Yesterday we talked about the latest attempt to replicate the now-blasé Drudge dot com, Joseph Curl’s “Off the Press,” and the human garbage therein.
Today we’re taking a quick look back at what was, until then, the latest attempt to make Drudge great again: “Populist Press.” You may have heard of it back in November, when researchers at Avaaz caught Steve Bannon using it to bypass Facebook’s misinformation filters for false claims about the election.
These days it focuses more heavily on anti-vaxx content, but will occasionally include a link out to climate denial. However, since Bannon’s never been quite as explicitly into the fossil fuel and climate denial side of the fake news ecosystem that Koch and Exxon et al. have created, there’s also the occasional mainstream story that gets it right.
For example, yesterday it linked out, via a preview page that serves you an additional helping of ads before sending you to a Townhall column making some tired points about COVID and climate science being the same, in that Democratic leaders defer to scientific experts, which… yeah?
Elsewhere on the (faux) Populist homepage, though, was an AP story on wildfire and drought in Hawaii, which notes both that the usually-rainfall-rich islands don’t usually have big fires, but that “blazes could become more frequent as climate change-related weather patterns intensify,” and “drought that is tied to climate change has made wildfires harder to fight.”
So it’s somewhat refreshing, honestly, to see what a conservative disinformation machine that isn’t fueled by oil money does differently. For example, the ads are much more.
Just more. More, everything that a terrible digital ad can be.
One ad on the page for the Townhall link (click here for screenshot, or see title image) featured none other than Ben Carson, the supposedly brilliant neurosurgeon, who went on to become Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. If you’ve forgotten which of the many once-somewhat-respectable people who embarrassed themselves he is, here’s a reminder. Ben Carson is the one who was also a candidate in the 2016 GOP primary, who apparently forgot his own name when called on stage for one of the debates and stood awkwardly at the side of the stage for over a minute, and who (repeatedly) described enslaved people as immigrants who came in slave ships so their great-grandchildren could achieve the American Dream. But apparently Carson had what Trump was looking for in a campaign surrogate, during which time he once apparently realized he’d forgotten his luggage somewhere during an interview on national television and had to run back to get it. (We assume he blamed his wife for that too.)
Anyway, the ad was a picture of Carson smiling with a microphone, and the caption “Ben Carson: ‘Memory Loss is Finally a Thing of the Past!’”
What was it advertising? We think maybe it was grain storage containers, but we know for sure we clicked through and were quite impressed. We just can’t seem to remember what the product being advertised was…