Callout Culture
by Gregory Hood
The role of a journalist is to restrict speech. In an age where
culture is a product and morality a marketing scam, reporters are the commissars of the cultural regime. They conceal information, reinforce phony Narratives, invent artificial controversies, and
promote deliberate lies.
And the laziest, most pathetic practice of this degraded profession is the Callout Content aggregators such as the
Huffington Post, who publish almost nothing but Callouts. Bernie Sanders gets “
called out” for being insufficiently eager to confiscate Americans’ guns. Piers Morgan gets “
called out” for criticizing well-known
hair weave saleswoman Beyoncé. Ted Cruz “
calls out” Donald Trump for attacking “strong women,” and is in turn “
called out” by Elizabeth Warren in an “epic” run of, uh, tweets.
And Elizabeth Warren is also “
calling out” the lack of diversity at the Federal Reserve. (The Jewish publication
Tablet notes that “Jews will have occupied the Fed’s top post for three decades straight – an unprecedented run of Jewish power and influence.” But that’s not the lack of diversity Warren means.)
In a normal context, to “call out” someone is to issue a challenge. In the most extreme example, this means a duel or a fight. To call out someone is the precursor to the battle. However,
as with the word “badass”, social networking and clickbait journalism is changing the meaning of vocabulary. Now, to “call out” someone is to highlight some violation of the Narrative. Identifying such an act constitutes a victory in itself.
Melissa Cronin, who is not a person but a soulless bundle of flesh animated by electrical signals emanating from the “Trending” section of Facebook, takes this to its logical conclusion with a post on (who else) Donald Trump. “Donald Trump has never been one to speak kindly of women, particularly women who have the gall to call him out on his egregious transgressions,” she
simpers at
Gawker, which for some reason has not yet been transformed into a Hulk Hogan tribute site. Cronin is further triggered because Trump likes the Washington Redskins, an “awful term.”
The schoolmarmish language of “egregious transgressions” is revealing, as it shows the premise of this entire technique. No information is conveyed; no analysis is presented. We’re just being shrieked at by emotionally crippled harpies enforcing the official ideology. Luckily, most are so frenzied about their “reproductive rights” that they will end up being evolutionary dead ends.
We are told in
the Post that Trump was “absolutely [destroyed]” by Warren on Twitter. If you add up every time some content aggregator told me Trump has been ANNIHILATED, DESTROYED, HUMILIATED, and OBLITERATED, you’d probably be close to the
number of votes Trump has won in the primaries. Of course, Trump actually won his exchange with Goofy Elizabeth Warren, first, because Warren and her supporters are still whining about the Cambridge squaw being given an Indian nickname, and secondly because there’s actually substance to Trump’s charge.
Warren’s career benefited because she went beyond cultural appropriation and was a #transracial pioneer. If she hadn’t been caught already, maybe Rachel Dolezal could have copied her and
made her way to the Senate.
This example is typical of the entire profession. A lazy outlet like
Jezebel will find some random Tweet to use as an excuse to start bleeding out of their… whatever. A more pretentious outlet like
Salon gives us long-form pieces about “White Privilege” in Westeros. And
Vice will travel the world
looking for interesting people so once they are found, journalists will scream and wail they be shut down so they can be turned into worthless and boring SJWs just like them. The end result is that cute girl you knew from high school is now a divorced single mom posting in all capital letters on Facebook about how gender-segregated bathrooms are a crime against humanity.
Comedy has already been reduced to
purely an exercise in signaling, not just lame but unwatchable unless you are part of the ingroup. As annoying as it is to pretend
Chuck Schumer’s fat cousin is attractive, it’s far worse having to pretend she’s a comedian. The Ghostbusters remake looks about as amusing as a mandatory sexual harassment seminar. And we’re all now familiar with supposed comedians who mock people for a living spending their nights “calling out” people for opinions which hurt their fragile feelings.
Callout culture is official culture. If you are in the official bubble, you can get access, notoriety, and funding. You can move seamlessly from one industry to another, one endorsement to another, one source of income to another.
That is, as long as you stick to the Narrative. If you slip up, you are cast into the outer darkness and cut off from these resources. Donald Trump can survive these kinds of attacks, but if you are a normal person caught in a hurricane of shitlib hysteria, it means social, political, and financial death.
