Eighteen advertisers have decided that staying with her show is less profitable than pulling out of her show, a decision all Free-Market Loving Republicans must now regard as Liberal and, therefore, wrong. Crackers must be Truly Conservative to see that and, soon, perhaps she’ll be so Truly Conservative it will be impossible for anyone to give her money, which is the true apotheosis of the Free Market.
Remember: Giving her attention only counts if you support her advertisers. Her dwindling, anemic number of advertisers.
The ‘bad news’ won’t be over until every advertiser of legitimate products pulls their support for any Fox News program and all they are left with are ads for cheap teeth whitening products, Paula Deen foods, and the fake catheter cowboy ads that Last Week Tonight can afford to run in whole blocks because it is the only remaining revenue stream for Fox which is now reduced to selling ad time for pennies on the dollar.
I particularly love her whining that she’s getting backlash for saying things that were supposedly OK five or ten years ago.
Setting aside the absurdity of claiming that personal insult was considered a valid form of argument five or ten years ago… well, yeah, that’s actually how it works in the real world. If I showed up at the office and tried to do my job exactly the way I did it five or ten years ago, as if I had learned nothing in the interim, I wouldn’t remain employed very long, and I suspect the same is true for most of you.
Do y’all remember the outrage when there was a call to boycott MSNBC and their sponsors for keeping Don “nappy-headed hoes” Imus on the air? And do you remember how, even on this board, people refused to accept that a society that values free speech and a free market should also value the public using its collective spending power as a means of expressing itself? I also remember having to make the point that people who use their position of celebrity to promulgate offensive things aren’t victims of censorship when public outcry leads to their firing. Being fired is the cost to opening your mouth and letting shit come out of it. No one is entitled to airwaves.
I say all of this because as bad as Ingraham looks by crying foul, her viewpoint isn’t exactly foreign or surprising; she’s obviously been accustomed to seeing herself as untouchable because no one has dare to fight back in any kind of meaningful way before. She’s been given wide berth to be as provocative as she wants, and she’s taken that berth with the haughtiness of the privileged. And the public has enabled this by making boycott a bad, uncomfortable word. Likening it to censorship and lynch mobs and such. But maybe, just maybe, people are starting to see that this is nonsense,
Pressuring advertisers is pretty much the only way an otherwise powerless people can push back against harmful media content. Now more than ever, we need to harness this power rather than ignoring it. I’m really encouraged that David Hogg and others are shining a light on what organized action can do.
Yup, not surprised she would say this. It wouldn’t have been okay 5 or 10 years ago, but social media wasn’t a living breathing organism back then either. It’s easier to find and organize the like-minded around a certain cause (like getting her off the air) when Twitter can reach millions.
I’m getting increasingly perturbed when people call things that are matters of morals & ethics “political.” When Nike did a LeBron ad that promoted equality (the tagline was “equality”), people were like “Why does everything have to be so political?” Like, how is the idea of “equality” political? Same thing here…Ingraham made personal jabs at a young man who is taking up a cause for, if nothing else, protecting his peers. Is making jabs at a young man political? No. But, if you say that what you are saying is “political” speech, and you say that believing in equality is “political” then your politics are trash. You’re trash. You’re also saying that whatever party you stand for and its members are trash.
Even the fucking Dixie Chicks controversy was about them taking a POLITICAL STANCE saying something against a POLITICAL FIGURE and the POLITICS of the country. That warrants a political fight, fine. You can say you don’t like their politics. You don’t want to hear politics in your country music. Your politics disagree with theirs. You’re right.
If you just have shitty morals and act cattily, you’re just shitty. Don’t try to hide behind “politics.”
This makes points about the weird and weak regulatory environment which previously prevailed (the prohibition on gold from 1933-1975 created a black market, the SEC and the CFTC couldn’t agree on jurisdiction until the ball got passed firmly to the CFTC) but it barely touches on how psychologically and, yes, politically important gold is to the hard right. Gold is not just a commodity, it’s the commodity, it’s the thing which has been used as money since ancient times, it’s the thing you can convince yourself is the sovereign and inviolable store of value if you draw the graphs right and ignore almost a century of economic thought and experience.
And that’s the other part: You can ignore economics, the field of study, if you convince yourself it’s been hijacked by Them. They own it, so They will tell you gold is just another commodity, like pork bellies or orange futures, and that inflation isn’t a moral failing induced by a weak-willed government which won’t make sure all the numbers on the price tags stay the same, but is a natural response to economic growth as long as it doesn’t become unmoored from reality. They don’t want you to know about gold, so They won’t let you keep gold once They are firmly in power, just like that [del]Rosenfeld[/del] Roosevelt dictator… and, once you get deep enough into it, They’re the Jews, just like They were in the Middle Ages. If you follow the Goldbuggery trail far enough, you go right out to Austrian Economics, far-right politics in general, and from there it isn’t far from Alex Jones and the frankly anti-Semitic portions of the right-wing world.
There’s probably a lot left to be written about how people get funneled into para-politics, my little nonce term for the extremist groups normal political parties can count on for votes; it must be a true comfort to have Alex Jones listeners and Southern Baptists and True-Believing Mormons who are so disconnected from reality they’re mushrooms, for the right wing to keep in the dark and feed bullshit, but mushrooms who vote Republican. Goldbuggery has been a marker for right-wing para-politics for decades now, and there are always people who can harvest mushrooms. The hope is that normal, mainstream companies can be shamed and boycotted out of it.
The My Pillow guy is pretty tight with Fox and vowed not to take his ads off Ingraham’s show. Oh yeah, he’s a conman. It was funny to watch the MAGA’s on Twitter post their receipts for buying mediocre $50 pillows.