CEC 2 conserv ent cmplx
see main
also echo/ escal
SEE MEDIA CONSOLIDATION MONOPOLY
SEE FASCISM
NEGLECTED 7 26
aha tweets are more infotainment than info?
walter benjamin on nazi art
https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trumpism
// AM SNIPER, AM VIGILANTE MUSK FAN JAMALNO REVENGE JUST IDEOL, MUSLIM FAM MASSACRED
AN 7 26
The twisted vile of Trump’s America exposed in Apple’s new 'Cape Fear'
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rww
08/24/2026
by
- Robert Jeffress accuses James Talarico of attempting to "prostitute the name of Jesus Christ, to turn the Jesus of the Bible into some woke Messiah that is contrary to what the Bible teaches."
- William Wolfe was very offended by the latest Toy Story film: "It was feminist slop with Jesse as the 'girl boss' and Buzz Lightyear totally emasculated."
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// recent movie while fam muslim shot am vigil
8 26
Run Hide Fight is a 2020 American action thriller film written and directed by Kyle Rankin. The film stars Isabel May, Radha Mitchell, Thomas Jane, Eli Brown, Olly Sholotan, Britton Sear, Cyrus Arnold, Catherine Davis, Treat Williams, and Barbara Crampton. It follows a teen girl who goes to save a group of hostages at her high school from a quartet of school shooters. The film's title derives from the "Run. Hide. Fight." procedure one can use during the event of an active shooter.[3][4]
The film had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 10, 2020, and was released by The Daily Wire in North America on their platform on January 14, 2021. It received generally negative reviews from critics.
A standalone sequel, Run Hide Fight: Infidels, is scheduled to be released in September 2026.
...
The film has a score of 30% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 20 reviews, with an average rating of 5.20/10.[11] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 13 out of 100 based on reviews from 6 critics, indicating "overwhelming dislike."[12]
The film was described as "fundamentally tasteless" by Jonathan Romney of Screen International, though he praised its "strong performances from young stars".[13] Guy Lodge of Variety compared the film to a cross between Elephant (2003) and The Hunger Games (2012), and criticized the film for being "merely pedestrian at the levels of direction, craft and performance" and "a grab for attention by peddling an ambiguous line on gun control and eye-for-an-eye morality."[14]
David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter stated, "Half-hearted posturing aside, this is Die Hard in a high school, with a seventeen-year-old female John McClane getting motivational input from her dead cancer mom as she dismantles the murderous plot using little more than gut instincts."[15]
David Ehrlich of IndieWire criticized director Rankin for several of the tropes he implemented, stating that the film is "a glib, artless, and reprehensibly stupid thriller that doesn't even have enough on its mind to be provocative."[16] Robbie Collin of The Telegraph negatively compared the ringleader of the school shooters to the Joker from The Dark Knight (2008) and noted that "May's performance feels as heroic as the character she's playing" but that the film "makes no attempt to grapple with the American school shooting as a nihilistic cultural phenomenon."[17]
Sequel
Main article: Run Hide Fight: Infidels
In February 2026, it was reported that Jonathan Majors had started shooting his first film in four years for The Daily Wire which was said to be an untitled action thriller written and directed by Kyle Rankin produced by Bonfire Legend that would be in the vein of Red Dawn and Toy Soldiers to be produced by Ben Shapiro and Dallas Sonnier.[18] In April of that year, it was reported that the film would be titled Run Hide Fight: Infidels and would be a standalone sequel to Rankin and Daily Wire's Run Hide Fight.[19]
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AN 11 25
Do you ever wonder why Republican propaganda appears to be everywhere while solid, informative news keeps going belly-up? It’s all about money, author Katherine Stewart tells Bulwark. Republican propaganda has it and news does not.
Fox News channels and amplifies rage at a carefully curated target, which never appears to be the Republican Party and that channeling “has worked overwhelmingly to the advantage of the authoritarian right wing,” Stewart said.
You can try to blame it on new technology, or the kind of reporters working in the industry, or the theory that the media has simply come to reflect the biases and polarization of the public. But it all really comes back to money and the moneyed interests who value driving the argument.
“Today … 40 percent of all local TV news stations are under the control of the three largest broadcast conglomerates: Sinclair Broadcast Group, Gray Television, and Nexstar Media Group,” said Stewart. “Their stations — each company now owns about 100 affiliated with ABC, CBS, FOX, or NBC — operate in more than 80 percent of U.S. media markets. A conglomerate with a distinct and well-documented right-wing bias, such as Sinclair, has an outsize footprint on our information ecosystem.”
And under the Trump administration, the concentration of the media business has accelerated.
“Consider that Trump cleared the way for [“Trumpy billionaire Larry Ellison, and his son, David”] to merge their Skydance Media company with Paramount in order to gain control of CBS News. Thanks to this preferential treatment, the Ellisons’ new media giant is now in the running to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes the crown jewel of the media marketplace: CNN,” said Stewart. “Other companies adapt swiftly to the new cronyistic landscape. Comcast, which previously drew scrutiny from the Trump administration for its own efforts to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, recently donated up to $10 million to fund Trump’s White House “renovation.”
These major media executives feel little need to satisfy any mission to genuinely inform the public, said Stewart. What they want is profits, and hate-based rage-bait is generally more profitable than information.
“Fox News blazed the trail when it reconceived the product that cable news produces: Instead of the straight story, information became fodder for entertainment, persuasion, and grievance. Under the direction of Roger Ailes, the outlet applied all the tricks of demagoguery to expand and consolidate its reach, including a hand-in-glove coordination with the GOP,” Stewart said.
