Category: Media

Vichy Republicans & Their Big Meh At Trump’s Collusion With The Russians

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

If there is any central event that signifies how fucked the United States is because of the rise of Trumplandia it’s the fact that as we careen towards the very real possibility of proved collusion between the Russians and the 2016 Trump campaign, there’s a growing chorus of people on the Right who shrug and say: So what, no laws were broken.

That’s pretty much the core belief of Trumplandia. There is no shame, no sense of how bad something might look as long as you win and keep power.

This intertwines quiet well with the absolute complete inability to recognize the repeated, staggering hypocrisy that members of the Right have to engage in on a daily basis to maintain their absolute support for their Dear Leader, Donald Trump.

Trumpandia citizens rail about liberal celebrities telling them how to vote, then turn around and vote for a celebrity. They make the use of a private email server on the part of Hillary Clinton a huge campaign issue, then their Dear Leader asks world leaders to call him on his personal insecure cellphone. The list goes on and on.

But the idea that even if we prove collusion that it doesn’t matter because no laws were broken really takes the cake. It seems to me that this is the first step in the defense of Donald Trump down the road once collusion is, in fact, proven.

This brings up an interesting point. The Right acts as if they’re so fucking oppressed and yet they are on a hair trigger to attack any screw up on the part of the Left. President Obama gets caught on a hot mic once that he will have more flexibility with them diplomatically after the election and Right Wing Nut Jobs try to compare that to could have been a wide-ranging, sweeping collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign in 2016.

Let that sink in for a moment.

All of this, of course, gets even more murky when you realize that the Vichy Republicans are so complicit this collusion that it is highly unlikely there would be any consquences even politically for Trump should it be proven beyond a doubt that there was active collusion with the Russians. It goes without saying that had Hillary Clinton’s campaign done anything like that, there would be hell to pay.

So all of this makes the rise of Trumplandia even more dire. It makes even more urgent that Congress flip in 2018. But given the shameless nature of the Republicans and the very methods that they actively use to prevent voting, it is a possible there will be no “Blue Wave.” It could be that we’re no longer a democracy at all. It could be that Trump will be proven to be, on an ethical level a traitor, but on a legal level not so much.

As I keep saying, the only thing I can compare this to is Vichy France. That’s the only time in the last 100 years or so where a nation was prostrate to another nation in such a willful manner. Also, if anything shows how we need to stop falloning Trump everytime he makes a stupid typo on Twitter, this is it.

I know it makes us feel better to get a good laugh from the boorish behavior of the president, but we need to wake up. We need to start taking all of this a lot more seriously. Instead of laughing, we should be figuring out more effective ways to combat Trumplandia.

So, as I keep saying, don’t rage, engage. Think of constructive ways you can engage in the political process to help save this nation that we all hold so dear. We no longer have to worry about the prospect of a dystopian future, we now live in a very dystopian present.

Shelton Bumgarner is the editor and publisher of The Trumplandia Report. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.

Don’t Rage, Engage: Hollywood, Do Your Fucking Job

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

The whole Kathy Griffin kerfuffle is yet another reminder that Hollywood has been oddly silent about Donald Trump in the way that matters most: actually producing content that helps civil society process what the fuck is going on. That’s the whole point of Hollywood.

Currently comedy on TV has been picking up the slack for Hollywood. Be it Full Frontal, or Saturday Night Live or The Late Show, late night comedy is where right minded people go in America to try to figure out how to understand this horrific dead-end that we’ve found ourselves in.

Both a market and an audience exists for movies and TV devoted to being metaphors for Trumplandia. I know I would shell out $11 to see a movie that addressed what a fuckwit Donald Trump is. Or maybe a remake of 1984. Or a remake of Being There. Hell, even a movie about The Mule portion of The Foundation Saga would make me feel better at this point. This is pretty basic stuff. If me, a hayseed rube in a flyover state can figure this out, then I’m sure someone at Miramax or Paramount can figure something so basic out.

But what do we have right now instead of quality content? We have silence. I have not heard of hardly any films in production and there are only a spattering of TV that are obvious meant to direction address Trumplandia. It makes you wonder why this is.

