Losing Faith

I’ll miss you, @TheRebelTV — from colleague friends to faraway fans, you remain my extended family. pic.twitter.com/vTuFSucZrD

— ☩ Faith J Goldy (@FaithGoldy) August 18, 2017

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To be honest I have found Faith Goldy a bit much on The Rebel. Cute as a button but a little over the top.

And she made a rookie mistake speaking to The Daily Stormer in Charlottesville. Pretty dumb but, perhaps, understandable given that an idiot had just killed someone behind her.

But Ez, champion of free speech, takes this as an excuse to fire the woman. He’s scrambling on all fronts, he’s lost his cruise, his access to the new leader of the PC’s, he’s being “extorted” by a couple of Brits and his staff list is dwindling by the hour. So, of course, the smart move is to fire one of his most engaging reporters.

Ez needs to be in front of the camera and let smart people run the business. But, I fear, it is too late for that. Holed below the waterline The Rebel is going down.

Pro-tip Ezra. Saying “fuck” a lot does not make you tough. As I say to my boys, it makes you stupid. The audio is out there and, I fear, you sound like a suburban kid trying to use foul language to sound tough and hip. You are neither. I realized that when we had our wee moment vis a vis Richard Warman’s bluster and your capitulation. The f-bombs were flying and I was bemused. I knew you could do better but, sadly, you didn’t.

Faith was very nice. Forgiving. Down right Christian about you firing her for simply speaking.

You are about to be pushed into a very dark place. Unfairly for the most part. But arrogance and hubris are their own rewards. You never understood Breitbart’s essential truism that culture is upstream of politics. You wanted to be political without the plinth of culture.

And now you’re done.

We Saw What You Did There

As my readers know I have very little time for Ezra Levant and RebelMedia. However, the SJW bullies are now well offside.

From the remarkably self-rightous Independent:

Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL) has bowed to pressure and cancelled a booking for a “neo-nazi” conference which was set to take place on one of its ships.

Rebel Media, a far-right group based in Canada, had planned to hold a week-long meeting on-board a NCL Caribbean Cruise. The trip was scheduled to leave in November from Miami and would take in Honduras, Belize, and Mexico. link

The quotes around “neo-nazi” don’t disguise the move. It is a move we are seeing a lot of recently.

Step 1: Ask if a person or organization was on the “right” side on something like Charlottesville. The right side here being unwavering support for the people who “opposed” the Nazis/KKKers/white supremacists who were, if you are woke, the only people who were demonstrating for the retention of the Robert E. Lee statue.

Step 2: If there is a hint, an inkling, of anything less than full Maoist denunciation of the obviously evil alt-right creeps, take that as an indication of support for Nazis. (Same applies to any less than full support for the antifa thugs confronting the alt-right creeps.)

Step 3: Where Step 2 has been successful, you are now able to call the person or organization “Nazi supporters” or “neo-Nazis” and then, and here is where the brilliance of the manoeuvre becomes apparent, you can then ask decent people – such as Norwegian Cruise Lines – if they want to be associated with Nazis, neo or otherwise.

It is a page right out of the Joe McCarthy playbook. Take a lie, turn it into a smear, spread it around.

Is Ez a Nazi? Hardly. Is RebelMedia “neo-Nazi” and is it correct to characterize any conference or cruise put on by RebelMedia as “neo-Nazi”. No and no. And is it correct to repeat the libel as Warren “Lying Jackal” Kinsella did this morning?  Frankly, calling a news organization “neo-Nazi”is libelous on its face. Ez has been known to be a bit trigger happy on the litigation front but filing in Ontario and in London might sober the smearers up a bit.

I suspect RebelMedia is going down in any event largely because it has been seduced into pushing right wing causes of the moment rather than building a solid reportorial reputation. Ez seems to think that, having got his name in the news with an epic rant what is required are epic rants on every topic which pops up on the right wing radar. Combine that with endless fundraising and you will begin to lose the audience you have worked hard to build.

But RebelMedia should not go down as the result of a nasty, fascistic, smear campaign.

Update: It may, however, go down if anything in this video is true.

Upper Date: Which, Ez says is not true and simply an attempt at extortion.

In Which Ezra Jumps The Shark

Not actually Ezra

I don’t actually watch Rebel Media. A bit too over the top for my taste; but I do get their emails and today Ezra went over the top.

There is no question that the prog Silicon Valley people are sharpening the knives for the less than PC people. And there is no question that alternatives to Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are needed.

But this is just nuts:

But making high-tech apps is expensive — all the different parts of it will cost us $302,000. From the app itself, to the video player, to the bandwidth for the hundreds of millions of video views a year that we broadcast.

Ez wants to ride the alternative horse to 300K. So dumb.

Gab got off the ground for about $3000 bucks.

There comes a point where a good idea – The Rebel – needs good management. Ez has his moments as a provocateur but The Rebel, and all who sail in her, would be best served if the “Rebel Commander” was kicked upstairs and smart people came in to run a lean, hard dollar, operation.

Update: In the comments Kathy Shaidle suggests I look at the cost breakdown of Ez’s app palace. Ok, you can read it here. But here are the line items:

Developing the app is going to cost us a lot of money. $120,000, for it to have all the functions I mentioned — all the fun notifications, all the social media, play all the video content.

To integrate it with our video hosting system, and with our payment system, that’s another $19,000.

$90,000 to build a proprietary video player, that runs the videos in the app. That serves up all the gigabytes worth of videos, on demand, quickly, in high def, to replace what YouTube gives us now free.

To move our 6,500 videos over from YouTube to the app, now, is about $13,000 — or about two dollars a video.

To upgrade our existing TV apps for Roku and Apple TV is $20,000.

And $40,000 to upgrade our computer software and servers at our headquarters, to make all of this work.

Together, that’s $302,000. I know that’s a lot. It’s the biggest expense we’ve ever had in our history.

Couple of points. Why bother migrating the entire Rebel catalogue of 6500 videos? Rebel is on the news and, like any other news enterprise, its output fades to irrelevance very quickly. The last couple of hundred vids would be more than enough. Building a “proprietary video player” – what the heck is that? There are dozens of off the shelf video players available for various devices. In terms of video hosting there are dozens of outfits who provide much the same service as You-Tube and some are happy to do so on a “white label” basis.

However, the larger question is why Ez is so convinced the Rebel needs to have proprietary apps and players. It would be a lot smarter to get together with Breitbart, Daily Caller, Gab, GoDuckGo, wikileaks, The Intercept, Kim Dotcom and a host of other “right wing”, no censorship, entities and actually construct the necessary backbone on an open source, distributed basis. The Rebel building its own little walled garden just isolates it from the general conversation on the right. Useful for fundraising, perhaps, but bootless if the objective is to build a work around for SJW and liberal censorship.

 

 

Rebel, Rebel…

Ezra rides again.

http://therebel.media/

Now here’s the thing. Ez has published a magazine and put on a nightly TV show. He apparently has some backing. He has name recognition.

The question is whether he has taken the proper lessons from the fact that neither of these two operations were successful? A good rant once in a while in the style of Rex Murphy is grand;but there needs to a lot more than that.

Sun TV is dead

Word arrives of Sun TV’s demise.

I don’t watch TV so this is an abstract blow. I watched enough of Sun to know that I didn’t like it any more than I liked the Sun newspapers. It was certainly a dissident voice in the wasteland of Canadian television. But it missed Marshall Mcluhan’s point about television being a cool media. Worse, it lacked the vision which has driven Fox to the top of the cable heap.

Television is dying. Viewership is dropping, ad revenues are down. It’s dying because no one has time and no one wants to be talked at. Talked with, perhaps. My phone offers me a thousand and eleven news sources, raw video of events:the opinions I can develop myself.

Sun’s critical mistake – other than having the production values of community TV, was to miss how mainstream, lefty, media works. The opinion is embedded not overt.

I love Ezra and Brian Lilley. For five minutes at a time max. Which leaves 23 hours and change to do serious reporting, regional coverage, round tables, celebrity bs, culture, media, books and call ins. Plus serious business reporting when the market is open.

None of that happened. Or,if it did, no one knew about it.

Taking several million dollars and running a conservative flag up a pole is a worthy endeavour. Everyone at Sun deserves a heartfelt pat on the back. But the reality is that marketplaces decide what works and Sun TV never did.

It is encouraging that BCF noted that Ezra was sitting with Moses Znaimer at the Mark Steyn event. Znaimer is the smartest guy in Canadian television bar none.

Sun TV was an attempt to change the channel. It failed. The need remains but it has to be smart, slickly produced and Internet aware. Sun TV, whatever its ideological virtue, was ham handed, as slick as Brian’s do, and Internet poison. These are people from the dying newspaper business trying to revive the dying television business and it showed.

The market is never wrong… On to the next thing.

UPDATE:Lots of smart commentary floating around the Canadian net. Thanks to Blazingcatfur, Five Feet and Mark Steyn for linking.

Creating conservative media one needs to keep a couple of things in mind. Toronto is not Canada. No, really. The Internet is here to stay and it has changed everything. Real news leads, opinion follows. Conservatives are busy people. They will watch smartly packaged news and business reporting. The success of BNN demonstrates this. Television is dying so don’t be television…look to VICE as a model. Fixed costs are your enemy, freelancers your friend. There is a lot of underutilised studio space all over Canada. Slick production is about style, the 70’s are over. Technology let’s you shoot studio quality on a DSLR and edit on your phone. Use it or find someone who can.

Lefty litmus test

Assorted lefties are falling all over themselves to support the freedom of the press.

Warren Kinsella has had a come to Jesus conversion and is in full support of Charlie Hebdo. I commented that he might want to apologise to his Sun colleague Ezra Levant for failing to stand with the Western Standard when it published the Motoons and that he might want to strike hate sniffer general Richard Warman off his Christmas list. The coward Kinsella deleted the comment a few hours later. The Jackal we know and love.

Over at Dawg’s one of his regular commenter took exception to my suggestion that mosques be closed. I responded at length. Two things:first, my comment and several responses are still up and there is a reasonable conversation occurring. I don’t think the lefties at Dawg’s are going to agree with me but, unlike the Jackal, they are prepared to engage.

Poor Warren is still trying to get the hang of this free speech thing. He might ask Ezra or Mark Steyn how it’s done.

S. 13 Dead and Now Buried

A long battle but section 13 is dead

As I write this I am still only being updated by text message on the proceedings in the Senate chamber but I am told Bill C-304 has passed third reading and will receive Royal Assent tonight making it law.

What does this bill do?

There are a number of amendments to the act that help limit abuse but the main one is this:

2. Section 13 of the Act is repealed. blazing catfur

Repealing s. 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act is the right thing to do. It was unfixable and, despite what the SCC maintained, was an unacceptable curb on free speech.

Worse, so long as S.13 existed, the grievance mongers and self-appointed censors were able to use the CHRC and the Tribunal to silence speech they disagreed with.

And, even worse than that, because of the fact the Human Rights biz is driven by a hierarchy of victims, real hate could be uttered by assorted protected – but none the less dangerous – classes with impunity while loons in their basements who represented no threat to anyone could be driven to bankruptcy by the Commission and its minions.

Canada has become a bit more free with the repeal of s. 13.

This repeal was driven by many, many people: front and center were Blazing Catfur, Five Feet, Small Dead Animals, Free Dominion, Ezra Levant, Marc Lemire and Mark Steyn and a host of others. Realistically, the effort has cost those people hundreds of thousands of dollars. It has spawned an assortment of legal actions which the Repeal will do little, directly, to mitigate.

So send the bloggers who made this happen some money!

(And, for those bloggers who are being sued – the fact that your actions and reporting have resulted in the Repeal of an odious law suggests, strongly, that your reporting in particular, was in the public interest.)

A good day.

Mrs. Warman I Presume

One of the enduring mysteries surrounding the assorted Richard Warman defamation cases against assorted Canadian bloggers has been the assumption by the defendants that our hero only had access to a single computer the hard drive of which has now been independently examined.

