
by Bob Cesca
WASHINGTON, DC -- Help me figure this one out because I’m totally baffled.
We all understand through great pain and frustration that the modern Republican Party, commandeered by Donald Trump and supported by the Red Hat entertainment complex, is basically Dummies For Dummies. There’s a reason why I’ve been repeating the word “idiocracy” since at least 2015. It has a little to do with party leadership, despite some well known dummies in Congress, and everything to do with the party faithful who compose the most easily manipulated voting demographic in existence today.
Republican leaders, including most of the weirdo influencers on cable and the internet, are fully aware that they’ve landed on a sizable faction of bubble-dwelling suckers who will believe nearly everything they’re told with zero evidence.
There’s a massive political advantage to having a captive audience like this and the Trump-Republican movement of fascist idiocrats is taking full advantage of it. This is how you end up with Republicans getting away with telling their people there weren’t any supply shortages in 2020 when Trump was president, or that Trump never politicized the pandemic, or that vaccines make you magnetic, or that Trump won the 2020 election because of fraud that doesn’t exist, or that John F. Kennedy Jr. is alive and on his way to Dealey Plaza somehow.
Hell, speaking of the JFK thing, Mike Flynn is on tape saying QAnon is bullshit, while presenting himself publicly as a true believer. They know they’re full of shit. Fox News hosts know they’re full of shit. Trump knows he’s full of shit. But the shit sells like PS5 consoles, so they keep on marketing it to unwaveringly gullible people.
Perhaps this is why the following tweets continue to be pumped into the atmosphere by Republicans. And I hasten to add: I’m okay with it.
I’m utterly baffled by this. Yes, I know they’re talking to dinguses and nimrods, but everything they’re saying is unequivocally a Biden administration accomplishment. I mean, isn’t Customs & Border Patrol supposed to interdict the flow of drugs across the border? Isn’t that what’s supposed to happen? If so, how can this possibly be bad news for Biden, substantiating this obvious intra-party neener-neener talking point?
If the fentanyl made it across the border and that was the story, fine. Troll Biden all you want. But repeating good news for Biden as if it were bad news for Biden makes zero sense. It’s like saying, “A record six million new jobs were created in 2021. This is Biden’s America! Boooooooo!”
Chuck Grassley said enough fentanyl was seized at the border to kill two billion people or 25 percent of the world’s population. In other words, Grassley’s saying that under President Biden, two billion lives were saved. And the tweets are still up.
So, I guess we should say... Thanks for the help?
By the way, back in 2019, there was a major bust involving fentanyl at the border, and Trump tweeted in response: “Our great U.S. Border Patrol Agents made the biggest Fentanyl bust in our Country’s history. Thanks, as always, for a job well done!”
To repeat: I’m fine with this. In fact, let them keep doing it. Then we can run ads in 2022 like the movie trailers with the review quotes at the end:
Biden and the Democrats saved the lives of 2 billion people!
--Chuck Grassely, R-IA
And:
Biden stopped a record 192,000 migrants -- ‘the most ever’ -- from crossing the border!
--The Republican Party
If the Democrats don’t make these ads, I swear to God, I will.
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The 'Anti Woke' Industry
by Ben Cohen
Making a living running an independent media publication is hard. So hard that most people debate giving up and getting a job on an almost daily basis — and I speak from experience here.
There are ways to make a lot of money from your writing, but they almost always involve compromising core values and selling out. You could create clickbait content designed to game social media algorithms and make money on ads plastered all over your site. You could write about topics you don’t like and get paid to promote products associated with it. Or if you want to write about politics, you could find a popular cause, pretend to associate with it and then relentlessly milk it for all its worth.
Writing honestly and from a non-ideological perspective is perhaps the least profitable path, and thus many in the industry consciously (or even unconsciously) decide at some point to go where the money is. This happens across the political spectrum and can be quite easily detected. Tucker Carlson for example, spent years toiling away in relative media obscurity, moving from one failure to another until he went all in on Trumpism. A once relatively sane conservative who would engage in honest debate with liberals, Carlson now spreads rabid right wing conspiracies and gets paid a cool $10 million a year by Fox do so.
The right wing grift is perhaps the most well known money spinner, but a newer, extremely profitable niche has now emerged that writers are piling in on to take advantage of…
Unfortunately, its a caged audience.
"If the Democrats don’t make these ads, I swear to God, I will."
Better start filming. Because you *know* the Democrats won't be making those ads. Too much potential to be effective.