These same companies “protect their turf” by protecting governments that decline to regulate their anti-competitive moves.
A similar drive toward oligopoly profits is at play in the tech industry, Stewart warned. When a government grants and enforces an effective monopoly to some technologist, they are “likely to use just as much misinformation and manipulation as they can get away with to protect their privileged position.”
The corporations that own the tech industry are also in the hands of plutocrats, who generally favor right-wing governments “because they want to keep as much of their money as possible—and prevent the little people from telling them what to do with it, said Stewart.
“Consider Peter Thiel, who identifies those who wish to end tax exemptions for the super-rich as possible representatives of ‘the antichrist,’” said Stewart. “Or consider Jeff Bezos, who is undermining The Washington Post’s long tradition of exemplary journalism by turning the Opinion section into an regime-friendly advocate for ‘personal liberties.’”
There’s no pretending this can all be overcome “simply by reducing partisan divides and promoting civility,” said Stweart. “… We need to confront and challenge media and tech oligopolies and establish a system that produces journalism committed to the goal of any free press, which is to inform the public and promote the truth.”
Read the New Republic report at this link.
REF
On a recent trip through Florida, my Uber driver was intent on letting me know just how truly evil Nancy Pelosi is. I attempted to deflect, as I often do in such circumstances, but he persisted. Didn’t I think it was outrageous that Democrats want to raise rich people’s taxes? What about “abolishing the police”?
“A lot of people want something for nothing,” he said. “They want to get things for free. I don’t believe in that. I say if you don’t work, don’t come looking for handouts.”
He continued in this vein, sprinkling his anger and frustration with right-wing talking points on the scourge of immigrant criminals and the Biden crime family.
“Where did you hear that?” I finally asked when he got around to his spiel on open borders.
“They were talking about it on Fox News,” he said.
With unobtrusive questioning, I learned that he had worked in health care and was recently laid off. He was extremely concerned with keeping his car free of smudges and scuff marks because, as he told me, he found it very expensive to clean and maintain. When he wasn’t venting at the Democrats, he was bashing Uber. “They’re taking more and more from us drivers,” he said. “It’s impossible to make a living.”
It’s a tale as old as time. A skewed economic system delivers stress and frustration to a large group of people who previously imagined that they had a path to a decent life, and somehow all that rage gets channeled into a reactionary brand of politics.
It’s the “channeling” part of the story that interests me here. Rage is natural, but it isn’t a constant. It can be amplified—and it can be directed. That is pretty much what has been happening for the past two decades. And the channeling, while hardly monolithic, has worked overwhelmingly to the advantage of the authoritarian right wing. It is impossible to overstate the damage to American political culture of a rising right-wing media ecosystem, centered on Fox News. The question is not whether this is happening but why.
There was once a simple theory about media bias. It said that the problem with media is all about the kind of people who enter the profession of journalism. This has mostly been a cherished theory of the right, because the usual story is that journalists are, by nature, liberal types in an Amtrak corridor who view “real Americans” with contempt. But there is a left-wing version, which says that professional journalists are all “establishment” types militantly committed to perpetuating the status quo.
A second theory holds that the media has simply come to reflect the biases and polarization of the public. This story is usually accompanied with hoary truisms, like “for every Fox, there’s an MSNBC.” It’s the notion that media caters to partisans on left and right with equal fervor, dishing up whatever red or blue meat they would like.
A third idea blames it all on new technology, with the premise that social media and handheld devices, by their very nature, mess with people’s minds and produce a distorted media landscape.
These theories are incomplete at best. First, they fail to acknowledge that right-wing and left-wing media spheres are not equal and opposite poles of a symmetrical system. This fact has been proven in careful studies of reporting patterns across many years.
“The right is more insular, it is more extreme, and it is more partisan,” said the director of research at the Berkman Klein Center, which conducted one such study. Indeed, while both left- and right-wing media spread false stories, a summary of the research from the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy notes, “Misinformation is currently predominantly a pathology of the right.” A study out of the University of Amsterdam, published earlier this year, asserts that far-right populist parties undermine democracy with misinformation as a matter of political strategy.
Importantly, the political impact of these two media spheres is not remotely comparable. One study, examining voting patterns among viewers in regions where Fox was off the air for technical reasons for certain periods indicates that Fox alone may have shifted between 3 percent and 6 percent of the votes in recent elections.
But perhaps the most important feature of the media landscape today comes down to money. Specifically, the endless, flowing river of oligarchic monopoly money.
Well-functioning media systems have generally included some kind of public constraint or oversight that keeps journalism from veering too far from its fundamental mission of informing the public. This public involvement can take the form of regulation (through broadcast licenses, for example), through support for large public broadcasting corporations (the BBC in the U.K., CBC in Canada), or through a variety of other mechanisms (like the old Fairness Doctrine in the United States).
In the U.S., public constraint on media has largely evaporated. But that doesn’t mean that the system has been handed over to “the market.” Today, for example, 40 percent of all local TV news stations are under the control of the three largest broadcast conglomerates: Sinclair Broadcast Group, Gray Television, and Nexstar Media Group. Their stations—each company now owns about 100 affiliated with ABC, CBS, FOX, or NBC—operate in more than 80 percent of U.S. media markets. A conglomerate with a distinct and well-documented right-wing bias, such as Sinclair, has an outsize footprint on our information ecosystem.
Under the Trump administration, the concentration of the media business has accelerated. And the administration has made it abundantly clear that the pathway to further consolidation involves pleasing (and funneling money to) the regime and its ruler. The news cycle related to Jimmy Kimmel’s exclusion and subsequent reinstatement has come and gone, but the real story endures. It was always fundamentally about securing regulatory approval for the CBS merger as a stepping stone to the CBS-Warner merger, which will leave us with a media behemoth under the thumb of Trumpy billionaire Larry Ellison, and his son, David.