You would think that something as momentous as the rise of Trumplandia would inspire the Hollywood scribes and producers to generate all kinds of content. But all we get is Kathy Griffin pretending to cut off Donald Trump’s head. Everyone would be served if she were to not rage against Trumplandia in such a stupid manner but rather write a TV script for a sitcom about dealing with Trumplandia. Something, anything to bring people together, instead of dividing them.

The only thing I can think of is that producers are skittish about offending people, by, well, losing money. In other words, stars feel obliged to be offensive on a personal level, but the people with money who maybe oppose Trump aren’t willing to take the risk that Trumplandia will freak out if you produced a movie that obviously attacked Trump in some direct manner.

That’s the only thing I can think of. That makes the most sense. There might be something to the fact that Hollywood is still in shock that Trump won in the first place and they just haven’t gotten over the shock enough to begin writing scripts that directly tough that live wire.

But I think it’s the money situation. Corporate types think differently that the artists they support, so that reluctance to lose money by offending the ever-so-touchy Trumplandia base probably is the reason. As someone pointed out to me recently, Watergate really only produced one movie and that was after it was over. So maybe it makes a lot more sense that I realize for there to be no movies about Trumpandia produce while it actually exists. And, really, if you think about it, it took decades before there was a movie that dealt with the Vietnam war directly, though Apocalypse Now was produced a few years after the fact. The closest to a TV show about Vietnam was that occured while it happened was M*A*S*H.

And, yet, Trumplandia is a significantly more weighty event than Watergate. Trumplandia, at least to me, seems ripe for a great movie or TV shows right now. We live in a different era than the 1960s and 1970 and I think audiences would flock to see a movie about a Trump-like character. I keep thinking of The Mule from The Foundation Saga, but it’s possible that because of Star Wars stealing so much from that series that that isn’t really applicable anymore.

Regardless, it would be sad if we had to wait 20 years before Hollywood addressed in metaphor Trumplandia. I really don’t want to have to keep seeing liberal Hollywood actors destroying their careers by raging against Trumplandia in a stupid way. Don’t rage, engage.

Shelton Bumgarner is the editor and publiser of the Trumplandia Report. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.

Progressives, Trumplandia & Jon Stewart As A Leader Of The Resistance

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Since dirt, there has been a struggle for the heart of America when it comes to the Progressive movement. Just about twice century or so, the stars align just right and the Progressive movement pops out of a long-dormant state and pushes through a huge amount of much needed change.

The weird thing is, you could make the case that the rise of Trumplandia is a sign that maybe the Progressive movement may be about to have it’s time in the sun again. The issue is Donald Trump obvious tapped into a populist rage. A smart politician, one with some vision, could use the populist rage of Trumplandia as a stepping off point to energize the Populist movement.

Of course, it there wouldn’t be a straight line. You would need leadership and vision. Right now, you have the Democratic Establishment, which is pretty much the bastion of the “Third Way” vision of Hillary Clinton and the base The Resistance which is much more in tune with the social democratic vision of Bernie Sanders.

But it’s pretty obvious that there’s a close correlation between the populist rage of Trumplandia and the near constant Progressive outrage of The Resistance. There is a possible opportunity to transform Trumplandia from its current bigoted, racist, misogynist decaying corpse and turn it into a vibrant Progressive base.

It would take leadership to do that because there are so many wedge issues that Trump uses to divide the populace that might otherwise have things in common that don’t fit the obvious Left-Right divide. The issue is, The Resistance has to stop simply being outraged all the time and figure out a way to engage Trumplandia in a constructive manner.

All of this is very complex and fraught with peril because you might tear the Democratic Party asunder in such a way that Trump easily walks to reelection in 2020. One problem is we have to deal with Trump’s surreal Being There ability to succeed politically despite himself.

While it is very much likely that we’ll reach a moment of outrage burn out, but if we can find the right leadership then maybe that energy won’t burn out, but rather will grow in power. Of all the leaders I think could maybe ride the nascent growth of a Progressive movement as part of The Resistance, Jon Stewart seems like the perfect person to do it.

