NAJ screen shot

By Glynn Wilson –

No matter how this election turns out, my retirement from political news and journalism is imminent. Social media has made news, journalism and facts irrelevant, even as Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are making the first big social media program Facebook irrelevant, by ignoring and downplaying news and politics.

No matter that the stupid bots are being trained not to care, that is what people care about.

I only embraced Facebook in 2009 because it was clear that’s where the masses of people were turning, and to be relevant in the political news business, to reach an audience, that’s where you had to be.

But I see no benefit whatsoever in chasing the next trendy thing in social media to TikTok, Tribal, BlueSky, Threads or any of the other copy cat programs, all just doing the exact same thing Facebook and Twitter were created to do nearly 15 years ago. To make news, even online news, irrelevant. To destroy the economy for news and make billions grabbing peoples’ attention with their own selfish, greedy pursuits.

This was a world where Donald Trump figured he could dominate, and he has.

I’ve said it a thousand times at least. At root, it’s the selfish gene vs. the trait of altruism. In this world the selfish gene wins. The bots feed the selfish gene like steroids feed muscle.

Pictures of their own kids and cats became more important than economic problems or war in the Middle East. Personal memories became more important than collective reality or factual historical context. The selfish selfie and the silly meme became the norm for communicating, at least on social media, which of course influenced the traditional and newer web press and media.

But before I go off into the sunset myself in the West, the story of Trump must be finished, one way or another.

It’s the story that has dominated my life and yours for the past eight years, and I’ve covered the hell out of it in the interest of warning people about the danger he poses to democracy. I mean I was doing it long before anybody else, when I saw the reaction Trump got from high school educated working class people at that first stadium rally in Mobile, Alabama.

The Donald Woos the Heart of Dixie, But Jesus Remains Politically Polygamous

Either he wins by votes of the ignorant made ignorant by brain washing on social media and cable news, or by fiat with help from the Supreme Court, and becomes the corrupt dictator we’ve all feared.

Or he is defeated by enough voters who are able to get past the bullshit on social media, and drifts off into the sunset as irrelevant. There will be no army to try to take over the Capitol this time. He is not president and can’t call off the Secretary of Defense, or issue a “stand down” order to the Capitol Police or beg to “please just let them in” from the White House lawn.

For anyone worried about violence, there will be none if he wins. Black Lives Matter has faded into distant memory, along with AntiFa, which was, by the way, a thousand miles away in a campground in Florida on Jan. 6, 2021. I know for a fact.

Even Trump has said if he loses he won’t run again. Thank God, or what’s left of our educated population willing to stand up and fight against Fascism. Vote!

Frustrated by the current irrelevance of Facebook, where the bots and the algorithm are PURPOSELY PROGRAMED to ignore and downplay news and politics, I turned back briefly on Monday to X, formerly known as Twitter, to see what actual news was being shared. For all its flaws thanks to the new sole owner Elon Musk, a despicable character in his own right, every politician and mainstream media outlet is still sharing political news there. I tried sharing a few links from X to Facebook, but the war between the tech billionaires is such that X links do not render on Facebook. No matter the content, they show up on Facebook like this.

How stupid

One of the stories being hidden on Facebook appeared in the form of a video and a link to The Hill news site, showing that Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have launched an investigation into former President Trump’s alleged acceptance of $10 million from the Egyptian government during his 2016 presidential campaign, as well as whether allies quashed a subsequent investigation into the matter. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, sent a letter following reporting from The Washington Post that found the Egyptian government withdrew $10 million in funds shortly after Trump made a last-minute injection of the same amount of his funds to his campaign in the last few days of the 2016 election.

That’s a blatant violation of the Constitution’s clause strictly banning gifts to presidents from foreign countries.

“Surely you would agree that the American people deserve to know whether a former president — and a current candidate for president — took an illegal campaign contribution from a brutal foreign dictator,” Raskin asked.

Raskin launches probe into closed DOJ investigation of Trump-Egypt ties

Of course the Republicans are actually in control of the agenda in the House and all its committees, so you won’t find out about this doomed investigation from them or any of their social media platforms, not even YouTube. I doubt anyone on cable news was even talking about it, not even CBS, now in the throws of a business crisis, and PBS, better now but still only watched by a few elderly people. They were all too busy covering Trump’s crazy remarks about Arnold Palmer’s penis size, two days after the fact, to which Stormy Daniels had the best reply. She is, after all, in a position to know.

“He’s no Arnold Palmer,“ she said, a meme that was passed around on Facebook.

Another thing that was not being shared or shown on Facebook was a video from a town hall in Wisconsin, where conservative radio talk show host Charlie Sykes was asking questions of Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney, allowing them to make a closing argument of sorts in the final days of the election against voting for Donald Trump for president.

This is the important initial exchange with Cheney, which of course is invisible on the Facebook feed. You have to go to a specific page, or a group.

Sykes: “Congresswoman Cheney you know how hard this is though you know how hard it is to break away from tribal loyalty to do something you haven’t done before. So I’d like you to address that as well. Lindsey Graham was on television yesterday saying ‘what do you never Trump Republicans you know what are you thinking of how could you possibly do all of this?’ There are a lot of people who are listening to us who may be disillusioned with what’s happening with the Republican party. But … they’re afraid of paying the price, because there is a cost to all of that. So what do you say to those Americans?”

Cheney: “Well don’t listen to Lindsey Graham number one, um it’s good life advice actually.

“What I say is that … what undergirds everything that we are as a nation … is the rule of law. And it’s our Constitution. And when you look at what Donald Trump did after the last election, when you look at the cruelty that’s involved in someone who watches an attack on the United States capital, an attack condoned by people in his name, and refuses for over 3 hours to tell the mob to leave. I mean … people just need to think about that. That’s depravity. He watched the attack happen and people kept asking him please tell the people to leave and law enforcement officers were being brutally beaten and the capital was being assaulted and he would not tell people to leave for over 3 hours. That cruelty is the same cruelty that we see when he lies about about the federal government’s disaster response, when he puts people’s lives at risk because he won’t tell the truth. He’s a man who’s unfit to be the president of this good and honorable and great nation.

“… I’ve spent a lot of time working before I was elected to congress in countries around the world that weren’t free, where people were trying to achieve their freedom, and I know how fragile this can be, how fragile democracy can be. And so in this election we have a choice. We have the choice of somebody in vice president Harris who you know is going to uphold the rule of law. You know that she’s going to lead this country with a sincere heart. You know that she is going to always be thinking about what is best for this nation. We might not agree on every issue, but she is somebody that you can trust. Someone that our children can look up to. And I think it’s so important for us to cast the vote for vice president Harris this time.”

You can watch and share the video here, if by some odd chance you happen to see this story. Maybe share it too, whether the bots like it or not. Who says we have to play by bot rules?

I’m not. Why should you?

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