Sunny yet with cool temperatures this near-noon Wednesday here in California’s Central Valley — a most-pleasant daily episode as we await summer’s drastic measures.
Also awaiting this evening’s farce Twitter bullshit horror-political-event with Ron DeSantis/Elon Musk coming together to create a spatter of media glow, I spied this in my rando InterWebs surfing:
Thinking about this @TheDailyShow video ahead of the Ron DeSantis/Elon Musk Twitter space for no particular reason whatsoever.pic.twitter.com/kOOBjItH8X
— Jo? (@JoJoFromJerz) May 24, 2023
Zeeshan Aleem at MSNBC just a bit ago on the idiocy of the moment in Floriduh Ron’s disjointed presidential hopes:
The launch has no precedent. Executives at major social media companies have sponsored nonpartisan election hubs to encourage voter participation, and they’ve privately met politicians to talk policy. But this development goes a step further. It publicly ties Twitter to a specific politician with a distinct MAGA-influenced ideological vision. It underscores Twitter’s ongoing evolution into a right-wing platform, and it could boost DeSantis as he struggles to loosen former President Donald Trump’s stranglehold on the Republican presidential race.
NBC reported that DeSantis will announce his intention to run in a conversation with Musk on Twitter Spaces, the site’s platform for audio chats. The conversation will be moderated by David Sacks, a venture capitalist who has a close relationship with Musk, pours money into right-wing activism, and is a staunch DeSantis ally. Musk too has expressed support for DeSantis in the past. Last year, when a Twitter user asked him whom he was leaning toward supporting in 2024, Musk replied “DeSantis.”
Everyone in this interaction will be getting a taste of a kind of power they don’t normally have. Musk and, to a lesser extent, Sacks are tech titans who wield power through money, and increasingly in American culture through their purchase of media properties. (Musk, of course, used his tech wealth to purchase Twitter; Sacks co-founded the independent media platform Callin, recently acquired by Rumble). With this conversation, though, they’re trying to play political kingmakers.
Musk has insisted that the conversation is not an endorsement. But this highly unusual arrangement will likely introduce a significant number of his millions of followers to DeSantis and prompt them to view him more sympathetically. DeSantis is well known among politics junkies, but he has only a fraction of the mainstream cultural status that Trump has. Receiving attention and new followers from Musk’s hyperonline cult could help him as he looks to get traction in a race where Trump has pulled far ahead.
[…]
Twitter and the MAGA right are becoming more deeply intertwined. The right-wing media network The Daily Wire recently announced that it’s moving its podcasts to Twitter, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has said he plans to host a show on the platform as well. Twitter was never a neutral platform — there’s no such thing — but it’s now a platform that should be perceived with extreme skepticism as a fair arbiter of news and information. It’s one man’s playground, and the public good is not top of mind for him.
And way-not good for the rest of America and the world.
Despite the obvious bullshit, or not, here we are once again…