jbsliverer, Thank you for the welcome nudge. On misinformation, yes, i had grown weary of repeating the three of misinformation, disinformation and lies and virtually in the last week or so (mainly since the goddamn election, i think) had sloppily settled into the wrong one. You're right, it is definitely disinformation by those who are telling lies to the U.S. and the world. And the ignorance, should clarify too, i meant to only apply to those who don't take the time to stay on top of things. With the mountain of disinformation (thanks again) piled on us, who with a family and struggling to get by really could take the time to filter the junk, so to most i mean no disrespect, it's just that millions of voters are single issue voters and just don't understand the bigger picture. And for sure there is little ignorance on the part of those who are poisoning the political and social discourse so badly, except from the view it is ignorant of them to be fucking the place up as they are. Is it ignorant to fuel our world with disinformation? I think so. It certainly is fucking wrong. But wrong seems to have lost much meaning in the US these days.
On Musk and X, again thanks. Media for some reason, slackness, laziness, whatever always refer to Musk as the owner of X and i have been sloppy on that account too. I thank you for prompting me to:
Elon Musk was just forced to reveal who really owns X. Here’s the list
BY Eleanor Pringle August 22, 2024 at 10:00 PM GMT+10
Bill Ackman, Elon Musk and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud are connecting with the ownership of X, formerly Twitter. Left to right: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg - Getty Images, Chesnot - Getty Images, Chesnot - Getty Images
Bill Ackman and Sean “Diddy” Combs are among the list of owners of Elon Musk’s X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
The platform has been forced to disclose its investors as part of a lawsuit brought by former employees, who are seeking payment of arbitration fees incurred following Musk’s purchase of the site.
Previously, X has argued that its investors were confidential as a matter of “routine practice and policy,” but this week, a federal judge in California ruled to unseal the list of the site’s owners.
Among the nearly 100 owners of the social media giant are some familiar names, both from the world of investment and within the X universe.
Previously, high-profile investors like Fidelity have been connected with X, most notably because the investment vehicle’s filings implied a 72% drop in the company’s value since Musk took it over.
However, the latest filing reveals the investment behemoth’s backing of the platform, with almost 30 separate Fidelity-linked entities holding stakes in the brand.
This week’s unsealed documents also lay bare the lesser-known stakeholders in the company.
The list seen by Fortune reveals the Pershing Square Foundation owns a stake in X. If the name sounds familiar, that’s because of its link to Pershing Square Holdings, founded by billionaire investor Bill Ackman 20 years ago.
Although the foundation of the same name is led by an independent senior leadership team, Ackman and his wife, Neri Oxman, are co-trustees.
Ackman is a vocal user of X and frequently uses the platform to address other high-profile individuals and entities. He has used it to debate Shark Tank star Mark Cuban and raise questions about the leadership of his alma mater, Harvard University.
Elsewhere on the list of owners is Oracle founder Larry Ellison. The stake in X comes via the Lawrence J. Ellison Revocable Trust, the principal business of which, per an SEC report filed in 2008 and seen by Fortune, is to “hold the assets and estate of Mr. Ellison.”
The interests of the trust and Oracle bear no relation to each other, the SEC filing adds.
Unlike Ackman, Ellison is not an avid user of the site. Despite having more than 130,000 followers, Ellison has posted twice—once in 2012 and once in 2023.
Another notable name on the list is Sean Combs Capital.
While SEC filings show no matches for the company, the business has previously been linked to the American rapper Diddy—previously known as Puff Daddy—who has launched a number of businesses under his birth name.
These have included the Sean Combs Foundation, Combs Investments, and more recently the umbrella brand for his holdings, Combs Global.
Musk has also managed to attract some royal attention for his endeavor, with HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud also featured on the list.
The Saudi prince has a net worth just shy of $19 billion, per Forbes, and also has holdings in the likes of luxury hotels the Four Seasons and the Savoy, as well as other technology firms like ride-sharing company Lyft.
It also seems that despite his criticism of Musk’s leadership, Jack Dorsey still owns shares in the platform he founded via the Jack Dorsey Remainder LLC.
The Twitter cofounder previously backed the Tesla CEO in his takeover of the company but walked back his support earlier this year, telling a member on rival social media platform Bluesky, “It all went south.”
Doubling down on investments
Among the less eminent names are some organizations that not only hold stakes in X as a business but have also seen senior leaders pitch in.
Take the likes of Danilo Kawasaki and Ross Gerber.
