need to Know but Probably Don’t Want To
Amazing Polly (pictured) is indeed amazing. She’s been pushing back against all the COVID hysteria from Day One with unassailable logic, and long before that she was fearlessly challenging all the propaganda and “official narratives” we’re inundated with day after day. And she does it all with a smile., Little wonder that she’s been banned by YouTube and PayPal.
I’m surprised that James Corbett and The Corbett Report haven’t yet been booted from YouTube. Corbett has for years been dismantling establishment narratives with calm logic and facts.
Same goes for Dave Cullen — though YouTube is starting to delete his videos. (As with Amazing Polly, find him uncensored on Bitchute. He’s also on Minds.)
Then there’s the incomparable David Icke, who has been banned from just about every online forum. That’s what happens when your truths hit too close to home.
Off-Guardian actually came about as a result of censorship, having been created by people banned from the comments section of the UK’s woke far-left Guardian newspaper. Who says something good can’t come of censorship?
Finally, there’s Humans Are Free — whose name challenges us to believe the very claim it makes.
I’m surprised that James Corbett and The Corbett Report haven’t yet been booted from YouTube. Corbett has for years been dismantling establishment narratives with calm logic and facts.
Same goes for Dave Cullen — though YouTube is starting to delete his videos. (As with Amazing Polly, find him uncensored on Bitchute. He’s also on Minds.)
Then there’s the incomparable David Icke, who has been banned from just about every online forum. That’s what happens when your truths hit too close to home.
Off-Guardian actually came about as a result of censorship, having been created by people banned from the comments section of the UK’s woke far-left Guardian newspaper. Who says something good can’t come of censorship?
Finally, there’s Humans Are Free — whose name challenges us to believe the very claim it makes.
15. Medical Sanity: America’s Frontline Doctors, Dr. Simone Gold, Dr. James Todaro, Evidence Not Fear, Rational Ground, Swiss Policy Research, and the One Book You Need to Read
Rational Ground
Evidence Not Fear
Swiss Policy Research Group
Great Barrington Declaration
America’s Frontline Doctors
Dr. Simone Gold
Dr. James Todaro/Medicine Uncensored
Dr. Lee Merritt
Dr. Joseph Mercola
Truth About HCQ
Plandemic
Face Maks in One Lesson
Did you know that no study has ever shown ordinary surgical masks to be effective against viral spread? That 85% of those who got COVID wore masks? That the COVID survival rate for healthy people under 70 exceeds 99%, and the average COVID age of death is about in line with life expectancy? That the average adult is more likely to die in a car crash, and that kids are more likely to die from a lightning strike? That lockdowns are counterproductive, and that the U.S. states with the toughest lockdowns and the longest-standing mask mandates have some of the highest infection and death numbers?
You probably didn’t, because the only thing the media feeds people, day in and day out, is a steady diet of cases, deaths, panic, and fear — while it cheers on the control freaks and petty tyrants who would destroy the village in order to save it.
Even when members of the medical community come forward to challenge the prevailing narratives about the virus, social media and the mainstream press either ignore them, ridicule them, or outright ban them.
Such has been the case with America’s Frontline Doctors, who have gone to great lengths to advocate for alternative treatments that they’ve found to work, and to point out the success in fighting the virus that Sweden and others have had by not locking down and letting healthy people go about their lives while sheltering those at risk. While the World Health Organization takes the Orwellian step of redefining herd immunity to mean mass vaccination, these doctors and others like them remind us that we have immune systems, and that they work, and that natural herd immunity is how humanity survived for the millennia before Big Pharma ever existed.
Two of America’s Frontline Doctors, Dr. Simone Gold and Dr. James Todaro, have been leading the charge in getting the facts to the people. Dr. Todaro has launched a site called Medicine Uncensored, which largely focuses on the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as part of an inexpensive and reliable treatment for COVID. The corporate media has of course gone on a crusade against HCQ, framing it as a dangerous and untested drug, when it’s actually been around for decades. The problem is that if a cheap generic drug were found to effectively treat the virus, then Big Pharma couldn’t make billions off their new vaccines. And if you think that’s not the reason a perfectly safe drug has been vilified, consider how many pharma ads you see on TV, all the time. He who pays the piper calls the tune. It’s all about the money. Always follow the money.
If you’d like to learn more about HCQ, you can visit Truth About HCQ to read Filipe Rafaeli’s extensively documented and researched piece on the drug, its history, and the media campaign against it. It originally appeared on Medium, until it was of course deemed to contain “dangerous and misleading information” and scrubbed from the site.
