By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
I don’t have anything against the folks at Axios, it’s just I guess I am so opposed to Trumplandia that the notion that you would willfully prostrate yourself before Trumplandia in an effort to get a scoop kind of troubles me. That’s why I keep thinking someone, somewhere will found an anti-Axios.
I’m dong my little part with this site, but I simply don’t have the resources to do nearly enough with my vision. Should that change, should I get even the tiniest little bit of traction — most likely in the form of someone helping me — then that would rock.
Or put another way, it just seems pretty obvious that there needs to be a site that does the exact oppose of Axios. Once you normalize Trumplandia by seeing it as just another administration, you kind of facilitate a surreal dystopian future where the once unimaginable is taken for granted.
So, that’s why I’m left scratching my head as to why someone with some resources to back them hasn’t decided to start a site much like the old Gawker devoted to getting people to use their outrage against Trumplandia to become engaged. I keep expecting the guys of Crooked Media to do as I propose, but they seem more interested in doing podasts than a traditional blog.
It just makes too much sense. All the ingredients are there for an anti-Axios to explode. You have a lot of people like me who want a go-to site to bone up on resisting Trumplandia and given that over half the population voted for Hillary Clinton, there obviously is a market for it as well.
As I keep saying, I think probably some of what I want is being served by Twitter. That may be, in fact, what is going on. People like me are simply going to Twitter to get what I suggest they may want in an anti-Axios website. Websites are kind of passe these days for various reasons, so it may be difficult to get the funding to do it at all.
I’m no media expert, I simply don’t know.
I guess all of this boils down to my personal belief that something cool could be afoot if someone with a little vision — ie, me — was given the resources to start a site devoted to being an anti-Axios. After some thought, I realize what about Axios makes me uncomfortable — it’s complicit and it normalizes Trumplandia, which in my mind is something akin to Vichy France.
So, Axios is kind of a news organisation devoted to getting scoops from Vichy France by being complicit in the hole endeavor.
I’m sure they’re great folks and I have nothing personal against them, but I am of the opinion that sites like the one I would like to build need something to pick on and Axios would be a perfect target. But, as I keep saying, no one is probably going to help me and I’ll get bored of all of this soon enough.
But I still have a little bit of hope.
Shelton Bumgarner is The Trumplandia Report’s editor and publisher. He may be reached at migukin (at) gmail.com.
