Oh no, not another blog war, dammit. I’ve got interview tapes to transcribe. And cool audio to upload.But this Svengali Media/”Yacub 7 Ali” crap is getting out of hand. All thanks to one man: self-styled “dissident journalist” Nicholas Stix, whom I had never heard of until this month. He is now the Internet’s number-one dupe in service to the Yacub 7 Ali hoax.
Unable to recognize a twisted joke when he sees one, Nicholas Stix has reported as fact that svengalimedia.com is the product of “black supremacist activists.” He believes there’s a group of Negroes on the Web literally cheering and bragging on behalf of black criminals who rape and murder whites.
Even after I’ve made him aware of a Svengali webpage that says, in black and white, “svengalimedia: cynical humor, more offensive than amusing,” Nick Stix insists on taking it seriously.
In mid-May, he disseminated the hoaxster’s cruelest fabrication. Couching it as an “obscene” rumor spread among blacks, Stix wrote: “According to this fantasy, [Channon] Christian wanted to die from black sexual torture, and arranged everything herself.”
How could any intelligent person take at face value anything found on svengalimedia.com? Particularly that the site was created by black people?
For instance, there’s this: “Famed Negro Clairvoyant Zelda Barrons X Investigates: Channon Christian Ghost: Damned for Eternity in Ghetto.”
Yep, according to Svengali Media, a black psychic has communicated with the ghost of rape-murder victim Channon Christian. The site describes Zelda Barrons X as the author of a book – “Life After Death for White Folks” – that is “cultishly popular among neo radical pro black groups.”
Of course, no such book can be found anywhere on the Web. And the only places you can read about the “famed” Zelda Barrons is on websites and blogs affiliated with the Yacub 7 Ali hoax… or else on legitimate discussion boards where the hoaxster goes a-trolling.
After I first blogged about this 13 days ago, the Svengali hoaxster put up a post headlined “SVENGALI MEDIA EXPOSED.” Momentarily abandoning the pretense of being a black hate group, the hoaxster offered a whole new cast of fictional characters – including site owner “Jeuger Niglery” and “Arthur Marshall, Web detective.”
“While Americans slept on creating ethical standards for Internet Appropriate Content,” the hoaxster wrote, “the Svengalimedia sensation birthed its media products and quickly advanced to the timeless & ingeniously creative realm of urban mythology.”
Also this: “Niglery, whose photo has never been taken, is often called by associates who dare to speak his name aloud as a media vampire.”
All of which is just more prankish bullshit. This seems to be the whole point… sheer Discordian mischief. Lies wrapped in jokes wrapped in disinformation. You get it now, Nicholas? Cult leader Yacub 7 Ali doesn’t exist! Neither does the “Sexiest & Hardest Ghetto Black Male Felon Bragging Rights competition”... which you reported as real.
Unfortunately, Nicholas Stix’s two articles this month advancing the Svengali Media hoax are now strewn all over the Internet. They’re on Stix’s four different personal websites. And one article or the other has been published by right-wing sites such as David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks, Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance, Intellectual Conservative, WEBCommentary, The Conservative Voice and Global Politician.
Worst of all, one of Stix’s articles was published Tuesday at Blogcritics.org, a huge grassroots-media site that logs between 1.2 million and 2 million unique visitors per month.
(Did I say this crap is getting out of hand?)
I sent an email to the publisher of Blogcritics, Eric Olsen. Then Nicholas Stix responded with an email of his own – which he subsequently posted on the Intellectual Conservative blog.
Here are both emails (though I’ve trimmed Stix’s for length... and it’s still way too goddamn long):
DAVID MILLS to Eric Olsen (05/29/07):
Greetings, Mr. Olsen.
I'm David Mills, a former reporter for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. Now I blog as Undercover Black Man.
I dig Blogcritics, but you have unwittingly spread an Internet race hoax by posting Nicholas Stix's "politics" piece today. ("Knoxville Horror: Trial Dates Set; MSM 'Discovers' Case; Bloggers Continue Spreading Rumors.")
He describes svengalimedia.com as a "black supremacist" website that celebrates the murders of whites.
Svengalimedia actually is the hub of an elaborate hoax. It is NOT a black website.
Go to the following webpage, and you'll see svengalimedia describe itself as "cynical humor, more offensive than amusing."
http://www.freeforums.in/phpbb/index.php?c=2&sid=deaf0ca434e8f0b1e797c189df90d2d3&mforum=svengalimedia
An adjunct to this hoax is a supposed cult of "Negro Sun Worshippers" led by "Prophet Yacub 7 Ali," who have the power to inflict skin cancers on white people with just a look. I wonder if Nicholas Stix believes that's real too?
You can track this hoaxster's digital footprints via domaintools. All the websites associated with the svengalimedia/Yacub 7 Ali hoax are registered through the same IP address.
Svengalimedia.com was created last November 27; americanpatriate was created on January 9; yacub7ali.org was created on January 27.
The only places on the Web where you'll read about the "Black Male Felon Bragging Rights competition" (which Stix believes exists) is on these websites... or on any of the pseudonymous blogs created over the same span of time to drive traffic to these websites.
Apparently somebody's up to some Discordian mischief, Eric. He has duped Nicholas Stix, and now a racial lie is being spread on your website.
I have blogged about the Yacub 7 Ali hoax:
http://undercoverblackman.blogspot.com/2007/05/yacub-7-ali-hoax.html
http://undercoverblackman.blogspot.com/2007/05/yacub-7-ali-hoax-cont.html
Take it easy.
David Mills
NICHOLAS STIX to Eric Olsen (posted on 05/30/07)
Dear Eric,
The Hunchmeister
David has a hunch. A hunch is not proof, and a hunch is not journalism, but the place where journalism begins. When Mills initially wrote to me, I began an involved response, but cut it short when I realized that I was going to miss a deadline on his behalf, and wrote a short reply, which I posted together with his assertion:
http://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2007/05/undercover-black-man-svengali-media-of.html
What Maketh a Hoax?
That the site (Svengali Media: http://www.svengalimedia.com/race/sexiest_black_male_felon_2006.html
) is produced by nutjobs has no bearing on whether it’s a hoax. Black supremacists ARE nutjobs. (Very dangerous, violent nutjobs, I might add.) That the writers largely use obvious pseudonyms likewise has no bearing on whether it’s a hoax. I did some of my best journalism using pseudonyms, I know brilliant journalists who use them, and I heartily recommend their use to freelancers and whistleblowers who want to tell the truth and keep their day jobs. (Actually, quite a few people think I am presently using a pseudonym. Years ago, my wife concluded that newspaper editors who rejected all of my submissions didn’t believe my name was real; when I sent them stuff under a more normal-sounding pseudonym, they immediately bought it. Nick Stix is a better name for a comic than a journalist.)
Obviously, these guys are not doing this, in order to tell the truth.
Initially, David Mills strongly insinuated that a white supremacist was singlehandedly producing the site and its satellites. I responded that if it’s a hoax, it’s one of the most brilliant ones I’ve ever seen. It has the distinct flavor of black supremacism, as I have known it both firsthand since childhood, and through studying its “literature” since 1990. Black supremacists celebrate any act of violence against whites (and Asians, too, but they tend to be less obsessed with them), the more gruesome, the better. Interestingly, if it is a hoax, it is the first I know of in which whites imitated black supremacists; all the others I’ve found involved blacks imitating white supremacists.
But again, this is just David’s hunch.
Personally, I have never come across a white supremacist with this sort of literary talent. The Svengali sites have several different writers or at least authorial names, writing in several different styles and levels of literacy. If you check out sites like vnnforum or stormfront, you will find people of decidedly limited capacity.
The Blogger Who Cried Wolf
But in a later post, David denied ever having said a white supremacist was behind the “hoax.” So, what does he really believe?
He has charted the person or persons behind this phenomenon moving from site to site, and put up some whois information. I intended to check it out, but on my schedule, not his. (I’ve got real commissions to complete; he appears to be between scripting gigs and at loose ends. Besides, David comes across to me as The Blogger Who Cried Wolf. He has a history of shouting that so-and-so is this-and-that (e.g., “racist,” in the case of Lawrence Auster, whose freelancing gig at Front Page Mag he sneakily got killed, when Mills sent a poison pen letter last year to David Horowitz, and the latter lost his nerve), and other people have a history of jumping at his charges. Just look at all the people who apparently swallowed his “hoax” hunch whole. I’m not jumping.
Having mirror sites is not evidence of a hoax. Hell, I have multiple blogs and Web sites; I do it so that more people will read my work. At present, there are roughly 6,499,900,000 people I’m not yet reaching.
Even if the person behind the site jumped ISPs, it wouldn’t prove anything; people probably periodically alert his providers that his site is what it is, and the providers shut him down for violating their guidelines. The same thing likely leads to his (or their) material being removed from newspaper message boards.
Someone who claims to be named “Larry Collins” posted a comment to David’s blog, claiming that Svengali is the work of his brother, “Steven,” that the brothers are white, and that all of the names associated with Svengali are the creations of “Steven Collins.”
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=4486244714643027014&postID=157786534719405525
There are three problems with “Larry Collins’” assertion. First, among the fake names “Larry Collins” lists is mine. Am I a creation of “Steven Collins”? Not that I know of. But maybe I’m lying. Or maybe, being “Collins’” creation, I’m unaware of my true identity. Secondly, a later post to the same thread with the same linked signature (“lc,” for “Larry Collins”), sounds like it was written by someone else altogether. Thirdly, I followed the “Larry Collins” link to his blogger page, and from there to his blog, “The Truth About On Svengali Media and Jou” ( http://svengali-truth.blogspot.com/ ), where he is supposed to be exposing this media “hoax,” and found … nothing. There’s no there there.
If anything, “Larry Collins” and his “blog” are the hoaxes.
That leaves us with … nothing.
And so, I am not going to get flustered and put on the defensive by The Blogger Who Cried Wolf. If I have some spare time, I’ll try and check out the whois information, but I am not going to waste my time on David Mills. If it’s a hoax, let him talk straight (no more ‘It’s a white supremacist/It’s not a white supremacist’), and hunt down the offender. Until then, he’s just spreading hysteria.
