Dan Mitchell

in this episode we cracked some jokes about the Sidney Sweeney ad and then someone in our Patreon comments said that not taking the issue seriously was white moderate behavior.

This is super bizarre and embarrassing for Acosta. The "interview" is just standard LLM-style responses. The only difference is that it was synced up with a GenAI avatar. There is no value in doing this for anyone, certainly not as an act of journalism.

To the reactionary centrists, small talk and common politeness among strangers are all humans really are. Surface-level shit. That's why their worldview operates strictly on that level.

"Look, Joe might want to throw immigrants into foreign torture gulags, but he's good people. He's *chummy*."

When those liberals on game night started feeling horror, it was because their knowledge of their counterparts had deepened, not because they realized that in fact, everybody is actually good. "Everybody is actually good" is a central tenet of reactionary centrism. It amounts to a social pathology.

"You were so nice on my first day of work. We talked about the weather and traded a few jokes. But then you started menacing and harassing me. What gives?"

Of course, people's workplace behavior *over time*, like their politics, reveal their true natures, where small talk does not.

The idea that people often seem "nice" until you get to know them better didn't even occur to him when he was designing this part of his abstraction. Surface-level social "niceness" is all people are to him. "But you were getting along so well until politics came up. What gives?"

It shows how shallow they all are. Because they live and work entirely within an abstraction of reality, everything is surface-level, just like a CAD file of a house isn't an actual house. So, small talk and full-on conversation are the same to them.

This @tyleralterman.bsky.social thing, besides being astonishingly perverse, might reveal the reactionary-centrist mind better than anything I've seen. It did so to me in about 10 different ways, each of which could take up several paragraphs of an essay. I'm time-limited, so I'll focus on just one.

I am extra sensitive to this because it was the foundational lie upon which the Right's successful 50-year effort to browbeat corporate media and tech companies into turning a conservative-leaning information environment into a hard-right information environment was based.
bsky.app/profile/jami...

I hate reposting "influencers," but this is right.

Mamet is another one like Greenwald and Taibbi: he was always a dick, but only some people recognized it from the start.

It's incredible what people can get away with if they (seemingly) have the right political stances, or write good scripts.

It's incredible how these people completely change their political worldviews based entirely on perceived slights or goofy notions. "A liberal said she didn't like me, so I naturally turned fascist." Or "I heard about a guy who got yelled at for using the n-word, so I naturally turned fascist."

It’s fun that a few months ago, millions of Americans were like, “Fellas, is it gay to have a constitution?” and now we all have to deal with the stupidest motherfucker of all time having free reign to destroy the governing capacity of the United States.

I find every one of these exits to be straight-up hilarious. “I cannot abide working for people who are 8 percent worse than me.”

More evidence that shallowness and cluelessness often morphs into outright evil. This happens in the media more than elsewhere. It’s a form of sociopathy.

next up on the jim acosta show, we're interviewing ai versions of the dead sandy hook children, who would be in college now. let's hear what they think about free speech on campus

Thinking about Goethe growing up in this ethno nationalist society

Oh, I gotta hear that story sometime.

“46 reasons why this doesn’t mean solar is succeeding”

@frankfukuyama.bsky.social tomorrow, probably.

Applebaum writes for the Atlantic. So what does this even mean, really?

Do people even remotely realize how many Trump voters made their choice based on their hatred of “cancel culture,” and that this wouldn’t be the case if it weren’t for the moral panic stirred by the mainstream media?

Even with…everything…it seems like that the fact that the president is making programming decisions for television networks should be a bigger deal.

Ironically, the best newsreader of all, which few even knew about, was on…Facebook. Interest lists. Then FB started enshittifying them and eventually zapped them out of existence. And look at Facebook now.

“We don’t need newsreaders anymore, we have Twitter and Facebook.”

The thing about feeds was that nobody owned them. There were dozens of newsreaders. The technology was free and open. Then news execs decided to just abandon it for Mark fucking Zuckerberg.

The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns.

The annoying spam texts destroying the Democratic brand:

$678M raised through those spam tactics

$282M to one consulting firm: Mothership Strategies.

$11M to actual campaigns (1.6%)

The party isn’t just treating donors like marks—it’s being fleeced itself yet continues to back Mothership.

Oh, derp, right you are. Will delete, ‘cuz stupid.

My tweet from earlier: “let's have a crisis of femininity, as a treat”

WSJ push alert: The conservative women who are "having it all”

WSJ article illustrated by photo of sen Katie Britt The Conservative Women Who Are 'Having It All' Politicians and other prominent women on the right are juggling work and family on their own terms. They credit grit, religious faith, family support and a laser-like focus on priorities.

By Pamela Paul Aug. 1, 2025 11:04 am ET

omfg

If that hadn’t happened, “cancel culture” would have been confined mostly to Fox News and Facebook comments written by dead-enders, as happened with The War on Christmas. The Atlantic didn’t publish an endless line of pieces about The War on Christmas, as I recall.

Applebaum writes for the Atlantic. So what does this even mean, really?

Do people even remotely realize how many Trump voters made their choice based on their hatred of “cancel culture,” and that this wouldn’t be the case if it weren’t for the moral panic stirred by the mainstream media?

‘They roll right over’: Many Democrats call their party weak and ineffective, AP-NORC poll finds A poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that many Democrats see their political party as “weak” or “ineffective.”

This shouldn’t be surprising. The only way to fight back is to… actually fight back.

If Democrats want to improve their approval rating (or far more importantly, make actual change), we need real leadership to put up real resistance to authoritarianism.
apnews.com/article/ap-p...

If the next Democratic president doesn't ride on a bulldozer down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol at their inauguration, a total missed opportunity.