Dr. Gold is interviewed in a very informative video to talk about why masks can’t possibly work against the virus. As it’s on Bitchute, probably having been banned on YouTube, I’m unable to embed it here. So I’m including a screen shot along with a link in the caption. Just click on the caption, and it’ll take you to the video.
Rational Ground
Evidence Not Fear
Swiss Policy Research Group
Great Barrington Declaration
America’s Frontline Doctors
Dr. Simone Gold
Dr. James Todaro/Medicine Uncensored
Dr. Lee Merritt
Dr. Joseph Mercola
Truth About HCQ
Plandemic
Face Maks in One Lesson
Did you know that no study has ever shown ordinary surgical masks to be effective against viral spread? That 85% of those who got COVID wore masks? That the COVID survival rate for healthy people under 70 exceeds 99%, and the average COVID age of death is about in line with life expectancy? That the average adult is more likely to die in a car crash, and that kids are more likely to die from a lightning strike? That lockdowns are counterproductive, and that the U.S. states with the toughest lockdowns and the longest-standing mask mandates have some of the highest infection and death numbers?
You probably didn’t, because the only thing the media feeds people, day in and day out, is a steady diet of cases, deaths, panic, and fear — while it cheers on the control freaks and petty tyrants who would destroy the village in order to save it.
Even when members of the medical community come forward to challenge the prevailing narratives about the virus, social media and the mainstream press either ignore them, ridicule them, or outright ban them.
Such has been the case with America’s Frontline Doctors, who have gone to great lengths to advocate for alternative treatments that they’ve found to work, and to point out the success in fighting the virus that Sweden and others have had by not locking down and letting healthy people go about their lives while sheltering those at risk. While the World Health Organization takes the Orwellian step of redefining herd immunity to mean mass vaccination, these doctors and others like them remind us that we have immune systems, and that they work, and that natural herd immunity is how humanity survived for the millennia before Big Pharma ever existed.
Two of America’s Frontline Doctors, Dr. Simone Gold and Dr. James Todaro, have been leading the charge in getting the facts to the people. Dr. Todaro has launched a site called Medicine Uncensored, which largely focuses on the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as part of an inexpensive and reliable treatment for COVID. The corporate media has of course gone on a crusade against HCQ, framing it as a dangerous and untested drug, when it’s actually been around for decades. The problem is that if a cheap generic drug were found to effectively treat the virus, then Big Pharma couldn’t make billions off their new vaccines. And if you think that’s not the reason a perfectly safe drug has been vilified, consider how many pharma ads you see on TV, all the time. He who pays the piper calls the tune. It’s all about the money. Always follow the money.
If you’d like to learn more about HCQ, you can visit Truth About HCQ to read Filipe Rafaeli’s extensively documented and researched piece on the drug, its history, and the media campaign against it. It originally appeared on Medium, until it was of course deemed to contain “dangerous and misleading information” and scrubbed from the site.
Dr. Gold is interviewed in a very informative video to talk about why masks can’t possibly work against the virus. As it’s on Bitchute, probably having been banned on YouTube, I’m unable to embed it here. So I’m including a screen shot along with a link in the caption. Just click on the caption, and it’ll take you to the video.
Click here to see the video!
Dr. James Mercola, thought not part of America’s Frontline Doctors, is a leading figure in natural health solutions. His website, mercola.com, will keep you updated on the latest COVID news, how the establishment manipulates data to control us, and what we can do to take matters into our own hands.
Dr. Lee Merritt uses data and common sense to annihilate the justification for mask mandates. Listen to a tremendous radio interview she conducted, and she what she had to say to the Omaha city council:
Dr. James Mercola, thought not part of America’s Frontline Doctors, is a leading figure in natural health solutions. His website, mercola.com, will keep you updated on the latest COVID news, how the establishment manipulates data to control us, and what we can do to take matters into our own hands.
Dr. Lee Merritt uses data and common sense to annihilate the justification for mask mandates. Listen to a tremendous radio interview she conducted, and she what she had to say to the Omaha city council:
As for other factual resources to fight the establishment COVID propaganda, I can recommend three sites.
First is the Swiss Policy Research Group, whose stated goal of battling propaganda is borne out in the data provided on COVID, from lethality to treatments, from mask effectiveness to the problems with the PCR tests.
Evidence Not Fear offers just that. The entire site is nothing but data related to the virus, which, when taken as a whole and not skewed out of context to gin up public fear, places COVID in a completely different context.
