Eyes Wide Open

Because hate is easier

Glenn Greenwald took time away from his seemingly perpetual appearances on Fox News to retweet me:

I confess I’m tired of the cynicism. People like Greenwald and Steve Bannon and the rest of their ilk are not stupid. They know exactly when they’re lying (which is practically all of the time)—they’ve just decided that lying is more lucrative.

1/31/22-2/06/22

I’m compiling A GLOSSARY OF FASCISTS and A GLOSSARY OF PSEUDO-INTELLECTUAL HACKS so this doesn’t get too repetitive. I’ll post it once it’s ready and will then include links to them in every new #GTFOTL posts as the lists will be constantly updated.

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N.B. The numbers in parentheses indicate the position on last week’s list.

FACEBOOK

Here are the 70 daily top ten posts for the week:

Ben Shapiro held 25 (26) Dan Bongino held 8 (8) followed by Breitbart with 6, Franklin Graham with 4, Steven Crowder with 4, and The Federalist Papers and Political Insider with one each.

Only one left-leaning organizations made the lists: Occupy Democrats, with 3 spots in the top 70.

NYT BESTSELLERS HARDCOVER NON-FICTION

3. The 1619 Project, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones (1)

8. Unthinkable, Jamie Raskin (4)

AMAZON BESTSELLERS HARDCOVER NON-FICTION

6. The Real Anthony Fauci, RFK, Jr. (4)

16. 12 Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson (17) I missed this last week, probably because I didn’t realize who Jordan Peterson was until seeing video of him as Joe Rogan’s guest. What a piece of work he is.

Glenn Beck and James O’Keefe have fallen off the list entirely, which is great news. Even better banned book Maus is holding strong at 3, 4, and 19. Thanks to everybody who bought it recently (or ever). Let’s do the same for Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Nic Stone’s Dear Martin.

APPLE PODCASTS—NEWS

THE RIGHT AND THE ENABLERS

3. The Ben Shapiro Show (3)

4. The Dan Bongino Show (7)

8. Steve Bannon’s War Room (10)

9. Real Time with Bill Maher

11. The Glenn Beck Program (16)

12. The Megyn Kelly Show

13. The Charlie Kirk Show

16. Candace Owen (13)

19. The Great America Show, Lou Dobbs. I can’t believe this guy has a podcast or that this many people actually listen to it. I mean, my god!

THE LEFT

5. Pod Save America (10)

6. The Rachel Maddow Show (12)

18. Lovett or Leave It, Jon Lovett

And, yep, Joe Rogan, the really racist disseminator of COVID disinformation, still has the #1 podcast on Spotify. 

SUBSTACK POLITICS NEWSLETTERS

Although the top-ten is more ideologically diverse across the right-wing spectrum it contains a disturbing number of serially wrong anti-democratic writers who have way too many followers than is healthy for our nation. Every single newsletter in the top ten has tens of thousands of subscribers.

This list won’t change much from week to week but there’s a new entry because of an over-sight.

2. The Dispatch Jonah Goldberg,editor-in-chief

3. TK News by Matt Taibi

5. Glen Greenwald  

6. Unreported Truths by Alex Berenson

7. Common Sense by Bari Weiss, aka the “Substack grifter” (in the words of Press Run’s Eric Boehlert)

8. The Weekly Dish by Andrew Sullivan

Thankfully this sorry collection of propagandists, purveyors of disinformation, and liars is bracketed by the exemplary Letters from an American by Heather Cox Richardson at number 1 and Judd Legum’s Popular Information at number ten.

N.B. Some of you wondered why Seth Abramson’s excellent newsletter Proof isn’t on this list. I decided only to look at the Politics category and Proof is in the Culture category (as is The Good in Us). Luckily, Abramson is consistently #1 there.

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And now Sebastian, Linden, and Cap need a nap: