the newest political tweets thread (3/26)

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You can ‘see WWII’ on a climate chart.

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Sigh.

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I have always loathed liberal Ta-Nehisi Coates. But he’s, apparently, made a ‘little’ progress in his thinking. Maybe. I dunno.

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capitalism continues consolidating the onslaught

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Type of acceptance speech you wont see at, say, the Grammys.

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Gloria Steinum defending the CIA. Calling them ‘enlightened’.

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Things ya cant say.

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https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/sep/14/macklemore-dropped-ed-sheeran-tour-free-palestine?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

Macklemore has been dropped from the remainder of the US leg of Ed Sheeran’s Loop tour, after the American rapper drew headlines for saying “free Palestine” on stage at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.

…

…In a lengthy Instagram post on Monday morning, Macklemore confirmed that Sheeran and his team had decided to remove him from the tour, but noted that he, Sheeran and Pink were not victims. “We have careers, money, opportunities, safety and audiences around the world,” he wrote. “Whatever consequences any of us face for what we say, we get to go home to our families.

“The victims are the Palestinian people. The men, women and children who have been killed, starved, displaced and forced to live through unimaginable violence,” he added, citing the more than 20,000 children killed in Gaza by the Israeli military since the 7 October 2023 terrorist attacks by Hamas.

Macklemore explained that the decision came after a week of “difficult conversations” with Sheeran, a friend of 13 years whom he considers a “brother”, though “as I told Ed multiple times on the phone, our friendship can’t change my responsibility to tell the truth about what happened.” According to Macklemore, Sheeran was under pressure from stadium owners rallied by Robert Kraft – the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots and their Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, where Sheeran was next slated to play – to drop Macklemore from the tour, lest the English singer be barred from their venues. “Ed was in a fucked up position,” the rapper wrote. “He knew it. His typical apolitical stance was being challenged in a way it had never been before.

“What I said at MetLife I have been saying on stages around the world for almost three years,” he added. “So why is it an issue now? Because now I’m sharing the stage with one of the biggest artists in the world, in some of the biggest stages in America.”

Macklemore ended his multi-page post by reiterating his call to “free Palestine”: “If those words cost me the stage, while turning the conversation back to Palestine, then it was the most successful tour I’ve ever been on.”

In a statement provided to NBC News, Kraft said the decision to bar Macklemore from Gillette Stadium, which is intended to be “a welcoming environment for all guests”, was made after the comments at the MetLife shows and “a broader history of rhetoric and imagery that we believe has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community”.

“I would welcome the opportunity to sit down with Macklemore and discuss the facts, because ultimately our goal is the same – peace for all people, an end to suffering, and an end to all hate,” he added. He also blamed Hamas for actions that “have caused immeasurable suffering for Palestinians and Israelis alike”.

“Much of my time and attention for the last decade has been focused on the fight against antisemitism and hate of all kinds, and I feel a responsibility to stand up when I believe that line has been crossed,” he said. Kraft, who is Jewish, created the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, now known as the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, in 2019. He is a longtime supporter of the state of Israel as well as its ally in the White House, Donald Trump.

The North American leg of Sheeran’s tour will conclude in November at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida, which earlier this year hosted two shows by Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who has a history of antisemitic statements. Tour openers Lukas Graham and Aaron Rowe are set to take the stage as planned.

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Kaepernik on the weaponization of his settlement with the NFL.
(I started the vid at 59 minute mark)

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I have come across several teens who have engaged in what Mina calls ‘mental sit-ins.’ Purposely binging on brain-rot-slop as a response to capitalist-realism-ennui.

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Ben Norton’s (lucid) view: China changes its ‘central contradiction’ from
‘maximum growth with inequality and eco-damage’ to
‘fight against inequality and better ecology’

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I got new respect for Azeez.

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Tebow-scam and rhyming-for-jesus. Sigh.

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I dont watch Saturday Night Live, but I cant imagine the American version ever doing this joke:

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Rambo sees the light.

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Just gets better and better…

A.I.
• Israeli Military Quadcopters: Documented reports from human rights organizations like the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and news outlets such as Al Jazeera and Middle East Eye revealed that small quadcopter drones equipped with loudspeakers have been used in areas like Gaza and southern Lebanon.

