While many of us were occupied with happenings on Steem lately, the Real World kept happening everywhere else too. One interesting development is that the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed laid off 1,000 'journalists'. I manage to avoid being mentally triggered by the racist, sexist, divisive drivel those outlets have been publishing by completely ignoring it, until I saw a blurb about the layoffs.
It has been said that you can measure a person by their enemies, and I took a look at the response of one of their favorite targets, /pol/, to see what their sentiment regarding the event was. As you might guess, the folks there weren't at all unhappy about the mass layoffs. But I found an interesting discussion about why those layoffs happened.
Recently the Leftist hatred of American values has increased in vitriol, with some journalists calling for American children to be fed into wood chippers, or castrated by lottery. I'm not kidding. The obvious assumption was that these publishers were being held accountable for the threats their employees were making by law enforcement, and that may actually be happening to some degree.
But what really activated my almonds was reading that the USG shutdown had impaired their funding mechanisms.
The Obama administration undertook to fund propaganda domestically, with Secretary of State Clinton in charge of who was funded, so publishers like Buzzfeed and Huffingtonpost were almost certainly recipients of such funding. But that funding came from the Federal government, and the government was shut down for over a month. The people being paid with that money either needed to work for free, or money from somewhere else needed to be found to pay them with.
Given the very poor opinion most people have of the kinds of articles these propagandists publish, I doubt funds could be sourced from anywhere besides government, which forcefully takes it from people as taxation.
The current President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, has a very low opinion of these outlets, which have continually lied and defamed him and his supporters for years. Under his administration and after the shutdown reached 30 days and he was empowered to actively effect what is basically emergency funding for essential government services, there was no way Federal funding for such propaganda outlets would be restored, so they shuttered.
I hope this is only the beginning. Not all the abusive threat makers have been cut loose from their whacko employers. More need to be.
But, this is a good start.
IMG source - all images from /pol/
