politics

My favorite part of the Dominion lawsuit was all of the internal messages showing Fox News hosts willfully lying to their viewers. Nearly all of the conservative ragebait is people being facetious with reality for political purposes.

He vehemently claimed Russia wasn't going to invade Ukraine when US intelligence came out and said it in advance. And then when Russia invaded, he shifted to all new bullshit, instead of having any self reflection.

All of it is a joke to all of them until there's repercussions for any of them

I mostly just feel sad watching Dave Rubin talk to people who clearly afford him 0 actual respect.

The look on his face when he just has to casually pretend that it's just a "difference of opinion" when people treat him like garbage to his face is hard to stomach.

He's getting paid and serving their purposes. He's actively harming his own community, so I know I shouldn't afford him much sympathy. Still feels bad to watch though.

Anger, fear and rage == $$$

It's kinda straight forward. Want to know why someone has made a big change to what you thought were their core values? the answer is probably going to be money.

Wow, I just realized that each of those people give me the same impression: They all remind me of the various types of Russian trolls one might meet online.

• You've got the "Fox News favorites," the Democrats who constantly appear on right-wing media to denigrate other Democrats and reassure their viewers that everything Fox says is true.
• Then there's the "Pac-Man right-wingers," the ones who present themselves as so far to the left that they've done the Pac-Man thing and looped from the left side of the screen to the right.
• And finally there's the "Look at me, I'm crazy" types, the ones who pretend to be absurd caricatures of the left, expressing exaggerated, straw-man versions Democratic positions as if they're the real thing.

Most Russian trolls online are designed to convince conservatives in America of various insane "facts" about Democrats, and they use various tactics to do it. The majority of the troll accounts pretend to be American conservatives and spread intentional disinformation and misinformation, but some try to play the role of people on the left, to convince conservatives that the left is insane.

And every name on your list reminds me of those trolls.

David Rubin and Candace Owens used to be on the left until they realized how lucrative it was being on the right too.

Yup. Though Taibbi is even far more tragic, IMHO, as I found his insights and writing style far more interesting than Greenwald ever was.

Maybe someone got their hooks into Taibbi during all that time he spent in Russia. He always gets salty when anyone suggests this, but....

He is certainly friendly with conservative beliefs...

From his Wikipedia page:

In his 2006 book How Would a Patriot Act?, Greenwald wrote that he was politically apathetic at the time of the Iraq War and accepted the Bush administration's judgement that "American security really would be enhanced by the invasion of this sovereign country."

Greenwald said that Bolsonaro could be a "good partner" for President Trump "If you think that the U.S. should go back to kind of the Monroe Doctrine as [National Security Adviser] John Bolton talked openly about, and ruling Latin America, and U.S. interests"

In an appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Greenwald expressed support for the Ukraine biolabs conspiracy theory.

And some quotes:

"If you think the real power centers in the US are the Proud Boys, 4chan, & Boogaloos rather than the CIA, FBI, NSA, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and spend most of your time battling the former while serving the latter as stenographers, your journalism is definitionally shit."

"The cultural left (meaning the part of the left focused on cultural issues rather than imperialism or corporatism) ... has become increasingly censorious, moralising, controlling, repressive, petulant, joyless, self-victimising, trivial and status-quo-perpetuating."