Good news! I'm sure I did a long version rant on the subject too recently for a repeat so.
Audience numbers say that the legacy media have been alienating and losing audiences for years. This is done by dishonest, untrustworthy reporting on all important issues--let's say every subject that answers the question: How did the nation collapse to this (still collapsing) state?
So Weiss isn't destroying CBS News; the entire legacy media are doing that to their respect outlets. What Weiss is doing is a) accelerating that process and b) getting Donny off the Ellisons' asses. (Rather two out of three Ellisons. The third is the artiste owner of A24 movie production house.) And because it's maybe required to note, is that what's being done to CBS News likely will help the Ellisons get the OK to buy WBD. Me, even with Donny's help, I'm sure the Ellisons can actually buy it. Then again, I don't quite get why there's no offers from anyone else but whatever.
Small quibble: in my view the Queensman does have a political agenda. It's the Gilded Age agenda for our post-modern times. Corporatism, pretty much. It's what he does and plans to continue. Stripping all hard stops on corporations and unfettering the vandals makes him a (relative) LOT of money. It is political to be economically dominant.
He's not that smart -- or, rather, he's a smart crook but a poor political scientist and administrator. Take tariffs. He likes them because he thinks they're shakedowns. And some companies have been dumb and rich enough to pay off. But most of them just stall, phumpher, and wait him out. Meanwhile, thanks to this and other bullshit, the economy collapses.
I take your point but a political leader in a democracy (which we are for the moment) must deliver the goods.
Oh he's deliverin' alright – for the people he pretends to care about, and especially the people he really does care about (in the not-really-caring-but-s'long-as-they-gimme-lotsa-moolah-and-the little-girlies-we're-good sort of way).
Somewhere in Pennsyltucky, a group of unemployed coal miners at the local opioid treatment clinic can't contain their excitement whenever the Triumphal Arch is mentioned.
The only thing he knows how to do is white-collar crime adapted to Mafia methods. He gets to "wet his beak" with every transaction like this.
"I take your point but a political leader in a democracy (which we are for the moment) must deliver the goods."
Agreed. His voters voted for Trumpov and "owning the libs is fun". They did not vote for someone who wants to kill them all at once (Miller) or starve and poison them to death (Vought). They didn't vote for breadlines and Victory Gin. Fat lot of good constant watching Fox News is going to do when you can't pay the light bill or breathe clean air anymore.
A side-note to this is that the media has been very very dutiful in running the never-ending story of "Trump to cut $2,000 checks to every citizen . . . . soon" That story first started appearing back in October, and it gets renewed every two or three weeks with the actual check-writing day always just a few weeks away.
Kinda like the Joe Biden Recession that the media kept promising us was just a few weeks away. They started running that story in June of 2021, rerunning it every few weeks for the rest of Biden's presidency.
This is timely, considering CBS just refused to air a Colbert episode with Dem James Talarico, which I'm pleased to say has already received over 3 million views, as Colbert offered CBS a cordial Fuck You and posted it on his YouTube channel instead.
I think Weiss has dual marching orders: make CBS news a punchline, and don't piss off the boss, who of course is Trump.
She knows which side her ass is buttered on, yeah. And she'll be happy to retire with a few hundred millions tax-free when the time comes (that's millions with an 'm' – not billions with a 'b'. She knows she'll never rub shoulders, or any other body parts, with the big boys.)
I still say she's gone by March, May at the latest. All her even-further-right-than-she-is enemies have to do is cook up an "LGBTQ panic" and she's gone. She won't even have Der Frei Presse anymore.
The thing that most seems to be leaving CBS' reputation in tatters these days is the Streisand effect. The public goes crazy for anything the network doesn't want to air, which inevitably turns up on other platforms and gets even greater viewership than it would have, and that just might be Bari's undoing.
I actually feel sorry for Barbra, that this is what she's likely to be remembered for, long after everyone has forgotten her music and movies. Think I'll go watch Funny Girl again to push back against the tide.
And it won't ever be her fault. After all, this is *Bari Weiss* we're talking about. She'll say everyone was a meanie to her, plus antisemitism. Surely not her incompetence. Surely not that.
Failing as a network news organization seems about as likely as running a casino into bankruptcy, and who could possibly do that, amirite?
There being three of them, I'm gonna take a wild guess that each gets about 33% of the geriatric audience who still watches network news? And the 33% who watches each network has been watching the SAME network for their entire lives.
It was pretty much both sides bullshit before Bari, post Dan Rather. Now it's right wing bullshit. So, bullshit either way. I don't think the flavor matters so much. Bullshit is bullshit. If anything, maybe more people will recognize it as bullshit and nope out. Bari might be doing us a favor.
My entire career was in small to midmarket TV stations. I was one of the drones running around in the background with a clipboard.
The newsrooms I worked in could be sloppy, the shows overproduced, and there were too many fellow drones who desperately wanted to be TV NEWS ANCHORS. Sometimes the firewall between News and Sales or News and the Local Old Boys Network was breached.
That said, all five of the newsrooms on my resume took their first amendment rights seriously. We wanted to keep the viewers honestly informed. This applied to staffers of every political stripe.
If you wanted to just make shit up, you had to wait until FOX called back for that second interview. If a promising liberal pol turned out to be a crook, well it sucks to be him.
If something about a story was fishy, there was almost always someone willing to tap the breaks until da-facks-wuz-straight.
Explaining to my relatives and neighbors that we weren't a bunch of commies/capitalist running dogs became second nature.
Watching The Media hollowed out on the local and national level has been painful. As in any industry, the rolling cutbacks and layoffs ruin careers and crush morale. And it does the viewers no favors. Never mind traffic pileups and juicy homicides. If no one sets up an interview with a whistle-blower (and fact-checks him, thank you very much) the malefactors get that much more breathing space to plunder.
Maybe if Dan Rather hadn't wiggled his eyebrows every time he mentioned President Reagan we wouldn't be in this predicament. Ailes and Murdoch wouldn't have had to say, "Look what you made us do!"
Does anyone point out the useless, childishness of it all? Are the Ellisons that idiotic?
Let's take an analogous situation, more main street.
You don't like a car dealership. You're wealthy, so wealthy you can walk down the street handing out trust funds every day all day and never run out of monopoly money to fund the trust funds. You buy the dealership and immediately send in vandals during regular business hours to trash the place and destroy the inventory, harassing the staff and burning the files, driving customers aways. What then? Hire another of your companies to come in and repair it and start over with creepier sales practices and criminals running the place?
How does this make sense outside a lot these folks having watched movies like Goodfellas and TV shows like The Borgias too earnestly and too often? Trump's fantasies and behavior mimics the mob guys he seems to think the epitome of a boss. Is this where the psychology of the captains of industry is now?
How difficult would it be in the next round for equally malicious and untethered anarchists to swat some of these top-shelf creeps, sending stupid legions of ICE goons, drunk with their own fantasy power, into Bezos's or Ellison's home?
Or why not their actual inhouse handlers sending them by accident on purpose, a kind of Keystone Cops version of the Night of the Long Knives? Throw in Gabbard and Weiss wandering around the scene, like Isabelle Adjani and Dominique Blanc during the massacre of the Huguenots. There's your set piece.
They wouldn't do it to a hard asset (unless as you indicate they're busting it out). But culture -- art, journalism, etc -- eludes and infuriates them. Wreckage is their only alternative.
Thanks for the Goodfellas reference, I was thinking of that myself when I saw Tubby was closing the Kennedy Center for "renovations." How did Ray Liotta tell it in the movie? Guy owns a restaurant, starts out paying protection money to the mob, then the mob guys are gettin' all their meals there gratis, then steaks and liquor deliveries to the restaurant "fall off a truck" and never make it to the kitchen. At the end, the place is bankrupt and they burn it down for the insurance money.
So it is with everything Trump touches, so it is with America. Fortunately we're still at the "Pay me protection money and free meals for my pals" stage and not yet at the "Burn it down for the insurance money" stage.
This time there is no money. What money by wrecking CBS? What money did DOGE get? Even stolen data is a questionable take. Must be something I'm missing or not. The mindless destruction of institutions and social relations is the goal. Social relations disrupted and severed, whether with tariffs or ICE raids.
And random at that, as you point out, like some blanket grievance payback against anonymous classes. Bureaucrats but not my neighbors who work in government? No consideration for the consequences. Consequences shmoncequences!
What matters to you when your money makes more money than you can spend? I'd bet Ellison doesn't see Weiss' job as destroying CBS but making it more pliant and agreeable. Making Trump happy is a major goal and Trump wants retribution (and money), sure. He wouldn't shed a tear if CBS news was no more. But a living cowed CBS news is worth more to Ellison than a dead one. If it goes under everyone involved will move on and say no more of it, but it will be a failure on their part, one of many. But there's still all that money.
Its a "trusted name" you can trust. Plus, there's always MyPillow and goldGoldGOLD!!! ads. Suppliments, vacation ads for Beautiful Boise, DHS ads where Kristi tells us what a great job she's doing, Patriot Solar Power, glasses to fight blinding headlights. To quote my favorite line in Rattatoui "once you get past the gag reflex there are a lot of dining oppotunities".
'Patriot Solar Power' would be a several-acre-sized magnifying glass suspended somewheres in the upper atmosphere, connected via a crypto-funded lottery to a pivoting arm that allows the lucky winner an opportunity to fry less-than-humans on the spot. Think of the hilarity!
Ah, but there's billions to be made, because EVERYBODY agrees with me, it's all just being kept secret by those Soros-funded polling organizations, but once we put the GOOD stuff out to The American People, just watch the money roll in! Why, we got this deal for a documentary about Melania, just you wait and see, gonna be BOFFO BOX OFFICE!
This constant theorizing that "He must be gettin' rich off it, somehow" is a form of sanewashing, I think. Self-enrichment would at least be rational, maybe it's scarier to realize the guy with the nukes isn't rational.
And yeah, he is doing self-enrichment too, but it's not The One Theory That Explains All.
I had a neighbor who told stories about growing up in a mob-adjacent family in Boise, Idaho (how far down the Mafia pecking order do you have be to have 𝘉𝘰𝘪𝘴𝘦 for your turf?). His father was persuaded to purchase a bowling alley in partnership with a character known as—I have to assign an equivalent soubriquet here, because I can’t recall it exactly—“Vinnie the Torch.” At some point the establishment caught fire: total destruction, down to the fucking ground. Fortunately it was heavily insured. To Vinnie.
Like their “philosopher” Yarvin, they think they will be the aristocracy after restoring the monarchy. They don’t know history, or they’d worry they might be among the lords and earls who got deep-sixed for being the wrong religion or offending the king or just inconvenient.
Is there even that much vision to it? My guess is a guy like Ellison imagines the future as being exactly like the present (because the present - whenever it is - is always pretty sweet if you're rich enough) except all the people he hates will be dead. No, he hasn't thought through the details, that's below his pay-grade.
Yes, that's what I see. There's no storyboard for the movie they're making here. They don't even have Weiss waltzing in with her citizen witnesses with cell phones to document the good works and show how the thugs have their own grass roots populism going on.
"The way things are is the way things always will be". This is how they're operating now, with the caveat that they'll have all the money. And because Wall Street loves drama and churn, they think it will be this way forever.
They're rewriting history because they want to throw out what actually happened.
This is exactly how the techbros and all conservatives think, like people who remember past lives are always members of royalty. The solution the techbros have come up with is that the peasants all kill each other and are replaced by robots, and the economy will trundle on just as before the Great Purge. A big improvement of the Hunger Games future the Republican party imagines.
An insight from Daniel Kahneman, I think, is that we vastly overestimate our own ability to change and vastly underestimate the world's ability to change. So yeah, things will be mostly as they are now but WITH ME ON TOP.
And let's face – they know better than to pretend there's an escape tunnel to Mars (or anywhere else) when one of the various potential Big Ones comes. This planet is gonna have to do for their King-of-the-Universe cosplay.
I have trouble seeing a through-line to a monarchy or any order in the actions of now. The result looks like disrupted social relations. Prove government doesn't work to meet needs. Prevent institutions like news media from serving a useful purpose. Then patronage of the wealthy is the obvious next door, the trough for the swine and hoi-poloi. Get your trust fund and join the thugs. Squeal like a pig on demand.
Whatever their intentions, breaking stuff is easy and making stuff is hard. That explains a lot of it, I think. Let's do all the easy breaking stuff NOW, if we have any notion of the Ayn Randian Libertopia to come, we'll figure that out LATER.
The reason I call it "Galt's Dry Gulch" is because in Western lore to "dry-gulch" someone meant to ambush them in a lonely spot and murder them.
And in Galt's Dry Gulch, what happens when it *rains* is you get Kerr County Texas, and the Guadalupe River, and people dying because they don't want to spend their precious money on warnings and evacuation plans.
The question then is why Weiss specifically and the way above value $200M payoff that went with it? There must be any number of fash-friendly scruples-free newsroom types who could have done the takedown much less hamfistedly for a tiny fraction of that number and at least for a little while looked legitimate. What am I missing?
I suppose Acting President Voughtmiller understood that Bari and her antic-prone flair for obnoxious own-goaling would guarantee the biggest, most obvious “fuck you, because we can” possible.
