Matt Taibbi is on a related journey. He stopped turning up to his own podcast a couple of years ago, and you can now catch him on random NewsMax segments.
After seeing Naomi Wolf make the full heel turn to Steve Bannon acolyte, in the aftermath of her book and reputation being utterly destroyed in a single BBC interview, it seems like it’s not necessarily Me-too driving the flipping phenomenon.
The MAGA right provides the last bastion for people with huge egos and well-paying careers in the public eye who refuse to go away.
Costco is a godsend in San Francisco, and I was always given to understand the employees are treated well. I’m gonna be really bummed if it does take a heel turn.
I followed Brand’s turn during COVID, and his YouTube methodology felt like a calculated attempt at a digital personality cult of sorts. Between language he used, the constant reinforcement of revelatory in-group thinking, the leader-as-peer-but-really-leader self-characterizations, the topics and tropes conveniently serving his professional career, it all seemed to be a deliberate construction of an online personality cult to harness COVID disaffection, general malaise, and conspiracy thinking.
One interesting thing about Brand today is that he’s not as quick and exuberant as he once was, and so you can much more easily see the scaffolding and calculation. He’s now repellent instead of rakish.
I have zero relevant knowledge, but based on the fucked-up mirror world we live in, where Dems manage to provide marginally arguable counter examples for all of the GOP’s worst behaviors, if one squints hard enough, I’m pretty confident that something ugly is waiting to be found in Joe’s banking history.
Concision is the right word, if speaking with a highly educated audience; if speaking with a less educated audience, perhaps “succinctness” or “efficient clarity” would be better understood, even if not conveying all of the connotations of concision.
Matt Taibbi is on a related journey. He stopped turning up to his own podcast a couple of years ago, and you can now catch him on random NewsMax segments.
After seeing Naomi Wolf make the full heel turn to Steve Bannon acolyte, in the aftermath of her book and reputation being utterly destroyed in a single BBC interview, it seems like it’s not necessarily Me-too driving the flipping phenomenon.
The MAGA right provides the last bastion for people with huge egos and well-paying careers in the public eye who refuse to go away.