Rational Ground is a news-based site following the latest COVID developments and challenging the official narrative. My favorite feature at Rational Ground is the ongoing series of mask charts that consistently show zero correlation between mask mandates and infection rates. Here’s just one example of many:
First is the Swiss Policy Research Group, whose stated goal of battling propaganda is borne out in the data provided on COVID, from lethality to treatments, from mask effectiveness to the problems with the PCR tests.
Evidence Not Fear offers just that. The entire site is nothing but data related to the virus, which, when taken as a whole and not skewed out of context to gin up public fear, places COVID in a completely different context.
Rational Ground is a news-based site following the latest COVID developments and challenging the official narrative. My favorite feature at Rational Ground is the ongoing series of mask charts that consistently show zero correlation between mask mandates and infection rates. Here’s just one example of many:
You should also check out the Great Barrington Declaration, written by two professors of medicine and an epidemiologist, laying out the case for why lockdowns do more harm than good and ought to end so as to minimize further health and economic damage to the world. In essence, it asks the world to do what Sweden did, rather than quarantining and masking healthy people and depriving people of their livelihoods. You won’t be surprised to know that this declaration of common sense has been attacked as much as hydroxychloroquine has — because it would destroy the prevailing fear-and-control narrative.
I’ve already mentioned Allan Stevo’s book Face Maks in One Lesson. You need this book if you want to acquire the tools to make the mask mandates end. It is absolutely vital reading.
Finally, check out the highly censored Plandemic video. (The link works as of the time I wrote this, but I can’t guarantee it will always be there.) I won’t tell you what to think about what you see in the film. But when you see a world fixated on endless lockdowns, useless mask mandates, vaccine passports, contact tracing, strict guidelines on where we can travel and who we can see in our own homes, and the growing police-state enforcement in the form of fines and arrests for those who don’t comply… well, it’s hard to argue that all of this is just about a virus that most people survive.
16. News and Commentary: The Best of an Endless List
News:
First up is The Federalist, which quite simply is good at doing journalism and at creating original commentary in response to the day’s events.
Next, The Daily Wire — home to Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, Andrew Klavan, and Ben Shapiro. That’s quite a lineup all in itself.
I’m not in love with The Blaze, but there’s no denying the impressiveness of its roster: Glenn Beck, Steven Crowder, and Dave Rubin.
Epoch Times earns a mention for not just delivering the news, but also focusing on China and its ongoing human-rights abuses — something the U.S. establishment, beholden to Chinese authoritarians, has never been keen on highlighting.
The Post Millennial brings not only a perspective on the news from Canada but also employs Andy Ngo, the investigative journalist who has literally put his life on the line to report on Antifa and BLM violence.
News:
- The Federalist
- The Daily Wire
- The Blaze
- Epoch Times
- The Post Millennial
- RT
- Sky News Australia
- RealClearPolitics (aggregator)
- revolver.news (aggregator)
- Charlemagne Institute/Chronicles/Intellectual Takeout
- Commentary
- Mark Steyn/SteynOnline
- Dan Bongino
- Western Journal
- National Review
- Spectator (UK and U.S.)
- The American Spectator
- Anti-Empire
First up is The Federalist, which quite simply is good at doing journalism and at creating original commentary in response to the day’s events.
Next, The Daily Wire — home to Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, Andrew Klavan, and Ben Shapiro. That’s quite a lineup all in itself.
I’m not in love with The Blaze, but there’s no denying the impressiveness of its roster: Glenn Beck, Steven Crowder, and Dave Rubin.
Epoch Times earns a mention for not just delivering the news, but also focusing on China and its ongoing human-rights abuses — something the U.S. establishment, beholden to Chinese authoritarians, has never been keen on highlighting.
The Post Millennial brings not only a perspective on the news from Canada but also employs Andy Ngo, the investigative journalist who has literally put his life on the line to report on Antifa and BLM violence.
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| Andy Ngo, after being violently attacked by mostly peaceful protestors. |
Russia Today. I know what you’ve heard about it. Just read it for yourself. Sometimes the best perspective on American news comes from outside its own borders. That’s the same reason Sky News Australia is also worth a look.
RealClearPolitics is probably the best of the news aggregators, with an abundance of articles from a wide variety of sources, and everything organized into neatly arranged categories, making it easy to quickly find what you’re looking for.
revolver.news, another aggregator, similarly scores points for its clean and simple layout.