It's not that ham-fisted -- she still has lots of Prestige Press peeps convinced that she's trying to fix rather than tank it. And being vastly unqualified is part of the cover-up!
Hiring Weiss was the Baby Ellison's call, wasn't it? And the mind of the billionaire, such as us are not allowed to peer inside.
This is how it is under the fascist/oligarchic system: All the important decisions are made on a whim by one guy who thinks he's a genius, his factota rush to assure him it's a brilliant decision, the rest of us are left scratching our heads until the next whim comes along.
You have to keep in mind that her history shows Weiss as a world-class bullshitter. From a Princeton rabble-rouser to NYT op-ed is a leap many desire but few complete. One bit from that story about her University at Austin was some faculty guy deciding to quit but being talked out of it by Niall Ferguson. That level of bullshit is the foundation of Weiss' career, the ability to con people with soothing words that match their biases and desires, then failing upward as it turs to shit by conning the next level up.
I'd say the reason for Weiss is her position in the world of counter-institutions. Founder of The Free Press, with its tagline: "Honest, Independent, Fearless." And she founded a "university," marble bust of herself and all. Her activities please the oligarchs who've backed those, as it pleased Ellison to install her for suitable care of CBS.
She creates things that LOOK like other things, without actually BEING those other things. This looks like a newspaper, that looks like a university, hire her and she'll give you something that looks like TV news without being TV news.
Title is on-point, and not just with Bari Weiss and CBS. What we got here is people who can't DO anything, who simply lack the competence or care necessary, and so what's left to them except to be the fuck-ups they are, but on a larger stage? Take this whole MAHA fiasco. Does anyone think RFK Jr. actually has an idea how remake the FDA, CDC, NIH, etc. into something approaching his fucked-up vision, whatever that may be? Of course not, so he does what he's capable of: Fire people, cancel grants and programs, simply refuse to do the job he's supposed to do. We won't be getting "healthy alternatives" to vaccines and other products of Big Pharma, we're just gonna get no vaccines.
To be fair, Bobby's idea of "remaking" those institutions is to make the rubble bounce. His fucked-up vision is to sell woo to people with bullshit, and the existence of those institutions is a major stmbling block for that. Bob and Bari and all the rest are all-in on moving fast and breaking things, but since the techbros left out "then replace it all with our rent-seeking product" from their mantra they're at a loss.
Look, people shouldn't be takin' all these damn diabetes drugs, they should eat good and do more pull-ups so they don't get the 'betes in the first place!
Now take that and do the "Deprive people of health care" care part because that's EZ n' fun, forget the "healthy diet and exercise" part because changing the personal habits of tens of millions of people isn't just difficult, it's damn near impossible.
On a side note, fret not about Junior's Nº2 Jim O'Neil – he's headed for the National Science Foundation, probly to stick a few kilos of gelignite under it.
Nice piece. Everything you say is pretty obvious, yet if others are saying it they are few and not working for major publications. I don’t really believe in Simulation Theory, but it would explain so much of how things have gone so far off the rails beyond anything the most pessimistic and paranoid of us could have imagined circa 1980. How does it make you feel, being one of the few to see the obvious? Do you give any thought to that?
Good news! I'm sure I did a long version rant on the subject too recently for a repeat so.
Audience numbers say that the legacy media have been alienating and losing audiences for years. This is done by dishonest, untrustworthy reporting on all important issues--let's say every subject that answers the question: How did the nation collapse to this (still collapsing) state?
So Weiss isn't destroying CBS News; the entire legacy media are doing that to their respect outlets. What Weiss is doing is a) accelerating that process and b) getting Donny off the Ellisons' asses. (Rather two out of three Ellisons. The third is the artiste owner of A24 movie production house.) And because it's maybe required to note, is that what's being done to CBS News likely will help the Ellisons get the OK to buy WBD. Me, even with Donny's help, I'm sure the Ellisons can actually buy it. Then again, I don't quite get why there's no offers from anyone else but whatever.
"WBD" lights up for me as Warner Bros/Ducks. You know – Donald, Daffy, Howard...
So thanks for that, I guess.
I got Will Be Decided, as in "A corporation to be named later"
There is another offer, WBD accepted it, from Netflix. Ellison’s bid is a hostile one trying to bust up that deal and make one of his own.
As we should have learned long ago, there’s nigh-infinite Donny can pull, or at least try to.
