F**king Mondays: Here We Go Again, RFK's Bullsh*t, And More!
Welcome to the best roundup on the internets!
Welcome to another edition of “F**king Mondays” — the best round up on the interwebs!
A big welcome
First of all, I’d like to welcome all the new Banter subscribers! Our email list has grown at an extraordinary rate after Substack’s “Notes” platform was released, and the rate does not appear to be slowing down.
A little bit about us: The Banter is a three person operation, myself (Ben Cohen), Bob Cesca and Justin Rosario, and we do our very best to provide reporting and insight into US politics. We’re generally center left and focus much of our efforts combatting political extremism, primarily on the Right, but increasingly the Left too (hello Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi!).
Anyway, we’re very glad to have you here, so please feel free to dive in to our lively comments section and weigh in with your own thoughts/opinions.
Another mass shooting in Texas
Another week another mass shooting in America. This sums up the brutal realities the politics gridlock the nation faces (via the NYTimes:)
After months of pleading for more gun control measures, a Democrat who represents Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children died in a mass shooting, was told by the Republican leader of the State Senate to stop bringing up gun legislation or be barred from speaking at all.
In the State House, Republican members talked and joked among themselves as another Democrat, Representative Jarvis Johnson of Houston, rose to discuss gun control. “This is not a joke — this is real,” he shouted from the lectern at his colleagues on Friday. “Children every day are dying.”
It was only hours later that gunfire again ripped apart the daily life of people in Texas. This time the violence erupted at a popular shopping center in the Dallas suburb of Allen, where a 33-year-old gunman armed with what officials said was an AR-15-style rifle swiftly killed eight people and wounded at least seven others, including at least one child, before a police officer fatally shot him on Saturday.
Republicans will ensure absolutely nothing gets done about this. They will offer “thoughts and prayers” and argue that there needs to be more “good guys with a gun” to end the never ending slaughter of people etc, etc. In any other country in the world, politicians would be forced to act if children were getting massacred in school, but not America where a deranged, neo-fascist, Christianist sect controls one of the two major political parties.
This issue is one of the main reasons we spend so much time here at The Banter hammering home the point that Republicans and Democrats are not the same. One party wants to ban assault weapons, implement proper red flag laws, and require licensing for all guns. The other believes the real reason so many children are shot in school is that there are too many doors.
How do we solve the gun crime epidemic in America? The answer is simple: vote Republicans out of office.
Robert F. Kennedy’s bullshit
New Age and Alt political circles are very excited by RFK Jr.’s entrance into the 2024 Presidential election. According to the formerly sane Andrew Sullivan, Kennedy is “appealing” because he feels the “spiritual desolation” in society and loathes “Tony Fauci — the patron saint of the pharmaceutical-government-media complex”. Kennedy has rallied prominent antivaxx, New Age grifters to his cause because of, in the words of fitness supplement seller Aubrey Marcus, his war on “the corruption of Empire- be it Monsanto, Big Pharma, or Big War”.
This is all fine and well until you look under the hood and discover Kennedy is, well, completely full of shit.
In the clip that can be seen here (Twitter still won’t allow embeds into Substack unfortunately), Kennedy claims that because Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine worked on coronaviruses 20 years ago, they must work on Covid-19. He says “they” (the federal government) blocked early treatment of Covid-19 because it would have destroyed the $100 billion "vaccine enterprise", and that hospitals denied people those drugs in favor of more profitable drugs and treatment (Remdesivir and ventilation) in order to kill them.
It’s hard to know where to begin with this nonsense. First, meta analyses have shown conclusively that Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine do not work on Covid-19, a novel coronavirus that behaves differently to earlier coronaviruses. Second, the government did not profit from Covid-19 vaccines (in fact they lost money), and third there is no evidence hospitals denied people effective treatment or tried to kill them with Remdesivir/ventilation for financial gain.
Ventilation was used frequently early in on the treatment of severe Covid, but became rarer due to some studies suggesting negative outcomes (there is still no consensus on ventilation due to the massive complexity of the subject — age of patient, co-morbidities, progression of disease etc). Remdesivir is a proven life saving therapeutic for Covid-19.
Kennedy is not a stupid man, so he must be aware on some level that what he is saying doesn’t hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. Yet he is doing the media rounds telling outrageous lies without batting an eyelid. Kennedy may well be a decent man in private, but his extraordinary disregard for the truth shows he is not remotely qualified to be President.
Vice Media and Buzzfeed News fall
Having had first hand experience of the brutal realities of the online media business, I was always immensely skeptical of the billion dollar valuations of companies like Vice Media and Buzzfeed. Their CEOs raised hundreds of millions of dollars to expand operations based on projections I knew couldn’t be true. It turns out of course, they weren’t:
Buzzfeed News, a pioneer of the internet news business that walked away with a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in 2021, said it was shutting down its newsroom on 20 April after shares in the company tumbled 90% since the company went public. Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti said the company “can no longer continue to fund” the site.
But that was just one of the pieces of bad news hitting the digital media sector.
Vice News, another pioneer of the period that once achieved a $5.7bn valuation, said it was re-organizing its news operation and cutting jobs as it seeks to sell itself. On Friday, Vice was said to be nearing a $400m acquisition deal from Fortress Investment Group and Soros Fund Management.
In fairness to Vice and Buzzfeed, Facebook and Google decimated their distribution and ad revenue model (as they did to The Daily Banter), making it next to impossible to build a sustainable, ad-based business. As the Guardian article notes:
The advertising model had deep flaws, not least that the flow of visitors to websites could be disrupted when the primary distribution networks for the traffic – internet giants Google and Facebook – could at any moment change their codes – algorithm – and send internet news customers elsewhere.
We pivoted to subscription fairly early on in the game, and then to email based distribution. And that is the only reason The Banter is still alive today.
I feel for any news/politics focused site that tries to do good work, as Vice and Buzzfeed did. It is a shame they failed, but a lesson that venture capitalists and giant corporations should never be trusted to keep journalism alive.
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Another thing worth discussing soon is today's ABC/WaPost poll that shows Trump "trouncing" Biden in a rematch. On the podcast, you discussed the importance of the media positioning elections as a horse race, but I have a feeling selling a likely flawed poll as official "approval ratings" only drives the narrative, getting lots of people who don't vote no incentive to do so. Having worked in the polling arena before, I've seen first hand that there is a difference between the type of person willing to take a poll, and the average person. Most people who agree to be polled want to vent. Hence why Trump will likely always poll better than Biden who is boring, but getting a lot of stuff done. The Dems need to trumpet his victories and position him as the most consequential president since FDR -- and while doing this, telling the media to STFU. To hear the head of the DNC say she "lost sleep" over the poll numbers instead of offering a counterpoint is absolutely maddening.
Weren’t Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine produced by pharmaceutical companies would profit by selling the drugs. BigPharma was always going to reap benefits.