Did you notice? We are still over 24 days or so before Convicted Felon Donald Chump is sworn in and reoccupies the White House and he is floundering, staggering around like a dying corpse. Chump's betrothed Elon Musk and maid of honor Vivek Ramaswamy have been in the news for their insulting attacks on American workers and insisting that immigrants need to be brought into this country because American workers do not have the skills (Mr. Musk) and they watch the wrong T.V. programs (Miss Ramaswamy). They are now being savaged by many MAGA voters. Brad Reed (RAW STORY) reports:
MAGA influencer Laura Loomer appeared on Steve Bannon's "War Room" podcast on Friday to warn President-elect Donald Trump against letting X owner Elon Musk into his administration.
In
an interview with Bannon, Loomer charged that Musk had major conflicts
of interest and said that it could turn into a major scandal if Trump
keeps him in his inner circle.
"I am simply trying to warn the Trump administration about something
that is going to blow up in their face," she said. "And it actually has
the risked of getting President Trump impeached in his second term if
the Democrats take back the House and are able to spin and create a
narrative that... they are enriching themselves in the Trump
administration. I'm trying to warn them about a serious issue on the
horizon."
In a stream of posts on the alt-tech social platform Gettr, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon warned that billionaire Elon Musk's "true colors" are showing with the ongoing debate about the H-1B visa program.
"True
Colors Shining Through," Bannon captioned a post that included an Axios
article about how a "MAGA Civil War" has broken out "over race,
immigration and billionaires versus the working class."
[. . .]
Bannon has previously called Musk a "stone-cold liar" and said "his paymasters" are from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), referencing the billionaire's extensive business ties to the East Asian nation.
Bannon had also said that Tesla was Musk's only thing "of real value,"
adding that Musk "uses it for margin loans." Those criticisms came in
2023 before Musk was publicly a leading Trump supporter.
Former U.S. House Representative Joe Walsh has weighed in, "And you are right -- Musk & Ramaswamy are being eaten right now by
an intolerant, nationalistic mob that they played a large role in
helping to create. They both deserve to be eaten by their mob." So that is a non-MAGA Republican take. James Bickerton (NEWSWEEK) notes a reaction from a Democrat in Congress:
Crockett made the claim late on Thursday in a post on Musk-owned platform X, formerly Twitter, commenting: "I won't have enough tea to sip nor popcorn to eat over the next 4 years!"
Friday, December 26, 2024. The Water Cooler Set declares the death of
non-FOX "NEWS" cable channels while not understanding the changing media
landscape, lived reality is about to hit MAGA hard, and much more.
In the face of Vice President Kamala Harris losing the presidential election to Donald Trump,
the punditry's focus has been almost exclusively on asking how the
Democrats couldn't beat a relentless liar with 34 felony convictions and
a previous attempted coup under his belt. Everyone has a different
theory about Harris' "messaging," with every critic inevitably arguing
that if she had just talked more about their pet issue, she would have
won.
Another option, however, is to listen to what swing voters who backed
Trump said about their decision. That would seem the wisest choice, but
to be fair to people who don't want to go there, hearing these people
out is a truly miserable experience. What quickly becomes evident about
the median voters in an American focus group is how profoundly opposed
they are to even the most basic factual information. On the contrary,
it's a community with a pathological aversion to reality, where people
compulsively react to anything truth-shaped with hostility, running as
hard as they can toward disinformation. They are addicted to BS. Of
course they voted for Trump, the country's most reliable dealer of their
favorite drug.
This may sound ungenerous to these voters, but only if you've been
sparing yourself the torture of engaging their actual opinions. If you
hold your nose and dive in, it's startling how much the typical swing
voter is allergic to facts. It's not just ignorance, but overt hostility
to anything that smacks of veracity. Such as the Trump voter who insisted
to the New York Times that Democrats are "lying about pregnancies," by
conveying factual information about abortion bans. Or the one who
falsely believed "so many people just walk right across the border and
get free housing, free food." Or the one who was
excited that "Trump brings a Robert Kennedy Jr. or a Tulsi Gabbard and
Elon Musk." Or the one who said the "Democratic Party [is] going after
average people who disagreed on Covid, who disagreed on school boards,
who disagreed on boys playing in women’s sports," which is just a way to
complain about liberals who criticize him on social media for saying
things that aren't true.
Sarah Longwell's "Focus Group" podcast ended the
year by interviewing Joe Rogan fans who voted for Trump for the first
time this election. It was a smart choice, and not just because Rogan's
endorsement likely pushed Trump over the top in a shockingly close
election. Rogan's audience perfectly illustrates the way the firehose of
disinformation online — his conspiracy theory-hyping podcast has over 16 million followers
— has pickled the brains of so many otherwise normal people. Most of
the people Longwell interviewed couldn't go two minutes without coughing
up a conspiracy theory. Everything is a shadowy plot, from the COVID-19
pandemic to the guy who shot Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. The
straightforward details of the shooting of UnitedHealth CEO Brian
Thompson came out after the arrest of Luigi Mangione, and yet these
voters refused to believe the banal facts. Some are wallowing in
theories that Mangione is a patsy, or that the shooting is a psyop. The
truer any information was, the more they rejected it.
