How The Five, America's most popular cable news program, shapes viewers' perspectives on politics and culture.

joelibutti.substack.com/p/negative-p...

One thing about me is that I will fight Nazis until I’m six feet in the ground.

The Anti-Social Century Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality.

Chosen solitude may be the most significant social fact of our age, @dkthomp.bsky.social writes. The emergence of the anti-social century is changing childhood social development, our physical infrastructure, and even our relationship to reality.

I'll say it until I'm blue in the face. There is just too much media, too much communication to be inauthentic. These days leople can sniff you out in an instant. Just be normal, it shouldn't be hard. @schatz.bsky.social really nails it in this interview.

www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Recently took a peek at Twitter and the disinformation is getting substantially more dangerous. Someone could get killed.

The tactics of constantly repeating outright lies, targeting specific people, repurposing years-old footage and presenting them as new is getting to another level. It’s scary.

30 Hours of Rogan with Guest Joe Libutti Toplines, Tabs, and Trends · Episode

Had a great chat with Adam Geller on Toplines, Tabs, & Trends. We tackled trust in institutions, shifts in media (hello, Joe Rogan), and where both parties should head next. Catch it on Spotify for the latest in public opinion.
open.spotify.com/episode/3BAK...

I'd never actually listened to Joe Rogan's podcast despite it being the most popular in the world. After the election made its cultural significance inarguable, I spent time listening, totaling 30 hours, hoping to get a sense for how it shapes listeners' views.

open.substack.com/pub/joelibut...

Title: "Participatory Disinformation The “Big Lie” during the 2020 Election and the January 6, 2021 Attack on the U.S. Capitol" This is a visual graphic explaining the dynamics between “political elites” and “audiences” in this phenomenon. Political elites are at the top of the graph, audiences at the bottom, with several arcing arrows from elites to audiences on the right, and from audiences to elites on the left, in a kind of clockwise motion, showing a cyclical process. The arcing arrows have labels, explained below. Political elites repeatedly spread the message of a rigged election, which set an expectation of voter fraud among their audiences. This became a “frame” through which events around the election were interpreted. Online “crowds” generated false/misleading stories of voter fraud, reinforcing the frame. Sometimes these stories were produced intentionally (with knowledge that they were false). But often they were generated sincerely, through misinterpretation. Activists and social media influencers helped amplify these stories, passing the content up to the political elites. Political elites echoed the false/misleading stories back to their audiences, reinforcing the frame, building a sense of collective grievance. As audiences echoed and reiterated this growing sense of grievance, violent language and calls to action increased. Political elites then began to mobilize and organize the audiences… into a series of rallies and protests. And one of these led to the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6.

Here's a graphic explaining how the Big Lie was seeded and mobilized into the events of January 6, 2021 through a kind of "participatory disinformation" process. Trump's "war on drugs" refrain could catalyze a similar kind of participatory propaganda and mobilization cycle.

RFK Jr. attacked the CDC’s ‘fascism’ and likened vaccinating children to abuse by the Catholic Church Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick for Health and Human Services secretary, also argued for jailing vaccine scientists in previously unreported comments at autism conferences.

New: Recordings from private autism conferences show Trump HHS pick Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vilifying & conspiracy theorizing about agencies he's set to lead. Videos show RFK Jr comparing CDC vaccine programs to "Nazi death camps" & calling for researchers to be jailed. www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...

If Democrats are so smart, they should be able to explain complicated things simply. How about:

"The GOP wants to give the new president unlimited power over nonprofits, letting him label any group he disagrees with as a terrorist supporter—without any checks or fair process."

Let me say something that is controversial because our brains are broken:

Vaccines are a miracle and amazing

Graph of posts and likes per day over the past 11 days showing growth from 2.2M posts per day to 6.5M posts per day and 11.7M likes per day to 37.5M likes per day.

Graph of follows per day and unique users following someone per day over the past 11 days showing growth from 2.1M follows per day and 417k people following someone to 41.5M follows per day and 2.9M people following someone. The growth is clearly exponential.

Bluesky by the Numbers today:

1.3M people Posted 6.5M posts
2.3M people Liked 37.5M posts
2.9M people Followed 41.5M people (!!!!!)

Over 1,000,000 people joined the network!!!!!!

We broke all-time traffic records by over 30% today across the board.

Follows are up 20x from 2 weeks ago!

Holy Moly

And it's why the Rogan crowd fits so well. Their personas rely on being the underdog, perpetually David v. Goliath, fighting the "mainstream" despite being the most popular podcast in existence and reaching further than most news outlets they claim to be exposing.

GM. Is Boebert for EdSec a bit we're doing or is that real?

So Matt Gaetz is about to be the subject of a damning House Ethics Committee report exposing his illegal behavior… and in order to give him a pretense under which he could resign and evade accountability… Trump offered him the role of the top law enforcement official in the United States of America.

Gaetz resigns from Congress He is Trump's pick to be attorney general.

Already resigned. Any suggestion that he is a sacrificial lamb is silly. When has Trump played by the old rules (of accepting losing one or two noms)?