This Is Your Brain on Newsmax
What it’s like bingeing on the Fox-killer.
by Tim Miller ·
December 4, 2020 1:10 pm
Since the glorious defeat of Donald Trump, I had been ensconced in my cozy coastal elite Twitter bubble, only privy to the bursts of Sidney Powell and Lin Wood crazy when it inserted itself in my feed. So when Ben Smith fed the blue-check tigers this juicy morsel about the rise of Chris Ruddy and Newsmax, I was shook.
Newsmax’s prime-time ratings, which averaged 58,000 before Election Day, soared to 1.1 million afterward for its top shows.
Wait, seriously? A million people?
That’s a boost of 20x over the network’s pre-election ratings. To put it another way, Newsmax, which Nielsen only started tracking this past summer, went overnight from having programming that topped out at 1 percent the size of Fox’s biggest show (Tucker Carlson Tonight) to about 20 percent its size.
The demand side of the conservative media curve was speaking. They want Coup Theatre News and they want it now.
I wanted to find out what these folks were being told, so I committed myself to hours upon hours of viewing. You may think you have a sense for what is happening on The Max, but I promise you it is much weirder, more alarming, and more debased than you can imagine. Here’s some of what I saw:
◾The president’s campaign lawyer saying that a former Trump official should be executed.
◾A host saying that Biden’s election would bring a war between the races and that Barack Hussein Obama is a “reprobate” who is “pimping” a book.
◾Hosts and guests suggesting several times an hour that Republican state legislatures should overturn the will of the people to keep Trump in power.
◾Fantastical stories of millions of votes being dropped off by tow trucks in the dead of night after nationwide blackouts.
◾The term “ballot harvesting” bandied about indiscriminately.
◾An endless stream of Lionel Hutz-level legal analysis.
And that was just one day in the life of Uncut Kraken.
The cast of characters who appear on Newsmax is so random that you might be tempted to describe it as a Political Star Wars Bar but that would be unfair to the Mos Eisley cantina.
I saw Dinesh D’Souza. Dick Morris’s shiny dentures. The Gorka. Random kids from Twitter. Rudy, Rudy, and more Rudy. Blago. John Gizzi. Lots of blonde ladies. Broadway Joe.
A few personal disclosures before we journey into this heart of darkness:
◾Chris Ruddy, who owns and runs Newsmax, is a South Florida spinner of yarns who bought me a few fancy lunches during the Jeb! campaign, when he thought I might have Sean Spicer’s job at the White House podium one day.
◾Sean Spicer was my boss at the RNC and has been to my home.
◾John Bachman had me on his show a time or three back in the day.
I would guess with a high level of confidence that all of these gentlemen know that Donald Trump lost. Spicer said as much on November 5 before Newsmax realized just how much juice they could get out of the scam. Ruddy openly told the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner that he saw a business opportunity in providing wall-to-wall election fraud fanfic.
What these characters are doing is exploiting Trump Nation’s need to believe that their great, nectarine idol is unbreakable and that the only way he could “lose” is if people whom they hate—the Deep State, Big Tech, Antifa, the media, black people—are conspiring against him.
So here is the dangerous story they are being told—minute by agonizing minute.
Apparently having canvassed the whole of the elite GOP, D’Souza says the view is unanimous among Republican elected officials that the election was corrupt but they aren’t speaking up because they are limited by the “cultural timidity” of the establishment.
He says the only thing stopping Trump from winning is Republican elected officials going “invertebrate.” He proposes a revote.
Next he describes the “intellectual Antifa” in the mainstream media that he says has terrorized Republican officials. The IA is what’s stopping them from couping, he concludes. (Bachman: “‘Intellectual Antifa,’ that’s an interesting juxtaposition I hadn’t considered.”)
For making it this far I’d like to reward you with a little gossip.
https://thebulwark.com/this-is-your-brain-on-newsmax/
Sekulow fils says he thinks there’s a “very good chance the outcome changes” thanks to their case that would disenfranchise every single person who voted absentee in the state of Wisconsin because something something signature matching.
“Very good” is doing a lot of work there, obviously, but I couldn’t help but thinking that a person could make a lot of money betting with these people.
That’s a thing, by the way. One of the footnotes to this election is that betting markets continued to take action on the outcome of the election even after the polls closed and there was an entire universe of suckers out there betting that Trump would win even days after the election.
When I saw those betting lines unfolding in real time, I couldn’t understand them. How could someone watching the election returns think that it was smart to bet cash-money on Trump, even as he lost state after state.
And how could tens of thousands of Americans be pilfered to the tune of $170 million dollars to fight an election that was already over?
But my time with The Max has given me a pretty clear explanation.
There’s a sucker born every minute. Maybe even a couple million of them.
That’s Newsmax’s business model. And it’s working out pretty well for them.
