We're Going to Need Some More Awards

Awards of prestige come and go. Sometimes they are created because a new field arises. For example, the Turing Award - considered the "Nobel Prize for Computing" - was created because Computer Science was not yet a field of study when the Nobel prizes were created. Sometimes awards die. The International Lenin Peace Prize died with the Soviet Union. (One wonders hold long until that is resurrected.) There are numerous Oscar Awards that have been abandoned. Overall, Tinseltown awards are on the decline. This year I didn't hear any news about the Emmy Awards at all, did not even know they had occurred, until hearing reports that they had, again, reached some new low-water mark for viewership. These awards may not be on the endangered list, but they've certainly lost a great deal of prestige.

Two other major awards have lost their luster without about half the populace. The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a newly elected President Obama for...wining the election, it seems. Apparently he was awarded for his campaign promises, and not just because of his ethnicity. (We'll take their word for it that it wasn't racially motivated). At the time, the award drew great scorn, since he hadn't done anything noteworthy to actually promote peace. The committee told us that the award could be awarded not just post factum, but also pre-emptively to encourage a peaceful outcome. (We notice that they don't similarly give Nobel prize to unaccomplished chemists or physicists in the hopes they'll be spurned to some great scientific discovery.) Perhaps they should have given him two Peace Prizes, because he went on to oversee a foreign policy that was just as bad - and arguably worse - as that of his predecessor. The Nobel became the Hail Mary play of peace prizes. There are some who say - a very few of them - that the Nobel Peace Prize might be redeemed if it is rewarded to President Trump, for his pivotal role in ending the 70-year war on the Korean peninsula. More likely, it would just mean the award would lose prestige for its remaining fans. The only way to restore the legitimacy of the prize would be to retract it from Obama. Still, some will demand that it be revoked from Arafat and Kissinger as well. Well, the Nobel committee certainly can't please everyone when politics are involved. But, as long as they've awarded it to Obama, and not to Trump, they have a serious credibility problem.

The other prize that's become about meaningless for everyone to the right of Glenn Beck is the Pulitzer, which is awarded to a number of writers each year. The domain is inherently subjective, so there will naturally be arguments about who deserved it and didn't. However, the awarding body decided to get political and awarded a journalism prize for coverage of the Trump-Russia scandal. That is, they gave a big-boy prize for serious reporting of a pretend crime. As that whole episode transitions from current calamity to historical absurdity, this will look worse and worse for the Pulitzer, and cast a shadow of doubt on all recipients. The only proper action would be to recall all fake-news recipients. Which, of course, they won't do, and the award will become nothing but the official reading list of the Democrat Party.

It's clear that we need new awards for journalism and peace. Some names come to mind. The Julian Assange Award for Bureaucratic Transparency. The Glenn Greenwald Award for Objective Journalism. The Sara A. Carter Award for Independent Journalism. For peace, it's hard to say no to the Donald J. Trump Peace Prize, with it's focus on peace through strength & mutual self-interest, national sovereignty, and self-determination. Now, someone might counter that calling it the Trump Prize makes it inherently political, since he's a politician, and isn't that what we're trying to avoid? We would kindly remind such a person of O'Sullivan's Law, the observation that all organizations that aren't explicitly right-wing will become left-wing over time. Observe the pattern that the Nobel Peace Prize, Pulitzer, and various awards were not inherently political, but succumbed to O'Sullivan's Law to their own slow but certain demise. No, by calling it the Trump Prize we inoculate it from left-wing capture, and ensure it becomes the gold-standard of peace prizes for all eternity.

Similar to journalism, an award might be necessary for guerrilla journalism. During the Wikileaks releases of Democrat emails, each dump would be pored over by an army of unpaid investigators at Reddit's the_donald forum. The voting mechanism meant interesting finds were elevated to the top and received the most exposure. As far as I can tell, it's the world's only example of an organized but de-centralized mass investigation. Of course, the media has completely ignored or demonized it all, but one day I think it will be looked back on as a remarkable event. Also, a Canadian girl on Twitter discovered that Reddit user stonetear was a Clinton staffer trying to get help destroying criminal evidence under subpoena. And, most notably, James O'Keefe has engaged in such substantive undercover journalism that we wonder if the other outlets are even trying. (We'll, we don't wonder that much.)

Another category which is in need of a major award is political blogging. The blogs vary a great deal, so it's tough to peg down what a category is. For instance, the Gateway Pundit is very different from the ZBlog, which is very different from Chateau Heartiste. One is practically a news outlet, one a sage political philosopher, and one a clever Trump bro. Can they all compete for the same award? Details to be solved, but I see no reason no to make those awards a feature of the eternalvigilance.com site once it's running. Who knows, maybe someone will mistake it for something prestigious.

Finally, and most importantly, there needs to be an award for an art form that was only made possible by the information revolution: online trolling. It seemed that the Troll of the Year Award would go to whichever 4chan prankster convinced the liberals that the A-OK hand-sign was actually a secret white-power gesture. However, even that ruse appears to have been eclipsed. After Diane Feinstein brought forth her claims of sexual assault four decades ago by the Supreme Court nominee (itself an epic trolling of the American people), who else came forward but...Michael Avenatti, the Creepy Porn Lawyer! He made these tweets and, while he has since locked down his Twitter account, I assure they are real, as I had to check for myself when they first came out.

It's looking like this guy just got trolled, hard. Someone in 4chan is taking credit, but has not provided any evidence. This trolls not just CPL, but the mainstream media that were infatuated with him and his prostitute client for...weeks? Months? And it trolls the entire nonsense that is these last-minute sexual charges against conservative candidates. (Even dorky virgins.) This isn't minor, as much as they'll try to downplay it. Look at that last screenshot. Ten thousand retweets. Forty thousand likes. Who knows how high they got before he privatized his account? I'd like to see a list of those who retweeted.

This is the most epic troll, at least since Rachel Maddow released Trump's tax returns. And, think about it, Trump was certainly behind that little masterpiece. Did Trump troll the Creepy Porn Lawyer? We might never know, but I'd plan for this to be the first eternalvigilance.com Troll of the Year Award winner.