These Republicans are too much. You wonder if they really think they can win this way and then realize they don’t. They’re just hoping he ends up in jail or embalmed:
The leading pro-DeSantis PAC surprised the political world with a single tweet after Donald Trump’s CNN town hall last week. It bluntly called out the former president for his answers on January 6th, his “rigged” election claims, “the sex abuse case” he was found liable for damages over, “his defense of his comments about grabbing women by their genitals,” and investigations into “his stash of taxpayer-owned classified documents.”
“How does this Make America Great Again?” the tweet from the official account of Never Back Down concluded.
This was the kind of all-out critique of Trump that Ron DeSantis — and most of the 2024 field — have never made themselves.
Don’t expect to hear it again, though: The tweet generated some heated internal pushback at Never Back Down, while multiple prominent conservativecommentators piled on publicly.
One DeSantis ally familiar with their thinking told Semafor that the group’s leadership “100%” recognized it as an error. A second source familiar with the situation added that they were told the tweet was sent without the approval of the PAC’s senior communications team.
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“That post was a massive mistake,” the first ally said. “It sounded like it came from CNN, and I think people inside realized that that was a massive mistake, and I hope it won’t be repeated again.”
In perhaps a sign of concern around how it had been received, Never Back Down also added a reply to the tweet the next morning: This one focused on DeSantis’ “impressive accomplishments” in Florida and his dedication to discussing his “great vision” for the country.
In a statement, a representative from Never Back Down called the sources’ version of events “false,” but did not name any specific errors.
“This inaccurate gossip based reporting about internal conversations and strategy at Never Back Down is false,” Steve Cortes, a spokesperson for the PAC, said in a statement. “Never Back Down remains focused on telling the incredible story of success and service of Governor Ron DeSantis and amplifying the growing grassroots calls for him to become president.”
The reporter weighs in with her analysis:
Never Back Down’s aborted attack gets to a core obstacle for DeSantis and indeed all of Trump’s Republican challengers: How do they attack him without sounding like Democrats to Republican voters?
Entire categories of what would be go-to attacks against any other candidate are effectively forbidden. DeSantis backed off almost immediately after a brief mention of Trump’s hush money payments to an adult film actress. He strongly defended him from his indictment in New York, from an FBI search on his Mar-a-Lago home that turned up hundreds of classified documents, and has avoided getting into topics related to other investigations. Even as DeSantis boasts on the pre-campaign trail that he’s a “winner,” he still hasn’t taken a clear stance on the most fundamental part of any electability argument: That his opponent lost the previous election.
Primary voters have long been conditioned to see discussion of Trump’s issues with the law, or January 6th, or women as liberal obsessions designed to drag down the party, not issues to be litigated in a contest between Republicans. After CNN’s town hall, for example, the network’s focus group of attendees bemoaned that the hosts kept bringing up his 2020 election claims: “Couldn’t the media ask him a question about 2024?” one voter asked.
This reflects my own experience on the trail in recent months: Republican voters rarely cite Trump’s personal or legal issues as prime arguments against him or even topics that they’re concerned about (the furthest they’ll usually go is to note that they’re tired of the “drama”). Issues like the economy, parental control over what’s taught in schools, or the border are much more likely to come up first.
Right. They just care about “the issues” because they are very serious people. Just build the autobahn Adolph! That’s all that matters.
She asks what’s left to criticize Trump over if you take all that off the table. It’s pretty this gruel:
DeSantis and his supporters have telegraphed some likely lines of attack aimed at hitting him solely from the right.
There’s electability, where DeSantis has recently criticized a “culture of losing” in the party without naming Trump, while warning Republicans will lose again if they “get distracted and focus the election on the past or on other side issues.”
And then there’s competence: DeSantis has hinted at attacking Trump from the right on COVID-19, in particular, saying repeatedly that he would have fired Dr. Anthony Fauci and resisted health guidance from CDC officials.
DeSantis has tried to call out Trump for attacking fellow Republicans as well, saying his criticisms of his record on Social Security and Medicare amount to “Democrat attacks” that damage the party.
Yeah, that’s really hitting him where it hurts. He’s damaging the party. Because Republicans really give a damn about that. And as far as the electability argument goes, I’m afraid they are overlooking something important: the vast majority of the GOP thinks Trump actually won! And these morons won’t tell them any different. So, the “culture of losing” argument is just a tad dissonant, don’t you think?