More on the side of commentary than news is the Charlemagne Institute and its two publications: Intellectual Takeout and Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. The latter promotes a non-interventionist, anti-globalist paleoconservative worldview, much like The American Conservative. The institute’s lofty focus is no less than to “defend and advance Western Civilization.”
National Review needs no introduction.
Western Journal, consisting mainly of original content, is the parent company of Conservative Tribune and Liftable. It says its mission is to fill the journalistic gap in a left-dominated industry and to be “a trusted source of news and information for the stories and views that remain untold by establishment news sources.”
Musician, author, and commentator Mark Steyn has thought-provoking takes on current events. Podcaster Dan Bongino has taken ownership stakes in Parler and video-sharing site Rumble, contributing to the viability of conservative-leaning media outlets.
Chicks on the Right: Featuring commentary and an entertaining podcast from two women who call themselves Mock and Daisy.
 |
| Chicks on the Right. |
Commentary is a journal of cultural opinion from a conservative Jewish perspective.
Anti-Empire is just that, examining current events, history, finance, war, and more from a European perspective. “So good it’s banned in Turkey,” the site boasts.
And finally, three Spectators. The UK Spectator is the world’s oldest weekly magazine, dating to 1828. Its U.S. counterpart arrived in print much more recently, in 2019. The unrelated American Spectator, which arguably peaked during the Clinton administration and featured the works of George Will and P.J. O’Rourke, is still alive and kicking.
17. Conservatism 101: Prager U
Dennis Prager’s PragerU is an invaluable resource for those who have questions about conservative policies and values. Its “5-Minute Videos” series are an excellent outreach tool, and Prager’s own informal “Fireside Chats” are enjoyable, relaxed takes on contemporary philosophy and ideology. A big bonus: The Candace Owens Show is hosted at PragerU, too.
Dennis Prager’s own website is well worth checking out, too.
18. Tucker Carlson: The Only Good Thing About Fox News
I remember Tucker Carlson from his bow-tied days on Crossfire. Not beholden to the establishment GOP, he also isn’t a Trump devotee. He’s his own person, and he pulls no punches in speaking the plain truth about the hot topics of the day. He gets what the average American is concerned about, and that’s what makes him and his show so popular. He may well be my favorite commentator out there today.
I remember Tucker Carlson from his bow-tied days on Crossfire. Not beholden to the establishment GOP, he also isn’t a Trump devotee. He’s his own person, and he pulls no punches in speaking the plain truth about the hot topics of the day. He gets what the average American is concerned about, and that’s what makes him and his show so popular. He may well be my favorite commentator out there today.
 |
| Even if he does look perpetually confused. |
19. London Real: Long-Form Video Interviews in Defense of Free Speech
Brian Rose asks good questions, and then he sits back and lets his interviewees talk. His goal with London Real is to allow views to be heard that may not otherwise be aired in the mainstream media. I discovered him through his extensive interview with David Icke, who went on at length about the COVID agenda, who he thinks is pushing it, and what he figures the end goal is. Pretty intense stuff, whether you agree with it or not. And naturally, that interview has since been banned from YouTube.
Here, Rose himself is interviewed by JP Sears, talking about his approach to engaging his guests and how he’s happy to welcome people he may not agree with, only to sometimes find his own mind changed afterward. That’s what the free exchange of ideas will do for an open mind. Ideas are not to be feared!
Brian Rose asks good questions, and then he sits back and lets his interviewees talk. His goal with London Real is to allow views to be heard that may not otherwise be aired in the mainstream media. I discovered him through his extensive interview with David Icke, who went on at length about the COVID agenda, who he thinks is pushing it, and what he figures the end goal is. Pretty intense stuff, whether you agree with it or not. And naturally, that interview has since been banned from YouTube.
Here, Rose himself is interviewed by JP Sears, talking about his approach to engaging his guests and how he’s happy to welcome people he may not agree with, only to sometimes find his own mind changed afterward. That’s what the free exchange of ideas will do for an open mind. Ideas are not to be feared!
20. Woman (n.): Adult Human Female
Transgender activists have taken gender dysphoria — by all accounts a horrible condition in which a person feels trapped in the wrong body — and turned it into a fashion statement, such that you can pick your gender off a shelf, as if it were some kind of accessory. Not only is this an insult to those who genuinely suffer from dysphoria, but the incredible narcissism embedded in such a concept is glaringly obvious and deeply disturbing.