Consider that Trump cleared the way for the Ellisons to merge their Skydance Media company with Paramount in order to gain control of CBS News. Thanks to this preferential treatment, the Ellisons’ new media giant is now in the running to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes the crown jewel of the media marketplace: CNN. Other companies adapt swiftly to the new cronyistic landscape. Comcast, which previously drew scrutiny from the Trump administration for its own efforts to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery, recently donated up to $10 million to fund Trump’s White House “renovation.”
It appears that these major media executives feel little need to satisfy any mission to genuinely inform the public. They want profits. And at least since the dawn of yellow journalism in the late nineteenth century, hate-based rage-bait has been seen as generally more profitable than information. The idea that such outlets are news organizations is increasingly quaint. Fox News blazed the trail when it reconceived the product that cable news produces: Instead of the straight story, information became fodder for entertainment, persuasion, and grievance. Under the direction of Roger Ailes, the outlet applied all the tricks of demagoguery to expand and consolidate its reach, including a hand-in-glove coordination with the GOP. This explains part—but only part—of the right-wing tilt in the media system.
The other part has to do with the kind of profits involved. The major media corporations in the U.S. aim for the kind of oligopoly profits that economists call “rents.” They make money by protecting their turf. The best way to protect their turf is to have governments that decline to regulate their anti-competitive moves—or, as in the present, that actively encourage anti-competitive outcomes that favor the regime. In short, they accumulate these rents by locking themselves into the economic and political structure.
One could argue that the mainstream media is not the only kid in town, and that the rise of social media, bloggers, and a thousand points of light on the internet have created a new landscape. But the role of the majors in anchoring the center and edges of national conversations should not be underestimated. My Florida Uber driver illustrates the point well. He was clearly picking up misinformation from a wide range of sources. But when it came to justifying his positions to me, he cited Fox News as holy writ.
A similar drive toward oligopoly profits is at play in the tech industry. The tech determinist narrative says that evil is built into the social media machine and its various hardware devices. But this just isn’t true. There is no natural law that says that social media, or any other technology, must be used for misinformation and manipulation. However, when you grant and enforce an effective monopoly to some technologist, they are likely to use just as much misinformation and manipulation as they can get away with to protect their privileged position.
One could still ask why a system that is so corrupted with money and regulatory policy would necessarily tilt to the right. The obvious answer is that the money that controls these corporations is in the hands of plutocrats, who generally favor right-wing governments because they want to keep as much of their money as possible—and prevent the little people from telling them what to do with it. Consider Peter Thiel, who identifies those who wish to end tax exemptions for the super-rich as possible representatives of “the antichrist.” Or consider Jeff Bezos, who is undermining The Washington Post’s long tradition of exemplary journalism by turning the Opinion section into an regime-friendly advocate for “personal liberties.”
But there’s a more subtle reason why these systems tilt away from progress and democracy. It’s because they are inherently corrupt and unreasonable. The last thing our tech, media, and corporate oligopolies want is an informed public, carrying on a rational debate about how we should govern ourselves. Their aim is to create dependence, and they succeed in doing so by filling up Uber drivers and others with narratives that appeal to resentment and frustration. The best way to control people, after all, is to get them to control themselves.
The main solutions, I hope, are clear. Let’s not pretend this can all be overcome simply by reducing partisan divides and promoting civility. And let’s set aside the idea that a few new apps to limit screen time or tame the worst bits of social media will have much of an effect. The fundamental problem is money and control. We need to confront and challenge media and tech oligopolies and establish a system that produces journalism committed to the goal of any free press, which is to inform the public and promote the truth.
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AHA VIOLATES JINGOISTIC NAT’L, MAN NOT COMPASSION
AN AH 7 25
ALTHO... es Gunn's new "Superman" movie is performing well at the box office, many right-wing media outlets are attacking it as "woke." The film touches on immigration, much to the chagrin of Fox News and others.
In an biting article published on July 21, Salon's Amanda Marcotte argues that right-wing media attacks on Gunn's film aren't just silly, but underscore their troubling view of the world.
"Every time there's a pop cultural phenomenon — a blockbuster movie, a chart-topping single, a hot new fashion trend — conservative media and MAGA influencers rush to denounce it as anti-American, anti-family or even demonic," Marcotte observes. "Labubu dolls are Satanic. The 'Barbie' movie is anti-male. Conservative men are being traumatized by rap songs informing them that women can experience sexual arousal — not that said conservative men are willing to believe it."
READ MORE: 'Can't beat the president': Former Trump lawyer issues major prediction about Rupert Murdoch
Marcotte continues, "The reasons right-wing pundits engage in this are transparent. The biggest is simple attention economics. Glomming onto popular topics is a good way to attract new audiences, especially those who may not be that political, and lure them into engaging with reactionary content. It also helps feed the paranoia that fuels the right, by propping up the narrative that all of pop culture is out to destroy them and their way of life."
The "MAGA talking heads" attacking Gunn and his "Superman" film, Marcotte observes, are "mad" because "Superman is an immigrant" in the movie.
"My initial reaction when I saw right-wing media conduct its all-too-predictable tantrum over the new 'Superman' movie was that it’s just more of the same: Claim it’s 'woke' propaganda, work the audience into a tizzy of boycott threats and reap the reward of alienating their base further from the rest of society so that the MAGA cult is all they have left," Marcotte explains. "Which, to be fair, is bad enough. But the actual content of the complaints made this whole exercise even more sinister."