According to the filing, the pair are named as individual investors in X but also have a stake in the business they lead, the wealth and investment management firm Gerber Kawasaki.
Elsewhere on the list are the Silicon Valley VCs one might expect: 8VC, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia.
The list, of course, also features Musk himself. Via the Elon Musk Revocable Trust, the SpaceX founder is also listed.
Musk purchased the site for $44 billion in 2022, though the filing did not make clear the proportion of his investment versus that of others. Since then, the business has been beleaguered by departing advertisers, mass layoffs, and criticism of Musk’s strategy.
X did not immediately respond to Fortune‘s request for comment.
The full list
8VC Opportunities Fund II, L.P. ADREM X LLC ADREM Y LLC Afshar Partners, LP Andrea Stroppa Andreessen Horowitz LSV Fund III, L.P. Anthem Ventures, LLC ARK Venture Private Holdings LLC BAMCO, Inc. Bandera Fund LLC Baron Opportunity Fund Baron Partners Fund Binance Capital Management Co., Ltd Brookfield Project X L.P.•CCM 2020 Investments LLC Cheng and Chen Family Trust CNK Fund IV, L.P. Danilo Kawasaki Dayton Family Enterprises, LLC Dayton Family Investments, LLC DFJ GROWTH IV, L.P. DFJ GROWTH IV PARALLEL FUND, LLC DFJ GROWTH X-I, L.P. Eden Relationship Capital L.P. Elon Musk as Trustee of the Elon Musk Revocable Trust dated July 22, 2003 FIAM Target Date Blue Chip Growth Commingled Pool By: Fidelity InstitutionalAsset Management Trust Company as Trustee Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Commingled Pool By: Fidelity Management TrustCompany, as Trustee Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Institutional Trust By its manager Fidelity InvestmentsCanada ULC Fidelity Canadian Growth Company Fund by its manager Fidelity InvestmentsCanada ULC Fidelity Central Investment Portfolios LLC: Fidelity U.S. Equity Central Fund -Communication Services Sub Fidelity Contrafund: Fidelity Advisor New Insights Fund – Sub A Fidelity Contrafund: Fidelity Advisor New Insights Fund – Sub B Fidelity Contrafund: Fidelity Contrafund•Fidelity Contrafund: Fidelity Contrafund K6 Fidelity Contrafund: Fidelity Series Opportunistic Insights Fund Fidelity Contrafund Commingled Pool By: Fidelity Management Trust Company,as Trustee Fidelity Destiny Portfolios: Fidelity Advisor Diversified Stock Fund Fidelity Global Growth and Value Investment Trust – Sub A By its manager Fidelity Investments Canada Fidelity Global Innovators Investment Trust by its manager Fidelity InvestmentsCanada ULC Fidelity Growth Company Commingled Pool By: Fidelity Management TrustCompany, as Trustee Fidelity Insights Investment Trust By its manager Fidelity Investments CanadaULC Fidelity Mt. Vernon Street Trust: Fidelity Growth Company Fund Fidelity Mt. Vernon Street Trust : Fidelity Growth Company K6 Fund Fidelity Mt. Vernon Street Trust: Fidelity Series Growth Company Fund Fidelity OTC Commingled Pool By: Fidelity Management Trust Company, as Trustee Fidelity Puritan Trust: Fidelity Puritan Fund – Equity Sub B Fidelity Puritan Trust: Puritan K6 Fund – Equity Subportfolio•Fidelity Securities Fund: Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund Fidelity Securities Fund: Fidelity Blue Chip Growth K6 Fund Fidelity Securities Fund: Fidelity OTC K6 Portfolio Fidelity Securities Fund: Fidelity OTC Portfolio Fidelity Select Portfolios : Select Communication Services Portfolio•G64 Ventures LLC Gerber Kawasaki Inc. GFNCI LLC Gigafund 0.21, LP Glacier Ventures LLC Go Mav, LLC HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud IMG US, LLC Jack Dorsey Remainder LLC Jack Dorsey Tr Ua 12/08/2010 Jack Dorsey Revocable Trust Kingdom Holding Company Lawrence J. Ellison Revocable Trust Linda Ye and Robin Ren Family Foundation Litani Ventures•Luchi Fiduciaria SR POS. 365 Manhattan Venture Partners X LLC Mirae Asset Innovation X ONE, LLC Mirae Asset Project X Fund I, LP•Olivier Janssens Q Tetris Holding LLC Ross Gerber Santo Lira LLC SC CDA1 LLC SCGE Fund, L.P.•SCGGF III – U.S./India Management, L.P. SCHF (M) PV, L.P. Scott Nolan SC US/E Expansion Fund I Management, L.P. Sean Combs Capital, LLC Sequent (Schweiz) AG as Trustee of the Debala Trust Sequioa Capital Fund, L.P. Series N Dis, a series of Atreides Special Circumstances Fund, LLC Shahidi Tactic Group, LLC Steve Davis T. One Holdings LLC The Pershing Square Foundation TM33 Partner Holdings Tresser Blvd 402 LLC UnipolSai S.P.A. Variable Insurance Products Fund II: VIP Contrafund Portfolio – Subportfolio A VYC25 Limited X Holdings I Investment, LLC
To your South African mention, yep, it would be interesting to know how many of those did have connections with apartheid South Africa.