Though it seems like a joke, Jon Stewart has the perfect skill set to be a major leader in The Resistance. As anyone can tell you, the only person who stands up to a middle school bully is the class clown. Jon Stewart is great at articulating a vision and we need to take a serious look at him as a candidate. I’d like to think he’d run for governor of New Jersey, but I’d give him a pass and let him run for president right away if that’s what I had to do to get him to stop petting rescue animals at a zoo.

If the rise of Trump and Trumplandia has taught us anything, it’s that the Great Man theory of history is now something we really need to start to think about again. So, maybe Jon Stewart has significantly more power in his hands than he realizes. Of all the Progressive leaders out there such as Al Franken and Elizabeth Warren, it seems only Jon Stewart has just the right touch to, through effective leadership, bring the goals of the Progressive moment to the fore again.

The reason I say this is because though Sen. Franken is an entertainer like Stewart, he doesn’t seem to have the passion for the Progressive movement that the younger Stewart has. Warren faces the same misogyny that Hillary Clinton faced, so the forces against her as an effective Progressive candidate are even stronger than they would be otherwise.

So it seems Jon Stewart might be the person to pull what I suggest off.

But this begs the obvious question — is it actually even possible for even an effective leader to bring Trumplandia to its senses. The power, the sway that Trump seems to have over Trumplandia is so astonishing that something truly extraordinary may have to happen for them to stop seeing him as some sort of Dear Leader figure.

Things like automation and AI could pose a serious threat to the economy of the Western World and as such, if the Progressive movement is ahead of the curve, maybe, just maybe, these titanic forces may cause Trumplandia to evolve into a base not for the bizarre Trump, but for the more logical and reality-based world of the Progressive movement and Jon Stewart.

We live in extraordinary times and it seems as though anything is possible right now. So, it’s possible that in 2020 there could actually be a way for the Progressive faction of The Resistance to gain the upper hand. And, yet, it’s also possible that we’re no longer a democracy but rather a “managed democracy” like is found in Russia. If that’s the case, then no matter of engagement on the part of the Democratic base will make much difference, sorry to say.

Things like “dark money,” gerrymandering and active voter suppression may mean that the will of the people will be stymied to such an extent that we really will be left with only civil society to defend us from autocracy. If that’s the case, may God have mercy on our souls.

Shelton Bumgarner is the Editor and Publisher of The Trumplandia Report. You may reach him at migukin (at) gmail.com.

Friend Of The Pod: Pod Save America Creeps Towards Selling Out

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

In this era of Trumplandia, I find myself turning to podcasts for some relief to the insane world we now live in. So, I have been listening to Crooked Media’s Pod Save America on a regular basis. So, because I’m a “friend of the pod” I thought I’d try to start doing a regular post about the show.

The first thing we have to note is that it seems as though Crooked Media is selling out to the man when it comes to its advertising at the beginning. It used to be that the ads at the beginning of Pod Save America were really funny and loose. But I have started to notice that they’re getting a little bit more professional.

I don’t know if it’s because they are starting to make money or if they’re just taking the whole endeavor more seriously.

They open this show talking about the Trump’s foreign trip. They talk about what a disaster it all was. “Didn’t want to lecture the dictators, did want to lecture the democratic leaders,” is one of the quotes. They also talk about how Obama would have gotten a huge amount of shit for even the littlest amount of what Trump has done. They also talk about Trump’s refusal to re-endorse Article 5 of NATO as well as the Paris Climate Agreement.

“Posture is the most important thing,” says Jon Lovett when it comes to NATO and Article 5. They talk a lot about how Trump seems oblivious to how the American press keeps mentioning how Trump sleeps to slobbing the knob of Putin. They also mention that Trump maybe be signaling that maybe that Putin can take a big chunk of Ukraine if he likes. Which, I think, we need to keep an eye on that. Ukraine could be huge in the coming days.

There is some talk about how Trump’s talk of leaving the Paris Climate Accords. It is interesting that our friends Axios is brought up. “If he pulls out of Paris, this it means its hopeless,” is the general consensus about how the power of the “New York Cucks” may not be really there.

“You’re either a part of this monstrosity or you’re not,” is another good quote from this general moment.

Taking up my view that we need to stop falloning Trump, Lovett says we’re “in a major crisis.”

