Sometimes after a forest fire we get pictures of cougars befriending fawns and fawns befriending cougars as they cohabitate in cuteness in the wildlife burn recovery ward. These pictures capture our imaginations because if two animals who normally try to eat each other in the wild can manage to find peace and friendship, there might be hope for humanity.

We’re living in a massive political forest fire. If you thought that electing Donald Trump would put it out, you are wrong.

If you look around, you’ll see sasquatches carrying alligators, frogs carrying scorpions, and star-bellied Sneetches carrying plain-bellied Sneetches. All these misfits find themselves in Shrek’s swamp, harried and persecuted by the king’s guards, who burned down the forest because the people living there didn’t think the right way about how political power in the kingdom should be wielded.

Now you understand the Alt-Right. It really is as simple as that.

It just so happened that on the way to their political extermination they happened to get a president elected. That is not an entirely true statement, but I need some leeway to flesh out my case a bit further.

Whether you were an enthusiastic Trump supporter or a lukewarm Trump supporter or a #NeverTrump supporter or a #NeverHillary supporter, you have to understand this election featured the biggest political upheaval since The War Between the States erupted in 1861. The Sweet Meteor of Death we all wished for actually landed. It impacted with a satisfyingly explosive thud on the danglies of the mainstream media.

The “Old Media” ran on a model of focus to influence media consumers. Mike Cernovich describes it here. Consumers could go to dozens of media outlets and get the same story from the same viewpoint with the same facts. Opposing viewpoints were provided by shills whose real job was to be shouted down in 3-on-1 “talking head” shows. Fox News stood out for a time because it presented news in a much more centrist manner, at least in comparison to most other outlets.

An alternative media began to emerge with Rush Limbaugh in the late ’80s. Rush found a way to bypass the media gatekeepers and present conservative viewpoints in an entertaining manner to a large audience. It was arguably the largest alternative media source until Drudge, and later Breitbart, emerged in the ’00s and early ’10s.

I’m not denigrating these efforts. Many of these focus media alternative sources have transitioned to the “New Media”. Many have not. They are the silent movie stars who will fade and be left behind now that the talkies are here. New Media runs on engagement. Most people don’t seem to understand this.

Engagement is what happens when a news story meets social media. People like it, link to it, discuss it, and rebut it. Ten-thousand words of drivel can be refuted with a pithy 100 character statement. The right picture with the right statement can rebut ideas that have lingered for decades despite being outright evil. Today’s example is Saint Castro.

Engagement existed before social media but it was small and isolated and didn’t make a difference because it couldn’t. It was drowned out in a sea of leftist narrative sputum.

Social media collectively acts like a giant filter or mesh for all of the inputs. The best ideas, arguments, and rebuttals tend to get the most attention. It is as pure as capitalism or democracy can be. Anyone with an internet connection and a social media account can participate. Do it well enough, and you’ll accumulate followers which will give your voice more reach. Abuse that trust at your own risk. Followers can leave quickly, and will do so if your cheese slips too far off your cracker. Glenn Beck should serve as a cautionary tale for us all.

Engagement is how we know the mainstream media has been lying to everybody for decades. Whether you identify as more left-leaning or more right-leaning, we can see on a daily basis how the old media edits and distorts a story to fit a narrative, even as we get contradictions from a citizen journalist showing pictures of what really happened. Often, now, in real time. The media told us the North Carolina BLM riots were “mostly peaceful” even as videos of white people getting stripped, beaten, and lit on fire were making the rounds on social media. They explained that even though freeways were blocked, cars with children were allowed through. The next day on social media we saw the cars going through from the opposite side, where the drivers with the right skin color waving a gun out the window were let through, and everyone else had to be inconvenienced for the cause.

