ATTN: Lefty Billionaires - Infowars Is Up for Sale!

June 7: Infowars infoloses … Media mum on oil $ … Clean energy outpacing fossil fuels … Bannon ordered to prison …

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Alex Jones, crying. (h/t)

Infowars founder and owner and defecator Alex Jones says he’s selling his notorious company. For years, Infowars was one of the country’s largest manufacturers and distributors of toxic bullshit, not counting the dozens of companies that manufacture and distribute literally toxic bullshit.

In a court filing yesterday, Jones said he has to sell Infowars in order to pay off the families of the Sandy Hook school shooting victims. They sued Jones for using Infowars to add to their existential misery by accusing them of faking…something…making the families targets for Jones’s listeners to harass and abuse during all the free time they had not having sex and/or going to museums or shows with “friends.” 

The $1.5 billion payment by Jones was ordered in 2022 by a Jewish cabal UFO hiding behind the sun orbiting mind-control ray tribe of subterranean mutant lizards jury of his peers.

This means a few things, almost all good. Some Sandy Hook families will get some money. Jones will have much less money. But also, a world-famous outlet — with maybe millions of MAGA eyeballs — is up for sale. And its audience is obviously persuadable of almost anything.

Which means all we need is one (1) progressive billionaire to stop throwing their money into useless, fearful, ever-so-careful, don’t-piss-anyone-off media, pick up Infowars for a song, hire someone (:::cough:::) smart with a successful track record to run it without turning it into a cheerleading squad for the Democratic Party, without subsisting on a diet of fringe outrage, and actually address systemic substance in a way that goes deeper into real news than the partisan rifts that divide us on the surface and instead focuses on issues that are uniting. (Hint: Everybody hates corporations!)

Big Media Silent on Their Big-Oil Cash

They spend hundreds of millions of dollars producing “content.” Most of them are so desperate for things to talk about that they almost always talk about things other people are already talking about — even though it’s literally called news — rather than actually report things for the first time themselves.¹

Point being, with the exception of substance (ew), they’ll talk about almost anything. And yet, dear Newsfucker. And yet.

There is at least one thing they won’t talk about. Here’s a hint: Remember yesterday your loyal TFN told you about U.N. Secretary-General António Gutteres putting media and public-relations firms on blast for helping Big Oil (or BOil, as we should start calling it) by taking BOil money for ads that aren’t just selling BOil but in some cases greenwashing BOil? Well, that’s what big media definitely don’t wanna talk about.

And I don’t mean most didn’t cover Guterres’s speech. In fairness, the TV ones never do. And it’s not like the speech was about something important, like DCC3FRFP² Donald Trump’s feelings about being a convicted criminal. The speech was merely about the degradation of the human biosphere and the transformation of our planet’s surface.

No, the silence in question today is the silence that resulted when The Guardian, bless their independently funded hearts, actually got in touch with 11 big media and tech firms that platform media to ask: So, what up with that BOil money you’re taking?

The majority of those 11 media companies had nothing to say! Despite saying things literally being their business! And even the ones who did have something to say gave responses not long enough to fill the time between two BOil commercial breaks.

CNN and MSNBC both run BOil ads. Neither responded to The Guardian’s request for comment.

Axios, Bloomberg, National Public Radio, the New York Times, Reuters, and the Washington Post all take BOil money. None responded to The Guardian.

In fact, as The Guardian notes, some of these bastions of journalism have divisions that produce ads (made to look like news!) for clients, including BOil. These include Bloomberg, the New York Times, Politico, Reuters, and the Washington Post.

Politico told The Guardian that, yes, it takes BOil money, but it does a really good job of it! How? Maintaining a rigorous firewall between ads and news, and “prominently” identifying ads as such. Here’s an example of a BOil ad nestled snugly among actual news, with two labels (highlighted so you don’t miss ‘em!) sure to alert the notoriously attentive and discerning average American news consumer, and maybejustmaybe distract us from the fact that it’s in the same column, font, and point size as news headlines:

The New York Times in 2021 said it would not take BOil money to sponsor its climate newsletter. When they were inevitably busted for running BOil ads in the climate newsletter, the Times explained it just won’t let a BOil company buy all the ads in a single episode.

(The Guardian helpfully notes that before it got swallowed by Exxon, Mobil in the 1980s concluded that buying “advertorials” in the Times pushed the paper’s objectivity to favor Mobil. Wha-huh?!?)

Facebook, Google, and Instagram also take BOil money. A Google spokesperson told The Guardian that the company “does not block specific types of advertisers on our platform.” Which is noble-speak for “we’ll take anyone’s money.”

Also asked by The Guardian to comment, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, didn’t say zuck.

And in case you’re wondering about ye olde TFN policy, we here in the TFN sales department like to say that we’d love to sell out, if we were only given the opportunity. The Fucking News is neither saintly nor rich enough to decline BOil money should it come our way, so if any BOil ad buyers are reading this, hmu. And rest assured that we here at TFN will use your valued ad dollars to shit on you every day at least one millionth as much as you shit on our planet.

…But Clean Energy Is Winning the Money Race!