The Salon journalist continues, "The attacks on 'Superman' are part of a larger effort by the right to completely rewrite history, so they can pretend that being a patriotic American means embracing authoritarian values…. Immigrants and kindness are both canceled in Donald Trump’s America, so the right was outraged. Jesse Watters of Fox News 'joked' that Superman should have 'MS-13' on his cape…. There have been a lot of dutiful, fact-check-style responses pointing out that Superman is an immigrant and the character was always 'woke,' in that he has a history of fighting fascists and KKK members. But in a sense, that was unnecessary, because everyone already knows this. That's where this Fox News gambit goes from being stupid to deeply sinister: They are asking their audience to deny not just the facts, but a fact we all grew up with, something woven into the DNA of our American identity."
READ MORE:'Reeks of regret': Republicans suffering 'remorse and shame' over 'grudgingly' obeying Trump
:{Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.
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Sorbo WIFE JUST POPPED 7 25
ideol entre? ~ limo liberal wst voast elite hollywood gomorrah
Conservatives’ favorite Hollywood couple, Kevin and Sam Sorbo, were on hand. Sam Sorbo portrayed the COVID-19 pandemic-related closure of schools as an opportunity for pastors to encourage parents to homeschool and avoid the “nefarious force” at work in “government schools”:
Nefarious forces in our government schools teach children disdain for their parents’ beliefs? and disgust for our country, programming them to question their own biology, obey authority, and despise themselves?—to believe that they are accidents of nature and that survival of the fittest is the law of the land. This is child abuse. Looting, rioting?, and self-destruction are the natural byproducts of atheism, hedonism, and abortion—survival of the fittest. The ideological anti-God virus that now controls most of our public education institutions is a disease of the mind that no vaccine can ever cure. We declare the conflict of interest of a government that teaches its citizens to worship it instead of their God.
rww 920
https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/the-hunt-is-a-fantasy-for-the-conservatives-who-want-to-believe-they-are-victims-not-victimizers/
no lnx
‘The Hunt’ is a fantasy for the conservatives who want to believe they are victims — not victimizers
Written by Matthew Rozsa March 16, 2020
The following contains spoilers from “The Hunt,” which you might as read anyway because it’s time better spent than watching the movie.
President Donald Trump’s supporters aren’t victims, they’re victimizers. Shame on “The Hunt” for pandering to one of their most cherished fantasies – that they are persecuted.
I felt the need to begin this article with those two sentences because “The Hunt,” a new horror film directed by Craig Zobel (“Compliance,” “Z for Zachariah”) and written by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof (“Lost,” “Star Trek Into Darkness”), tells the story of liberal elites who kidnap 12 conservatives — heavily implied to be Trump supporters since they’re often referred to as “deplorables” — in order to hunt them for sport.
There isn’t much in the way of plot in “The Hunt.” The Trump supporters are picked off one by one until only two survivors remain (played by “GLOW” star Betty Gilpin and Wayne Duvall) and they turn the tables on the liberal elites (the leader is played by Oscar winner Hilary Swank). There are a couple of plot twists thrown into the narrative to give the illusion of cleverness, but the film’s entire story could otherwise fit on the back of a postcard. None of the kills are particularly memorable, all of the characters are two-dimensional stereotypes, and the pacing is so brisk that the movie feels like it’s over before it has had a chance to start. Even if “The Hunt” were completely apolitical, it would still be mediocre and forgettable.
Alas, “The Hunt” is very much about politics — namely, validating right-wingers who desperately want to believe they are among the wronged of the world. While Zobel has said that the movie’s goal is to “poke at both sides of the aisle equally,” there are three problems with that statement. The first is that an early draft of the script reportedly depicted working-class conservatives as the heroes, suggesting that the film always had a pro-conservative agenda. (Although, it should be noted that Gilpin’s character Crystal, is actually an apolitical schmoe who was hapless enough to get mixed up in this business because of liberal incompetence.)
The second is that the film’s attempt at “balance” is to reveal near the end that there this brutal hunt never actually existed until right-wing conspiracy theorists incorrectly accused several liberal elites of participating in one, thereby inspiring them to actually create it. It’s a “twist” that still manages to make the liberals into monsters and the conservatives into, at worst, fear-mongering fools . . . and is also the only significant shade thrown at the pro-Trump side in this story.
The third, and by far most important, problem with Zobel’s statement is that it reduces politics to a game, cheapening the real-world issues that impact people’s lives and making it all seem like so much pointless bickering.
Take the issues cited by the film’s liberal elite bad guys. As I watched the film I made amental list of the most prominent issues that they cited as justification for conducting a hunt: Gun control, global warming, anti-racism, immigration, gay rights. These are not issues in which each side is morally equal.Wanting to save lives from gun violence is not equal to perverting the Second Amendment to satisfy right-wing delusions. Striving to stop climate change from destroying civilization is not equal to denying it because conservative dogma demands you to do so (and note how Trump’s anti-science agenda has exacerbated the COVID-19 outbreak in this country). Being horrified by how Trump has stoked the flames of bigotry in this country is not equal to being okay with or outright supporting it. Empathizing with undocumented immigrants is not equal to persecuting them. Supporting gay rights is not equal to the bogus claims of “religious freedom” cited by those who hate the LGBTQ community.
