Hi friends! Three quick things.
1. Thank you for subscribing and sharing. Still figuring out the best format for this so this week I'll to try to keep it shorter. Feedback is always appreciated!
2. To broaden the scope of this thing and make it more useful to you, I've enlisted the help of some of my smartest colleagues who're always deep in the shit. Starting this week, the brilliant Katie Notopoulos and Ryan Broderick (who is peerless in his understanding of dark corners of the net) will be contributing little bits of what they saw this week. This is very good news.
3. It's come to my attention that there are other newsletters similar to this one. Will Sommer's Right Richter is one of them and it is very good and it's been around for a while now. You should also subscribe to it, if you already don't!
To the week!
Travel Ban 2.0 Overturned by Hawaiian judge. So it's time for a good old fashioned Infowars Conspiracy!
How Influential is Infowars? An hour or so later the conservative leaning, IJR published a very similar piece about Hawaii "coincidences." People got mad; There was an Editors note amended to the story; the writer apologized to IJR staff; and a staff writer quit over it. Influence!
More on IJR (and their VP Pence ties) from BuzzFeed News's Steven Perlberg.
A take on the travel ban via Breitbart: "Trump Could ‘Go Full Andrew Jackson’ and Ignore Interference from Activist Judges" (Trump visited Jackson's grave this week).
Breitbart vs. Paul Ryan vs. Trump: Breitbart continues its stand against the healthcare bill by publishing an audio clip from October of House Speaker Paul Ryan telling GOP House members that he was “not going to defend Donald Trump — not now, not in the future.” More context, here.
Interesting absence in the healthcare debate: The deeply, deeply influential Drudge Report (read BI's good story on this).
How The Upside Down Reacted To Maddow's Tax Reveal Episode: At first, they cried "Deep State!" then they cried "Corporate Jihad!" And then basically just made fun of it.
DON'T APPROPRIATE #MAGA CULTURE:
Ryan Broderick writes in from London, where his mentions are only just recovering:
That Paul Joseph Watson Infowars dude called one of the BuzzFeed UK reporters a racist for making fun of white people on Friday. So then I called him a triggered millennial snowflake. And then he accused me of far-right appropriation. So now I'm a triggered sjw snowflake, but also by calling Paul Joseph Watson a triggered snowflake, I've appropriated their culture. A taste of my mentions for the last 12 hours:
To cap all of this off, I've also been negatively livetweeting the new Netflix Iron Fist show is (it's really shit), which the far-right accounts Paul Joseph Watson sent after me are REALLY defensive about. Apparently, there's a growing contingent among like the Reddit/4chan/MAGAsphere that Iron Fist is actually Good because leftist SJW critics called it racist (it's really racist).
"Based Preet" And Reddit's Fairweather Trolls:
Katie Notopoulos emails this gem from her Reddit travels, which I'm including in its entirety:
Charlie is one of the only people I know who watches 'Billions,' and I won’t deny that Billions is the main reason for my interest in the whole Preet Bahara firing saga. Preet's firing though, has been a little difficult for me to parse on a political front.
And I’m not the only person confused – the good folks over at r/The_Donald, Reddit’s alt-right HQ – seem similarly without a compass over this. As you might guess, there were plenty of racist comments about Bahara in the thread about his firing last week the reaction was gleeful – Trump got to flex his power as well as his Apprentice catchphrase! A few comments:
“DO NOT LET THE DOORKNOB HIT YOUR ASS ON THE WAY OUT MOTHERFUCKER!” “Attention whore!” “Cockmunchingcuckold.”
But these are fairweather trolls. This fall, r/The_Donald loved Preet Bahara. Stay with me: remember Comey from the FBI announcing they were investigating the additional Hillary emails? They were found on on a laptop Huma used that came up during…. Bahara’s investigation into Anthony Weiner for sexting a teen.
JUST 4 months ago, r/The_Donald hailed him as a hero:
THIS IS WHY COMEY COULDN'T LET THIS SLIDE! PREET BHARARA and the NYPD are leading the investigation into ANTHONY WEINER. PREET and his team found the emails, COMEY couldn't provide cover for this because his crooked team wasn't leading the investigation!
And these were the comments at the time:
“Based Preet!” “For those who don't know PREET, he does not fuck around. He's gone after big time crooked politicians in NY including The once untouchable Sheldon Silver. He is as clean as they come and hates corruption.”
“CAN'T BEAT BASED PREET” “based AF Preet! ALL HAIL PREET!”
More Pro-Trump New Media In The White House: After last week's WH briefing room scuffle between a Fox Radio reporter and a Gateway Pundit writer, Lauren Southern, a Canadian far-right YouTube personality made an appearance in the WH press room. Southern is fairly controversial (last week Vice called her "the Alt-Right's not-so-secret weapon"). She took a much-tweeted selfie in the briefing room and made a video with the title "I GOT WHITE HOUSE PRESS ACCESS?!"
Her take: A gathering of "self-important liberal elites all desperately huddling and trying to get their utterly useless questions in."
Fallout: Media Matters was none too pleased as you might gather from their article:
The Far-Right's obsession of the week: Censorship on social media.
- Infowars was complaining, tweeting, and posting all week about their posts (from individual writers) getting marked as Spam.
- Meanwhile, plenty of pro-Trumpers on Twitter were suggesting that they're getting less traction on Twitter lately. RTs are down, so are follows. New Right blogger and Twitter person, Mike Cernovich wrote about the potential "shadow banning" here (I suggest reading the comments, too).
This Week In White House Staffer Browser Histories: 4chan!
And so what did the pro-Trumpers do? First, they celebrated. Then, they reported him to the FBI.
Speaking of 4chan! More pranks. This time the target is the Wall Street little girl statue (which is becoming an increasingly exhausting cultural landmark):
