Fwiw I generally don’t laugh at Alex Jones, I have contempt for the guy who said that “no one died” at Sandy Hook.
Anyway Tucker’s going to end up doing a Tucker Carlson Today interview with Jones and it’ll cause a stir and then Lachlan will say that actually Tucker criticized him and even though that will be obviously false Tucker will be fine because he’s Fox’s meal ticket at this point.
The Carlson-Jones relationship is hard to nail down because both of them are knee-jerk liars but there’s definitely something there.
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Per this release, the former president of the United States is (still) cold-calling Republican politicians when he likes something he sees them saying on his television. mediamatters.org/fox-news/gop-c…
How to catch Trump's attention, leading to a meeting that boosts your primary campaign against the sitting GOP governor.
This also shows how Fox is supercharging the GOP's "critical race theory" election strategy. GOP politicians respond to RW media coverage and take action on the issue, leading to favorable coverage of their campaigns.
I took a crack at explaining the right-wing feedback loops that are generating scenes like this while turning local debates about school curricula into a polarized national issue. mediamatters.org/fox-news/feedb…
There are ~130,000 K-12 U.S. schools. As teachers and administrators grapple with how to discuss race and racism in the wake of 2020’s police killings and protests, it is inevitable that some will make decisions that are clumsy, ineffective, unpopular, or all of the above.
Such disputes have traditionally been managed between local stakeholders. But the right-wing strategy is to take as many of those instances as they can find, manufacture others, stretch them beyond recognition, dishonestly place them under the heading of “critical race theory.”
In several of those cases, the locals Fox has highlighted are also Republican strategists, conservative think-tankers, or right-wing media figures -- ties the network has downplayed or ignored altogether.
Ian Prior is a GOP operative who worked for the NRCC, American Crossroads, and Trump’s DOJ. He runs his own Republican PR shop.
Important read. Trump's reach benefited from the algorithmic acceleration and the built-in audience his social accounts gave him. If Facebook returns access to his account, he gets that megaphone back.
And adding labels to his misinformation won't help -- Facebook labeled at least 506 Trump posts between January 1, 2020, and January 6, 2021, and those posts averaged twice as many interactions. mediamatters.org/facebook/faceb…
If I understand Facebook's stated reasoning, they kicked him off for inciting violent unrest and in two years they will reassess... whether he's learned his lesson and won't do it again?
I'm fine with extracting a political price for Republican intransigence to investigate Jan. 6, but once that's over Democrats in Congress need to use their power to do the work and get answers through the committee process.
I mean look if you think Kevin McCarthy would fight a subpoena from a House committee because it's "partisan" but would happily talk to a commission if it were empaneled over his objections, I don't know what to tell you.
The one difference is that it's easier for witnesses to run out the clock knowing that if Republicans win in 2022 they'll shut the whole thing down... but if you think they wouldn't do that to a commission, again, I dunno what to tell you.