MAGA
is stupid. There's no reason to pretend otherwise. When we'd get a
MAGA uber drive in whatever state we were campaigning in last fall,
their ignorance regarding how a tariff works wasn't the only thing that
came up. There was so much more stupidity.
We
noted on recently and a lot of people e-mailed asking what was I
talking about. Roseanne Barr gave a big speech that people on the
YOUTUBE left and 'left' mocked -- it did deserve that -- but didn't
really seem to understand.
Roseanne, in her
speech, was talking about Donald Chump as a savior to children -- I'm
blocking the speech -- in my mind -- because it's so painful to watch
someone who should know better fall into lies.
And
I know Roseanne so I know how she fell in. Things didn't make sense to
her, she smokes way too much pot, her sleep is always erratic meaning
she's often up all night reading conspiracies on the internet and taking
them as truth and praising God that he's seen fit to enlighten her and
now it's her job to enlighten others.
While he
was in office from 2017 through 2021, she honest believes -- because of
lies on the internet -- that governments -- including the US -- are part
of some world sex slavery system for children and that Chump fought
that. He was the savior of children.
These people have been taken out of the real world and plopped into crazy land.
And
if you speak to them -- and we spoke to several nut jobs especially
when we were campaigning in South Carolina -- you'll find that they base
this on internet liars and on the corporate media system.
Internet liars should be obvious, they're spreading it.
Why did the nut jobs also point to the corporate media.
In
their minds, the corporate media proved that this lie was true. How
so? We would be told that back in 2016 when Hillary Clinton and others
were accused of running a children's slave trade out a pizza place in
DC, the media was all over that and calling it a lie and blah blah
blah.
But, we would be told, notice how they don't say a word about the slave trade Trump is fighting!!!!!
That's proof that it's real!!!!
The media doesn't have the time to respond to every nut job on RUMBLE. But they need to start responding.
It's
no fun. I get that. In the last four years, I think we've noted four
liars on RUMBLE. They're disgusting people and life is frankly too
short for me. But the media needs to be covering it regularly. When
they do not call it out, it leads already deluded people to become even
more irrational and more delusional.
I spoke
about this in a post-election analysis and one person noted that if
outlets have time to assign journalists to the Taylor Swift beat and the
Beyonce beat, they certainly have time -- and money -- to cover the
underbelly of the internet that spreads one lie after another and never
gets challenged.
I'm not in the mood to sugar
coat. MAGA lives pathetic lives. There's the economy, yes. But it's
so much more than that. They are pathetic. And they need to whine and
scapegoat. So they target women and people of color who are not their
enemies but whom they see as getting ahead while they're sinking. And
the resentment builds and they need some unifying theory to explain why
this is going on. So they latch on to conspiracy theories while looking
for a con artist to rescue them.
"He's a
convicted felon!" doesn't matter to them when they're embracing the lie
that governments -- including our own -- are participants in global sex
trafficking of children and only Donald Chump can save us!!!
They
delude themselves and if the lies aren't being addressed by the
corporate media, they read that as an admission that the lies are true.
We're
probably all doomed, to be honest. Even MSNBC is bringing on crack
pots to normalize Chump. We almost posted an MSNBC segment -- I don't
know who the host was, some woman -- due to the title but I paused and
thought, stream it first. I did. I then deleted it -- I do the evening
and overnight posts here at least four hours in advance. I studied
poli sci -- undergraduate and graduate. I am well aware of the
hypothesis that a madman can bring security to a multi-polar system in
some ways. Their Republican guest was trying to make that argument but
didn't know that argument.
Instead of doing what they should be doing -- exposing lies and taking on crackpot notions -- they are bending to him.
And it's stupid for democracy but it's also stupid for business.
The ratings are in free fall!
This is what those pushing changes at CNN and MNSBC insist.
Historically,
this is the month when ratings go into free fall. Why? Few care about
politics in the holiday season. Interest tapers off following a
general election.
There is a lesson to learn
and that was provided by MORNING JOE which, post-election, began fawning
over Chump and saw their ratings drop significantly. The smartest
thing MSNBC could do would be ditch that program. The fawning broke the
trust the viewers had for the hosts and then the hosts screaming and
yelling at viewers about how people are too stupid to understand what
they -- Joe and Mika -- were doing and all that other garbage. It's
really the most harmful program the network has.
Ratings
keep being mentioned. Ratings aren't everything or the only thing.