The political fugitives, which I left stranded in the swamp at the start of this post, happen to be very, very good at the engagement game. They produced many of the best social media responses to Hillary Clinton’s media onslaught. They took Donald Trump’s ideas and magnified them. For the first time, the mainstream media had to respond to stories and ideas coming from the alt media. This is something they’ve never had to do from the old focus-based alternative media. So no, they didn’t get a president elected alone, but they were a vital part of the effort. Without their engagement, we’d almost certainly be facing a country led by Queen Hillary.

A lot of people on the right who espouse high-minded and good ideas about the constitution and equality are stuck in the old model. They don’t understand the new media landscape. They don’t understand the new political landscape, either. It is no longer left-right but globalist-nationalist. Many, but Conservatives in particular, were betrayed for decades by the Republican party. Republicans never implemented Conservative ideas because they never had to. Conservatives were a large voting block with 90%+ loyalty rates as long as Republicans made the right promises every couple of years.

I watched as smart Conservative thought leaders criticized blacks who voted at 90%+ rates for Democrats, who also returned nothing that would actually help their situation. How can this be–!? the Conservatives kvetched. Gee, how indeed?

Even now, many of you who identify as Conservatives, Libertarians, or Liberty Movement folks can enhance the social media mesh with your ideas and your criticisms, but you keep shooting at the wrong target. That would be the whack-a-doodles in the Alt-Right, stuck right in the same swamp as you are. Yes, you too got driven there. The Marxists who lit up the forest didn’t stop to make the distinction. Did you actually think they would?

I read many of you who moan and gripe because Trump isn’t this or that or pure or holy. He isn’t tackling THE problem yet, the one that will doom us all, and that is unacceptable because, even though he isn’t in power yet, it is all his fault. We know, because the mainstream media told us, and we know they were lying in the past but they surely aren’t lying this time. After all, we just got Trump elected. Well, sort of. I mean with a week to go we realized that if we didn’t start telling our shrinking audience to vote for him we’d get Queen Hillary. So yeah! Go team Trump! He’s still crude and unfit to lead, though.

Plus, many of you are saying, there might be Nazis in the swamp. I mean, Leftists have called anyone who disagrees with them Nazis for quite some time but we actually saw video of, like, 100 white-looking guys saluting Hitler-like at a dinner or something. Okay, maybe it was a dozen scattered around the room. But still! Actual Nazis that this new Alt-Right aren’t disavowing!

They’ll work it out. One thing to bear in mind is that the Alt-Right doesn’t know how to define itself either. There are plenty of people who will define it for you and every single one that does this should be disqualified immediately. I know, because I go to their parties. Did you know there are at least four distinct flavors of Alt-Right folks, and probably more that I’m missing? Many of them hate one another. It is not a simple homogeneous philosophy. If you don’t want to be counted among them, all you have to say is, “I’m not Alt-Right.” Milo Yiannopoulos, Stefan Molyneux, and Mike Cernovich are all huge players in the new engagement media. You know what they aren’t? Alt-Right. Neither is President Elect Donald Trump.

Do you know who has figured out the new engagement media? The old media. Even in the midst of their meteor-stricken wedding-tackle whimpers they’ve launched a torrid assault on all things new media. This includes mass social media purges, website blocks, fake security warnings, search engine result manipulation, demonetization schemes, and an attempt to delegitimize the entire alt media via accusations of “fake news.”

You guys are smarter than this. You have more common sense than this. You are better than this.

You know who is a better ally? The old-school leftists who recognize the danger the Marxist cult poses to all freedom-loving people. They are engaged and firing at the evil ideas espoused by too many maleducated people and I will gladly sing the praises of their efforts, despite the fact that we probably only agree on 30% of the issues.

The issues don’t matter if we’re all slaves to the old media.

Figure it out. If you want to find your former audience, look in the ranks of the Alt-Right. They left because you stopped shooting at the slavers in order to shoot at your allies shooting at the slavers in the wrong way. You are going to be called “cucks” a bunch. Get used to it. It is a far kinder description than your foolhardy words have earned.

___

The Spork Speaks — Tempest in a Teardrop — tempestinateardrop.com