Dearest friend,
Some weeks I wonder if there will even be enough news to stretch into a digest worth reading, and others I find myself inundated with subjects; this week is one of the latter. It seemed like I would get to speak about Davos, or the Nixon controversy at length, but a comedian found a way to steal the conversation within the greater conservative world (without fighting a war against Russia), and it brought back many thoughts I was having six months, a year ago.
I hope you are well. With the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos this week, the activist media has created a low buzz of haranguing old tyrants, and it seems like every story has gone under-the-radar between it, and Steven Crowder. Roger Stone made an appearance on the algorithmic feeds, bringing fire to the old controversy of Nixon’s presidency, Alec Baldwin is charged with involuntary manslaughter in a case where he deliberately brought live ammunition to a filming, Russia has been sending scouting ships into the Pacific, and more has come to light this week, and I’d love to discuss it with you.
Before we get into the heavier parts of the discourse, we should start with something light: the threat of global thermonuclear war. Medvedev was seen on Telegram saying that a loss in Ukraine could trigger nuclear war, at the same time that Russian intelligence-gathering ships are being observed off the coast of Hawaii. These threats, however, come at a strange time, with the war slowed to a near halt by the winter; amid a major military reorganization as announced by Russia that will conscript half a million new soldiers in time for the spring, Russia is doing exactly what she does every time feels threatened. Remember that it’s the United States, not Russia, that has dropped the greatest number of nuclear bombs on foreign territory; when Russia feels threatened, she spends about a year re-learning how to engage in warfare, conscripts all her citizens, and throws bodies at the problem until the problem goes away. This spring will be a bloodbath, but I do not expect it to become an irradiated bloodbath.
The Coast Guard and Department of Defense are, of course, gathering information right back, and are taking their knowledge public — the kind of public message that says, “Get your military ships out of my economic zone,” right between the lines. For the sending of a message from one decrepit superpower to another, this was sent masterfully; what we haven’t yet seen is whether Russia understands that. I don’t hold our Armed Services in very high regard, but the Coast Guard is one that gets a little more than the rest, as theirs is both a wartime and peacetime commission that makes sense within any model of defense. That being said; we have heard nothing from Russia on this, which could mean they are working on complying or they’re ignoring the message altogether — the latter of which being a concern. After all, the only reason to be spying around Hawaii (or Alaska) remains the same as it was 100 years ago; you cannot attack the octopus of the United States without first cutting off a couple far-reaching tentacles.
Russia doesn’t have a Pacific Navy of any fighting strength, so intelligence-gathering operations make a lot of sense if Russia wants to warm up the longer-range weapons from cold wars past, as a bargaining chip in the coming year. But no matter how “mad” they want you to think Putin could be, he would not be making plays for bargaining chips if he were irrational, or completely backed into a corner. The next year will be transformative in that war; we can only hope Biden does not escalate alongside Putin as the Russian War Machine churns to life.
In a wonderful interview with Michael Malice, Roger Stone laid out his memory and understanding of the former President Richard Nixon, alongside his Substack post discussing a recently-declassified tape which may, or may not, say what he thinks it says. The story, unfortunately, may be a little more complex — but that he has the courage to keep a positive memory of Nixon alive is enough to pique my interest.
What fascinates me is that Roger Stone isn’t the only one to have picked up on this interesting little video; a generally-undiscussed article on Politico was released shortly after the new batch of Nixon tapes were put up, which does its best to paint the Cathedral’s official story in light of the new information that arose. It boils down to a few words: “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” and “the ‘Who Shot John’ thing”. Roger Stone would have you believe that what he said was, “I know who shot John,” but those words are distinctly missing from the video Stone shared; while it can be implied, there are 3700 hours worth of recordings of Richard Nixon in total, with about 1500 hours now released. Even if I were to focus entirely on the spring of 1971, when so many things began to heat up, it would be months of work to find the specific file from which he got this clip — and I have not yet.
This is not to discredit the man, however, but instead to dive into the controversy around Nixon a little bit, as it seems oh so prescient with matters occurring now. Though generally reviled, I never quite agreed with the commonly-accepted narrative for what happened between 1970 and 1973, or who they made Nixon out to be; while I have no doubt he was corrupt, as any person who gets that close to the locus of power would have to be, he was also human and that humanity came out, as Roger Stone would point out, after a couple martinis. But I struggle to see the man who created the SALT treaty, ended the Vietnam war, and, as the Nixon tapes can reveal, fought the same war against the Intelligence Community that Kennedy did right until the last moment. But Watergate, I hear some cry! I never cared much for that narrative either, and Roger Stone lays out a different narrative worth further investigation.
