One summer in college, I had an unpaid internship in DC. I went into debt paying for rent and food and was grateful when some random guy who wanted to start a website “tracking Republican lies” and knew I had worked on @alfranken’s book offered me a job.
(This was 2004, back when people cared or claimed to care about dishonesty in public discourse.)
Anyway, the guy was not hugely sophisticated, and so the arrangement was: “I’ll pay you $10 for every lie you find and debunk.”
Which made the financial incentives pretty clear. I quickly found that the list of contributors in the center column on the @DRUDGE Report was full of high-volume targets. It didn’t matter that nobody knew or cared who these people were.
In fact, it helped. Because they were tucked away in a fringy corner of the right wing internet, they could write just absolute batshit nonsense and it didn’t matter at all. And I quickly found two guys in particular who were always good for at least a bar tab’s worth of lies.
Honestly, I pretty quickly started phoning it in. Instead of canvassing the web for disinformation, I was just reading whatever these two lunatics were posting and “debunking” stuff like “Al Gore did 9/11.” It took maybe fifteen minutes a day, total.
So, these two guys. One was Joseph Farah, who would go on to become a leading birther, although that was just one stop on his whirlwind tour of racist conspiracy theories he advocated in a desperate attempt to stay relevant. splcenter.org/fighting-hate/…
The other one might be the governor of California pretty soon.
I mention this because I don’t think people understand just how bugfuck crazy it is that Larry Elder might soon become the chief executive of the world’s fifth largest economy. This guy is a Known Cuckoo and has been for, like, twenty years.
This would be like Democrats nominating Jim Hightower for President, except Hightower actually has some brief public service experience and, to my knowledge, has never threatened a domestic partner with a handgun.
Elder winning — which, again, is startlingly possible — wouldn’t just represent a humanitarian disaster for millions of people. It would be the most embarrassing goof in Democratic Party history.
You should be very worried about this. If you live in California, please be worried. Return your ballot today. Go bother your friends. Walk the streets (I know nobody walks out there) screaming. Tweet stuff with #CArecall if you want, but it’s honestly worth leaving your house.
This guy cannot crawl out of the discard pile of fever swamp leeches and get elected Governor. It just cannot happen.
Oh, and, Congress: pay your interns. -30-
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