Login

u/emeric_ceaddamere

▲ 513 r/officehourslive

Tim's plans for InfoWars: Adult Swim 2.0

"While much of the early promotion for the project involves Heidecker doing his spot-on Alex Jones impression, he explained that exclusively lampooning an increasingly irrelevant man is not a path to building a long-lasting comedy institution. Instead, he plans to turn InfoWars into the kind of broader comedy brand that platformed him early in his career.

'I think most satire gets old pretty quickly, and we don’t want to keep fueling [Jones],' Heidecker said. 'So the plan is to goof on him for a few months, and have fun with it, and then transition the site into a comedy streaming platform for people that he would hate to see have success.'

He expressed that his ultimate hope would be for his InfoWars to play the kind of role in the comedy ecosystem that Adult Swim and Comedy Central once did, allowing comedians from all backgrounds to experiment and create their first big projects.

'We’re starting like Adult Swim era 2006. All these great basic cable platforms stopped making stuff. Or they stopped taking big swings or trying new voices, experimental shows. It all just moved to Instagram or TikTok. All these very talented young people are just twisting in the wind,' he said... [Early Adult Swim] 'brought up a lot of voices, a lot of individual artists who are now doing great things. And we hope it’s a little bit of that.'"

indiewire.com
u/emeric_ceaddamere — 3 days ago
▲ 6 r/thebulwark

Good breakdown of the messaging and overall vibes at Rededicate 250 from someone who attended. It's easy to write the event off as a sideshow, but there was a lot more going on than thanking God for the ballroom.

Rick: "So literally, around the the mall, everyone's bending the knee to the cause and [Lou Engle]'s getting them to be like, 'Will you do whatever it takes?' And so then the question becomes, 'What does doing whatever it takes to this cause of making the nation one nation under God mean exactly?'"

Pat: "And there's some important context here... The people organizing this event was the same company that organized the January 6th speech with Trump... [And] at January 6th there was this spiritual warfare motif going through the whole thing. There was a lot of worship music being played and [then] the people stormed the Capitol... And so when somebody asks, 'Well, what's the harm in just singing some songs?' if you've got a government-sanctioned worship service stirring people up and, like you say, getting them to 'bend the knee,' and then you've got pardons for anyone who gets a little out of hand and does 'whatever is necessary,' that's a little bit alarming to me."

youtube.com
u/emeric_ceaddamere — 5 days ago
▲ 54 r/thebulwark

Sarah: "Persuasion is not about getting people to change their minds. Persuasion is about taking something people already feel and unlocking it."

This line stood out to me in today's Secret Pod, and I think it's worth dwelling on.

So many of us have spent the past decade (at least) trying to win the conservatives we know over to the light side with finely crafted arguments. But having information, however compelling and accurate, thrown at them by people whom they already view as "the enemy" is not how people change. They need to hear something based in a belief they already hold coming from someone they trust to be "on side."

A liberal cousin sending clips of Trump saying cruel or blasphemous things along with a message like "how could you vote for this?" is only going to encourage someone to dig in their heels rather than admit their own hypocrisy. But if a church friend sends the same clip, along with a message like "I like XYZ that he's done, but this doesn't feel right to me," that's going to be much more likely to find fertile soil.

People don't respond well to being told they're betraying their own values. But if they can become convinced that *Trump* is betraying what's important to them--even if they have to lie to themselves and say Trump used to be okay but now he's changed for the worse--then they might actually start to turn, even if that just means sitting out the next election.

Anyway, that's just my interpretation. But I think Sarah's statement is an axiom worth keeping in mind.

Full episode: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trumps-17b-friends-and-family-fund

u/emeric_ceaddamere — 8 days ago
▲ 159 r/thebulwark

Looking forward to a day (possibly imaginary) when I don't have to constantly check the URL bar to make sure I didn't somehow end up at The Onion

u/emeric_ceaddamere — 8 days ago
▲ 28 r/thebulwark

Video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oywjaN8FdpA

Today's Triad: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/a-conspiracy-theory-we-can-all-believe-in

And a few thoughts on the Triad...

JVL: "In order for a Democrat to capture the presidency, he will have to win over a bunch of voters who believe in conspiracy theories."

True enough.

JVL: "This doesn't mean promoting or affirming conspiracy theories. Just a little . . . benign neglect?"

Not making debunking conspiracy theories the center of the Dem platform, sure, but what does this "benign neglect" look like? If it looks like today's Triad, then it's not only ignoring conspiracy theories but giving the theorists cover by letting them *think* you agree with them, whether or not that's actually the case. If the right was doing it (which they have and are), we would rightly call it sanewashing. One thing we cannot sacrifice for political gain is the truth.

For example, listing the hard facts of the Epstein case, in which Trump is directly implicated, alongside a few cherrypicked and completely unrelated facts about DHS and the actions of other governments, which have absolutely no connection to Butler or the Correspondents' Dinner other than the winking inclusion of them in the same article where the latter are discussed--is already giving cover to conspiracy-brained users on this very sub to say "I knew JVL was on our side!"

JVL's hypothetical response for a Dem candidate to give when confronted with a conspiracy theory, on the other hand, is quite good, imho. But the rest of the Triad risks falling prey to its own cuteness and sending the wrong message. Again, just imho.

u/emeric_ceaddamere — 18 days ago
▲ 16 r/thebulwark

I know a lot of people skip The Focus Group to avoid hearing ignorant Trump voters, but this is *not* that kind of episode. Instead, it's a refreshing combination of realism and optimism that offers people something to vote *for*. (And don't worry about the Shapiro jumpscare in the thumbnail. They only mention him for two seconds at the end.)

u/emeric_ceaddamere — 23 days ago