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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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Mildly Interesting
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This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
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A lot of these shows go hand-in-glove with traditional media. The police-blotter style coverage of local news, wherein a handful of old white people bemoan the latest string of young black man violent crimes gets picked up and fed into the Podcast Racism Engine and spat out as the show's Two-Minute Hate of the day.
Then you have a congo-line of ex-military blowhards telling you how they got rich trading in their service pensions for crypto futures. You have the usual suspects lineup of incel sex pests complaining that America's Newest Supermodel isn't hot enough or isn't Trad Enough, in between reading sponsor copy for whatever PR company paid them to say said Supermodel's name twenty times in a given episode. You have interviews with C-list politicians who come on the show to cry about how you can't say the N-word anymore, on account of the Woke. You have middling athletes at the end of their careers complain about how Transgender high schoolers are ruining the sport. You have middling songwriters at the end of their careers complain about how they pay too much in taxes and hate all three of their ex-wives. You have middling screenwriters demo a pilot episode of a cartoon series about Real Americans forced to use pronouns at gunpoint, then point you to the conservative version of Kickstarter with the promise of a full series that'll never get produced once they have your money. And holy shit will you get an earful about Jesus.
All this takes a bunch of time and networking and tons of money to grease the wheels. Charlie Kirk ain't doing this shit for free. But it's stacked up like any classic MLM, with the kingpins racking in disproportionately more than any of their minions or guests.
It's short-sighted to say these operations are just faster than traditional journalism, though. Lots of the names on that board have been bouncing around for decades. This is a long term, heavily financed, hugely lucrative propaganda machine. It dates back to the Nixon Era (arguably earlier) and quite a few folks have gone to their graves helping to build it.