• Psychological Warfare and Tactics: The drones broadcast simulated distress sounds—including crying infants, women screaming for help, barking dogs, and fake gunfire—late at night.

• Luring and Targeting: According to local testimonies gathered by agencies like the Euro-Med Monitor, the audio is used to disorient residents, cause psychological terror, and exploit natural instincts to provide help, drawing civilians out into the open where they have been targeted or fired upon by snipers and drones.

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John Gruden. Of course.

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NBA and genocide.

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Israel has an election coming up soon. Many Israeli’s dont seem upset about the genocide. They are upset that Net-an-yahoo didnt ‘prevent the Oct 7 attack.’

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Some bold political ads in Michigan

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Is there a word for ‘worse than hopeless’ ?

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“Soviet cartoon (1978) showing a western youth having his mind poisoned by ‘tele-propaganda’.
The cartoon was drawn by Naum Moiseyevich Lisogorsky for Krokodil magazine. Krokodil and other Soviet publications produced dozens of cartoons in the 1970s and 80s condemning the culture of Western youth, as well as its adoption among the youth of the Soviet Union.
The caption reads in full: ‘Hours of daily tele-propaganda of violence, cruelty and depravity poisons the souls of Western youth and contributes significantly to the growth of crime in capitalist countries.’
Published in Issue No. 16, June 1978”
Propagandopolis, Facebook

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2krispii

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i think about this kind of thing a lot.

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Succinct explanation of the Israel election result.

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Just a rant i read and agree with. I learned a new term: memebrain swill
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Everybody hates Pat: is a cabal of college kids really trying to bring down ESPN’s star meathead?

Aaron Timms
Thu 29 Oct 2026 05.00 EDT

It was all shaping up to be a golden year for Pat McAfee. The man who landed a five-year, $85m deal in 2023 to take The Pat McAfee Show to ESPN had cemented himself as the star attraction of the sports broadcaster’s bold new era of stunts, stupidity and memebrain swill. His persistently honking presence on the set of ESPN’s College GameDay had helped push ratings to new heights. ESPN executives were so impressed with McAfee they were reportedly in negotiations to award him a new contract worth between $60m and $65m a year; one even went so far as to describe him as a “generational” media talent.

Then, over the weekend, disaster struck. A handful of college kids attacked him online ahead of his appearance with College GameDay at the University of Utah. Well, “attacked” is maybe overstating things: they made a few mild jokes at his expense. But it was all too much for ESPN’s brightest blimp. Suddenly, McAfee’s world came crashing down. His initial reaction, to be fair, was mild: “The university’s Instagram account posted something talking a little trash about me last night, which I certainly love,” he said ahead of the Utes’ clash with the Houston Cougars last week.

But by Monday the narrative had changed. On his eponymous show, McAfee said he had “never felt more uncomfortable” than he did on the Utah campus, alluding to the assassination of Charlie Kirk as a reason for his unease: “I thought to myself: Has anything really scary happened at, like, a college gathering in the state of Utah recently? Do you think we should be amplifying reasons for why people hate my guts as a university? I don’t know.”

Well, Pat, neither do I. To read this comically melodramatic retelling of his time at Utah you might assume last week’s College GameDay was uncommonly vicious and antagonistic. Instead, it was the usual chop-up of hype, half-assed technical analysis and shouting, in which McAfee supplied his standard mix of meandering rants and basic crowd work and the gathered masses, in turn, responded with cheers and (good-natured) boos as expected. The video that McAfee implied had him fearing for his life, posted to the university’s Instagram and TikTok accounts, involved a handful of students poking very light fun at the ESPN host for ripping off his shirt on set (which he does often) and spouting “corny” lines in place of real analysis (ditto); one of McAfee’s would-be assassins even emphasized that “we love you bro” as he implored McAfee to “keep the shirt on”.

The wokes and the leftists are always the most precious snowflakes on earth until some kid does a mild impersonation of Pat McAfee ripping his top open; when that happens it’s a federal emergency and the national guard needs to be called in to set things right. Any more of this mild banter from the brutes and ingrates of the American undergraduate population and McAfee will be calling his buddy Donald Trump to request Secret Service

Even more bizarre than McAfee’s amazingly thin-skinned overreaction to this absolute non-event is how seriously his claims of imminent danger to his life (stemming, once again, from a video in which a few students say they don’t want to see McAfee’s naked torso) have been taken by those around him. The school published a groveling apology for its actions and deleted the offending video from its social media channels, while ESPN issued a statement of support for McAfee and “the very real and valid concerns he has around safety and security”.