That would be bad enough, but this approach to gender is also reducing the concepts of male and female to 1950s-era rigid stereotypes, such that a boy who likes pink can’t just be a boy who likes pink — he must actually be a girl. Likewise, a girl who’s a tomboy must actually be a boy. This is how someone can claim to be both genders, no gender, or anything in between — it’s not about biology but about how you identify according to cultural concepts of male and female.
Adults who know better confuse kids and their developing brings with these ideas — drag queen story hour anyone? — and then put these kids in counseling to help them come to grips with their imaginary identity. They then often end up undergoing hormone treatments and surgical procedures that disfigure their growing bodies and permanently turn them into something they aren’t. All this is often done without the consent of the parents.
This insanity is rooted an irrational and anti-scientific notion that your biological sex is irrelevant and how you feel about your maleness or femaleness is all that matters. That’s why Nancy Pelosi is trying to remove the words “father,” “mother,” “sister,” and “brother” from being used in official House of Representatives communications — the very ideas of gendered family titles are now offensive, since you could be a “father” with a uterus. You’re just a parent. Nothing else may be spoken.
This is also where all the “assigned at birth” nonsense comes in. Never mind your genitals, your chromosomes, your sex hormones — you’re just an empty shell at birth. You could grow up to be a girl with a penis. (A notion as ridiculous as tits on a bull, as we might have said in a more rational age.)
This stuff has real-life consequences for women in particular. Women are having their private spaces taken away (bathrooms, changing rooms, even crisis shelters) by men who “identify” as women and insist on sharing those intimate spaces. And women’s sports is under assault by men who, with their more muscular bodies, crush their biologically female competition (sometimes literally). Tennis legend Martina Navratilova put it well when she said: “Letting men compete as women simply if they change their name and take hormones is unfair — no matter how those athletes may throw their weight around.”
Moreover, women are being reduced to their biological functions, being called such degrading things as “birthing people” and “menstruators,” so as not to offend a tiny minority of men with male bodies who insist on being called women.
Even the United Nations is in on the game of de-womaning women.
- Gender Critical Woman
- peaktrans.org
- Women Are Human
- Lily Maynard
- Feminist Current/Meghan Murphy
- Lindsay Shepherd
- Posie Parker
- Arielle Scarcella
- J.K. Rowling
- Madeleine Kearns
- Abigail Shrier
- spinster.xyz
- Magdalen Berns
Transgender activists have taken gender dysphoria — by all accounts a horrible condition in which a person feels trapped in the wrong body — and turned it into a fashion statement, such that you can pick your gender off a shelf, as if it were some kind of accessory. Not only is this an insult to those who genuinely suffer from dysphoria, but the incredible narcissism embedded in such a concept is glaringly obvious and deeply disturbing.
That would be bad enough, but this approach to gender is also reducing the concepts of male and female to 1950s-era rigid stereotypes, such that a boy who likes pink can’t just be a boy who likes pink — he must actually be a girl. Likewise, a girl who’s a tomboy must actually be a boy. This is how someone can claim to be both genders, no gender, or anything in between — it’s not about biology but about how you identify according to cultural concepts of male and female.
Adults who know better confuse kids and their developing brings with these ideas — drag queen story hour anyone? — and then put these kids in counseling to help them come to grips with their imaginary identity. They then often end up undergoing hormone treatments and surgical procedures that disfigure their growing bodies and permanently turn them into something they aren’t. All this is often done without the consent of the parents.
This insanity is rooted an irrational and anti-scientific notion that your biological sex is irrelevant and how you feel about your maleness or femaleness is all that matters. That’s why Nancy Pelosi is trying to remove the words “father,” “mother,” “sister,” and “brother” from being used in official House of Representatives communications — the very ideas of gendered family titles are now offensive, since you could be a “father” with a uterus. You’re just a parent. Nothing else may be spoken.
This is also where all the “assigned at birth” nonsense comes in. Never mind your genitals, your chromosomes, your sex hormones — you’re just an empty shell at birth. You could grow up to be a girl with a penis. (A notion as ridiculous as tits on a bull, as we might have said in a more rational age.)
This stuff has real-life consequences for women in particular. Women are having their private spaces taken away (bathrooms, changing rooms, even crisis shelters) by men who “identify” as women and insist on sharing those intimate spaces. And women’s sports is under assault by men who, with their more muscular bodies, crush their biologically female competition (sometimes literally). Tennis legend Martina Navratilova put it well when she said: “Letting men compete as women simply if they change their name and take hormones is unfair — no matter how those athletes may throw their weight around.”