It is their discussion about Jared Kushner that makes me so angry and makes me wish Crooked Media would produce a blog like Gawker. They talk about all the dump, possibly criminal things that Kushner alledgly did. The thing that everyone is talking about, and thinking about — what was the deal with using Russian “clock and dagger bullshit” that Kushner wanted to do.

“It’s a backchannel to keep things from America,” Lovett says.

The possibly that the backchannel is maybe a way to get Trump to lower the sanctions against Russia at some point in the future. They also talk about the difference between Obama’s Iranian backchannel and Kushner’s efforts. “It’s unprecedented,” is the quote at this point about what Kushner wanted to do.

“It’s all a little to convenient and weird,” is another quote of note.

“It’s so awful, you don’t want to believe it happened,” Jon Faveau says.

The pee tape comes up, with Jon Lovett saying the Pee Tape would be better than if the Russians have some sort of fiduciary power over the administration.

“None of it makes sense without leverage, none of it,” Lovett says about Trump and Russia.

There was a lot of discussion about Kushner getting high-level security information is something they talk about at length. “It’s a risk question,” is the quote on the issue. As well the lack of a denial by Trump’s administration when it comes to the Kushner back channel. They also talked about how complicit the “real” journalists of FOX News are at this point.

“We’re not doing the basic things to protect our country,” is the quote.

The failure of the Vichy Republicans is also the subject of discussion. Lots of picking on Paul Ryan is done, but there is also discussion about Sen. Bob Cooker being enthusiastic about the Russian-Kushner backchannel issue. They talk about the hypocrisy of Sen. Cooker when it comes to Trump versus Obama. They note that Sen. Cooker is up for re-election in 2018 and they think maybe the reason for Sen. Cooker being so fawning about Trump could be he wants to win reelection by not “losing single base vote.”

There was so discussion about the need for a new message on the part of the Democratic Party. This is something I really agree with, but I don’t know what it could possibly be. They mention that the Democrats shouldn’t “over correct” about issues that really matter to the base.

They also talk about how policy is being clouded over by people hoping that the malfesence of the Trump Administration may bring it down. I really agree with this take on things. But I there are no easy answers. I don’t know what path The Resistance should take.

The issue of trying to get people who otherwise wouldn’t vote to vote for The Resistance is something they talk about, which I think is pretty important at this point. The difference between The Resistance and Trumplandia is so great at this point that. The disillusionment of the average person who just doesn’t want to vote is a very important issue.

“What’s next,” is an issue that is addressed and I think that’s really important.

There is an interview with Sen. Elizabeth Warren which you can listen to for yourself. If I get positive feedback for this, I might do something similar for the entire podcast. I really like Crooked Media and I really, really wish they would start an anti-Axios blog like Gawker. They really do a good job with their pods and it would be nice to have a go-to blog for the Trumplandia Era.

Shelton Bumgarner is the editor and publisher of The Trumplandia Report. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.

Talk To Me Internet: The Covfefe Debacle

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

In today’s Talk To Me Internet, I talk about the new world in the English language, “Covfefe.” I think it’s really an example of how we need to stop laughing and address the pink GOP elephant in the room: Trump’s nuts. And he’s the leader of the free world.

Meanwhile, I’m also interested in Labour maybe winning the upcoming British general elections and events happening in Ukraine and North Korea. We’ll see what happens.

Trumplandia & The Age Of ‘Covfefe’ — We Need To Stop ‘Falloning’ Trump

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Twitter is, well, atwitter with the latest screw up on Twtter on the part of Donald Trump. Since Trump’s phone apparently doesn’t have spell check, he tried — we think — to say “coverage” in a tweet and it came out “covfefe.”

This led to any number of different funny hot takes by the chattering class on Twitter. Which is all well and good — I enjoy a good crack about Trump being an idiot as much as the next guy — but there comes a point when we have to stop “falloning” and start to address the serious issues caused by Trump being, well, Trump.

To me, “to fallon” has two meanings. The first, most obvious meaning is to try to make a monster like Donald Trump warm and cuddly by making him a lovable fun character. But there is a second, more urgent meaning as well: to get so wrapped up in making fun of Trump that you lose sight of how dangerous he is.