During his ascent at ESPN, McAfee has perfected all the attributes of a WWE-style heel – the gift for offense, the shirtlessness, the penchant for writhing on the ground like an upturned beetle – with the exception of one: he absolutely cannot stand it when he’s the butt of the joke. The man is a machine at whipping a crowd into a hostile frenzy then runs in fright the moment the first boos hit his ears. McAfee is perhaps the leading light of the rightwing sports bros who’ve come to prominence in the age of Trump: these men love sports, love their country, love their president, and are unsure what to make of women. Trump himself made his debut appearance on The Pat McAfee Show late last year, and over this summer McAfee was on hand to lend some primetime meat to the inaugural Patriot Games, the president’s Hitlerian exercise in uplift for the white youth of America.

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that McAfee has absorbed completely the personality traits of the president: to the casual misogyny, the constant moaning about “woke”, the boorishness and the egomania can now be added McAfee’s Trumpian inability to take a joke or any kind of criticism, however mild or well-intentioned; in the deranged McAfee worldview it now seems even college kids, a big part of College GameDay’s own audience, are part of the shadowy network of villainy working to bring ESPN’s star beetroot down. Whether it’s punching across at critical media outlets or punching down at fans who don’t like the kind of shirt-ripping frattiness he’s introduced to College GameDay, McAfee never seems more engaged in his work than when snarling about the “rats”, “marks”, “losers” and “puppets” snapping at his feet.

It cannot be emphasized too much how stupid and overblown this whole concocted controversy is. What is really going on here? Is this all reflective of a desire for attention on McAfee’s part, another demonstration of his continuous need to make everything – in sport, on TV, in culture at large – About Him? Or is ESPN so heavily degraded and virality-brained now, so in thrall to the Magaverse and its perverse understanding of the world, that the empty suits who run the place genuinely feel the operation will collapse without a happy McAfee – placated and kept safe from the everyday terrorists roving the college campuses of America – at its core?

Perhaps it’s a bit of both. As Soft Pat’s star at ESPN has risen and he’s been handed more prestigious on-air assignments, the statements emanating from the C-suite hailing his “generational” and otherworldly talent have become more and more ludicrous; amid reports of his monster new contract, McAfee is now involved in Monday Night Football and there’s talk of potentially using his Super Bowl alt-cast for even higher honors on screen.

“Pat can do whatever he wants,” ESPN executive vice-president Mike Foss recently mused, and there’s a real sense that the whole network is under the spell of McAfee’s bare breast, that – if only as a cultural project – the erstwhile “Worldwide Leader in Sports” now belongs to McAfee. The wholesale enrollment of a once-proud network into the cult of McAfee does not reflect the man’s talent: he’s good for ratings, sure, but any old rightwing purplehead could curl up into a topless ball, screeching, and do what he does. Instead, it’s a sign of the profound confusion that has gripped traditional media in the post-cordcutting era of vertical video and endless slop. Nothing else works, seems to be the thinking; maybe this idiot will.

In another context, or another era, the TV triumph of the outcast, the oddball, the unlikely star might have heralded a deepening of the culture, a growing sophistication in our collective understanding of what it takes to be appealing as a popular media talent. But so much of what McAfee represents is the kind of meatheaded insensitivity that sports broadcasting – with its
polish and professionalism – was historically designed to supersede, especially at a place like ESPN. Figures like McAfee drag us all back into the frathouse, the kegger, the swamp, and now they won’t even let us joke about it.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/oct/29/pat-mcafee-college-gameday-espn?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us

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memebrain swill

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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/sep/23/espn-has-discarded-brilliant-journalism-for-squirts-of-memebrain-swill

ESPN has discarded brilliant journalism for squirts of memebrain swill

Aaron Timms

Influencer creep symbolizes a broader rot at the heart of the broadcaster as it attempts to stop interrogating the very sports it covers
Tue 23 Sep 2025 06.00 EDT
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For a certain segment of American sports fans, all change is automatically bad – especially when it comes to their favourite shows. Minor tweaks to beloved theme songs, shuffles to commentary booths and analysis teams, new scoreboard graphics, even changes to the duration and placement of ad breaks: all of these can trigger days, sometimes even years, of volcanic debate. For a certain type of sporting masochist it’s possible to plug into corners of the online sportingverse that are still litigating, say, the chyrons from the 2010 NBA finals, or ESPN’s decision – originally made in 2011, reversed in 2017, then reinstated in 2020 – to cut ties with Hank Williams Jr and his legendary All My Rowdy Friends Are Here on Monday Night intro song for Monday Night Football.