These are only a handful of examples from the film. The movie also references issues like cultural appropriation, anti-Semitism, the AIDS epidemic, abortion rights, atheism, and food safety concerns, and has characters use partisan nomenclature like “cuck,” “snowflake” and “deplorable.” (Even Fox News host Sean Hannity, the ultimate deplorable, gets a shout-out). The writers seemed to believe that merely acknowledging that something exists is tantamount to making a meaningful observation about it, a problem with much of modern American satire. Unfortunately, because most of these boxes from the Trump-era zeitgeist are checked for the sole purpose of giving the villains a motive for hunting the heroes, the message winds up being that liberal political concerns are nothing more than an excuse for putting one group of people in Team A and another in Team B.
Yet the difference between the pro-Trump and anti-Trump camps is not Coke versus Pepsi, Tweedledee versus Tweedledum. By telling a story based on that premise, and then have the liberals take things too far by actively hunting Trump supporters, the writers of “The Hunt” encourage right-wingers to believe something they yearn to convince the world is true — namely, that they are the victims in modern America.
It doesn’t take much intuition to glean why they want to feel this way. Most people don’t want to view themselves as bullies and aggressors, so when their beliefs lead to malevolent results, they have to come up with rationalizations that justify them. This is why conspiracy theories like QAnon and Pizzagate remain so popular in right-wing circles. It is why white nationalists claim that they are being “replaced” by non-whites rather than admit that they aim to recreate explicitly white supremacist social hierarchies. It is why Trump depicted himself as the victim of a deep -tate conspiracy — to thunderous applause — when he was investigated after his campaign colluded with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, and did so again after he was impeached for trying to extort Ukraine into helping him defeat Joe Biden in 2020.
It is why conservatives, when trying to vilify liberals, love to depict them as out-of-touch, wealthy elitists, even though right-wing ideology blames the poor for their own poverty and diminishes or outright denies how in modern America, the rich oppress the working class, white people oppress non-white people, cishet people oppress the LGBTQ community, men oppress women, and Christians oppress non-Christians. No one wants to believe that they are the bad guy in the movie of life, and what better way to convince them of this than to release a movie in which they are blameless victims literally hunted for their conservative convictions?
In retrospect, it is poetically fitting that the very assumptions encouraged by “The Hunt” nearly lead to the film’s own undoing. When the movie was supposed to be released last year, it was swiftly attacked by Trump himself, who said it was intended “to inflame and cause chaos,” claimed it was made by people who “like to call themselves ‘Elite,’ but they are not Elite,” and said it proved that Hollywood is racist and “full of great Anger and Hate!” He also implied that the movie would provoke violence, and after the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, Universal Pictures decided to cancel its release at the time. While the movie executives would like us to think it was because of the fear of mass shootings or respect for the victims, the fact that the release was canceled so shortly after Trump denounced the film as dangerous makes it difficult to believe that his opposition wasn’t a crucial factor.
To be clear: I do not support censorship. As reprehensible as “The Hunt” is, I do not question the filmmakers’ right to create it. I also do not wish harm on anyone who disagrees with me. The point of this article is not to say that “The Hunt” shouldn’t have been released, even ifI can’t help but smirk at the irony of Trump trying to suppress a movie without realizing that it’s a love letter to his supporters.The point is that if you want to watch a thought-provoking, socially responsible horror movie, you can check out “The Invisible Man” or “Midsommar” or “Get Out.”
“The Hunt” isn’t satire; it is propaganda of the lowest sort. If you agree with this movie’s message, there is something seriously wrong with your soul. Its only value is in helping dispel the myth of Hollywood’s supposed liberal bias.
“The Hunt” is currently playing in theaters.
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/last-years-gun-massacres-put-the-kibosh-on-a-movie-about-liberals-hunting-deplorables-six-months-later-no-problem/
chic trib
the satiric thriller “The Hunt” sure as hell didn’t look like a satiric thriller in its original trailer seven months ago. Right-wing commentators, including our president, couldn’t believe Universal backed a film about scummy, murderous liberals hunting “deplorables” for sport. And the movie apparently sided with the liberals! Sheer depravity.
Then came the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, which proved too much for anyone’s comfort. “The Hunt” would have to wait on the shelf for a while.
Now it’s here. At the risk of blowing its central twist, Universal rethought its approach and issued a [semi\-insane new trailer ](last month. This isn’t a movie lionizing bloodthirsty liberals; audiences now learn they’re the bad guys, see? The new trailer hints at opaque story elements dealing with a vicious “deplorables” joke that gets out of hand, and the price paid for that joke. It’s worth watching these trailers, both new [and old](
“The Hunt” itself hasn’t changed, unfortunately. It’s a lame and weaselly thing, made strangely more frustrating by some excellent performers.
The script by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof, who worked on “The Leftovers,” jabs at liberals, conservatives, the Twitterati, cancel culture, climate crisis deniers, every side of every sociological issue. That may sounds promisingly small-d democratic. But the movie can’t stop congratulating itself for its cleverness long enough to take off as a movie.
On the other hand: Betty Gilpin. The breakout star of “Glow,” whose wry comic timing doesn’t stick with any one time zone, does a lot here. Too much, sometimes; at times, she’s mugging like she’s getting paid by the facial expression. But she’s a fearsome action presence as well as a screwball heroine under wraps. She periodically saves “The Hunt” from itself.
Unlike the new trailer, let’s not laundry-list the narrative devices formerly known as “twists.” In a location undisclosed at the start, a dozen strangers from Mississippi, Wyoming, New York and elsewhere wake up to realize they’ve been drugged and dropped into an outdoor game of catch and kill. They’re being hunted by a cabal of sniffy, insufferable, painfully woke liberals with guns, grenades, land mines and bows and arrows. Hilary Swank, as the icy queen bee of The Manor, remains off-screen for much of the set-up, while Gilpin, her glowering adversary, takes care of business.