Let’s start with the Watergate break-in itself. The accepted story is that G. Gordon Liddy and other members of the Committee to Re-Elect the President hired five men to break into the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Hotel, for Nixon, to photograph campaign documents and wiretap phones. What often goes unmentioned, though, is four of those five men worked for the FBI & CIA — the very same groups which Nixon had been, at the time, threatening with knowledge of the Kennedy assassination to steady their warhawk talons. Two of those men, E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, were also at Dealey Plaza, on the day Kennedy died. And the now-infamous words, “what did he know and when did he know it,” fall deaf from a book that never actually proves its central thesis, despite being lauded by those who haven’t read it. Was the man perfect? By no means, but his story is one of how easy it is to use power against power. He has gone down in history as Tricky Dick, and not the man who ended the Vietnam War. He was a statesman; worth learning from both for his successes, and the coup against him, at the locus of power.
And though Davos might be on the lips of everyone who involves themselves in the self-effacing and dirty world of politics, it will have to wait for next week; as more pertinent is the matter of Steven Crowder’s public rebuff of the Daily Wire’s contract terms. In a media strategy titled, “Stop Big Con” (short for Stop Big-Conservative), Crowder lit the podcasting and livestreaming scenes on fire with his concerns that these big legacy-style media companies coming to prominence in the conservative sphere, and their equally legacy-style contracting methods. This stole the wind out of any other big discussions this week, as Steven Crowder keenly knows how to use his voice and platform to create impact.
Though he left out the name of the company whose contract he read aloud on his show, everyone knew who he meant — it was the media-darling of the right, home of such personalities as Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens, The Daily Wire. Jeremy Boreing, the CEO of Daily Wire, gave an equally-lengthy response to explain his position, and Steven, being Steven, could not let Jeremy have the last words. Some have taken sides, with Candace Owens dedicating her time on Timcast IRL to taking everything Steven Crowder said about DW very personally, and projecting that onto Crowder. Others are trying to keep their distance; after all, they already have a good thing that they built themselves.
That seems to be what Jeremy Boreing and the Daily Wire team are missing, in this, though. The contract terms offered, by what some might describe as “boomer” standards, makes perfect sense; though detailed it boils down to conditions by which the Company will recuperate its investments should outside forces alter the amount of money the Personality can make for them. But it only makes sense if you clench your teeth tightly, as you read that sentence; the fancy words of a fancy lawyer. What Jeremy Boreing and Ben Shapiro have created, they want to compare to Disney — they wish to create a behemoth that can compete with Disney, but “loves America,” as Boreing puts it. Except, if memory serves, Disney loved America right up until the end of the nineties; it was a conservative company.
Big-Conservative, or Big-Con, is a great turn of phrase; I wish I had thought it up myself. You can make anecdotal or character arguments that even if Daily Wire comparable to Disney, they are not supporting the genocidal actions in China or pushing a “woke” agenda, but it misses the point that with that size comes greater and greater risk. If I had to suggest something that isn’t said much, though, it’s that the average conservative in this country prefers a very low amount of risk, and a stable core over a massive enterprise. Centralising the conservative media personalities into two, going on one, company, does not leave us with better discourse on the right in the long run — it leaves us with Fox News, with slightly fewer warhawks and a few good movies. This kind of centralisation is exactly what leads to the stagnation of discourse for conservative media in the long run; let’s not forget that Rush Limbaugh had better numbers on AM and XM radio than the reigning news champion, Fox News, for most of his independent career, and that independence allowed him to challenge everyone — even if he was derided on “more respectable channels.”
If only he could have lived to see the radio renaissance we find ourselves entering.
Back in the 90’s, Reel Big Fish released a single hit entitled “Sell Out”, and that that was their only radio hit is almost poetic; but like many things of the past, we need not think of them as any more than vestigial at this point — selling out to a corporation is far less necessary when you can bring your product directly to those who want it, via the internet or any other way you can consider. The “newspaper delivery boy” of yester-era exists, in part, because of Lincoln’s censorship of the press during the Civil War; the New York Tribune hired young men to deliver papers directly to people after they were blocked from selling their papers in public, for being critical of Lincoln and the war on many occasions, and now the internet serves that purpose of cutting out further intermediaries in bringing the truth to light, in the face of overwhelming power.
I’m glad Crowder came out to say the things he has, even if some of it is entirely for marketing purposes. “The Right” should not accept without criticality these growing monolithic corporations which say they agree with your principles, but anchor themselves in the same methods and manipulative agreements that created the cesspit of Hollywood. After all, such contract terms display plainly where the interests of a personality conflict with the interests of an advertising firm that supports personalities — after people have spent a considerable portion of their career working alone, diligently, to reach the pinnacle they have, they are then told they know nothing of how this industry works and that they must accept risks, risks that do not exist when those personalities operate independently but also support each other informally. Freedom isn’t just freedom from government; it’s freedom from any power’s influence and signing such a contract is giving up one’s freedom. Is it worth the trade?
And that brings us to the end of another digest, one I hope has sparked thought and inspiration. It was a pleasure to write this one, as so many of the topics that passed through the digital firehoses this week were ones on which I could speak at even greater length, if not for Substack’s warning that my message will soon be too long for e-mail. I should go deeper into Richard Nixon’s presidency; I think as a study of modern Statesmanship, there could be no one better with which to start.
Thank you again for taking the time to keep up with my little newsletter; I hope to bring you more and more as time goes on.
love, sevvie.