Your Enemies Closer
"Catastrophic moral crime," misinformation, and projection
1/16/22-1/22/22
Looking at the the daily top ten posts for the week, Ben Shapiro held 21 of the 70 top ten posts. Dan Bongino took 9. Last week it was 13 and 12 respectively.
Only two left-leaning organizations made the lists: Occupy Democrats with two spots and The Other 98% with one.
Of the remaining 37 top ten spots, 17 were taken by right-wing individuals and organizations.
NYT AND AMAZON BESTSELLERS HARDCOVER NON-FICTION
Jamie Raskin’s Unthinkable and The 1619 Project edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones held steady at 1 and 2.
Glenn Beck’s The Great Reset: Joe Biden and the Rise of Twenty-First-Century Fascism debuted at 12 pushing Robert F. Kennedy’s anti-vax screed, The Real Anthony Fauci, to 13. Mark Levin’s American Marxism, on the list for its 22nd week, moved to fourteen.
Over at Amazon, Glenn Beck’s The Great Reset fell to 18 on the overall bestseller list but debuted at number 1 on the list of non-fiction hardcover books. Kennedy’s propaganda moved up to 3 on the overall list and is also at 3 on the hardcover non-fiction list.
APPLE PODCASTS—NEWS
5. The Ben Shapiro Show. Shapiro is an anti-Muslim, anti-choice, homophobic bigot. He is, in other words, a mainstream Republican (which is pretty much what can be said about all of the others on these lists).
6. The Matt Walsh Show. Walsh is a white power transphobe whose podcast is hosted by Shapiro’s Daily Wire.
8. The Dan Bongino Show. In November 2020 Bongino was listed by The New York Times as one of the top 5 election "misinformation super-spreaders.”
11. Steve Bannon’s War Room. Simply put: Bannon is an anarchist who seems hell-bent on destroying America.
14. The Charlie Kirk Show. Kirk is founder of Turning Point USA, an organization that recently invited Kyle Rittenhouse to speak and hailed the double-murderer as a hero.
15. The Megyn Kelly Show. Kelly is former Fox flunky and Black face apologist.
17. The Glenn Beck Program. Beck is a long-time conspiracy theorist.
20. Michael Knowles Show. Knowles also co-hosts a podcast with Ted Cruz (what more needs be said?).
The only progressives shows in the top 20:
10. Pod Save America
12. Rachel Maddow
And who has the #1 podcast on Spotify? Joe Rogan, the guy who ingested ivermectin and continues to spread COVID disinformation on an almost daily basis to his 200 million monthly subscribers.
I think it’s time for a mental health break:
SUBSTACK NEWS
Although the top-ten is more ideologically diverse across the right-wing spectrum it contains a disturbing number of serially wrong anti-democratic writers who have way too many followers than is healthy for our nation. Every single newsletter in the top ten has tens of thousands of subscribers.
2. The Dispatch: Jonah Goldberg is the editor-in-chief of this newsletter. Goldberg wrote Liberal Fascism in 2008 and continues to be wrong much of the time. He is very critical of Tucker Carlson and Fox in general, also he bad-mouths pro-Donald Republicans so that’s something.
5. Glen Greenwald: I’m not sure how to characterize Glenn Greenwald, although I have no doubt he thinks he’s a righteous bomb-thrower. Suffice it to say that during the four disastrous years of the Trump administration Greenwald thought the best use of his time was to criticize Democrats on Fox. Since 2017 he has appeared on the network over 80 times—over half of those on Tucker Carlson’s show.
6. Unreported Truths: Alex Berenson who initially downplayed the Coronavirus and now spreads disinformation about it on right-wing media outlets, recently compared the January 6th Committee to the House Un-American Activities Commission.
7. Common Sense (Oh, the irony.): Bari Weiss, aka the “Substack grifter” (in the words of Press Run’s Eric Boehlert), who clearly fancies herself a sophisticated polemicist, seems to offer nothing but bad takes—almost always at the expense of facts. On a recent appearance on fellow-traveler Bill Maher’s show she said, “Continuing extreme pandemic measures like school closures or mask mandates will someday be remembered as a ‘catastrophic moral crime.’” Anybody who thinks the “moral crime” is the measures taken to prevent children from getting sick and dying not the willful and malignant actions of the previous administration that led to the completely avoidable deaths of almost one million people, is a person nobody should be paying attention to.
8. The Weekly Dish: It’s hard to pin down Andrew Sullivan’s political ideology. I don’t even think he knows what it is. But he’s a trans-phobe who helped popularize The Bell Curve, a racist 1994 book that claimed a connection between IQ and race. Again, he’s not on the same end of the spectrum as Berenson or Greenwald, but he is very often wrong or misleading.
Thankfully this sorry collection of propagandists, purveyors of misinformation, and liars is bracketed by the exemplary Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson at number 1 and Judd Legum’s Popular Information at number ten.
There is NOTHING like happy cats for a mental health break. Maybe we could start worshipping them as the Ancient Egyptians did - they were probably onto something!
SO glad I signed up for this free edition! Great reading!! Noticed something you may want to fix. Her name is Heather Cox Richardson, not Helen. I’m sure it was probably just ‘spell check’ raising it’s ugly head, but since I’ve been reading her since the beginning of her Letters from an American, I know her first name is Heather. Looking forward to more from you!