Media organizations are reporting high levels of cancellations of newspapers and other news products in the week of the election of Donald Trump, as liberal Democrats depressed by the results decide to check out rather than to fight a man that they described as an existential threat to democracy.
How Americans Resist
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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Not loving the auto-scroll on the site. Makes reading the comics very hard unless you’re quick on hiting the “comments” button before it scrolls to the next one.
This one didn’t age well, Ted.
Yesterday, we all saw some highly effective protesting. Brian Thompson was shot to death in a planned assault. The weapon had a silencer. The bullets had words carved on them indicating a grudge against health care or, specifically, Thompson’s company, United Health, which (if the figures I’ve seen are accurate) has a 32% claim denial rate. The assailant, whose salary was probably a lot less than the $9.9 million a year Thompson was handed to screw over sick people, has not yet been caught. (I suspect he made closer to the $10K pittance that’s being offered as a “reward.”)
The problem the 99% face is that not enough people protest. I suspect that the killer will be found soon (or one will be found) and almost certainly die from a “self-sustained” gunshot to the back of his head with a bullet whose caliber doesn’t match the one he used on Thompson because the most important thing now is to make sure hoi polloi don’t draw the wrong lesson from this.
Plus, we’re fickle.
I think it’s good that people are unplugging from media that lied to them. Maybe some of them are waking up, rather than falling into a deeper slumber, and perhaps some are going into cocoons in order to re-emerge transformed.
That’s the metaphor behind Buffalo Bill in “Silence of the Lambs”!
Seriously though, I think you’re onto something here. I think a lot of the conversion to social media is that, buried in with all the hype and flat-earther stuff, an occasional truth does emerge, and it’s pretty much all scrubbed away at the MSM level. (What I wouldn’t give for the New York Times to run a “Man on the Street” article: “I’m glad he shot that CEO. I think they should gun down all the CEOs. Well, not the CEO of the Shriners, of course, but let’s line up the rest of them and run the metrics.”
But I won’t hold my breath on that (my insurance provider would probably say breathing was a pre-existing condition).
These comments are a great example of, when someone shows you who they are, believe them. Wow!