No reason to believe that Netflix/WBD is a done deal. In normal times, it would be but…
Small quibble: in my view the Queensman does have a political agenda. It's the Gilded Age agenda for our post-modern times. Corporatism, pretty much. It's what he does and plans to continue. Stripping all hard stops on corporations and unfettering the vandals makes him a (relative) LOT of money. It is political to be economically dominant.
He's not that smart -- or, rather, he's a smart crook but a poor political scientist and administrator. Take tariffs. He likes them because he thinks they're shakedowns. And some companies have been dumb and rich enough to pay off. But most of them just stall, phumpher, and wait him out. Meanwhile, thanks to this and other bullshit, the economy collapses.
I take your point but a political leader in a democracy (which we are for the moment) must deliver the goods.
Oh he's deliverin' alright – for the people he pretends to care about, and especially the people he really does care about (in the not-really-caring-but-s'long-as-they-gimme-lotsa-moolah-and-the little-girlies-we're-good sort of way).
Somewhere in Pennsyltucky, a group of unemployed coal miners at the local opioid treatment clinic can't contain their excitement whenever the Triumphal Arch is mentioned.
The only thing he knows how to do is white-collar crime adapted to Mafia methods. He gets to "wet his beak" with every transaction like this.
"I take your point but a political leader in a democracy (which we are for the moment) must deliver the goods."
Agreed. His voters voted for Trumpov and "owning the libs is fun". They did not vote for someone who wants to kill them all at once (Miller) or starve and poison them to death (Vought). They didn't vote for breadlines and Victory Gin. Fat lot of good constant watching Fox News is going to do when you can't pay the light bill or breathe clean air anymore.
A side-note to this is that the media has been very very dutiful in running the never-ending story of "Trump to cut $2,000 checks to every citizen . . . . soon" That story first started appearing back in October, and it gets renewed every two or three weeks with the actual check-writing day always just a few weeks away.
Kinda like the Joe Biden Recession that the media kept promising us was just a few weeks away. They started running that story in June of 2021, rerunning it every few weeks for the rest of Biden's presidency.
Record wheat harvest on its way, far exceeding goals of five-year plan! And I hear the chocolate ration will be going up FIVE GRAMS any day now.
This is timely, considering CBS just refused to air a Colbert episode with Dem James Talarico, which I'm pleased to say has already received over 3 million views, as Colbert offered CBS a cordial Fuck You and posted it on his YouTube channel instead.
I think Weiss has dual marching orders: make CBS news a punchline, and don't piss off the boss, who of course is Trump.
She knows which side her ass is buttered on, yeah. And she'll be happy to retire with a few hundred millions tax-free when the time comes (that's millions with an 'm' – not billions with a 'b'. She knows she'll never rub shoulders, or any other body parts, with the big boys.)
I still say she's gone by March, May at the latest. All her even-further-right-than-she-is enemies have to do is cook up an "LGBTQ panic" and she's gone. She won't even have Der Frei Presse anymore.
The thing that most seems to be leaving CBS' reputation in tatters these days is the Streisand effect. The public goes crazy for anything the network doesn't want to air, which inevitably turns up on other platforms and gets even greater viewership than it would have, and that just might be Bari's undoing.
I actually feel sorry for Barbra, that this is what she's likely to be remembered for, long after everyone has forgotten her music and movies. Think I'll go watch Funny Girl again to push back against the tide.
And it won't ever be her fault. After all, this is *Bari Weiss* we're talking about. She'll say everyone was a meanie to her, plus antisemitism. Surely not her incompetence. Surely not that.
Failing as a network news organization seems about as likely as running a casino into bankruptcy, and who could possibly do that, amirite?
There being three of them, I'm gonna take a wild guess that each gets about 33% of the geriatric audience who still watches network news? And the 33% who watches each network has been watching the SAME network for their entire lives.
It was pretty much both sides bullshit before Bari, post Dan Rather. Now it's right wing bullshit. So, bullshit either way. I don't think the flavor matters so much. Bullshit is bullshit. If anything, maybe more people will recognize it as bullshit and nope out. Bari might be doing us a favor.
An especially good one, Roy. Thanks for the effort, as always.
My entire career was in small to midmarket TV stations. I was one of the drones running around in the background with a clipboard.
The newsrooms I worked in could be sloppy, the shows overproduced, and there were too many fellow drones who desperately wanted to be TV NEWS ANCHORS. Sometimes the firewall between News and Sales or News and the Local Old Boys Network was breached.
That said, all five of the newsrooms on my resume took their first amendment rights seriously. We wanted to keep the viewers honestly informed. This applied to staffers of every political stripe.