So, there comes a point when the time between when we make fun of something stupid done by Trump and we wake up to this horror grows significantly shorter. It seems to me that the issue right now is comedy is how civil society is dealing in a most immediate manner with Trump. We’re still getting used to the end of the “No Drama Obama” era and the struggle to process that is coming out in comedy.

But I’d like to think eventually we’ll wake up and things will take a significantly more serious edge. We’ll stop laughing and start engaging. Maybe more serious forms of entertainment, like a good movie that serves as a metaphor for Trumplandia, or a great protest song will come out.

And on an even more serious note, maybe if we quit falloning, more center-Left people would run for office. Or try to cross the political divide and figure out what the fuck is wrong with people who are now comfortably in the mental country of Trumplandia. I still haven’t figured that out, and I’d like to think it’s even possible to do so. If we don’t figure out Trumplandia now, we’re all pretty much doomed.

We absolutely have to stop falloning sooner rather than later because this is all deadly serious. The entire post-WWII global liberal order is beginning to unravel before our eyes and if we don’t start to engage politically, we risk laughing ourselves into oblivion.

So, laugh while you can. I don’t know when things will begin to change. Maybe what I suggest is just too difficult right now. Maybe the changing of the guard is just to profound for our collective psyche to comprehend in any way other than comedy. But I have to have hope.

If we don’t do something soon, eight years will have elapsed and while we were laughing, Trump will have ruined the country and maybe even the world. Then we really will have to find some one to make America great again.

Don’t Rage, Engage: Trumplandia, Tribal Politics & Misogyny

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Today, I have been reminded twice there are two Americas right now and they hate each other. There is The Resistance, which is found largely on Twitter and moves at light speed when it comes to observing the latest Trump catastrophe and Trumplandia.

Trumplandia is a mythical, surreal land closed off from any rational thought and the electoral victory of Donald Trump is constantly relitigated and rehashed.

Being an ardent member of The Resistance, I sometimes find myself making some conclusions about other people that obviously I shouldn’t be making. Two events today reminded me that the United States is in deep trouble politically and things aren’t going to get any better any time soon.

For instance, I put out a call for writers on Craig’s List on a lark hoping I might find someone, somewhere who would be willing to work for free — at least for the time being — to help me build this site. My lone response so far, is this:

I will help you write about Hilary Clinton in a snarky manner.

I know Trump is an unpolished goof but I will take him to the alternative.

If you want insight into how grave things are in America, look at that quoted text. The entire post World War II global liberal order is quickly becoming a dumpster fire and the only critisim of Trump I can get out of this guy is Trump’s an “unpolished goof.” I find this staggering. This just blows my ever living fucking mind.

And, yet, I have to reflect on this mind set. I can’t just rage about it. I have to at least attempt to engage in some sort of understanding of the mindset that would cause such a comment. This bring me to the other interesting thing that happened today. I shoot out all the posts I write here to Twitter. In one of today’s headlines I asked why everyone hates liberals. Someone on Twitter saw this and wrote, “They’re losers and anti-American.”

Whoa buddy.

So, when we write the obituary of the America Republic, we’re going to have to address how it is that not only is the misogyny against Hillary Clinton such that people were totally blinded to her obvious experience, skill and ability, but also that the FOX News echo chamber made Trumplandia so apoplectic in its rage that people had reached the point where they hated liberals without any rational. They hated them because they hated them.

I am not a huge Hillary Clinton fan. I thought she was a weak candidate and probably should have been indicted because no person is above the law. But she wasn’t and when given the opportunity between what I saw as the potential of her steady hand and that of, um, a “unpolished goof” I had no qualms about voting for her. But she lost. And now we have to deal with the consquences.

But the weird thing about Trumplandia is they totally don’t realize they won. They don’t realize that when you’re in power anything that goes wrong is your fault. It all kind of blows my mind. What is the origin of their hatred for modern norms? How is it that they would see the person I see as a racist, bigoted, misogynist demagogue as simply an “unpolished goof.” How can the residents of Trumplandia be seeing what I see and come up with such dramatically different conclusions?

That is the crux of the crisis we’re currently in. And it’s not going anywhere.