Moreover, women are being reduced to their biological functions, being called such degrading things as “birthing people” and “menstruators,” so as not to offend a tiny minority of men with male bodies who insist on being called women.
Even the United Nations is in on the game of de-womaning women.
Got that? Women are “formless.” A shapeless, undefinable blob. And because women are shapeless, undefinable blobs, anyone can opt into being a woman. It’s not a fixed biological state of being but a category you can pick. And when someone not a woman picks that category, women had better know their place and shut up about it.
It’s the grossest kind of misogyny imaginable. And it’s no wonder women are pissed off.
Even lesbians are under attack for having “genital preferences” and imposing a “cotton ceiling” (think about how disgusting that one is) if they refuse to date a lesbian with a male body. The poor lesbians can’t win — first they’re demonized by right-wing religious zealots, and now they’re demonized by left-wing political zealots. They can’t even march at pride parades anymore, without being assaulted by trans-activists — to whom lesbians are transphobes merely for being women who love women.
And so we’re left with a situation where an actress can one day claim to be a man, and we’re all compelled to call that actress by a new male name and male pronouns, under threat of being canceled for “transphobia” if we don’t. The woke mobs are gaslighting us, insisting that we deny the evidence of our own eyes, and call things what they clearly aren’t. It’s like living in the tale of the emperor and his new clothes, where no one has the courage to actually say that the emperor is, in fact, naked.
On the erasure of women and lesbians, radical feminists have found common ground with many traditionalist women on the right. While I’m happy to see that, all I can do is be a male ally — and I think it’s incumbent on all men to support real women who face these attacks simply for being who they are. I’m an ally not just because I love women, or I wish to uphold logic and biology, or I think the differences between men and women are to be celebrated rather than erased, but because I have a daughter who will have to one day confront these activists who will try to shame, guilt, and gaslight her into accepting their point of view. They may even become violent, as many of these activists have. So my fight is mostly on her behalf.
Here’s what Gender Critical Woman has to say about the fight for women — and, of course about the all-too-predictable censorship when you arrive at “peak trans”:
It’s the grossest kind of misogyny imaginable. And it’s no wonder women are pissed off.
Even lesbians are under attack for having “genital preferences” and imposing a “cotton ceiling” (think about how disgusting that one is) if they refuse to date a lesbian with a male body. The poor lesbians can’t win — first they’re demonized by right-wing religious zealots, and now they’re demonized by left-wing political zealots. They can’t even march at pride parades anymore, without being assaulted by trans-activists — to whom lesbians are transphobes merely for being women who love women.
And so we’re left with a situation where an actress can one day claim to be a man, and we’re all compelled to call that actress by a new male name and male pronouns, under threat of being canceled for “transphobia” if we don’t. The woke mobs are gaslighting us, insisting that we deny the evidence of our own eyes, and call things what they clearly aren’t. It’s like living in the tale of the emperor and his new clothes, where no one has the courage to actually say that the emperor is, in fact, naked.
On the erasure of women and lesbians, radical feminists have found common ground with many traditionalist women on the right. While I’m happy to see that, all I can do is be a male ally — and I think it’s incumbent on all men to support real women who face these attacks simply for being who they are. I’m an ally not just because I love women, or I wish to uphold logic and biology, or I think the differences between men and women are to be celebrated rather than erased, but because I have a daughter who will have to one day confront these activists who will try to shame, guilt, and gaslight her into accepting their point of view. They may even become violent, as many of these activists have. So my fight is mostly on her behalf.
Here’s what Gender Critical Woman has to say about the fight for women — and, of course about the all-too-predictable censorship when you arrive at “peak trans”:
Social media platforms have been aggressively censoring women for voicing concerns about sex based rights and the medicalization of children.Maria McLachlan at peaktrans.org speaks about the same kind of bullying when she says she’s fed up and not taking it anymore:
Many of us called this “peak trans”—that moment when you realize “trans rights” are not really about supporting a marginalized population, but about undermining the rights of girls and women and bullying people into accepting transgender ideology.
I no longer care about offending people. Transgender ideology is – as evidenced by a large number of items linked to from this site — oppressive and misogynistic and those who promote it are intolerant, short on reason and often hateful. […]The people behind Women Are Human, a news-based site that’s one of the leading pro-woman resources out there, explain why they do what they do:
I support the right of adults to ultimately make their own decision on how they present themselves and on whether or not to medically alter their appearance. I also strongly believe that trans people should have the same human rights as anyone else. However, I know from experience that it doesn’t matter how often I say this, as far as trans activists are concerned, anything short of full submission to trans ideology justifies opprobrium and abuse.
Women are not a concept in a man’s brain, a feeling a man has, a costume a man puts on, a type of performance, a state of nirvana a man can achieve through drugs, a dysphoria that haunts a man’s mind, or disease to be treated with pharmaceutical medicine or surgery.Lily Maynard went through the trans-nightmare with her daughter but was able to rescue her in the end. Here’s what she had to say about the experience:
The human rights of women and girls on the one hand, and the rights of people born male who self-classify as women on the other, have been set up as a zero-sum game. Legal protection of women’s and girls’ human rights, including those fought for over centuries, and still being fought for in much of the world, are sacrificed in favor of the rights of men who declare themselves women.
Women are Human is dedicated to exploring the totalitarian impact of the gender identity movement on society as a whole, and particularly on women and girls, in every aspect of life, from identity, legal rights, health care, privacy, safety, sexuality, participation in sports, careers and politics, and more.
Without the idea that there is a “right” or a “wrong” way to be a boy or a girl there would be no need to beguile and medicate these kids in an attempt to make them “fit in”. Our current culture of blind affirmation is not doing anyone any favours. It is nothing short of abusive to tell a child that they are “wrong”, that they have been “born in the wrong body” or that medication and surgery can make them into the opposite sex.More:
Feminist Current, headed by Meghan Murphy, is perhaps the best resource out there fighting for women and tirelessly reporting on the battles women face. Murphy herself is a warrior for women, even testifying before the Canadian Senate when it was considering a national transgender bill. “The rights of women and girls are being pushed aside to accommodate a trend,” she told the Senate. Twitter eventually banned her for calling perpetual litigious pest and bully “Jessica” Yaniv a man — which he is. And so another woman was made to sit down, shut up, and know her place by the “tolerant” “progressive” woke overlords.
Fellow warrior Lindsay Shepherd, red-pilled out of the left by “liberals” who bullied and threatened her for her political activism on behalf of women, continues to fight as well. She now heads up a Canadian political outfit called True North.
British women’s-rights activist Posie Parker is among the banned — both from YouTube and Facebook — for proclaiming the painfully obvious truth that trans-women are, biologically, men.
Arielle Scarcella, a lesbian YouTuber, evolved over time on trans-ideology, to where she now sees the attacks on women and lesbians for what they are. For her efforts, her enemies have now tarred her with their usual slur. If you ever hear a woman being called a TERF, it’s because she stands up for women against the trans agenda. The term stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” and most who are slapped with the label wear it like a badge of honor — because the targets of the hate know they’re not “trans-exclusionary,” just “transactivist-exclusionary.” In other words, they’re the ones who won’t cave in to the woman-erasing bullies, and that drives the activists insane, so accustomed are these privileged children to having everyone bend the knee to them.
Fellow warrior Lindsay Shepherd, red-pilled out of the left by “liberals” who bullied and threatened her for her political activism on behalf of women, continues to fight as well. She now heads up a Canadian political outfit called True North.
British women’s-rights activist Posie Parker is among the banned — both from YouTube and Facebook — for proclaiming the painfully obvious truth that trans-women are, biologically, men.
Arielle Scarcella, a lesbian YouTuber, evolved over time on trans-ideology, to where she now sees the attacks on women and lesbians for what they are. For her efforts, her enemies have now tarred her with their usual slur. If you ever hear a woman being called a TERF, it’s because she stands up for women against the trans agenda. The term stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” and most who are slapped with the label wear it like a badge of honor — because the targets of the hate know they’re not “trans-exclusionary,” just “transactivist-exclusionary.” In other words, they’re the ones who won’t cave in to the woman-erasing bullies, and that drives the activists insane, so accustomed are these privileged children to having everyone bend the knee to them.
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| Arielle Scarcella. |
Madeleine Kearns, a staff writer for National Review, has written several articles critical of both the trans movement and current standards of female empowerment — which she argues is more akin to female degradation. (Think of that porny Cardi B. song whose title is so crude I’m not going to even write it here.)
