Please put this delightful track in your ears ASAP. From the new album by (ahem, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ son) Henry Hall, “John The Dog” is a first-person narrative about Henry’s relationship with John the Dog, who was not a real dog because, as we learn, Henry’s mom wouldn’t let him have a dog, but no matter: Henry loves dogs so much that he makes up stories about John and tells us all about it in his kooky, honeyed tenor. This and more on the album entitled, “Neato”— just more evidence that Hall must be a really fun friend.
While all the journalists leave their jobs for Substack, all the right-wing pundits seem to be leaving Twitter for Parler (a much less drastic move, but gossip is gossip). That headline raises several questions: firstly, what’s Parler, and do we pronounce it the French way? Well, friends, Parler is a conservative social media platform that bypasses all the pesky truth filters imposed by the arbiters of democracy known as Facebook and Twitter (ha) in favor of protecting free speech. Based on that information, you can bet that “Parler” is pronounced the way you would say it if you called a mask a “freedom muzzle.” Founded in 2018, the platform is now finding its footing (it recently hit the top spot in the app store’s free downloads, above Tik Tok and Youtube) as facts swing lightly back into vogue and the hate-group subcultures that approached the mainstream via the president feel at once empowered and shoved back into the margins. The main worry here, beyond deepening the echo chamber of lies, is that on an app that espouses free speech as its top value, extremists have free rein to potentially radicalize other, more moderate users. If it’s any comfort, though, no other comparable right-wing platform has really taken off since this type of company doesn’t tend to have the engineering resources to handle a critical user mass. So you can only be moderately horrified.
In other right-wing news, maybe you’ve heard that Fox News ratings have dropped since the network called the election for Biden. Please hold your delight, though, since other, more toxic conservative news outlets have already arisen to fill the Fox-shaped void. Trump himself says that Newsmax, a low-budget cable channel that has yet to acknowledge the party’s loss, is the place to go, mainly because it tells his folks what they want to hear. We should note that the Newsmax founder is both a friend of the president and a member of Mar-a-Lago— in case you wondered about what will happen to Trumpism come January.
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