If The Resistance is going to make any headway in the coming years, we’re going to have to understand exactly why Hillary Clinton lost. The process of doing that will probably rip the Democratic Party in two for at least one major election cycle as the progressives and the business friendly Wall Street liberals duke it out to see if Bernie or Hillary’s vision of the Democratic Party will be implemented. It is very likely that the Democratic Party will see the loss of Hillary Clinton as a sign that it should nominate a progressive like Sen. Al Franken in 2020.

Yet, at least in my opinion, a large part of Clinton’s defeat can be laid at the feat of misogyny. I think America choked. We had had the first African American president and the center-Right is still racist as fuck and they turned around and saw the prospect of a woman president and they just couldn’t handle it. That doesn’t even begin to address the general hatred of the Clinton family that, in itself, was a large factor in how passionate the Republican base was in 2016.

Meanwhile, much of that surreal world view comes from a general hatred of liberals. That one, too, kind of eludes me. It is obvious that eight years of “No Drama Obama” along with the rise of bubble inducing things like FOX News and Twitter caused the liberals to think there was some sort of assumption of slow, steady progress when in fact there far from that in some quarters.

This is what the Russians were able to so skillfully take advantage of during the 2016 election. The Republican Party had become so full of rage against the liberal mindset that they would rather vote for a quisling than vote for someone who was of the opposing party. And that doesn’t even begin to address what exactly the hold Trump had over primary voters was. That one still leaves me puzzled.

So where does this all leave us?

As I keep saying, if you’re not a member of Trumplandia, if you still care about America in the traditional sense, you’re going to have to put your outrage aside and engage instead. This is really tough. I don’t mean you have to give up what you believe. Far from it. But instead of just randomly being angry all the time, see this as an opportunity to engaged, to be excited and energized

See it as a chance to use your rights as a citizen in an effective manner. Trumplandia in all its delusional, surreal love of Donald Trump can take a lot away from us through gross malfeasance and gradual attacks on our liberties, but they can’t take the American spirit away from us.

Americans aren’t Russians. We’ve got spunk. We can do this. At least, that’s my hope. That’s all I got right now, is hope.

Shelton Bumgarner is the editor and publisher of The Trumplandia Report. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.

From The Publisher: Thanks, Twitter, For Screwing Me Over

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Now, the fact that Twitter is making it more difficult for me to market this site by DMing people on Twitter is probably good for the service in general, but it definitely makes my efforts at building this site a lot more difficult.

I have a pretty good vision for this site, but I simply don’t have the resources to do anything with it to the extent that maybe I otherwise would. I just don’t have the money. There is definitely an audience and a market for what I propose with this site, but the strategy I imagined originally — marketing the site to “thought leaders” on Twitter is now moot.

And, again, while it makes a sense for Twitter to impliment this feature, in a way some of the charm of Twitter is gone. It was fun to think that you might, just might, be able to talk to a powerful person in a direct way using Twitter and those days are now, sadly, over.

I guess it was inevitable that this would happen, but that’s life.

A Vision For Saving Newspapers In The Trumplandia Era

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It appears as though if nothing else, Trumplandia has sparked a fierce newspapers battle between The New York Times and The Washington Post. But the long-term survival of the newspaper business continues to be up in the air. While those two newspapers are well financed, the industry as a whole continues to struggle.

I have written at great length about how I would save the newspaper business and for various reasons, I will try to do a quick recap here. Though, I must note that I know no one listens to me and I’m kind of shouting into the void as things stand.

One thing that is clear is the newspaper business is ripe to be disrupted. But, if I was going to disrupt it, I would disrupt it from within. One of the reasons no one has figured out how to disrupt the newspaper business already is it’s a tough nut to crack give its social component.

But let’s talk a little bit about how you might do it.

To me, to disrupt the newspaper business, you need to re-imagine newspapers altogether. Instead of coming at it from a tech angle and hiring a lot of young reporters on the cheap then throwing algorithms at the problem, I would buy a few regional newspapers — they’re pretty cheap n real terms now — and then go from there.