MORNING JOE is also down on streaming -- which, let's remember, is where
everything's headed. Like it or not, that's where it's headed and it's
how news and public affairs programs are increasingly consumed.
Take
out THE FIVE and FOX "NEWS" is not doing well in streaming. MSNBC is
doing much better and has many segments that go over 70,000 views --
some well over that. Take out THE FIVE and you're not seeing a lot of
hit clips on YOUTUBE for FOX when it comes to streaming in the last 24
hours. You're dealing with a lot of 14 thousand and 40 thousands.
Their biggest streamer in the last 24 hours is 135K for the story about
how Russia might have shot down a plane. MSNBC has three videos on that
topic and the one with the largest streams is at 221K. CNN covered
that as well and their YOUTUBE clip is at 459K.
FOX
"NEWS" will from this day forward most likely always have higher
viewers because their viewers are older and are youngsters who hit old
age early (there's a reason it's called conservativism). But, so sorry
all you idiots who keep insisting that these are the worst times for
cable 'news' that's not FOX, that is not accurate.
The
landscape changed some time ago -- long enough for MODERN FAMILY to
have done a joke about it and have Hayley explain that her generation
gets their news watching a video at the gas pump -- and all the media
observers this month and last acting as though FOX "NEWS" is the big
success and the business model of the future? That's just not true.
That should have been in Ava and my piece. In "Raison d'être (Ava and C.I.),"
we noted the liars. We didn't note the lazy. Lazy people do no
research and run with conventional wisdom and that harms us all.
And
while this nonsense has gone on, no one's really challenged it. The
Water Cooler Set is what Ava and I have long called these lazy idiots.
Many have print experience. You're seeing the impact the internet is
having on broadcast and cable and not one of these conventional wisdom
idiots can think back to how the internet changed the figures for
newspapers? How the audience shifted to outlets websites and not
printed page. The consumers want to consume when they want to. They
don't want to be dictated to or tied to a schedule they didn't make.
But
instead of talking about how consumers are taking in public affairs
programs and news stories, we're getting garbage that among the oldy
crowd (elderly and those born old), FOX "NEWS" is a success!!! When in
fact the streaming on YOUTUBE says otherwise. And you pull segments
from THE FIVE out of the mix and FOX "NEWS" is an embarrassment in terms
of streams.
By the way, here's the CNN video on Russia that beat MSNBC and FOX "NEWS."
Donald Trump has promised to cut energy costs, but an expert said some of his policies might end up hurting his own supporters.
The
price of natural gas looks likely to jump despite record-high
production, which could undermine the president-elect's campaign pledge,
and political analyst Leah Wright Rigueur told CNN that energy costs
are largely outside the government's control.
"I think, you know, the secretary of the interior, I think the secretary
of energy both understand that or the newly appointed, the nominated
secretaries understand that," said Rigueur, an assistant professor of
public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. "What is more
interesting, I think right now is the fact that under [president Joe]
Biden, these kind of energy policies,
particularly under the Inflation Reduction Act, have actually been
deeply beneficial to red states and blue states, but in particular red
states, in some cases rescuing manufacturing, rescuing energy
production, rescuing all kinds of industry, and so there is a push
amongst Republicans, particularly Republican congressmen, to keep those
acts and to keep those things in place."
As
much as the press actually doing their job could help educate voters,
the reality is that lived experience is about to educate a lot of people
over the next four years.
Adding to alarm over U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's immigration plans, his "border czar" toldThe Washington Post in an interview published Thursday that the administration plans to return to detaining migrant families with children.
Tom
Homan, who served as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement during Trump's first term, said that ICE "will look to hold
parents with children in 'soft-sided' tent structures similar to those
used by U.S. border officials to handle immigration surges," the Post
summarized. "The government will not hesitate to deport parents who are
in the country illegally, even if they have young U.S.-born children,
he added, leaving it to those families to decide whether to exit
together or be split up."
Since Trump beat Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris last month, migrant rights advocates have reiterated concerns about the Republican's first-term policies—such as forced separation of families—and his 2024 campaign pledges, from mass deportations to attempting to end birthright citizenship, despite the guarantees of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Homan—who
oversaw the so-called "zero tolerance" policy that separated thousands
of migrant kids from their parents—said: "Here's the issue... You knew
you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put
your family in that position."
And then there's Elon and other idiots.
Their
statements are outraging even MAGA. Educating MAGA now in the way that
the media failed to do in the lead up to the election. Charlie Nash (MEDIAITE) notes:
Former
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy received heavy
backlash on Thursday after he suggested that Americans were not being
hired because they were mediocre.
After Ramaswamy and billionaire Elon Musk
came under fire from prominent Trump supporters on X, formerly Twitter,
for supporting H-1B visas over the training and hiring of American
workers, Ramaswamy defended his position in a post which accused the United States of suffering from a culture of “mediocrity.”