The outrage prompted by the latest upheavals at ESPN certainly fits the pattern of involuntary fan resistance to change, but on closer inspection this is more than a case of a few disgruntled cable TV subscribers reenacting the “old man yells at cloud” meme. In August ESPN announced it was bringing on Katie Feeney, a recent Penn State graduate with 14 million followers across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, to produce sports and lifestyle content – offering “a blend of on-site access, fashion, and culture”, as the press release put it – for the network’s main broadcasts and digital channels.

Feeney’s hiring is the latest move in ESPN’s drive to appeal to younger viewers, all those sewn-to-their-phones and (presumably) lifestyle content-hungry Gen Z and Gen Alpha hordes unenthused by the stuffier news-and-dad-banter offering of ESPN mainstays like SportsCenter and Pardon the Interruption. In 2020 the network brought on sporting influencer Omar Raja, founder of the House of Highlights, as a digital commentator, and its in-house “creator program”, a kind of year-long fellowship for promising young influencers that acts as a beachhead for ESPN into the burgeoning creator economy, is now in its third iteration.

On its surface, the new ESPN looks innocent enough, and the network is hardly alone in trying to get down with the kids and freshen its output with a spritz of youthful rizz: the NBA and other leagues have introduced creator programs, MLB has invested in the podcast network Jomboy Media, and Fox Sports is collaborating with Barstool Sports. (The founders of Jomboy and Barstool are hardly young – Dave Portnoy, for example, is in his late 40s – but the material these networks produce is designed to go big on social media and rope in younger fans.) On the one hand, this is just the way sports broadcasting operates now: what fans see on their screens emerges from a series of “partnerships” with off-the-shelf online brands and personalities, rather than reflecting something more innate and homegrown about the journalistic metabolism and personality of the network itself.

The output from influencers like Feeney and Raja, only a small fraction of which makes it to air on ESPN’s cable programming, is a mix of fan interviews, “crazy” scenes live from the tailgate, sideline clips that reveal nothing surprising from the sideline (the general tenor of which is, “The game is about to start!” or “Wow, can’t believe I’m here!”), get ready with me reels, behind the scenes footage of famous ESPN broadcasters standing around looking at their phones, and minute-long “hot takes” that are so thumpingly uninteresting they seem designed to instantly kill any debate. (“My hot take is that if your favorite teams aren’t all from the same city, you’re not a real fan” was a recent offering from Raja, to which the only reasonable response is: OK?)

This stuff is all trivial and expendable by design, but it’s hardly offensive: anyone who consumes sports on the internet is inured to this type of garbage, and the social media platforms are awash with sugary, under-one-minute video hits of players building their ideal teams or pronouncing their own names or trying to execute the perfect dap or naming their favorite pasta. It’s not as if creators like Feeney and Raja, however much noise ESPN has made about hiring them, enjoy the kind of prominence on air during live broadcasts that a fellow influencer like Dave Portnoy, say, commands over on Fox. For the most part, these figures feel like summer interns in a world still dominated by the big beasts of gameday.

On the other hand, influencer creep symbolizes a broader rot at the heart of ESPN. It’s important to set these moves in their proper context. In just the past 12 months the network has inked a new $100m, five-year deal with Stephen A Smith that allows him to be even louder than usual; it’s snapped up Inside the NBA, perhaps the most universally admired talk show in American sports broadcast history, from TNT; and most tellingly of all, it’s reached a deal with the NFL, an organization it is nominally supposed to cover critically, that will see the league take a 10% equity stake in ESPN in exchange for the rights to the NFL network and the league’s popular RedZone channel.