As Saul Alinsky pointed out in "Rules for Radicals" so many years ago, normal people don’t care if you are right or wrong, they just don’t want to have to deal with any trouble. They don’t want to be the collateral damage of a Callout. This is why
antifascists are, correctly, obsessed with policing music and artistic subcultures. It’s also why
Gamergate was so deeply important, even if you haven’t played a video game since Battletoads. Leftists know they can’t break a truly dedicated activist, but they can increase the costs for casual involvement in any movement or subculture they deem “problematic.” They can also choke off the access to markets and resources their enemies need to survive.
Those inside the official culture cannot be “called out.” For example, it is now a news story of several weeks duration that (((Julia Ioffe,))) a Russian Jewish immigrant who fled to America because of “anti-Semitism,” is being
called mean names after writing a hit piece on Melania Trump. Objectively, she has nothing to complain about. Her career will benefit because “Nazis” are mad at her. But because a Callout only works one way, instead of this journalist’s bias being highlighted, there is now a coordinated media campaign across a host of outlets to pressure Melania Trump to denounce random people on Twitter because they made some leftist reporter have a feel.
Ioffe’s chutzpah is especially evident considering what she’s written about in the past. Like another Russian Jewish immigrant born in Moscow, (((
Cathy Young))), Ioffe specializes in hunting down normal White people and trying to whip up crazed mobs to destroy their lives. After our black fellow citizens decided to burn down Ferguson in solidarity with Gentle Giant Michael Brown, Ioffe
found whites in a nearby suburb and wrote an article calling them out for complaining about black crime in St. Louis. The problem is not that the federal government
turned Ferguson into a disaster; it’s that white people complained about it. And the obvious intent of the article was to shame (and hopefully dox and punish) Whites for the crime of wanting to live peaceful lives in functional communities.
Can you break out of the controlled culture? Well, you need certain information to know there’s even a problem. And that information can be denied. The best example of this is Facebook, which, as we already knew, is carefully manipulating its “Trending” news in order to promote only progressive viewpoints. We already know
Twitter is using shadowbans, stopping autocompletes of certain words and removing trending topics it doesn’t like in order to
limit the exposure of ideas coming from the Alt Right. Meanwhile, footage of prematurely aging
amateur porn star Jennifer Lawrence swearing at Donald Trump feels like it’s been trending for a week.
Cuckservative pundits, rather than challenging this setup or trying to build an alternative, beg for scraps (usually by writing at The Daily Beast) and try to find a way in. The best way to do that is to “call out” everyone to your right. This is now
Jack Hunter’s life. He was duly rewarded with an appearance on Bill Maher along with Michael Moore. S.E. Cupp cries about how great poopdick marriage is and complains about the “fringy Alt-Right” backing Trump, even though that “fringe” just took over the whole party.
Kat Timpf is
upset that people use the term “cuckservative” because an actual right wing
might do something about the “political correctness” she pretends to be upset by. These and other figures depend on the Left running the system and controlling access to media. If you had a real culture and society, their novelty and function would not exist.
What would they even say?
The Alt-Right will never have a space in the Callout Culture and each insufferable piece of shitlib clickbait is simply a reminder that we are an occupied people. But the faux moralism and phony outrage preached by the insentient denizens of this electronic wasteland are ripe for deconstruction and mockery. Within that space, this is all we can do as we pave the way for something new. A postmodern culture built upon signaling can’t survive both mockery and sincere opposition from those dedicated to a higher morality.
Obviously, we have to set up our own network and institutions and those are being developed, slowly, painfully. But don’t count on getting those commissions from Amazon or donations from PayPal. Don’t expect to be able to monetize that YouTube account.
There’s no shortcut to liberation. The revolution will not be online. It will be in the shadows, in the small gatherings taking place around the country from the woods of Cascadia to conspiratorial meetings in the capital of the Hollow Empire. And if we can just build a large enough subculture that it no longer matters when you are “called out,” Your Jaw Will Drop and You Won’t Believe What Happens Next.
http://www.radixjournal.com/journal/2016/5/23/callout-culture
