You could almost forgive Mike Cernovich for believing, as he certainly seems to believe, that he can alter reality with his mind.
During the presidential campaign last year, Cernovich — the right-wing Trump superfan and self-proclaimed “mindset” expert — managed to convince himself, and a good number of voters, that Hillary Clinton was secretly suffering from some mystery ailment that left her perpetually close to death. When it turned out that she really was afflicted with pneumonia he wondered aloud if maybe, just maybe, she had caught it from a Tweet of his.
“What if we caused sick Hillary to have her coughing fit?” he wondered on his blog. “What if we manifested her health problems?”
These days, Cernovich seems to have lost a lot of his manifesting mojo, as this matched pair of headlines from his blog make abundantly clear.
Here’s the first, posted on Sunday:
And the second, posted a day later, after the Flynn who was in became Flynn the has-been:
Ouch!
So what had gone wrong? As Cernovich evidently sees it, Americans were insufficiently resolute in sacred duty of not believing the Washington Post.
Cernovich began his first post — the pre-resignation one — by mocking liberals who couldn’t understand why Flynn hadn’t yet been kicked to the curb.
“The world must seem like a confusing place to tens of millions of my fellow Americans,” Cernovich patronizingly declared. “Today you can’t understand why Trump has not fired General Flynn .. .”
The problem, he explained, was that these Americans think the stuff published in the Washington Post is true — even though, in a couple of recent cases, the Post got some things wrong!
Cernovich himself has concluded that since the Post got some stuff wrong, they are making up everything they say about Flynn. And everything else, for that matter.
“It’s not that I believe WaPo is biased or slants its coverage,” he wrote. “My sincerely held belief if that they make up stories and fabricate sources.”
Cernovich naturally offered no evidence to back up these beliefs of his, and neither of the problematic stories he cited earlier in his post involved “made-up stories” or imaginary sources. (In one case the Post gave a biased source more credibility than it perhaps deserved; in the other the reporter came to a false conclusion on a key point because they assumed something that turned out to not be true.)
Given how quickly the Flynn-who-was-in turned into a Flynn-on-the-outs, one might have expected Cernovich to show a little humility in his follow-up post, but in fact Cernovich showed none. Instead, he blamed Americans for believing the Washington Post too much.
Flynn’s resignation, he wrote, was a major victory for the Washington Post and the rest of what Cernovich sees as the “fake media” — the real enemy of Trump and all his footsoldiers.
“Tonight the fake news media landed a tactical nuke on America,” Cernovich declared, again offering no evidence of anything fake about it. While the forces of Trumpism had suffered “a major stategic defeat” that had cheered the “fake news media and so-called #TheResistance,” there was one thing true Americans could do to fight the media’s awful power.
They could simply stop believing it.
“Consider the source of the media’s power – it’s YOU,” Cernovich declared.
The media’s power is socially constructed. They do not have guns. They do not power of the purse. Their power comes from you.
When the media writes something negative on a candidate, you choose to believe it. You choose to act on that information. You have [sic] the people they tell you to hate, buy the products they tell you to consume, and vote for the candidates they endorse.
If we collectively agreed that the words in WaPo were a lie, they would lose all power.
It’s all a bit reminiscent of a story most of us will remember from our childhood. One involving a perpetual child named Peter and his little friend Tinkerbell, and a theater audience roused to clap to save the life of a fairy:
Her voice was so low that at first he could not make out what she said. Then he made it out. She was saying that she thought she could get well again if children believed in fairies.
Peter flung out his arms. There were no children there, and it was night time; but he addressed all who might be dreaming of the Neverland, and who were therefore nearer to him than you think: boys and girls in their nighties, and naked papooses in their baskets hung from trees.
“Do you believe?” he cried.
Tink sat up in bed almost briskly to listen to her fate.
Long story short: The audience claps, Tink lives, and gets a cultural trope named after her.
For better or worse, the real world doesn’t work the same way. Oh, sure, delusions have a shocking amount of power in politics. But the truth has a stubborn habit of reasserting itself, even if people like Mike Cernovich loudly denounce it as fake.
Trump managed to ride a wave of his own bullshit into office. But that wave is subsiding, and the truth is making itself heard again. That’s bad news for people like Flynn, and Cernovich, and (one can only hope) Trump.
@PeeVee
Benghazi!
Also, my own particular favorite:
Hillary allowed Bill to cheat! (So undignified!)
@Kat re Juicebro’s grammar:
“Sum vir virilis ergo sum supra grammaticam”
@ooglyboggles
Yes!
This conviction has been my mantra for a long time now. Sometimes I lose faith in it . . . but just for a short time.
I only have to look at history to verify its truth: colonies have won their freedom, women and blacks have won the right to vote, and husbands can no longer (legally) beat or rape their wives. Of course, we still have a long way to go. Nonetheless, we are not condemned to a terrible fate — not if we resist/persist!
@Laugher at Bigots
Google Translate says this:
I am a man, therefore I am above grammar.