After all, the Hate Sniffer was, at the time married to Lise Warman for a couple of years. In this modern world was it not possible that Lise had a computer at home as well? Up until quite recently that was merely a pretty good hunch. But I was poking about on an entirely unrelated subject and came across Richard and Lise’s testimony in the William White case (the odious White Supremacist who was convicted, on appeal, of soliciting the murder of the Hate-Sniffer in Chief.)

Let’s go to the transcript of Lise Warman’s testimony:

Q Good afternoon, Ms. Warman. Would you introduce yourself
2 to the jurors.
3 A Certainly. My name is Lise Warman, and I am Richard
4 Warman’s spouse.
5 Q You may want to pull that microphone a bit closer so
6 everyone can hear you.
7 Where do you live?
8 A I live in Ottawa, Canada.
9 Q And you’ve been married to Richard Warman since 2001?
10 A That’s correct.
11 Q What do you do for a living?
12 A I’m a lawyer. I am an assistant Crown attorney, which is
13 equivalent of assistant district attorney for you. So I’m a
14 criminal prosecutor and I prosecute offenders.
15 Q What type of cases do you prosecute?
16 A We have a criminal code in Canada, so we prosecute
17 everything that’s a criminal code, including theft, all the
18 way up to the murder cases. We don’t do drugs or federal
19 statutes.
20 Q What do you specialize in?
21 A I specialize in Internet child exploitation, sexual
22 assault. We do everything, but those are mostly my areas
23 of —

(you can find the reference here but I can’t get the link to the transcript to work. I have it if anyone wants it.)

So, now there is more than merely a hunch – Mrs. Warman specifically prosecuted cases of Internet Child Exploitation. In other words, the nature of her job meant that she did very much the same sort of thing as her husband except, of course, she was prosecuting actual internet criminals under the Criminal Code. (And good for her say I.)

However, it does raise some interesting and, I suspect, important questions. First, did Mrs. W. have a computer at home for work or simply because she was a wired up kinda gal? Second, did the Warmans trade tips on how best to engage their respective prey? Third, why have none of the defendants in the assorted Cools related defamation cases sought to examine Mrs. W’s computer (assuming, rather plausibly, she had one) to determine if hubby might have been using it as a back up/cut out machine? I am sure more computer savvy people than I will have further questions one of which might well be whether Mrs. W’s computer shared the same IP that Bernard Klatt swore the Cools post came from?

And, while we tease out these possibilities, let’s hope Connie and FreeDominion prevail tomorrow in motions court in the Do’s matter. Apparently Connie would like a jury trial. Which would be fascinating. (Oddly, I gather that the Hate Sniffer in Chief’s counsel are not so keen on letting the hoi polloi nobble the judge with messy findings of fact.

UPDATE: Free Dominion Wins a Round:

Connie writes,

Both sides said that they did. So, she basically said that she was going to accept our amended Statement of Defence as it was written. Then, on the issue of the jury notice, she said that the other side had not provided her with any evidence that they would be prejudiced if she allowed us to file a jury notice. Since there was nothing in their evidence that showed they would be prejudiced, it was clear she was going to allow our jury notice, too.

Then, she asked the lawyers if they wanted to take half an hour to talk and see if they could come to a resolution. Once we met, the other side immediately agreed to consent to the updated Statement of Defence and to us filing a jury notice. Costs will be awarded at the end of the trial. We agreed to allow them two more hours to cross-examine me since our Statement of Defence is now considerably longer and more detailed. We responded to that by asking for two more hours to cross-examine Richard Warman. They did not consent to that, and the judge didn’t think the law allowed for it, so we let it go. It’s not like he answers questions, anyway, so it’s not a big deal.

The big deal is that we got what we wanted in the motion. Exactly what we wanted. We now have a kick-ass Statement of Defence, and this trial is going to a jury! free dominion

I can think of nothing better for Freedom of Speech in general than to have the Witch Sniffer before a jury. Arrogance and self righteousness tend to go over rather badly with juries.