They've benefited most from our collective loss
Throw a goddamn punch
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I guess to maintain what's left of my sanity I'm bargaining that I’ll wake up from my restless sleep one day soon and learn that something very funny has happened. Then again I buy scratch tickets and smoke cigarettes so I'm not really the best at calculating odds and risk.
Here's one thing that the non-capitulating media and the Democrats can do more of: Pin every plane crash on Trump and Musk. Every single one. I don't care if they may not technically be responsible. The fact is they have fired hundreds of FAA agents. It would be trivial to connect the dots. And it's a message that would resonate with people. Trump and Musk have made the lives of every American less safe for nothing.
There are so many evil and downright stupid people in this country who want all manner of terrible things to happen to others but I guarantee you there isn't one who wants to die in a plane crash because some juvenile billionaire thought it was epic and based to sabotage all of them.
“This is about protecting national security, and I’m scared to death,” a recently fired FAA worker named Charles Spitzer-Stadtlander said this week. “And the American public should be scared too.”
They would do it if it happened under a Democrat administration in a fucking second. Hell they already did try to blame the crash in D.C. on Joe Biden and D.E.I.
Hang this on them. Hang every single bad thing that happens on them. There’s currently a rock salt shortage in the northeast during all these recent storms. Everyone is stumbling around falling on their assholes. Why is that? I don’t know but blame Trump fuck it. The ads writes themselves. A Coffin Flops style montage of people eating shit in their driveways over and over.
"Trump did this to you."
Put them on their back feet for once. Throw a goddamn punch.
I know they are fucking with every aspect of government which makes it hard to confront everything all at once so why not start somewhere easy and common sense like this: The man who invented the ugliest exploding Nazi-mobile of all time wants you to die in plane crash.
Why else would they be doing any of this?
I promise you this shit is not going to stay funny for very long even to people who thought they wanted it.
Hold on a second though. Maybe this will all work itself out on its own after all. From (sorry) The Daily Mail:
President Donald Trump, frustrated with Boeing's slow pace at finishing two new 747s to serve as Air Force One, has ordered Elon Musk to find a way to speed up their delivery.
The options include relaxing security clearance standards for those who work on building the presidential planes.
Musk could also scaled back military communications and defenses on the aircraft to speed up the production process. ...
'We've been engaged with Elon' on how to deliver the aircraft earlier, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg told CNBC last month.
'The president wants those planes sooner so we're working with Elon to see what can we do to pull up the schedule of those programs,' he said.
Please Mr. Musk sir get those planes out the door quickly. Think of the memes.
Today I'm happy to share an excerpt from Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left by my pal Eoin Higgins. Its release could not have been better timed as we watch the billionaire tech villains run roughshod over what's left of this crumbling country's democracy.
I was happy to blurb the book a few months back. Here's what I wrote.
"Perhaps like me you log on every day to read news feeds awash in right wing conspiracies and outright fascism, and a diminished digital media either incapable of fighting back or complicit in its own dismantling, and think wait, what the hell happened here? Where did it all go wrong? Owned goes a long way toward explaining the decline. An impressively researched look into the decades long partnership between tech oligarchs and the authoritarian right that have a vested interest in keeping us all less informed and perpetually agitated, and some of the key players who have benefited most from our collective loss."
Like a lot of other people on the left another question you've probably asked yourself at one point or another is what exactly is Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald's fucking deal ? Owned puts in the work to answer that as well.
There's also a chapter in there about Substack and their shift to the right caused in large part by taking investment money from another one of these jewel hoarding dragon fucks Marc Andreessen. I spoke to Eoin about my experience with leaving Substack a few years back for these very reasons and am quoted a few times. This particular take of mine holds up pretty well I think.
“When people talk about free speech,” Luke O’Neil told me, “that’s basically a dog whistle which means you can say whatever you want about trans people and do race science-type shit.”
Eoin previously wrote for Hell World about his favorite Chris Cornell songs.
Luke O’Neil
He also wrote about the con artists in The Lincoln Project back in 2020.
Luke O’Neil
Time to Make the Switch
“I think they should be described as terrorists, not as writers or reporters,” Peter Thiel raged in an interview with PE Hub in 2009. “I don’t understand the psychology of people who would kill themselves and blow up buildings, and I don’t understand people who would spend their lives being angry; it just seems unhealthy.”
Thiel wasn’t alone in his fury at the press. Dissatisfaction with the mainstream media was growing in Silicon Valley. After a decade of fawning, excessively laudatory coverage, reporters— slowly but surely—were asking harder questions. The shift took hold in the mid-2010s, as the glow of the Obama era wore off and the challenges of surveillance and monopoly began to rear their hydra-like heads, connected, dangerous, and impossible to ignore.