Probably not. They are clearly rooting for a horse race and frankly, they seem to want to take Biden down a peg for reasons that elude me. (He doesn’t abuse them to their faces the way they like it?) Whatever he case they went crazy over that poll that showed Trump Beating Biden even though it’s conclusions were called into questions and they polled “adults” which is a very sloppy way to poll a presidential race.
Anyway, a number of polls have come out since and they haven’t said much about them. I suppose it’s because
Jon Schwarz with a review of Hawley’s new book is headlined “Josh Hawley won’t let go of his manhood.” Lol:
ACROSS THE AGES, right-wing politics has had an enduring fixation: manliness, whatever that means exactly.
You may remember that Hogan Gidley, the press secretary for former President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, declared that Trump was “the most masculine person ever to hold the White House.”
Before that, there was Trump’s runner-up in manliness, George W. Bush. When Bush delivered his “Mission Accomplished” speech on an aircraft carrier, convicted Watergate felon G. Gordon Liddy said Bush’s flight suit “made the best of his manly characteristic.” Bush’s one-time chief speechwriter Michael Gerson described him as possessing “a manly humor.”
Then there was the Vietnam War, a manly endeavor prosecuted by the Nixon administration’s manly men. When Henry Kissinger’s assistant Anthony Lake objected to the intense U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, Kissinger told Lake he was “not manly enough.”
Practitioners of this politics perceive themselves as exemplars of masculinity, even as they fear manliness in general is being sapped from society by the forces of darkness. For example, Kissinger once told Gerson that radical Islam was trying to humiliate us, “and we need to humiliate them.” Nixon referred to our Vietnamese enemies as “little cocksuckers.”
A few years before, in 1965, the U.S. had supported a massive bloodbath in Indonesia in which at least 500,000 people were slaughtered. The Indonesian military justified this by claiming that communist witches had castrated several army generals. This fear goes back as far as humans do: The 1486 exposé of witchcraft “Malleus Maleficarum” proved that witches can, via sorcery, “truly and actually remove men’s members.”
“Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” a new book by Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, is a worthy heir to this tradition.
BEFORE YOU ASK, the answer to your question is no. In a book titled “Manhood,” Hawley literally never mentions the most famous act of his life: running away from the protesters in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the protesters he had earlier that day saluted with a raised fist of solidarity.
Your guess is as good as mine. My assumption is that it’s because the U.S. right has created an entire self-contained fantasy world, one in which GOP politicians like Hawley can thrive without ever facing the most obvious questions, so he doesn’t feel the need to bother. Notably, “Manhood” is published by the conservative Regnery, where editors presumably understand Hawley’s readers won’t want any intrusions from unpleasant reality.
“MANHOOD” IS SOMEHOW both short and long: Short because it’s an op-ed stretched out to barely 200 pages, and long because it is preternaturally boring. There are zero jokes, not even a single wry remark. Consuming it is like eating a small but dense log of suet.
Hawley’s thesis is that America’s men are in crisis: fathering children out of wedlock, failing to get jobs, committing crime, and playing video games. Why? The problem is the Greek philosopher Epicurus and his modern descendants, liberals.
Epicurus taught us, Hawley summarizes, that “the universe is neither planned nor orderly. … Mankind should put the gods aside and focus on what really matters, which is, he said, pleasure, happiness. … The trick was to arrange one’s life, and society in such a way to allow maximum choice for pursuing pleasure.” (This is actually not at all what Epicurus said; he wrote that “pleasure is the end” but emphasized the pleasure of “living prudently and honorably and justly.” But who cares, I guess.)
However, there is another philosophy of life, as found in the Bible: “It says man was created as God’s image and called to perform God’s work.” In Genesis, the Garden of Eden “is the only place of order and flourishing. … When we learn anything of the land beyond Eden’s borders, it appears untamed, wild. Dark forces lurk there.” The job of men is not to give into their hedonistic yearnings but assume the yoke of manhood and “subdue what is yet wild.”
The problem is that “there are dark forces that resist this mighty work,” i.e., the Epicurean liberals. Because the Epicureans believe only in base sensuality and giving no thought for the morrow, they are naturally hostile to God and the role he has given man and therefore proclaim that manhood is a wholly negative force that must be destroyed.