AI Overview Groups of former employees from Silicon Valley tech startups are called "mafias" because they support each other's new businesses with money, advice, and hiring. The term has been used since at least the 1950s, when the "Traitorous Eight" group of disgruntled Shockley Semiconductor employees started Fairchild Semiconductor.
The three South Africans and a close friend who ran the PayPal Mafia
Shaun Jacobs • 28 October 2024
Mafias dominate Silicon Valley today, with a Facebook Mafia, OpenAI Mafia, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Mafia emerging in the past decade.
While these mafias have rapidly grown in prominence, they all owe their existence to the godfather of tech mafias – the PayPal Mafia.
The PayPal Mafia was the training ground for many of Silicon Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, with its members creating companies such as Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Yelp.
The mafia has regained its notoriety in recent years, with many of its members becoming heavily involved in developing generative artificial intelligence and US politics.
What is not widely known about the PayPal Mafia is that three South Africans played a major role in its formation and growth under the so-called ‘Don’ of the mafia, Peter Thiel.
The three South Africans – Elon Musk, Roelof Botha, and David Sacks – share a common background, all coming from the tip of Africa.
Thiel also spent some time in the country before becoming a renowned tech investor. Most of his few years in Africa were spent in modern-day Namibia at a school in Swakopmund.
These three would effectively run the company, rising to become C-suite executives. Musk had a brief stint as CEO, while Botha and Sacks occupied their positions as CFO and COO well after Musk was booted from Paypal.
PayPal was founded by Thiel, Max Levchin, and Luke Nosek in December 1998 as Fieldlink and later renamed Confinity. The company originally offered just a money-transfer service.
Musk became involved in 1999 when his company, X.com, merged with Confinity. The South African-born entrepreneur was extremely bullish about the future of digital wallets and payments.
However, the wheels soon began to fall off at the company. Musk wanted to keep the name X.com while a majority of the employees preferred PayPal.
Musk’s management style became increasingly intense, resulting in a small group of employees persuading the board to oust him as CEO and bring back Peter Thiel.
Botha was brought along for the ride by Musk. He joined X.com before it merged with Confinity and soon rose to become its CFO. He was not a fan of Musk’s management style.
“I think it would have killed the company if Elon had stayed on as CEO for six more months,” Botha said. “The mistakes Elon was making at the time were amplifying the risk of the business.”
X.com was renamed PayPal in June 2001 and was listed on the Nasdaq in 2002. Shortly after, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion.
The original PayPal employees had difficulty adjusting to eBay’s more traditional corporate culture, and within four years, all but 12 of the first 50 employees had left.
As these former PayPal employees left the company and became successful tech entrepreneurs and investors in their own right, the PayPal Mafia moniker emerged.
In 2007, Fortune published a photo of thirteen former PayPal employees in gangster attire, creating the ‘PayPal Mafia’. Botha, Sacks, and Thiel were among them, but Musk was absent.
These ex-employees created companies such as LinkedIn, YouTube, Yammer, Yelp, Tesla, and SpaceX. Many were also early investors in Facebook, Instagram, Square, and Reddit.
These three South Africans were instrumental in PayPal’s rise and Silicon Valley’s emergence as the world’s tech hub. Here’s where they came from and where they are now.
Elon Musk
Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter CEO Elon Musk
Elon Musk is probably the most famous member of the PayPal mafia. He has become a lightning rod for political controversy alongside his incredible entrepreneurial feats.
He is best-known for revolutionising electric cars with Tesla and his ambitious mission to get humans to Mars with SpaceX.
Born in Pretoria on 28 June 1971, Musk has garnered a reputation for his intense management style – which resulted in his ouster from PayPal.