Kearns, in turn, has written about Abigail Shrier, whose book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters was rejected by one publisher, then hidden by Amazon, then banned by Target until the retailer was forced to back down. What has everyone so up in arms? The radical idea that “most teenagers are not in a good position to approve irreversible alterations to their bodies, particularly if they are suffering from trauma, OCD, depression or any of the other mental-health problems that are comorbid with expressions of dysphoria.” “In a sane world, such a thesis would be considered a statement of the obvious,” Kearns wrote. Indeed. Heather Heying had an illuminating exchange with Shrier on letter.wiki in the latter part of 2020 that’s worth a look.
For any gender-critical women looking for a space to congregate and support each other, there are the message boards at spinster.xyz.
And finally, a belated RIP to Magdalen Berns, who drew as much ire as she did love for her hard-hitting plain talk in defense of women everywhere.
21. The Court Jesters: JP Sears, P.J. O’Rourke, PJW, CJ Hopkins, Babylon Bee (and Not the Bee), and More
- JP Sears
- Babylon Bee and Not the Bee
- Paul Joseph Watson
- Sydney Watson
- WhatsHerFace
- CJ Hopkins/Consent Factory
- P.J. O’Rourke
JP Sears, in my estimation, is the king of satire. The long-haired comic from Southern California used to gently mock crunchy-granola types and burned-out hippies who convinced themselves of their own enlightened rightness. But 2020 red-pilled him hard — so much so that Facebook has de-monetized him for his mockery of COVID rules, election nonsense, and the willingness of so many people to blindly follow orders and never ask questions. Here’s his Awaken With JP page, and here’s his YouTube page — I wouldn’t be surprised if the latter eventually gets the woke ban-hammer, because the Woke can’t take a joke.
Babylon Bee has similarly been de-monetized at Facebook for laughing in the face of Woke orthodoxy. Babylon Bee began its life as an Onion-like satire site that delivered its satire from an evangelical-Christian perspective, but it’s since become more of a general culture critic, with frequently biting results.
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| Just a couple of recent examples of Babylon Bee’s brilliance. |
Then there’s the related site Not the Bee — which just posts real-life headlines that are crazier than any of the satire the Bee could ever dream up. When you read a headline and think “No one could ever make this stuff up,” Not the Bee swings into action.
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| When you create a satire website simply by posting real-world headlines. |
Paul Joseph Watson’s approach is similar to Not the Bee’s. In mocking tones, PJW simply lets the camera roll, filling his videos with real-life examples of the Clown-World absurdity we’re all living in. Ironically, just chronicling how bad it is out there can be pretty depressing to watch.
Sydney Watson and WhatsHerFace, two YouTube creators, occupy pretty similar space in their often gently humorous criticisms of contemporary political culture.
I’ve placed CJ Hopkins here because of how his website, Consent Factory, frames the work it does and the targets it calls out:
Please note that, although we do, from time to time, coordinate with corporate-friendly dictators and murderous authoritarian regimes on behalf of some of our clients, the Consent Factory remains fanatically committed to the establishment and maintenance of global neoliberalism (i.e., laissez faire capitalism), and thus opposes all forms of despotism that prevent our clients from forcing into debt, aggressively privatizing, and then ruthlessly exploiting whatever markets they (i.e., these murderous despots) control. Simply put, we don’t care how you oppress your own people at home, as long as you’re playing ball with our clients globally.In short, Hopkins is putting words in the mouths of what he calls GloboCap — the fascist global corporatocracy that has all of us under its ever-present and all-powerful thumb. His excellent writing serves up gloriously unfettered vitriol against these power-drunk ghouls, but it also excoriates the masses of unreflective, obedient sheep who never think of fighting back. Since the people massively outnumber the oligarchs, he would argue that we’re just as much at fault for the state of the world as the oligarchs are.
And you know what? He’s right.
Finally, I have to give credit to P.J. O’Rourke. He has a new book out, but I don’t see him around much online. His website makes it pretty clear that he doesn’t like computers, so maybe he’s content to rest on his laurels these days and let his books do the talking for him. He served his time honorably in the culture wars, and I cut my teeth politically on his book Parliament of Whores. Even if the references to people and policies are outdated, his hilarious criticisms of our system are probably more relevant today than when he wrote them some 30 years ago.
Being Informed Is Your Best Weapon
I hope this sprawling list helps you navigate what’s sure to be a tumultuous year. Knowledge is power, and the truth isn’t quite dead yet. Go out there and use the information you amass, from these resources and others, to arm yourself for the ongoing culture wars. After all, knowledge is the best weapon you could ever possess.
And if you have any additional resources to recommend, let me know in the comments. Thanks for reading.
And if you have any additional resources to recommend, let me know in the comments. Thanks for reading.
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