If you wanted to just make shit up, you had to wait until FOX called back for that second interview. If a promising liberal pol turned out to be a crook, well it sucks to be him.
If something about a story was fishy, there was almost always someone willing to tap the breaks until da-facks-wuz-straight.
Explaining to my relatives and neighbors that we weren't a bunch of commies/capitalist running dogs became second nature.
Watching The Media hollowed out on the local and national level has been painful. As in any industry, the rolling cutbacks and layoffs ruin careers and crush morale. And it does the viewers no favors. Never mind traffic pileups and juicy homicides. If no one sets up an interview with a whistle-blower (and fact-checks him, thank you very much) the malefactors get that much more breathing space to plunder.
Maybe if Dan Rather hadn't wiggled his eyebrows every time he mentioned President Reagan we wouldn't be in this predicament. Ailes and Murdoch wouldn't have had to say, "Look what you made us do!"
But I'm just a drone, so what do I know?
I used to have to drive by the USA Today HQ... those people have a lot to answer for
Honestly McPaper is one of the better outlets these days.
Can we repurpose your drone for, let's say, higher lethality?
I'm just a drone sittin' here by the phone
Won't somebody throw me a bone?
[sung to the tune of "I'm just a Bill" from Schoolhouse Rock"]
[for some super-hyper-over-el-top-o version of 'sung']
Does anyone point out the useless, childishness of it all? Are the Ellisons that idiotic?
Let's take an analogous situation, more main street.
You don't like a car dealership. You're wealthy, so wealthy you can walk down the street handing out trust funds every day all day and never run out of monopoly money to fund the trust funds. You buy the dealership and immediately send in vandals during regular business hours to trash the place and destroy the inventory, harassing the staff and burning the files, driving customers aways. What then? Hire another of your companies to come in and repair it and start over with creepier sales practices and criminals running the place?
How does this make sense outside a lot these folks having watched movies like Goodfellas and TV shows like The Borgias too earnestly and too often? Trump's fantasies and behavior mimics the mob guys he seems to think the epitome of a boss. Is this where the psychology of the captains of industry is now?
How difficult would it be in the next round for equally malicious and untethered anarchists to swat some of these top-shelf creeps, sending stupid legions of ICE goons, drunk with their own fantasy power, into Bezos's or Ellison's home?
Or why not their actual inhouse handlers sending them by accident on purpose, a kind of Keystone Cops version of the Night of the Long Knives? Throw in Gabbard and Weiss wandering around the scene, like Isabelle Adjani and Dominique Blanc during the massacre of the Huguenots. There's your set piece.
Dare to dream a little bigger, darlings.
They wouldn't do it to a hard asset (unless as you indicate they're busting it out). But culture -- art, journalism, etc -- eludes and infuriates them. Wreckage is their only alternative.
Thanks for the Goodfellas reference, I was thinking of that myself when I saw Tubby was closing the Kennedy Center for "renovations." How did Ray Liotta tell it in the movie? Guy owns a restaurant, starts out paying protection money to the mob, then the mob guys are gettin' all their meals there gratis, then steaks and liquor deliveries to the restaurant "fall off a truck" and never make it to the kitchen. At the end, the place is bankrupt and they burn it down for the insurance money.
So it is with everything Trump touches, so it is with America. Fortunately we're still at the "Pay me protection money and free meals for my pals" stage and not yet at the "Burn it down for the insurance money" stage.
My “fuck you, because we can” line was Goodfellas-inspired as well.
Great movie, we had to wait 30 years for our shared reality to catch up to it.
This time there is no money. What money by wrecking CBS? What money did DOGE get? Even stolen data is a questionable take. Must be something I'm missing or not. The mindless destruction of institutions and social relations is the goal. Social relations disrupted and severed, whether with tariffs or ICE raids.
Like I said: revenge.
And random at that, as you point out, like some blanket grievance payback against anonymous classes. Bureaucrats but not my neighbors who work in government? No consideration for the consequences. Consequences shmoncequences!
What matters to you when your money makes more money than you can spend? I'd bet Ellison doesn't see Weiss' job as destroying CBS but making it more pliant and agreeable. Making Trump happy is a major goal and Trump wants retribution (and money), sure. He wouldn't shed a tear if CBS news was no more. But a living cowed CBS news is worth more to Ellison than a dead one. If it goes under everyone involved will move on and say no more of it, but it will be a failure on their part, one of many. But there's still all that money.
If alla advertisers say nopenopenope then what value does the dessicated husk have?