Musk went to Bryanston High School before moving to Pretoria Boys towards the end of his school career. He briefly attended the University of Pretoria before moving to Canada, gaining citizenship through his Candian-born mother, Maye.
Musk later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania and received bachelor’s degrees in economics and physics.
He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University but dropped out after two days and, with his brother Kimbal, co-founded the online city guide software company Zip2.
The startup was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. That same year Musk co-founded X.com, a direct bank. X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal.
When eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion, Musk used $100 million of the money he made from the sale to found SpaceX in 2002.
He would soon become an early investor in Tesla in 2004, becoming chairman. He later became the product architect and, in 2008, the CEO.
These two companies make up the bulk of Musk’s net worth and are behind him becoming the world’s richest man, as at the time of writing, worth $269.8 billion.
Roelof Botha is the grandson of the late minister of foreign affairs, Roelof Frederik “Pik” Botha.
His father, a renowned economist, ensured Botha flourished academically at Hoërskool Jan van Riebeeck but also that he never spoke English at home.
Set on attending an English university, Botha attended the University of Cape Town and graduated with a BSC in Actuarial Science, Economics, and Statistics.
The young Botha landed a job as a business analyst at consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in Johannesburg and worked there for a few years.
At the time, Botha said he was reading about what was happening in Silicon Valley and was set on challenging himself against the world’s best and riding the wave of the internet.
After two years at McKinsey, Botha enrolled at Stanford University for an MBA and finished top of his class. Job offers flooded in after that.
One immediately stood out. After rejecting two offers, Botha was introduced to Elon Musk by a mutual friend, after which the X.com founder convinced him to join the fledgling startup.
Botha rose to become PayPal’s CFO, and once he left, he said that Musk had not provided the board with a full picture of the company’s problems.
At 29, during the Dot-com Bubble, Botha oversaw the financial operations of a billion-dollar company and led it through its IPO in February 2000.
Botha received an offer to stay on at PayPal, but Sequoia’s Michael Mortiz offered him a chance to enter the venture capital world.
He has been immensely successful as an early-stage venture capitalist, growing Sequoia’s assets under management and his own wealth.
He led the firm’s early investments in YouTube, Instagram, and Square – netting the company hundreds of millions of dollars.
Botha now leads Sequoia Capital and sits on the boards of MongoDB, Evernote, Bird, Ethos, Natera, Square, Unity, and Xoom.
David Sacks
David Sacks spent considerably less time growing up in South Africa than Musk or Botha, moving from Cape Town to Tennessee when he was five.
Unlike Musk and Botha, Sacks also never had a great desire to become involved in the tech world. He simply did not want to work in a profession like his father, an endocrinologist.
Sacks attended Memphis University School in Memphis, Tennessee. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in economics from Stanford University in 1994 and a Juris Doctor from the University of Chicago Law School in 1998.
While Musk headhunted Botha, Sacks went to work with Thiel at Confinity in 1999 and became the company’s first product leader and then its COO.
Sacks built and ran many of the company’s key teams, including product management and design, sales and marketing, business development, international, customer service, fraud operations, and HR.
He pivoted the product from beaming money on Palm Pilots to emailing money on the web and introduced the business model that would make PayPal a billion-dollar business.
Like Musk, Sacks used the money from the listing of PayPal on the Nasdaq, and its sale to eBay to launch his own companies.
In 2008, he founded enterprise collaboration company Yammer, which was one of the first software startups to apply consumer growth tactics to enterprise software.
Yammer’s viral approach made it one of the fastest-growing software startups in history, exceeding eight million enterprise users in just four years. As Founder/CEO of Yammer, Sacks grew the company to roughly $60 million in sales and 500 employees.
In July 2012, Microsoft acquired Yammer for $1.2 billion. Using this money, he co-founded Craft Ventures, a venture capitalist firm, in 2017.
As a partner at Craft, Sacks has invested in over 20 unicorns, including Affirm, AirBnB, ClickUp, Eventbrite, Facebook, Houzz, Lyft, OpenDoor, Palantir, Postmates, Reddit, Slack, SpaceX, Twitter, Uber, and Wish.
Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?
"[...]It doesn't matter what the policies are or what the facts, numbers, and graphs say or show. It all just boils down to the perceptions gained from the traitors planned and orchestrated DISINFORMATION and Russian style Propaganda War. With their suppression of votes, billions$ of corruption, using lawfare against democracy, draining $$'s, resources, and time (using our citizens paid for court systems against us), and continuing culture wars of hate to divide and conquer are some of the forces we need to deal with." [my emphasis]
It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer.