Hawley turns this idea into a book by repeating it at you 700 times. In addition, there are a smattering of statistics and a few charming anecdotes about Hawley’s sons Elijah and Blaise. But that’s pretty much it. “Manhood” is striking because it is fundamentally a work of airless theology. It’s just a dreary debate between Hawley’s interpretation of the Bible and his straw man Epicureans, all with the intellectual rigor of what he tells us in the last chapter: “The Bible is right. The Epicurean liberals are wrong.” Case closed.
Even Hawley’s conception of manhood is a shallow mess. The liberal Epicureans, he informs us, want to abolish masculinity altogether. But this would be a horrible mistake. To illustrate this, he relates a tale from his wife’s family, who had a homestead in New Mexico in the 1860s. It was occasionally menaced by “the region’s most notorious outlaw, Captain William Coe,” known for murder and pillage. On one occasion, Coe arrived while being chased by federal soldiers. Hawley’s wife’s widowed ancestor Susan fed Coe and then waited for him to fall asleep. She then sent her son Bud, then in his early teens, to search for the soldiers and bring them back to the homestead, even though she knew that if Coe woke while Bud was gone that Coe might kill her.
Bud succeeded, and Coe was captured. For Hawley, this means various things, but it is foremost “the story of a young man becoming something every man is called to be — a warrior.”
Yet as Hawley tells it, the most courage was shown by Susan. She was the one directly at risk. Moreover, Coe himself was a warrior, a Civil War veteran who was a “charismatic leader, in a malevolent sort of way.” So que es mas macho here? When Hawley writes elsewhere that “men are part of God’s solution to danger in the world,” shouldn’t he emphasize that a great deal of this danger is also created by men?
Another example Hawley provides of manliness is his uncle Gene, who served with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam. “That’s part of what it meant to be a man — to go stand on the line, to go and defend,” says Hawley. “To confront evil and do something about it.” Hawley does not mention the Tiger Force unit of the 101st, which carried out a voluminous spree of rape and murder of Vietnamese civilians. Nor does he ask whether any masculinity was demonstrated by the men who refused to go 7,000 miles as agents of the most powerful empire that’s ever existed to dump napalm on a peasant society.
HAWLEY’S CORE UNSERIOUSNESS is especially pernicious because America should be considering the issues he raises — just not like this. Hawley tells us that “the corporations [want] a nation of androgynous consumers who don’t rock the boat and don’t question much but buy plenty of cheap paraphernalia to keep the corporations profitable.” This is essentially accurate, but it’s also obviously the basic characteristic of our economic system, not the philosophy of elusive modern-day “Epicureans.” Ferocious 21st century capitalism and the society it’s created is clearly a bad fit for humans in general — and young men in particular. All you need to understand this is to witness how many of them are carrying out random massacres with AR-15s (something that goes unmentioned by Hawley).
The funniest part of all is that Hawley tells us that “America’s most urgent need politically is not for this or that piece of legislation. It is for men to embrace a call to character.”
So … WHY IS HE A SENATOR? By Hawley’s own estimation, he is the weakest, most unmanly man imaginable. His entire life is what he did on January 6: succumbing to his own desire for power, running away as fast as possible from the consequences, and refusing to acknowledge any of it.
Hawley is obviously preparing for a career as America’s most important motivational speaker for the Mens Rights/Incel movement. There’s some real money in that sector.
A great way to get cooperation from a neighbor is to call him a primitive loser. Works every time:
Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy went on a racist tirade against Mexicans this week and demanded the Biden administration engage in mafia-style tactics to force the Mexican government to allow an invasion of its country by the U.S. military and law enforcement agents to fight drug cartels.
His comments enraged Mexican officials who have condemned Kennedy and even gone so far as to openly urge Latinos in the U.S. to not vote for Republicans as a result.
Kennedy unleashed his racist rant during a Senate hearing on the FBI and DEA’s budget Wednesday. In comments to DEA Administrator Anne Milgram, Kennedy derisively argued that without the United States the people of Mexico “would be eating cat food out of a can and living in a tent behind an Outback.”
More than 37.2 million Americans — more than 10 percent of the total population — are of Mexican descent, according to the Pew Research Center.