Tone problems, first off: “The Hunt” tries to get laughs with grenades down someone’s pants and then, 20 seconds later, it’s taking the maiming and the impaling seriously. Then it’s a joke again, then seriousjokeseriousjoke. It’s neither very funny nor very scary. It’s merely very gory.
Flashbacks lurch into the story framework around the midpoint, reorienting our perception of what’s going on, and why the game of ideological Twister is being played at all. For those who enjoyed [“The Cabin in the Woods,”](or the more recent tricked-up bamboozler [“Bad Times at the El Royale,”](
At one point Gilpin’s character, a Mississippi belle of the brawl, speculates on her survival odds against a cabal of well-armed elites. “It depends,” she says, “whether they’re smart pretending to be idiots, or idiots pretending to be smart.” “The Hunt” is a little of both.
an 220
https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/do-cop-shows-like-chicago-p-d-reinforce-misperceptions-about-race-and-criminal-justice-a-new-study-says-yes/
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1219 re-analysis:
conservative entertainment complex
southpark republicans
action hero WWE
shock jocks
Fox upstart distant 4th network; ended up with Simpsons how?
Bifurcation: talk radio went right ad humor/satire went left because of hard-wiring, ability to manage complexity/ambiguity:
right is about protection from threat, so has to amped constantly to get effect?
https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-different-are-sean-hannity-and-samantha-bee-a-media-scholar-explains-how-right-wing-outrage-and-left-liberal-satire-have-reshaped-our-world/
Written by Paul Rosenberg / Salon December 8, 2019
Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly are masters of outrage — not just the emotion, but a genre of political theater — just as Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart are masters of ironic satire. They’re poles apart, and yet — ironically or outrageously — they’re profoundly similar, both in how they’re impacting their audiences, and why their genres emerged when they did. That’s perhaps the central thesis of “Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States,” by Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, who’s both a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Delaware and an improv comedian with the troupe ComedySportz Philadelphia. That’s among the many different hats she wears.
The idea for the book, Young explains, came from two decades of research on the effects of late-night comedy, and always encountering the same question: “How come your examples are all from liberal satire?” Of course, she also knew that the political talk genre was dominated by conservatives, and as she read the work of scholars who studied that genre the same way she studied satire, “I started seeing these sort of parallel tracks,” she recalls. “And that opened up this possibility that perhaps these are the natural genres to which each of these sides are drawn.”
https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/in-right-wing-media-universe-trump-is-winning-on-impeachment/
no lnx
In right-wing media universe, Trump is winning on impeachment
Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon November 15, 2019
There was a lot of talk on Thursday about the theater criticism of the impeachment hearings coming from some quarters of the mainstream media. Press Watch’s Dan Froomkin wrote a must-read piece here at Salon taking them to task for trivializing the event and creating the impression among many people who didn’t watch the live testimony that it was boring and worthless. This is another example of the media’s insatiable need for drama, explaining once again how Donald Trump, a carnival sideshow act if ever there was one, wound up in the White House.
Less discussed but equally important was the coverage of the hearings in the right-wing media. They too indulged in theater criticism and sports-style analysis but while some mainstream media reporters declared the hearings dull, they at least reported the testimony accurately. The right-wing media presented a version of the hearings totally at odds with reality.
The Trump TV flagship, Fox News, adopted a novel way of spreading its own propaganda during the hearings themselves. In the guise of on-screen, pop-up informational cards about the witnesses, they delivered Trump talking points. Media Matters’ Eric Kleefeld gathered several examples, notably those in which House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is described on screen:
Bill Taylor, the acting ambassador to Ukraine, was helpfully described this way:
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent was similarly characterized as someone who had no first-hand knowledge of the events to which he was testifying. This was, of course, the lame official talking point of the day, carried forth by every right-wing media talker on TV and radio, apparently sure that no one would notice that the most damning “first-person” information had been public for weeks: the White House “rough transcript” of President Trump flagrantly attempting to bribe the president of Ukraine. These witnesses were merely filling in background details of the conspiracy that Trump and his henchmen had been plotting for months.
Fox News’ evening opinion shows went a step further and described the hearings as a devastating defeat for the Democrats and an overwhelming victory for President Trump.Indeed, after watching for a couple of hours, Fox viewers could easily assume that the Democrats were going to have to close down the inquiry immediately.
Tucker Carlson thought the glass was half full, saying “it was like Christmas and New Year’s and the Super Bowl all put together.” Sean Hannity took the opposite tack, calling it “the worst show on earth” and dubbing the Democrats on the committee “dumb, bad, stupid and shallow corrupt idiots.” Each in his own way surely reassured the president and his supporters that the Democrats had completely failed to deliver and it had all been a rousing success for him.
In between those two guys, Laura Ingraham made fun of the witnesses and declared that the Democratic impeachment had collapsed.
Meanwhile, right-wing operativeJoe diGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing, both of whom are professionally involved in the case— having worked with Rudy Giuliani to spread nasty rumors about Friday’s witness, former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch — appeared with Lou Dobbs on Fox Business and declared that the State Department and FBI agents on foreign assignment are all controlled by George Soros, who for some reason is trying to take over Ukraine.
Holy Shit! Rudy/Trump confidant DiGenova spouts wild list of bananas conspiracy theories after hearing: “There is no doubt that George Soros controls a large part of the foreign service part of the State Department and the activities of FBI agents overseas who work with NGOs.” pic.twitter.com/J7ulAKXvb3
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 14, 2019
Joe McCarthy would have been proud. That odious anti-Semitic comment drew a rebuke from the Anti-Defamation League, along with a demand that diGenova be barred from appearing on the network.