Its a "trusted name" you can trust. Plus, there's always MyPillow and goldGoldGOLD!!! ads. Suppliments, vacation ads for Beautiful Boise, DHS ads where Kristi tells us what a great job she's doing, Patriot Solar Power, glasses to fight blinding headlights. To quote my favorite line in Rattatoui "once you get past the gag reflex there are a lot of dining oppotunities".
'Patriot Solar Power' would be a several-acre-sized magnifying glass suspended somewheres in the upper atmosphere, connected via a crypto-funded lottery to a pivoting arm that allows the lucky winner an opportunity to fry less-than-humans on the spot. Think of the hilarity!
"Patriot Solar Power"
If you sell it as prepping for the Race War it overcomes their normal "Solar is Gay" biases.
Ah, but there's billions to be made, because EVERYBODY agrees with me, it's all just being kept secret by those Soros-funded polling organizations, but once we put the GOOD stuff out to The American People, just watch the money roll in! Why, we got this deal for a documentary about Melania, just you wait and see, gonna be BOFFO BOX OFFICE!
This constant theorizing that "He must be gettin' rich off it, somehow" is a form of sanewashing, I think. Self-enrichment would at least be rational, maybe it's scarier to realize the guy with the nukes isn't rational.
And yeah, he is doing self-enrichment too, but it's not The One Theory That Explains All.
I had a neighbor who told stories about growing up in a mob-adjacent family in Boise, Idaho (how far down the Mafia pecking order do you have be to have 𝘉𝘰𝘪𝘴𝘦 for your turf?). His father was persuaded to purchase a bowling alley in partnership with a character known as—I have to assign an equivalent soubriquet here, because I can’t recall it exactly—“Vinnie the Torch.” At some point the establishment caught fire: total destruction, down to the fucking ground. Fortunately it was heavily insured. To Vinnie.
"Uh... Mr.... Torch, before we enter into this partnership, can you please tell me about your relevant business experience?"
"I'm MATCHLESS!"
Like their “philosopher” Yarvin, they think they will be the aristocracy after restoring the monarchy. They don’t know history, or they’d worry they might be among the lords and earls who got deep-sixed for being the wrong religion or offending the king or just inconvenient.
Is there even that much vision to it? My guess is a guy like Ellison imagines the future as being exactly like the present (because the present - whenever it is - is always pretty sweet if you're rich enough) except all the people he hates will be dead. No, he hasn't thought through the details, that's below his pay-grade.
Yes, that's what I see. There's no storyboard for the movie they're making here. They don't even have Weiss waltzing in with her citizen witnesses with cell phones to document the good works and show how the thugs have their own grass roots populism going on.
You can trust our smartphone chronicling!
"The way things are is the way things always will be". This is how they're operating now, with the caveat that they'll have all the money. And because Wall Street loves drama and churn, they think it will be this way forever.
They're rewriting history because they want to throw out what actually happened.
This is exactly how the techbros and all conservatives think, like people who remember past lives are always members of royalty. The solution the techbros have come up with is that the peasants all kill each other and are replaced by robots, and the economy will trundle on just as before the Great Purge. A big improvement of the Hunger Games future the Republican party imagines.
An insight from Daniel Kahneman, I think, is that we vastly overestimate our own ability to change and vastly underestimate the world's ability to change. So yeah, things will be mostly as they are now but WITH ME ON TOP.
And let's face – they know better than to pretend there's an escape tunnel to Mars (or anywhere else) when one of the various potential Big Ones comes. This planet is gonna have to do for their King-of-the-Universe cosplay.
I have trouble seeing a through-line to a monarchy or any order in the actions of now. The result looks like disrupted social relations. Prove government doesn't work to meet needs. Prevent institutions like news media from serving a useful purpose. Then patronage of the wealthy is the obvious next door, the trough for the swine and hoi-poloi. Get your trust fund and join the thugs. Squeal like a pig on demand.
Whatever their intentions, breaking stuff is easy and making stuff is hard. That explains a lot of it, I think. Let's do all the easy breaking stuff NOW, if we have any notion of the Ayn Randian Libertopia to come, we'll figure that out LATER.
The reason I call it "Galt's Dry Gulch" is because in Western lore to "dry-gulch" someone meant to ambush them in a lonely spot and murder them.
And in Galt's Dry Gulch, what happens when it *rains* is you get Kerr County Texas, and the Guadalupe River, and people dying because they don't want to spend their precious money on warnings and evacuation plans.