Kennedy then went on to demand that Milgram and President Joe Biden engage in mafia style tactics to force Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to essentially cede his nation’s sovereignty. “Call President López Obrador and make him a deal he can’t refuse to allow our military and our law enforcement officials to go into Mexico and work with his to stop the cartels.”
Kennedy made his comments in his signature faux Southern drawl. Although the accent is widely considered to be an affectation designed to give off a bit of folksy “charm,” it often ends up sounding more like an Englishman doing a bad impersonation of Foghorn Leghorn, rather than an average Louisianan.
Which makes some sense: Kennedy has a law degree from Oxford. As in, Oxford in the United Kingdom, not Mississippi — though Kennedy was born in that state. He also has degrees from Vanderbilt and the University of Virginia. According to Open Secrets, in 2016 his estimated net worth was $12.14 million, making him among the wealthiest members of the well-heeled United States Senate.
Predictably, his comments didn’t sit well with Mexican officials. Mexico’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs Marcelo Ebrard condemned Kennedy, arguing that “what is behind these ideas and those who promote them … racism against Mexicans, and in general all Spanish-speakers,” according to the Daily Mail.
The newspaper also reported that Mexico’s President also weighed in, saying “tell our countrymen, Hispanics, our American friends, not to vote for people with this very arrogant, very offensive and very foolish mentality.”
Invading Mexico is the big new idea on the right. Kennedy says that we should send in the military and the police to “work with” the Mexican government but the plan being put forth by Trump and others is to just bomb the cartels. Some are even talking full-scale invasion. You can imagine how that makes the Mexican government want to cooperate.
And then there’s the rank bigotry. The Mexican government did not like it one bit:
📄Ambassador @emoctezumab sends a letter responding to insulting comments made by @SenJohnKennedy about Mexico.
1 Durham Report is in. After four years, review of 1 million documents, 490 interviews, his conclusion is that FBI should have opened a preliminary investigation (PI) instead of a full investigation (FI) in 2016. THREAD
2 The only difference between FI and PI is the duration and the authorities that may be used. This is a hairsplitting quibble, and one on which FBI officials routinely disagree.
3 Durham also minimizes the reasons FBI was alarmed enough to open a FI in 2016 based on information received from Australian diplomats about Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos.
4 According to Aussies, Papadopoulos said, “Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist this process with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Mrs Clinton.”
5 Papadopoulos’s statement came right after the DNC hack. FBI was properly concerned about Russia’s efforts to influence the presidential
election. This was an investigation into RUSSIA.
6 Trump had other concerning ties to Russians: real estate deals, Miss Universe Pageant, loans from Russian lenders, Trump Tower Moscow project. Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort had lobbied for pro-Russian oligarchs.
7 Trump campaign members also had ties to Russia. Mike Flynn was paid $45,000 by Russia Today in 2015 for a speech he gave at a banquet where he sat next to Putin. He later lied to FBI about his calls with the Russian ambassador about sanctions during the transition.
8 Carter Page had been seen meeting with Russian intel officers. It now appears that he was unaware that they were trying to recruit him. Papadopoulos worked to set up a meeting with Putin.
9 Durham criticizes the FBI for relying on the Steele Dossier for the Carter Page FISA. Steele Dossier was not the basis for opening the investigation, but it makes for a useful scapegoat to blur that fact.
10 We now know FBI was unable to corroborate the Steele Dossier, which contained explosive details about Russian kompromat on Trump. That’s 20/20 hindsight. And, importantly, Durham never says the information in it was false, just unconfirmed.
11 In fact, some aspects of Steele Dossier were confirmed by Mueller and DNI: Putin favored Trump and was working to influence the election in Trump’s favor and against Clinton. It also contained unconfirmed information that could have seriously compromised Trump as president.
12 Failing to investigate these ties would have been a breach of duty by FBI. This was an investigation into RUSSIA. Russia was the threat and the focus. Trump was just Russia’s useful idiot.
13 Page FISA also was based on an e-mail altered by an FBI lawyer. That lawyer was identified by IG, not Durham, and he was properly convicted for making false statements. Mueller disregarded all aspects of Page FISA.
14 In addition to criticizing the FBI for opening a FI instead of a PI, Durham also ignores other facts and helps advance the narrative that the Russia investigation was a hoax.
15 Like Barr, Durham says Mueller found no conspiracy between Trump and Russia but fails to mention the 2016 Trump Tower meeting to receive dirt on Clinton, sharing of polling data with Russian intel officer Konstantin Kilimnik, and coordinating of messaging with Wikileaks.
16 Durham also ignores Trump’s public statement, “Russia, if you’re listening …” asking them to find Clinton’s missing emails, and the subsequent release of hacked emails hours after the release of the Access Hollywood tape.
17 The result of Durham’s four-year investigation is two failed prosecutions of bit players outside of government and a recommendation for FBI to hire someone to oversee their FISA work.
18 But the Durham Report provides fuel for the false claim that the Russia probe was a hoax. Don’t fall for it. While Mueller found no conspiracy, he concluded that Russia worked to help Trump become president.
19 And rather than report Russia’s overtures to FBI, Trump’s campaign was willing to accept the help.
20 The only winner here is Russia, which succeeded in its mission to get its favored candidate elected, sow discord in the United States, and undermine public trust in American institutions.
Talking Points Memo reports that two staffers in Rep. Paul Gosar’s office have close ties to Nick Fuentes’ white-supremacist “Groyper” movement:
TPM has uncovered an extensive digital trail of interconnected Groyper social media pages using variations of the “ChickenRight” and “Chikken” handles that can be linked to Wade Searle, who works as the digital director for Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), one of the most extreme, far-right members of Congress. ChickenRight’s posting on far-right websites and Searle’s alleged involvement with Fuentes occurred before and after he started working in Gosar’s Capitol Hill office. Gosar, his chief of staff, his press secretary, and Searle have not responded to multiple detailed requests for comment.
Well. You could have knocked over MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan with a feather. Not to mention his being “shocked” by Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.) “conflation of white supremacists and Nazis with MAGA supporters and Trump supporters.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat (“Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present“) commented, “What we’ve got now is [Donald] Trump is openly appealing to people as a violent cult leader. He’s not a conventional politician. He’s a cult leader.”
“You got neo-nazis. You’ve got fascists. You’ve got people who love Pinochet and the military juntas … All the way up to the new right … Orbán and Putin” grouped around Trump, not to mention “historical racism and white Christian nationalism.”
I once explained the resurgence of medieval spirituality, mysticism and superstition (even as technology accelerated) as resulting from people trying to navigate a 21st century world with a medieval collective unconscious.
Our inability to recognize a threat to the republic today stems, perhaps, from a similar cultural reflex, one that dates at least to the Silent Generation. Americans are “nice.” We are the “good guys.” God’s chosen. Whatever. Other people have “problems” we do not speak aloud for fear that in naming them we make them real. Like “Voldemort” that way.
Faced with ugly truths — Christian nationalism, resurgent white supremacy, daily gun slaughter, xenophobia, and more — we tell ourselves “that’s not who we are.” And yet, that’s who we are. Frogs slowly boiling.
Sublimation: a feature or a bug? One has to wonder with the obsessive attention Americans pay to the sex others are having, to gender nonconformity, and especially to extrajudicial punishment.
Brandon Garrett and Gregory Mitchell ponder findings that suggest Americans’ adherence to Sir William Blackstone’s principle that it is “better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer” is slipping. If their faith in due process was ever there.
Researchers asked if at trial it was worse if an innocent was convicted, a guilty person went free, or if both were equally bad. (Slate):
Most respondents answered that the errors were equally bad. Our first results showing widespread rejection of the Blackstone ratio were so surprising and potentially disruptive that we tested their robustness multiple times, using a series of large samples drawn from the entire U.S. population and multiple measurement methods.
Across multiple national surveys sampling more than 12,000 people, we have found that a majority of Americans, more than 60 percent, consider false acquittals and false convictions to be equally bad outcomes. Most people are not Blackstonians. They are unwilling to err on the side of letting the guilty go free to avoid convicting the innocent. Indeed, a sizeable minority viewed false acquittals as worse than false convictions; this group is willing to convict multiple innocent persons to avoid letting one guilty person go free. You would not want those people on your jury if you were charged with a crime.
Democrats? Republicans? It did not matter. “Convicting the wrong person is not just a fairness concern but also a public safety concern,” the pair write. “When an innocent person languishes in prison, a guilty person goes free.”
So what? Give me that old-time retribution, you know?
The findings suggest to me an inability of more Americans to ever see themselves as unfairly charged or guilty of anything. “Stand your ground” has been codified across the country, as Digby noted on Monday: “Self-defense has been redefined to mean you can kill if you simply feel threatened. There’s no responsibility to retreat and there doesn’t have to be an actual threat. Kill first and ask questions later.”
Conservatism, especially these days, is an ideology of perpetual innocence.
Michelle Goldberg examines the ReAwaken America Tour, the “Christian nationalist roadshow co-founded by the former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.” The issue for Republicans in 2024 “isn’t whether the next Republican presidential candidate is going to be a Christian nationalist,” but “what sort of Christian nationalism will prevail: the elite, doctrinaire variety of candidates like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, or the violently messianic version embodied by Flynn and Trump.”
If DeSantis treats Christianity as a moral code he’d like to impose on the rest of us, Trump treats it as an elevated status that should come with special perks. That’s how he can slam DeSantis for being “sanctimonious” even as he wraps his own campaign in biblical raiment. If a Republican wins in 2024, the victor will preside over a Christian nationalist administration. The question is whether that person will champion an orthodoxy or a cult.
But Christian nationalism is more like the old Reese’s commercial about peanut butter and chocolate. You got nationalism in my Christianity, etc. Happy accident?
People with a taste for punishment are like Alex of A Clockwork Orange, mimicking godliness while fantasizing about whipping Jesus up the hill. Or about gunning down (or choking to death) perceived evil doers before they’ve done anything evil. Making white people uncomfortable is enough to merit death these days. They cannot imagine themselves wrongly accused or killed.
Give them access to power and they’ll find out soon enough once they’ve run out of the obvious heretics to punish.
One of the biggest immediate consequences if Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket in 2024: Republicans may campaign aggressively in fewer Senate battleground races.
In an interview with CNN last week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was cautious about the number of top GOP pickup opportunities — despite a historically favorable map giving the party a strong chance of ending Democrats’ 51–49 majority.
“I just spent 10 minutes explaining to you how we could screw this up, and we’re working very hard to not let that happen. Let’s put it that way,” McConnell said.
He only listed four Democratic-held seats as top opportunities: West Virginia, Montana, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
If Trump’s endorsements of weak candidates hurt GOP prospects in 2022, it’s the prospect that Trump will lead the GOP presidential ticket that could jeopardize purple-state opportunities in 2024.
Yep. It’s not a given that the GOP takes the Senate or keeps the House. Not at all.
E. Jean Carroll won. I’m glad she won, but I’m still depressed. Why? Because a financial victory against Trump is not enough.
As I said on the Nicole Sandler show on Thursday, we know how Trump responds when he loses, so we need to KEEP working to crush him especially after we win. He must be crushed legally, financially, politically and narratively.
I could speak generically, “Here’s what we should do.” But I have experience in fighting the right financially, legally, politically and narratively. I think that experience can be applied to the situation now and apply it in the future.
E. Jean Carroll after a jury found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing her in 1996. Photo John Minchillo AP May 9, 2023, in New York.
Recently I spoke on a panel about my wildly successful work to make the violent rhetoric, racism, sexism and religious bigotry coming from right wing media toxic to mainstream advertisers and less profitable to the distributors of RW media. It was a financial victory, but I kept working to make it a legal, political and narrative victory.
I spoke about the narrative and messages that I used that people on our side could get behind and how I taught other groups how to use the Spocko Method.
(If you want to hear more about how it was used on Rush Limbaugh, check out my conversation with Matt Binder on Doomed on Feb 18, 2021. Here’s the YouTube video link)
Because of the recent Dominion settlement, I talked about my previous success, working with Color of Change and Angelo Carusone (while he was still in college before he was CEO of Media Matters) to get Glenn Beck pushed off of Fox News. I spent months writing to News Corp institutional investors to point out Beck wasn’t getting ad revenue in line with his viewership. That was the narrative I used for the institutional investors, “Hey, you care about quarterly revenue, why isn’t this popular show bringing in ad revenue?”