Yeah, whatever Cernovich can’t do he’s above doing.
Diptych:
#notacult
@Kat:
Google Translate missed “vir virilis”, which means “manly man”.
@Laugher at Bigots
Google Translate & I stand corrected.
Donald Trump
Opinion
The first 25 days of Trump have been a zoetrope of galloping despair
Lindy West
In the post-Obama United States, there are simply too many emergencies to hold all of them in your mind at once
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/14/first-25-days-trump-despair-united-states
WTF?!
OMG, she’s right about the time line. And about everything, really — except her totally negative characterization of house flies.
Wikipedia:
Nonbelief can make things go away? Hot dog! I’ll try it now!
*tries*
…nope, the White House is still run by Nephandi pretending they’re the Technocracy. The Consensus has failed me.
Did anyone see that new VicBerger video where Mike Cernovich started taking Blue Pill suppliments? That’s pretty funny. He’s tried to mind-force all this nonsense, not surprising he tries to go this higher.
Long-time lurker, but I just had to give a standing ovation to the reference, and its bizarrely surprising relevance to the discussion.
Ray of Rays : don’t sully the names of Nephandi. They do know what they do, and do it efficiently.
Now I want to play Mage: the Ascension again so badly. Sigh.
Umm, candidate? Trump won. He’s not a candidate anymore. Are these guys so focused on ignoring consequences that they don’t even acknowledge that the election results were real? Or are they just, ya know, kinda dumb?
what is it with rich white guys and the god complexes?
seriously, you think you have magical internet powers… and you’re going to use them on a newspaper.
@Handsome Jack
Forgive me, it’s early here and I haven’t been getting a lot of sleep. I don’t understand what the implication of your statement is. Would you mind explaining? It seems as if you’re refuting what JS has said, but as you’re talking about two different years, I don’t see how that could be the case.
On a related note, I finally broke down and got the Hamilton cast recording a couple of weeks ago, expecting it to be good, but not revelatory. It has now taken over my entire existence. I have not been so obsessed with a piece of art since I was a teenager. I didn’t think that could still happen to my adult brain, but apparently it can.
Carolyn:
There have been times since November when I’ve wondered whether vocal Trump supporters – and Trump himself – just enjoyed the campaign so much that they’re subconsciously still living it. After all, chanting “lock her up” and “build the wall” is more fun than the exhausting reality of leadership.
@EJ
I know what you mean. And never thought I’d see those words written.
Me, I’d go 1st Edition AD&D.
“I DISBELIEVE!”
…
…Nope. Still sitting around a table littered with dice, tiny figures and spilled Mountain Dew.
The Mage of WoD 2 is one of thoses rare case where the new world of Darkness did it better than the first. But I still have fond memory of Mage : The Ascension. Especially because my GM often showed the technocrats, nephandi, and marauders (sp ? I played in french) as actual human being with goals and conviction, and not just as the opponent or as punching balls.
I suppose ‘In like Flynn’ is now fake news?
Chaos: The Battle of Wizards for me. Unfortunately, it applies to monsters, not events.
@Carolyn:
Well, technically, Donald J. Trump is a candidate — for 2020. He filed about 5 hours after he was sworn in. There’s some question about whether that will affect non-profits in how they talk about him, but it seems to be settling out to “it won’t.”
@Carolyn None of them ever actually took a moment to think about the ramifications of being in charge. They’ve been told they’re the outsiders by their talking heads so long that the concept of actually being in charge of something is just totally alien to them.
On the Pro Left podcast, Driftglass brought up the example of Colonel Saito from The Bridge On The River Kwai and points out that Saito, like Trump and his underlings, are incompetent middle managers: when faced with a task, the only tools in their toolbox are force and bribery. The British have been defeated and are at his mercy, but now he has to build a bridge and doesn’t know thing one about doing it: he has no design, chooses a poor site and his workers are actively sabotaging it.
And in the face of resistance from his British prisoners, he says:
Because Saito knows his life depends on getting that bridge done. He holds the Geneva Conventions in contempt to the point that he slaps Colonel Nicholson across face with them because that’s the loser code, but his superior bushido code, the warrior’s code, demands he commit seppuku should he fail:
Remember, they’ve been told the government is the enemy since Reagan. They’re there as a wrecking crew, so when their fundamental incompetence is made plain, it makes them look bad in front of their political opponents, and that’s what riles them more than watching their bridge blow up or their country burn around them. That’s what my instincts are telling me as to why Flynn was let go, but time will tell.
One of us, one of us, one of us, one of us…
Hey, Jackie, since we’re talking about how fictional leaders would be responding to Trumplethinskin, how do you think the Camarilla would handle this? (Or any VtM clan, for that matter)
Honestly, I think in Vampire the Giovanni would be behind Trump. They would benefit from the chaos he wrought and their tastes match the one of the Orange Agent.
Other options include that he is an anarch Brujah toy, or was supposed to be the tool of ventrues but Setites did a number on him. That being said, WoD is based on the idea that the average human is Trump, and that’s why things go bad quick.