Taken together, these deals herald a major shift: away from the adversarial tradition of reporting that the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network once stood for, toward a much more accommodating and insider-driven approach to covering sports. ESPN’s embrace of the creator economy is part of this broader push for a cozier relationship with power. For years, ESPN has managed a conflict between its dual function as both a broadcaster and a news service, screening professional sports even as its in-house reporters subjected those same sports to aggressive journalistic scrutiny. That tension was always difficult to negotiate, but the disruptions of the smartphone economy, which has blitzed attention spans, pushed the epicenter of sports talk away from cable TV to social media, and handed more power to individual leagues, teams and athletes to shape and influence media narratives to their liking, have made live sport the absolute business priority for networks like ESPN.

Several highly regarded journalists have left ESPN in recent years, as the paramount importance of live programming to the network has become clear and reporting has come to be seen as a privilege, or a burden, or sometimes both. Among those who have left are excellent reporters and writers such as Zach Lowe and Pablo Torre, who recently reached a licensing deal to produce Pablo Torre Finds Out, his excellent, eponymous investigative podcast, for the New York Times. This continues a decade-long exodus of similar talents from ESPN, including Colin Cowherd and Dan Le Batard, extending all the way back to Bill Simmons’s acrimonious departure from the network in 2015.

Does ESPN care that they no longer have these personalities, all of whom have gone on to have successful careers after leaving the network, to enrich their programming and “content” around game days? Did the studio executives look on in envy as Torre unspooled his string of summer love scoops, from the Bill Belichick-Jordon Hudson romance to the hectic coupling of Kawhi Leonard and a tree-planting company? It seems unlikely. When they have Katie Feeney locking in the youth demographic with sponcon for Neutrogena Hydro Boost (“my go-to for hydrated, juicy skin”) and bringing viewers exclusive, behind-the-scenes footage of what @SAWEETIE, “the first ever female curator for Monday Night Football”, would do as her touchdown celebration dance, what need does ESPN really have for the fussy old business of journalism? The stories all come from inside the locker room now, or directly from the players themselves: questions, criticism, scrutiny are anathema to ESPN’s fresh mission as a souped-up PR agency. There is still worthy reporting that comes out of the company’s creaking news arm but it’s clear that ESPN’s priorities now lie elsewhere.

Increasingly, it seems like the old media model, in which the networks that broadcast live sport could do double duty as aggressive excavators of those same sports’ ugly truths, has passed. From now on, sports coverage is divided between two camps. On one side are the insiders, the broadcasters, the image-fluffers, fabulously well resourced and operated for mutual benefit in partnership with the sports world’s most powerful entities; on the other are the outsiders, the journalists, the critics, perpetually strapped for cash and digging for revelatory nuggets around a sporting-corporate PR machine that’s built to withstand the apocalypse. Where it once tried to keep a foot in both camps, ESPN now stands irrevocably on the side of the powerful: a company that once set the news agenda in sports is now just another sweaty social media setup fishing for quick clicks. With occasional noble exceptions, whatever sports “content” it produces from this day forward will be necessarily soft-focus and unchallenging.

The vapidity of the new ESPN captures the crisis of modern sports media. In the attention economy, what exactly is the role of broadcast media during the lulls when sports are not being played live? For a shrinking corner of the professional commentariat, sport in its “dead” time is still something to subject to sustained critique and discussion, a topic appropriate for serious journalism and analysis. But for ESPN, sport has become fluff, visual candy cotton, an inexhaustible source of sugar in a contest for viewer-consumers’ addiction as endless as the feeds on our phones. Rather than pushing back against the easy tyranny of the vacant scroll, ESPN is giving in to it, trying to ride it – and the vision of a zonked-out, lobotomized viewership is captured perfectly in the network’s Black Mirroresque new slogan, “Sports Forever”.

By chasing dollars, ESPN is betraying the very fans on whose passion it has built its success, trading away its journalistic credibility for a diminished status as the glorified Pravda of the modern American sportscape. The network’s approach to covering sport now is properly post-journalistic, built on player access, highlights, fan experiences, viral squirts of memebrain swill skimmed from the trough of online trend culture, and zero contestation. It’s a strategy that elevates narrative management over entertainment, teams over viewers, money over truth. And increasingly, it feels like the future – a reality that should trouble anyone who cares about sports and the real stories that shape them.

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Be nice to live in a country where a General Strike is on the table.

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The JD Vance definition of socialism is precious.

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