What it’s like bingeing on the Fox-killer.
Quote:And that was just one day in the life of Uncut Kraken.
by Tim Miller ·
December 4, 2020 1:10 pm
Since the glorious defeat of Donald Trump, I had been ensconced in my cozy coastal elite Twitter bubble, only privy to the bursts of Sidney Powell and Lin Wood crazy when it inserted itself in my feed. So when Ben Smith fed the blue-check tigers this juicy morsel about the rise of Chris Ruddy and Newsmax, I was shook.
Newsmax’s prime-time ratings, which averaged 58,000 before Election Day, soared to 1.1 million afterward for its top shows.
Wait, seriously? A million people?
That’s a boost of 20x over the network’s pre-election ratings. To put it another way, Newsmax, which Nielsen only started tracking this past summer, went overnight from having programming that topped out at 1 percent the size of Fox’s biggest show (Tucker Carlson Tonight) to about 20 percent its size.
The demand side of the conservative media curve was speaking. They want Coup Theatre News and they want it now.
I wanted to find out what these folks were being told, so I committed myself to hours upon hours of viewing. You may think you have a sense for what is happening on The Max, but I promise you it is much weirder, more alarming, and more debased than you can imagine. Here’s some of what I saw:
◾The president’s campaign lawyer saying that a former Trump official should be executed.
◾A host saying that Biden’s election would bring a war between the races and that Barack Hussein Obama is a “reprobate” who is “pimping” a book.
◾Hosts and guests suggesting several times an hour that Republican state legislatures should overturn the will of the people to keep Trump in power.
◾Fantastical stories of millions of votes being dropped off by tow trucks in the dead of night after nationwide blackouts.
◾The term “ballot harvesting” bandied about indiscriminately.
◾An endless stream of Lionel Hutz-level legal analysis.
And that was just one day in the life of Uncut Kraken.
The cast of characters who appear on Newsmax is so random that you might be tempted to describe it as a Political Star Wars Bar but that would be unfair to the Mos Eisley cantina.
I saw Dinesh D’Souza. Dick Morris’s shiny dentures. The Gorka. Random kids from Twitter. Rudy, Rudy, and more Rudy. Blago. John Gizzi. Lots of blonde ladies. Broadway Joe.
A few personal disclosures before we journey into this heart of darkness:
◾Chris Ruddy, who owns and runs Newsmax, is a South Florida spinner of yarns who bought me a few fancy lunches during the Jeb! campaign, when he thought I might have Sean Spicer’s job at the White House podium one day.
◾Sean Spicer was my boss at the RNC and has been to my home.
◾John Bachman had me on his show a time or three back in the day.
I would guess with a high level of confidence that all of these gentlemen know that Donald Trump lost. Spicer said as much on November 5 before Newsmax realized just how much juice they could get out of the scam. Ruddy openly told the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner that he saw a business opportunity in providing wall-to-wall election fraud fanfic.
What these characters are doing is exploiting Trump Nation’s need to believe that their great, nectarine idol is unbreakable and that the only way he could “lose” is if people whom they hate—the Deep State, Big Tech, Antifa, the media, black people—are conspiring against him.
So here is the dangerous story they are being told—minute by agonizing minute.
Apparently having canvassed the whole of the elite GOP, D’Souza says the view is unanimous among Republican elected officials that the election was corrupt but they aren’t speaking up because they are limited by the “cultural timidity” of the establishment.
He says the only thing stopping Trump from winning is Republican elected officials going “invertebrate.” He proposes a revote.
Next he describes the “intellectual Antifa” in the mainstream media that he says has terrorized Republican officials. The IA is what’s stopping them from couping, he concludes. (Bachman: “‘Intellectual Antifa,’ that’s an interesting juxtaposition I hadn’t considered.”)
For making it this far I’d like to reward you with a little gossip.
https://thebulwark.com/this-is-your-brain-on-newsmax/
Sekulow fils says he thinks there’s a “very good chance the outcome changes” thanks to their case that would disenfranchise every single person who voted absentee in the state of Wisconsin because something something signature matching.
“Very good” is doing a lot of work there, obviously, but I couldn’t help but thinking that a person could make a lot of money betting with these people.
That’s a thing, by the way. One of the footnotes to this election is that betting markets continued to take action on the outcome of the election even after the polls closed and there was an entire universe of suckers out there betting that Trump would win even days after the election.
When I saw those betting lines unfolding in real time, I couldn’t understand them. How could someone watching the election returns think that it was smart to bet cash-money on Trump, even as he lost state after state.
And how could tens of thousands of Americans be pilfered to the tune of $170 million dollars to fight an election that was already over?
But my time with The Max has given me a pretty clear explanation.
There’s a sucker born every minute. Maybe even a couple million of them.
That’s Newsmax’s business model. And it’s working out pretty well for them.
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