Investors hate an “asset” that isn’t maximizing its profit potential. I knew some would be willing to wait a while, but they would ask Murdoch, “Why AREN’T there any advertisers? What can your hosts do to get the advertisers back?” When it was clear Beck wasn’t going to change, that led to investors to pressure Murdoch to fire Glenn Beck, because they wanted higher quarterly revenue.
In 2023 we see that Tucker Carlson had virtually no ad revenue and that News Corp now uses carriage fees to keep a high viewership, low revenue show on the air. The institutional investors may have have come to accept that they aren’t going to get money from ads on Tucker’s show, but they would REALLY like to have ad revenue.
(BTW, New Corp lied about the impact of losing Glenn Beck advertisers, they are lying now about the lack of advertisers for Tucker Carlson. How do they lie? Using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles of a Conglomerate. That’s why my question to Murdoch started out, “I know you don’t break out the numbers… but”
A new report in the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal about Tucker Carlson’s very abrupt firing confirmed Fox News had been lying for years about supposedly not having an advertising problem related to the toxicity of its former prime-time star.
If I couldn’t stop violent rhetoric, I could make it less profitable.
When I first started contacting advertisers in 2005 about the violent rhetoric from right wing radio host I knew that management and the hosts might listen to them and stop talking about blowing people’s brains out and putting a bullseye on Nancy Pelosi. THAT was my goal.
I knew that some hosts wouldn’t listen to anyone. One “doubled down” with more violent rhetoric, he eventually got fired.
Lee Rodgers KSFO radio 560 AM says we should massacre all Iraqis on June 20, 2009
A second host was more careful with what she said, but she had already lost the support of the advertisers and got fired for not bringing in enough revenue. The third started using the Tucker Carlson, “I’m just asking questions” construction and he stayed.
I knew saying, “These hosts should not talk about torturing and killing people.” would be ignored. I was told, “If you don’t like it, change the channel. You aren’t forced to listen to it.”
One of my goals was to interrupt a platitude I heard used by the left, “I don’t like what they have to say, but I’ll defend to the death their right to say it.” Fine. So I said, “The hosts can say what they want, but there are sponsors who don’t want to support what they are saying. Advertisers have a choice. They can choose not to associate their brand with violent rhetoric. The hosts can keep saying certain things, but they don’t have to get rich saying it.”
You might notice I didn’t use certain terms, I did NOT want the hosts to be able to use certain defenses. “I was censored!” No you weren’t, you could keep saying what you did, but you won’t get paid for saying it. “I have my 1st Amendment Rights! ” The sponsors aren’t the government.
Here’s the thing, as a society we HAVE made decisions that certain things people say should be restricted. And, if those restrictions are violated, there should be consequences.
KSFO was, and is, broadcast radio, they WERE under government restrictions. They still are. If they violated those restrictions, like using profanity, the stations could be fined. I knew that, I might not have agreed that profanity was detrimental to society, but the stations were under FCC rules with consequences, so they set up tools to prevent them, like the 7 second delay. If someone let slip an f-bomb, during a broadcast, the station suffered governmental financial consequences for it.
I knew certain forms of violent rhetoric aren’t illegal, even on broadcast radio. However, advertisers said those kind of comments weren’t in line with their stated values. So they pulled their ads. My method was to make violent rhetoric less profitable. It worked.
I also realized that making it less profitable didn’t stop it, but it had an impact. Those stations lost the ability to make money from hosts who said things that advertisers found repugnant. If the stations couldn’t convince the hosts to stop their violent rhetoric, they needed to find other sources of revenue or accept less profits. And that is what happened. Advertising revenue for the “controversial” right wing media hosts crashed. The distributors didn’t make the huge pots of money like they did in the past. Rush wasn’t bringing in the big bucks, so radio distributors shuffled him off to radio stations with a smaller broadcast footprint so they could make revenue when they switched the station to Sports Talk.
iHeart has also forced its high-profile talk hosts to take pay cuts in an effort to save money. In 2016, Limbaugh agreed to a reduced salary, although the terms of the deal were not announced. This was a departure from past years, when information about Limbaugh’s contracts was blasted far and wide to boast of his influence and power.
Laden with $20 billion in debt, talk-radio giant iHeartMedia is trying desperately to save its failing business Salon, Feb 2018
People in right wing media adapted, some hosts moved to platforms where they could hide from accountability from advertisers. When platforms started monitoring them for saying certain kinds of things, the hosts stopped saying those things–because they couldn’t earn money if they did! Others moved to a subscriber only model, where their revenue wouldn’t be subject to platform or advertisers approval. For others, like Alex Jones, even if the show didn’t get ad revenue, mainstream platforms would not host them. So they kept looking for new platforms where there are no restrictions.
So what if a host has enough money sources that likes what they say, and the platforms are fine with it?
Do we just ignore them? Or do we say, “What they are saying is dangerous, harmful and we need to act.”
My friend Angelo Carusone talked about this on the Nicole Reid show last Friday, how this idea that “free speech and defending free speech … is one and the same with this paradox of tolerance, which is that it doesn’t matter how extreme, how ridiculous, how terrible, how violent — if you’re not willing to, as you know, subject yourself to it or even go one step further, facilitate and enable it” you are against free speech.
I’ve been talking to experts in the legal profession, and those who think and write about what people say on right wing media and via social media. I’ve focused on what do we do when what’s said is specifically used to harm people.
I’ve also been talking to people to understand why it looks like there is nothing we can do about this because … (and they have lots of reasons, the 1st Amendment, how they define ‘free speech’, the reluctance to engage in prior restraint or issue a gag order, the difference between public broadcast vs. private platforms, how threats are defined legally vs practically used, enforcement problems by the criminal system vs. enforcement on social media, the use of comments that are “awful but lawful” and the scale problem. ‘It’s too big to solve!”
I want to see Justice. What do we need to do to reach it?
I’ve been breaking down each reason and looking for solutions. Like what I did to stop the violent rhetoric on RW media. I know that a financial path is powerful, but it also isn’t enough. We can understand how a corporation can be defamed and be compensated. We are seeing that a price can be put on “reputation restoration.” But is that Justice?
I want to see Justice. What does that include? I’d like to see the perpetrator punished. I think the victim who is harmed should be compensated. Going forward the perpetrators’ bad behavior should stop.
After the E. Jean Carroll case I read people saying, “He’ll never pay!” So I talked about how he had to put up a $5 million dollar bond to appeal. How it will take at least a year, and he’ll likely lose, so when he does, the money will be there.
When people said, “He’ll raise four times as much money from his supporters.” I brought up how Jack Smith is already investigating Trump for campaign finance violations from his last fund raising actions.
But I know that’s not addressing the anger people are feeling, “He denied he lost, acts as if he won, is getting more money than the settlement and won’t stop harming others? WTF?”
Trump is different. How he responds when he loses is different, so we need to KEEP working to crush him after we win. I didn’t give up after my first win against my local radio hosts on KSFO, I kept building on successes. It’s not an accident that Tucker Carlson had no advertiser revenue in 2023. That’s a good thing, We made that happen. As a CEO of a syndication company said about our campaign,
David Landau, former co-chief executive of syndication company Dial Global
I’m proud of that work. And I know that the right adapts. Going forward we go after how they raise money, we explode their twisted definitions, we use their threats to harm others after they lose a civil case to crush them criminally and then politically. We destroy their narrative that they are the victim.
Tomorrow is election day all over the country and Bolts Magazine has provided one of its very handy cheat sheets to follow the important races. I think we have all learned that ignoring the state and local elections is very foolish. Right now that’s where the action is and much of it hasn’t been good for quite some time.
Voters across Pennsylvania and Kentucky, and in some areas of Colorado and Florida, will resolve major questions on Tuesday, May 16. Who will control the Pennsylvania state House? Who will be the next mayor of Philadelphia, Colorado Springs, and Jacksonville? Can a state judge who gave Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” efforts one of its brightest legal victories in 2020 score a promotion?
Voters will also decide who wields power over Pennsylvania’s criminal legal system, whether conservatives take over more local school boards, whether the Pittsburgh left continues its gains, and whether an election denier topples a secretary of state.
Here is our guide to the 22 elections that Bolts is watching in one of the busiest election days of 2023.
The page is prepared by Daniel Nichanian. More may be added to our cheat sheet through Election Night. Check back on Election Night as we fill in each result in the second column.
Click here to bookmark the cheat sheet. If you happen to be in one of the places where these elections are happening I hope you’ve already voted or are prepared to do so tomorrow. The days of ignoring these off year elections are over.