Gulch: Where the Water is NEVER Juuuust Right!
The question then is why Weiss specifically and the way above value $200M payoff that went with it? There must be any number of fash-friendly scruples-free newsroom types who could have done the takedown much less hamfistedly for a tiny fraction of that number and at least for a little while looked legitimate. What am I missing?
I suppose Acting President Voughtmiller understood that Bari and her antic-prone flair for obnoxious own-goaling would guarantee the biggest, most obvious “fuck you, because we can” possible.
It's not that ham-fisted -- she still has lots of Prestige Press peeps convinced that she's trying to fix rather than tank it. And being vastly unqualified is part of the cover-up!
"She couldn't be trying to wreck it. This is just Bari. She's *always* this incompetent!"
Hiring Weiss was the Baby Ellison's call, wasn't it? And the mind of the billionaire, such as us are not allowed to peer inside.
This is how it is under the fascist/oligarchic system: All the important decisions are made on a whim by one guy who thinks he's a genius, his factota rush to assure him it's a brilliant decision, the rest of us are left scratching our heads until the next whim comes along.
You have to keep in mind that her history shows Weiss as a world-class bullshitter. From a Princeton rabble-rouser to NYT op-ed is a leap many desire but few complete. One bit from that story about her University at Austin was some faculty guy deciding to quit but being talked out of it by Niall Ferguson. That level of bullshit is the foundation of Weiss' career, the ability to con people with soothing words that match their biases and desires, then failing upward as it turs to shit by conning the next level up.
I'd say the reason for Weiss is her position in the world of counter-institutions. Founder of The Free Press, with its tagline: "Honest, Independent, Fearless." And she founded a "university," marble bust of herself and all. Her activities please the oligarchs who've backed those, as it pleased Ellison to install her for suitable care of CBS.
She creates things that LOOK like other things, without actually BEING those other things. This looks like a newspaper, that looks like a university, hire her and she'll give you something that looks like TV news without being TV news.
Ah…that’s the symmetry I was seeking.
Let be be finale of seem
Creating an appearance of success was enough for Tubby, got him elected President, right?
Triumph of marketing over substance (which is why I despise, for example, Madonna)
Let's not forget that Trump actually IS a racist. It's just about the only thing he's got besides self-interest.
Title is on-point, and not just with Bari Weiss and CBS. What we got here is people who can't DO anything, who simply lack the competence or care necessary, and so what's left to them except to be the fuck-ups they are, but on a larger stage? Take this whole MAHA fiasco. Does anyone think RFK Jr. actually has an idea how remake the FDA, CDC, NIH, etc. into something approaching his fucked-up vision, whatever that may be? Of course not, so he does what he's capable of: Fire people, cancel grants and programs, simply refuse to do the job he's supposed to do. We won't be getting "healthy alternatives" to vaccines and other products of Big Pharma, we're just gonna get no vaccines.
Bari Weiss was going to create an alternative university, to show all us pointy-headed liberal academics how it's done. How did that go?
But we *will* be getting eugenics, thinly disguised as woo-woo health paranoia.
Yes, if eugenics only requires us to destroy things we have now without creating any new things to replace them.
To be fair, Bobby's idea of "remaking" those institutions is to make the rubble bounce. His fucked-up vision is to sell woo to people with bullshit, and the existence of those institutions is a major stmbling block for that. Bob and Bari and all the rest are all-in on moving fast and breaking things, but since the techbros left out "then replace it all with our rent-seeking product" from their mantra they're at a loss.
Look, people shouldn't be takin' all these damn diabetes drugs, they should eat good and do more pull-ups so they don't get the 'betes in the first place!
Now take that and do the "Deprive people of health care" care part because that's EZ n' fun, forget the "healthy diet and exercise" part because changing the personal habits of tens of millions of people isn't just difficult, it's damn near impossible.
On a side note, fret not about Junior's Nº2 Jim O'Neil – he's headed for the National Science Foundation, probly to stick a few kilos of gelignite under it.
They're already trying to sell off the supercomputer at National Center for Atmospheric Research, probably to bitcoin-mining.
Nice piece. Everything you say is pretty obvious, yet if others are saying it they are few and not working for major publications. I don’t really believe in Simulation Theory, but it would explain so much of how things have gone so far off the rails beyond anything the most pessimistic and paranoid of us could have imagined circa 1980. How does it make you feel, being one of the few to see the obvious? Do you give any thought to that?
Nice Spiro Agnew callback there, boss!
Pathetic Pile o'Pustulence!