But Thiel’s anger was more personal. In 2006—just a few years after he founded Palantir, his tech company that spied on Americans and collected revenue from the US government—Gawker Media launched Valleywag, a blog that mocked, attacked, and generally disrespected the titans of the tech industry, removing their mystique and making them look like fools. The attacks from the site’s writers crossed a line for Thiel when they effectively outed him in 2007. In Silicon Valley it was an open secret that Thiel was gay, but he had never publicly acknowledged his sexuality. Though he profited immensely from spying on others, Thiel did not like his private life made public.
Yet the real issue was not being outed. According to The Contrarian author Max Chafkin, as well as other Silicon Valley insiders to whom I talked, Thiel was livid that Valleywag implied he wasn’t mentally stable and drew attention to his poor performance in the markets. Thiel blamed Gawker Media for this, but the parent company of Gawker and Valleywag didn’t stop. Instead, it doubled down. Gawker not only defiantly reported on Thiel’s donations to Republican Ron Paul, but also tied the Texas congressman’s racist newsletters to the billionaire. The outlet also noted how much capital Thiel’s fund Clarium had lost and implied that Thiel was inflating his net worth. That kind of scrutiny made him furious.
He spent years planning his revenge; meanwhile, Valleywag shut down in 2011, briefly relaunched in 2013, and folded again in 2015. But that didn’t matter, because the real target was Gawker Media. Thiel and his team schemed for years about how to take down the site, using hacking, social infiltration, and other techniques. Their best opportunity came in 2012 when Gawker published a sex tape featuring wrestler Hulk Hogan and his friend’s wife. The site then released a second tape, audio only—one that Hogan had been desperate to keep quiet—featuring the wrestler uttering racial slurs. He sued.
Thiel secretly backed Hogan’s lawsuit, as he later admitted to the Times. A Florida jury decided in Hogan’s favor on March 18, 2016, and Gawker Media had to pay $140 million in damages. Once Hogan won, there was blood in the water and others the outlet had gone after saw their chance. All they had to do was sue, and the company would surely be forced to close.
Faced with the onslaught of lawsuits that came in the next months, drowning in debt, Gawker Media declared bankruptcy and was acquired by Univision Communications on August 22, 2016. The Gawker blog was subsequently shut down. The last post on the site came from founder Nick Denton, who lambasted Thiel for how he used Hogan to tear down the publication. “Peter Thiel has gotten away with what would otherwise be viewed as an act of petty revenge by reframing the debate on his terms,” Denton wrote. “Having spent years on a secret scheme to punish Gawker’s parent company and writers for all manner of stories, Thiel has now cast himself as a billionaire privacy advocate, helping others whose intimate lives have been exposed by the press.”
Thiel’s support of right-wing politics earned him a backlash within Silicon Valley. But taking down Gawker made him a cult hero to the national right wing. He had arrived.
In an interview with far-right firebrand Ann Coulter in April 2024, Thiel claimed that he’d “set up a whole law firm to bring cases against Gawker” and had funded other lawsuits before striking gold with Hogan. Thiel said that he and his attorneys communicated with Hogan and his attorneys during the Gawker Media case via a third party in Australia, a firm named the Australian Energy Company.
Thiel told Coulter that he saw himself as doing battle with a much more powerful and truly dangerous entity. “It was very motivational for me to tell myself during this entire process that Gawker was uniquely evil and that if we did something about them, we’d fix all the media,” Thiel said, adding, “This might have been slightly delusional or intentionally self-delusional.”
More important than Thiel’s personal vendetta, however, was that killing Gawker was a trial run for a media takeover. Thiel picked an unsympathetic target—an outlet that the mainstream media would be loath to defend—and won.
He had destroyed a newsroom with the reputation for being fearless. Suddenly, adversarial media—the sort that might be counted on to talk back to the status quo—was facing an existential threat.
Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left is available now.
Remember adversarial media? Remember media that didn't go out of its way to euphemize on behalf of the powerful? Media that didn't consider themselves a part of the elite and untouchable class and had no aspirations for ever graduating to such? What a time to be alive.
Now we have this shit.
"...a provocative gesture that resembled the controversial salute Elon Musk gave at a post-inauguration rally last month."
Okay!
Speaking of a golden age of media please enjoy this real 2013-ass playlist of mine that I uncovered the other night. Marina, Sky Ferreira, Yuck, Yeasayer, Solange, Cults... We didn't know how good we had it.
A couple of favorites I heard for the first time in a good while on there:
Hey did you know Daniel Blumberg of Yuck is an Academy Award nominee for best original score for The Brutalist? Hell yeah buddy.
Here's a shitty photo I took of them playing at T.T. the Bears in 2011.
I know I just shared this in here a couple weeks ago or whatever it was but here it is again. People seem to like it.
How good we had it
— Luke O'Neil (@lukeoneil47.bsky.social) 2025-02-19T21:48:42.649Z