The New Republic Nov 09, 2024
Selcuk Acar/Getty Images
This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky.
I’ve had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion times. And so on.
These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?
The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, "I give up."
But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Whydidn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.
The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeartMedia (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.
Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backward to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.
If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.
I’ve been in the media for three decades, and I’ve watched this happen from the front row. Fox News came on the air in 1996. Then, it was an annoyance, a little bug the mainstream media could brush off its shoulder. There was also Rush Limbaugh; still, no comparison between the two medias. Rush was talented, after a fashion anyway, but couldn’t survive in a mainstream lane (recall how quickly the experiment of having him be an ESPN color commentator went off the rails). But in the late 1990s, and after the internet exploded and George W. Bush took office, the right-wing media grew and grew. At first, the liberal media grew as well, along with the internet, in the form of a robust blogosphere that eventually spawned influential, agenda-setting websites like HuffPost. But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, V.C.-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google starting eating up the revenue pie.
And the result is what we see today. The readily visual analogy I use is: Once upon a time, the mainstream media was a beach ball and the right-wing media was a golf ball. Today, the mainstream media (what with layoffs and closures and the near death of serious local news reporting) is the size of a volleyball and the right-wing media is the size of a basketball, which, in case you’re wondering, is bigger.
This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media.It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.
And that is why Donald Trump won. Indeed, the right-wing media is why he exists in our political lives in the first place. Don’t believe me? Try this thought experiment. Imagine Trump coming down that escalator in 2015 with no right-wing media; no Fox News; an agenda still set, and mores still established, by staid old CBS News, the House of Murrow, and The New York Times.
That atmosphere would have denied an outrageous figure like Trump the oxygen he needed to survive and flourish. He just would not have been taken seriously at all. In that world, ruled by a traditional mainstream media, Trump would have been seen by Republicans as a liability, and they would have done what they failed to do in real life—banded together to marginalize him.
But the existence of Fox changed everything. Fox hosted the early debates, which Trump won not with intelligence but outrageousness. He tapped into the grievance culture Fox had nursed among conservatives for years. He had (most of the time) Rupert Murdoch’s personal blessing. In 2015–16, Fox made Trump possible.
And this year, Fox and the rest of the right-wing media elected him. I discussed all this Thursday with Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America, who watches lots of Fox News so the rest of us don’t have to. He made the crucial point—and you must understand this—that nearly all the crazy memes that percolated into the news stream during this election came not from Trump or JD Vance originally, but from somewhere in the right-wing media ecosystem.
The fake story about Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs, for example, started with a Facebook post citing second- and third-hand sources, Gertz told me; it then "circulated on X and was picked up by all the major right-wing influencers." Only then did Vance, a very online dude, notice it and decide to run with it. And then Trump said it himself at the debate. But it started in the right-wing media.
Likewise with the postdebate ABC "whistleblower" claims, which Gertz wrote about .. https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-business/maga-runs-wild-random-posters-abc-whistleblower-claims .. at the time. This was the story that ABC, which hosted the only presidential debate this election, fed Team Harris the questions in advance. This started, Gertz wrote, as a "wildly flimsy internet rumor launched by a random pro-Trump X poster." Soon enough, the right-wing media was all over it.
Maybe that one didn’t make a huge difference (although who knows?), but this one, I believe, absolutely did: the idea that Harris and Joe Biden swiped emergency aid away from the victims of Hurricane Helene (in mostly Southern, red states) and gave it all to undocumented migrants. It did not start with Trump or his campaign or Vance or the Republican National Committee or Lindsey Graham. It started on Fox. Only then did the others pick it up. And it was key, since this was a moment when Harris’s momentum in the polling averages began to flag.
I think a lot of people who don’t watch Fox or listen to Sinclair radio don’t understand this crucial chicken-and-egg point. They assume that Trump says something and the right-wing media amplify it. That happens sometimes. But more often, it’s the other way around. These memes start in the media sphere, then they become part of the Trump agenda.
I haven’t even gotten to the economy, about which there is so much to say. Yes—inflation is real. But the Biden economy has been great in many ways. The U.S. economy, wrote .. https://www.economist.com/special-report/2024-10-19 .. The Economist in mid-October, is "the envy of the world."
[Insert: According to the economist our economy is the envy of the world... (Actually, Forbes and WSJ and others agree...) https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175358785 .. and .. [...]The Historical Puzzle of US Economic Performance under Democrats vs. Republicans https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/historical-puzzle-us-economic-performance-under-democrats-vs-republicans We have heard much about the puzzle that US economic performance under President Joe Biden has been much stronger than voters perceive it to be. But the current episode is just one instance of a bigger historical puzzle: the US economy has since World War II consistently done better under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents. This fact is even less widely known, including among Democratic voters, than the truth about Biden’s term. Indeed, some poll results suggest that more Americans believe the reverse, that Republican presidents are better stewards of the economy than Democrats. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175397257]
But in the right-wing media,the horror stories were relentless.And mainstream economic reporting too often followed that lead. Allow me to make the world’s easiest prediction: After 12 noon next January 20, it won’t take Fox News and Fox Business even a full hour to start locating every positive economic indicator they can find and start touting those. Within weeks, the "roaring Trump economy" will be conventional wisdom. (Eventually, as some of the fruits from the long tail of Bidenomics start growing on the vine, Trump may become the beneficiary of some real-world facts as well, taking credit for that which he opposed and regularly denounced.)
[conix - Same page would be only good for America. See
B402, Bidenomics Is Still Working Very Well .. Trickle down as you know is the Republican thing, and that since Reagan's time has not served many in American nearly as well as it has served the more wealthy. Trickle down has not served much of the people world well, perhaps would be better said. Still poverty worldwide has declined. And, still, speaking of economies, as i was, as economies go it is accepted worldwide that Bidenomics has served the world well. Also, see the red below it has served American workers relatively well. P - "Trickle Down economics?..... Middle and working class waiting for dem economics." P - Related: Based on Incomes, Americans Are a Lot Better Off Under Biden Than Under Trump Despite a spurt of high inflation that has dramatically receded, Joltin’ Joe’s economy is far more robust than that of his oft-indicted predecessor. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175223762]
Back to the campaign. I asked Gertz what I call my "Ulan Bator question." If someone moved to America from Ulan Bator, Mongolia, in the summer and watched only Fox News, what would that person learn about Kamala Harris? "You would know that she is a very stupid person," Gertz said. "You’d know that she orchestrated a coup against Joe Biden. That she’s a crazed extremist. And that she very much does not care about you."
Same Ulan Bator question about Trump? That he’s been "the target of a vicious witch-hunt for years and years," that he is under constant assault; and most importantly, that he is "doing it all for you."
To much of America, by the way, this is not understood as one side’s view of things. It’s simply "the news."This is what people—white people, chiefly—watch in about two-thirds of the country. I trust that you’ve seen in your travels, as I have in mine, that in red or even some purple parts of the country, when you walk into a hotel lobby or a hospital waiting room or even a bar, where the TVs ought to be offering us some peace and just showing ESPN, at least one television is tuned to Fox. That’s reach, and that’s power. And then people get in their cars to drive home and listen to an iHeart, right-wing talk radio station. And then they get home and watch their local news and it’s owned by Sinclair, and it too has a clear right-wing slant. And then they pick up their local paper, if it still exists, and the op-ed page features Cal Thomas and Ben Shapiro.
Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis. You’ll pretty quickly come to understand what I’m saying here.
And then contemplate this fact: If you think they’re done, you’re in fantasyland. They’re not happy with the rough parity, the slight advantage they have now. They want media domination. Sinclair bought .. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/20/business/media/baltimore-sun-owner-david-smith.html .. the once glorious Baltimore Sun. Don’t think they’ll stop there. I predict Sinclair or News Corp will own The Washington Post one day. Maybe sooner than we think.
I implore you. Contemplate this. If you’re of a certain age, you have a living memory of revolutions in what we used to call the Third World. Question: What’s the first thing every guerilla army, whether of the left or the right, did once they seized the palace? They took over the radio or television station. First. There’s a reason for that.
This is a crisis.The Democratic brand is garbage in wide swaths of the country, and this is the reason. Consider this point. In Missouri on Tuesday, voters passed a pro–abortion rights initiative and another that raised the minimum wage and mandated paid leave. These are all Democratic positions. But as far as electing someone to high office, the Man-Boy Love Party could probably come closer than the Democrats. Trump beat Harris there by 18 points, and Senator Josh Hawley beat Lucas Kunce, who ran a good race and pasted Hawley in their debate, by 14 points.
The reason? The right-wing media. And it’s only growing and growing. And I haven’t even gotten to social media and TikTok and the other platforms from which far more people are getting their news these days. The right is way ahead on those fronts too. Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it’s too late, which it almost is.
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