Now, if you had a big chunk of change to play with — say upwards of a $100 million, I buy a company like Tronc which owns The Chicago Tribune and The LA Times and hook the entire chain up to something that aimed to be a Twitter Killer. Because I think given how desperate things are for the newspaper business, only by embracing social media in a full throated manner can newspapers possibly expect to thrive.

What, exactly, would the feature set of this Twitter Killer look like?

I have go into great detail as to what I think it would look like elsewhere — most notably on my Instagram account — but let’s do it again real quick.

First, you’d have Sections. These would be your typical newspapers sections and would help group content produced by your reporters.

Second, you’d have Groups. This is where things get interesting because only verified account holders could make Groups. Groups would be similar to the old Usenet Newsgroup in that they would contain threads, though in this scenario I call them Discussions.

Discussions would allow your reporters to post articles that people could inline edit in the context of a threaded discussion. It wouldn’t have to be a newspaper article, but that would be one option. There would be a robust live chat feature similar to Slack, but for the masses. It would be archive and searchable.

This concept only works if you buy up a bunch of newspapers and give them something akin to a national footprint. That’s why you might also use this concept with Time Inc., given that it is a national brand.

But, regardless, it’s probably too late to impliment this concept for various reasons. Chief among them being VR and AR are where all the money is these days and it’s doubtful you could get the investment needed to pull this off.

I still think, though, that if you did Twitter one better that something pretty cool could happen. Twitter is the center of the national and global debate these days and yet it has a horrible interface and a sharp learning curve in some respects.

Produce a better mousetrap, if you will, and maybe something cool would happen.

This is more of a general talk about issues of the day, but it’s worth a watch.

Trumplandia Has Caused A Global Leadership Vacuum

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It is self-evident that Donald Trump has caused an enormous leadership vacuum globally. For about 70 years, the world has relied upon the United States for moral leadership.

No longer.

Now, there is a mad scramble to find out who is going to fill the void caused by Trump being not only obviously unhinged, but a Russophile and an ardent admirer of autocrats across the planet. The chilling thing is, this has happened in the absence of a major international crisis.

God only knows what might happen should Putin make a major landgrab in Ukraine or the DPRK attack South Korea. And should both things happen at the same time, we’re going to be faced with the very real possibility of something at least marketed at World War III happening.

To put another way, the unprecedented nature of the Trump Administration is now beginning to be not just a domestic crisis, but an international one as well. The election of Trump in conjunction with Brexit means the global liberal order that we’ve come to expect is now unraveling before our very eyes. All of this doesn’t happen in a vacuum, there could be some very real consquences to Trump being completely temperamentally unqualified to be the leader of the free world.

It doesn’t seem possible that Putin would let the opportunity poised by Trump to go unexploited. I feel like we’re all waiting for the other shoe to drop. Trump is simply unable, on a personal level, to engage in the fine art of diplomacy. He is simply too crass to understand theh nuance that is at the core of international diplomacy. It takes a moral core to be able to stand up to a thug like Putin and Trump has made it painfully clear that he would rather slob Putin’s knob on a geopolitical level, rather than stand up to him.

So, it seems almost inevitable that Putin will either attack Ukraine or attack a Baltic nation. It will be a tragedy of the highest order should this happen because the United States has lost its moral compass. And, yet, unless something drastic happens, something is going to happen. Something big.

With the international order in flux, different great powers are jostling to see how things will fall out. Russia is trying to draw smaller nations away from the herd, while nationals like France and Germany are trying to pick up the banner of the liberal order that the United States has so unfortunately dropped as a part of Trumplandia.

So my only conclusion can be that something that we will in hindsight call World War Three, something that is marketed as such by the American press, at least, is now almost inevitable. You can’t have this much instability in the world order without someone, somewhere — probably Russia in Europe and the DPRK in Asia making a major miscalculation.

Or it could go down something like this — Trump’s Administration, in a spasm of self defense attacks the DPRK just as Russia attacks Ukraine. It just makes too much sense that something like that might happen. I really can’t see any other outcome in the near term with things so much up in the air.

And it’s only going to get worse as long as Trump is in charge in the United States. So when a major American city is vaporized by a DPRK nuclear weapon, you can say a little prayer to yourself and whisper, “But her emails…”

Shelton Bumgarner is the editor and publisher of The Trumplandia Report. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.