That ugly accusation made the rest of the juvenile insults hurled at Taylor and Kent seem tame by comparison. One guest on Carlson’s show said they “looked like people who sat by themselves at recess.” Hannity guest Mark Levin said they reminded him of “two homeless guys.” On talk radio, Rush Limbaugh mocked them as “self-important nerds who believe in their own superiority.”
All these people thoroughly enjoyed themselves.
They are literally attacking one of the impeachment witnesses for…….drinking water pic.twitter.com/vVSrCcVNcS
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) November 14, 2019
The upshot is that right-wing media, led by the mothership Fox News and the White House, all took the tack that the hearing on Wednesday was a massive success for the president, largely because the Democrats and the witnesses are creepy, unattractive people.
Conventional wisdom holds that this is all done for an audience of one: the president. There is some truth to that, to be sure. Trump is obsessed with media coverage, and if the idea is to buck him up, this absurdly positive spin probably had an effect. But he isn’t the only one listening, unfortunately.
On Thursday, AP-NORC released a new survey showing that Americans are having a hard time figuring out what is true and what isn’t. And a certain subset is relying on extremely unreliable sources:
Democrats are more likely to say they rely on scientists and academics, while Republicans are more likely to trust what they hear from President Donald Trump. “When I hear him on Fox News — that’s where I get all my information,” said Al Corra, a 48-year-old Republican from Midland, Texas. Trump, he said, is the easiest way to cut through an otherwise confusing information environment.
Republicans are more likely than Democrats to put a great deal of trust in the president’s statements, 40% to 5%.
You can understand why right-wing media would spin the impeachment inquiry as positive news for Trump. Their audience considers him to be a truth-teller and a man of integrity.
Recent PRRI polling shows that Trump has a solid base of support among Republicans, who say nothing he could do could change their minds about him. What people in this group have in common is the fact that they get all their news from Fox, like the man quoted above.
These people are fearfully misinformed, obviously. Trump is the most dishonest person in public life and lies to their faces every single day. Fox amplifies his lies and delivers more of their own in a constant feedback loop. As we continue down the path of impeachment over the next few weeks, it’s clear that won’t just see Trump and his defenders batting back the accusations or spreading alternate conspiracy theories. They’ll do that, of course. But from the looks of things they’ve decided to offer their viewers a full-blown alternate reality in which the impeachment process is actually an ignominious defeat for the “nerdy” Democrats and government officials and a triumph for the president, regardless of what is uncovered.
I knew this was going to be a strange and different process than the two other impeachments I’ve seen in my life. But I didn’t see this coming. Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber are consciously attempting to make Trump supporters happy that he’s being impeached.
Heather Digby Parton, also known as “Digby,” is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.
Rush Limbaugh Is Furious That a Black Actor Might Be the Next James Bond
by :{December 24, 2014:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:
The right-wing radio host is apparently thoroughly confused by the concept of fiction.
https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/trump-is-about-to-become-the-right-wing-smear-machines-greatest-unintended-casualty/
no lnx
Trump is about to become the Right-wing smear machine’s greatest unintended casualty
Written by Daily Kos October 6, 2019
It’s commonly said that the “wheels of justice turn slowly,” and that’s usually true. But once in a while those wheels suddenly pop into reverse, jolting the car backwards and crushing whoever happens to be standing behind the truck.
In what is truly the richest of ironies, Donald Trump is now poised to become just another piece of right-wing roadkill, an unintended casualty of his own disinformation machine, the exact same machine that cemented his electoral victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. By extorting foreign leaders to manufacture dirt involving Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Trump stupidly fell into the trap of believing his own team’s propaganda, a result that those who created the Biden/Ukraine fairy tale in the first place completely failed to foresee. And now he’s looking at impeachment for believing their lies and taking them to their logical conclusion.
The warning signs for Team Trump were there from the start, but they went unheeded. It’s well-documented that Trump the politician (as opposed to Trump the phony media creation) is at his core a deeply stupid, credulous man whose ”agenda” and worldview are shaped entirely by what he sees on Fox News. Couple that with a tendency to surround himself with sycophantic “yes-men” who assure him that all his actions are examples of some titanic genius, and it should have been predictable that this president, watching dumbly as his Hannity-fed heroes droned on and on about supposedly nefarious dealings by the one political opponent he feared the most, would do something extraordinarily idiotic with that information at some point.
Jane Mayer of the New Yorker explains how the “Biden/Ukraine” hoax was invented and spread by the same people who invented the “Uranium One” fiction which Fox News and other Republican sludge generators spawned in order to smear Hillary Clinton in the 2016. The cast of characters for both smears is remarkably similar.
Anyone trying to track the Ukrainian conspiracy stories that were eventually embraced by President Trump is likely to get mired in the same echo chamber of right-wing news purveyors that misinformed voters in 2016. A pivotal source of the allegations against the Bidens, for instance, is the Government Accountability Institute, a Florida-based opposition-research operation that was founded by the former Trump political adviser Stephen Bannon—the same conservative nonprofit that ginned up questionable stories about the Clintons during the last Presidential campaign. In both instances, much of the coverage of the scandal was kicked off by Peter Schweizer, a longtime conservative political writer who is an editor-at-large at Breitbart News and the president of the Government Accountability Institute.
The “Government Accountability Institute” or GAI is funded by a “libertarian” (i.e., I’ve got mine so fuck you) billionaire named Robert Mercer, a major donor to Trump’s campaign, whose interests apparently lie in shaping American society in tandem with his grotesque social whims. As Stephen Bannon himself acknowledged in an email to Mayer, the GAI acted as the primary source for the Biden/Ukraine “story.” Mayer’s article describes the purpose of the GAI as intended to generate baseless smears and worm them surreptitiously into the “mainstream” media where they can be repeated by more “credible” sources, even if those sources are simply busy debunking them.