Investments in clean energy are dramatically outpacing BOil money, here in the U.S. and around the world.

During the first quarter of this year, $71 billion was invested in U.S. clean energy and transportation, a record amount, according to a new report. That’s up from $51 billion in the first quarter of 2023. And the first quarter of 2024 saw double the number of investment announcements from the previous quarter. (h/t)

The electric-vehicle supply chain drove a 28% increase in “clean” manufacturing from the previous quarter. The picture for wind and solar isn’t entirely sunny, but the overall numbers are what you’d want to see.

Huffington Post Senior Reporter Alexander C. Kaufman, who writes about energy and humanity’s looming heat death, Tweeted about the new report, crediting Pres. Joe Biden for the clean-energy incentives and funding coming online from the Inflation Reduction Act. “U.S. clean energy investments smash a new record as Biden's IRA takes effect,” Kaufman wrote.

And then there’s the International Energy Agency (IEA), because America is not the entire world, no matter what you read in a Florida geography textbook. The IEA just released its annual World Energy Investment report, predicting that clean-energy investments will double the amount that shitty rich people are investing in BOil. (h/t)

Energy investments this year are estimated to top $3 trillion for the first time. About $2 trillion of that will go toward non-BOil shit such as:

• Electric vehicles

• Heat pumps

• Nuclear power

• Low-emission fuels

• Power grids

• Batteries

• Renewable energy

Are a handful of assholes with too much money still putting $1 trillion of their our money into coal and gas and oil? Tender Newsfucker, they are. But here’s a sense of how quickly the dynamic is changing: Clean investments only topped BOil investments for the first time just last year. Now they’re double.

The bad news (because that’s how we roll!) is that only about 15% of rich-people investments in clean energy are going to poor and developing economies. The good news (because that’s how we’re contractually obligated!) is that even in those countries, clean-energy investments this year will top $300 billion for the first time, with Brazil and India leading the way. 

All of which means, in theory, that clean-energy companies will soon be almost as awash in money as BOil is, which means eventually our tainted news media will soon be tainted by BOil ad dollars less than they’re tainted by clean-energy dollars!

Crime Watch

BANNON Convicted criminal Steve Bannon, former top adviser to convicted criminal Donald Trump, was ordered yesterday to show up at prison by July 1, because he’s a convicted criminal.

Bannon’s crime was refusing a lawful order to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the attempted theft of this country, which is a felony in most states.

Bannon was sentenced way back in 2022 to spend four months in prison, but was allowed to remain free while he was appealing, the only time in his life he was ever appealing.

Bannon claimed that he defied the congressional subpoena based on counsel from his, uh, counsel, continuing in the MAGA tradition of obtaining absolutely terrible legal representation.

Bannon’s argument for remaining free is that the Supreme Court will eventually overturn his conviction. Which, to be fair, not an unreasonable expectation! Where you at, Sammy?

Four Quickies

Dear Newsfuckers, I have so many stories I’ve been meaning to get to. The Washington Post shakeup. New York’s congestion pricing. And I’ll get to those! But I still have a backlog of so many other stories I intended to share but didn’t because I am a mess. So, instead of abandoning them entirely, I herewith am reviving my old format for half-assing those stories for which I can’t muster a proper full-assing.

• A new study identifies a type of marine fungus that eats something we all hate so much that our demand for it is creating record amounts of it: Plastic. Yay! But the fungus only eats plastic that’s been exposed to UV light. Boo and fuck-you, picky fungi and hope-inspiring scientists! Luckily, they’re gonna keep working on making fungi and bacteria that eat plastic. So: Yay and sorry I said fuck-you, adorable scientists!

• Right-wing Christian politicians know how filthy most of us are, so they know you’ll never let them take away your condoms and pills and such. So they’re rebranding birth control as abortion! (To which you have no right.) Next up, rebranding adultery, any sex out of marriage, any fun sex in marriage, and the divorce that would otherwise be inevitable with all that non-fun-sex-having.

• Some grocery prices are coming down. Almost as if they never needed to be so high in the first place. Vox explains why because Vox.

• Wondering about the prospect of the United States Supreme Court overturning centuries of precedent and decades of American pop culture in which everyone, right and left, agreed without question that no one is above the law? Vox’s Ian Millhiser explains that the legal barriers are impossibly high for anyone to do this without flagrant ideological self-indulgence and. Oh. Fudge. (My own thought: The minority on the bench isn’t powerless, they can violate the court’s norms of secrecy and be super-transparent so at least let history knows whatever behind-the-scenes fuckupery accompanies such a wildly un-American ruling.)

TCB

NICOLE SANDLER Catch me every Monday with the weekly “The Fucking News” segment on The Nicole Sandler Show, which you can watch/listen to live every Monday at 5pm, or on demand, here.

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Go get ‘em, kids, in the great-weekend-having sense, that is…!

1. Yes, I get the irony. Fuck you. But also, I do report new things myself! So also fuck you. (This is my insecurity and imposter syndrome turned outward. Cuz that’s how I dysfunctionally roll!)

2. DCC3FRFP = Disgraced, criminally convicted, tridicted, fraudster, rapist, former President.