Bannon designed the organization as a means of transmitting partisan dirt-digging to the mainstream media. He realized that, though mainstream reporters were suspicious of partisan opinion, they were open to damning facts about public figures, regardless of the sourcing. He set out, with Schweizer, to produce material that would generate mainstream coverage, and right-wing outrage.
In 2016 Schweizer published the book “Clinton Cash” which made the baseless accusation that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, had essentially traded away American national security by selling uranium mines to Russia in exchange for contributions to the Clinton foundation. By hawking this over and over through their mouthpieces on Fox News, Mercer, Bannon and Schweitzer had no trouble convincing susceptible viewers eager to believe any right-wing drivel spoon-fed to them that the Clintons were wholly, unimaginably corrupt. The fact that these insinuations were totally false was beside the point. As it turned out, several government agencies having nothing to do with Hillary Clinton approved the deal, which ultimately involved a “negligible” amount of uranium.
Just as with the “Clinton Cash” fable constructed to inflame a drooling base of Fox News knuckledraggers, we now have practically the exact same cast of characters behind the latest baseless smear against Joe Biden—that he somehow intervened with Ukraine to protect his son’s profits.
In March of 2018, Schweizer and the Government Accountability Institute once again produced a book that was perfectly timed for the Presidential campaign. “Secret Empires” devoted a chapter to the subject of “Bidens in Ukraine,” which laid out the conflicts of interest posed by the wheeling and dealing of Biden’s son Hunter.
Even though Schweizer conveniently omitted the fact that there was no prove to his insinuations about Ukraine and Joe Biden, that didn’t stop the conservative media from jumping on the bandwagon like flies on the proverbial shit. And, just as before, again we had the same hawking on Fox News of a shabbily-source tome of lies that every credible media source has shot down. But this time an attention-whoring sleazebag named Rudy Giuliani became involved, traveling to Ukraine under the guise of being Donald Trump’s “private attorney,” and attempting to solicit Ukrainian acquiescence and participation in the scam. And as Mayer points out, a couple new characters were now recruited by the Trump campaign itself to stoke the phony story. In particular, John Solomon, formerly a respectable reporter for the Hill but now entrenched in the more lucrative occupation of churning out right-wing trash for profit, was tapped to spread the manure around.
As Giuliani conspired this past spring with questionable Ukrainian sources, Solomon pumped out a string of eye-catching stories echoing those sources’ claims about the Bidens. This appears to have been no coincidence. According to NBC, the Giuliani documents show that Solomon’s columns were part of the Trump team’s strategy. (The New Yorker was unable to reach John Solomon, and a question e-mailed to the editor of The Hill, about whether the publication stood by Solomon’s stories, went unanswered.)
(As you may have noticed, Mayer’s article notes several people whom the New Yorker contacted for comment, but refused to respond)
She explains how the story was churned by Solomon and Schweizer, with lots of mutual dick-sucking apparent on both sides:
In Solomon’s April 1st column, he cited Schweizer’s book. Two days later, Schweizer sent “kudos” to Solomon during an interview on Breitbart News, and added, “We’re talking about potentially legal jeopardy involving the Vice-President’s family.” Schweizer opined that it was “all the sort of thing that needs to be investigated and looked into by a grand jury,” and added, “it’s pretty clear that you have a pattern that the for-sale sign was open with the Biden family . . . and that in itself demands investigation in the United States.”
Republican state television (also known as Fox News) then proceeded to run twelve or more segments hyping this wholly in a single month, seeding it into the right-wing swamp. Of course, dumb Donald was watching like any other addled fool, slurping up every word. Sean Hannity mentioned it on seven separate shows, prompting Trump to respond personally to his hero with this Tweet, praising Solomon’s reporting:
“John Solomon: As Russia Collusion fades, Ukrainian plot to help Clinton emerges.” @seanhannity @FoxNews
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2019
If Trump was capable of generating a hard-on, it must have happened during April of this year, as measured by the rapid, subsequent merging of the White House and Fox News, first by Giuliani, then of Trump himself, who called the network to declare that further action was needed, and in particular, that he wanted to involve his stooge William Barr in the investigation.
By this time, the stodgy New York Times had become involved in “covering” the “controversy,” and even though the Times threw in a casual disclaimer–nineteen paragraphs into their own story– confirming that the entire farce was bullshit (”No evidence has surfaced that the former vice president intentionally tried to help his son by pressing for the prosecutor general’s dismissal.”), as far as Bannon, Schweizer and Mercer were concerned, they had already won the battle. Nevermind that several credible news sources spent the next few months confirming that it was all an invented hoax—the damage was done, and high-fives and clinking shot glasses were doubtlessly being exchanged all around.
Except no one stopped to consider what an irrational, power-mad sociopath like Trump would do with this information, swirling around busily in his brain. As it turns out, he went with his instincts, which, unlike the arc of history, do not bend towards justice but towards extortion. And his attempt to extort Ukraine by withholding Congressional aid until they manufactured some non-existent dirt about Joe Biden has ended up biting him squarely in the ass. He’s going to be impeached, something he existentially has dreaded since he assumed office, because it will forever leave a stain on his presidency that people will use to compare his tenure to that of an untarnished, impeccable, Barack Obama.
Thanks to his slavish devotion to the right-wing propaganda machine, Donald Trump is about to become just another piece of collateral damage. And he has no one but himself to blame.
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