The Atlantic: Jerry Springer Explained It All

Megan Garber writes:

One of Springer’s legacies will be his realization that shamelessness is a lucrative industry. Another will be his recognition that even shock can grow stale. Springer had to keep finding new ways to outdo the drama on his show. In the 2000s, he began arriving onstage by sliding down a stripper pole. When real people’s stories seemed insufficiently titillating, he brought on a character—the drunken “Reverend Shnorr”—to punch things up. Springer masterminded the havoc, but on-screen, he presided over it for the most part like a mild-mannered father amused by his unruly children. And then, for the final twist, he tried to graft meaning onto the chaos he’d just presented to his viewers. Springer ended each episode with his “Final Thought,” the wan sermon he delivered as a response to the stories just aired. The address, a holdover from a similar one he’d delivered during his days as a news anchor, tried to find a moral in the madness. It concluded, always, with the same line: “Take care of yourself, and each other.”

The hypocrisy of the Final Thought—its episode-by-episode effort to cleanse all the scandal with sanctimony—will be Springer’s most lasting legacy. The Jerry Springer Show exploited people fervently and ruthlessly and lucratively. It treated real tragedies as diversions. And it did all of that as it pretended to be more profound than it was. Springer tried to frame the show’s exploitation as anthropology, as something revealing and instructive. But it was Springer’s own arc that would prove most culturally revelatory: His show’s concessions predicted the ease with which American politics would give way to entertainment. He was an omen of all that can go wrong when audiences treat boredom as vice.

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The Atlantic: America Is in Its Insecure-Attachment Era

Faith Hill writes:

Discomfort with intimacy seems to be on the rise—and no one’s quite sure why….

About a decade ago, the social psychologist Sara Konrath led a study that yielded some disturbing results. As a researcher at Indiana University, she’d already found that narcissism rates seemed to be increasing among Americans, and empathy decreasing; that was a combination that didn’t bode well, she feared, for the quality of people’s relationships. So she decided to look more deeply into the state of Americans’ connections—and in order to do so, she turned to attachment theory…

People are feeling precarious right now.” He rattled off a list of fears that people may be wrestling with: war in Europe, ChatGPT threatening to transform jobs, constant school shootings in the news. When society feels scary, that fear can seep into your closest relationships. People tend to think of attachment style as a static personality trait; really, Chopik told me, “it’s an evaluation of the broader world.”

Konrath pointed to financial precarity in particular. The 2008 recession seems to have really rocked people; not long after that, she saw empathy start to rise and narcissism start to dip, and some researchers think the recession contributed to an increase in insecure attachment too…

Many people grow more securely attached over time. They make friends, go on first dates, fall in love, get heartbroken and survive it. “We all learn from those things, and we try to figure out relationships as we go along,” he told me. The world is a scary place, and our personal lives exist within it. But, as Chopik noted, “there’s a lot of power to a life lived.”

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Richard Spencer v Tucker Carlson (4-27-23)

01:00 Does Tucker cultivate helplessness, https://radixjournal.substack.com/p/cultivated-helplessness
07:00 Dennis Prager on the radio today about Tucker
09:45 CNN, Jonah Goldberg on Tucker
14:00 WP: With Tucker Carlson’s ouster, House GOP loses a key ally – and agitator, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/04/26/with-tucker-carlsons-ouster-house-gop-loses-key-ally-agitator/
21:00 Chuck Johnson, Eric Garland April 24 Space on Tucker Carlson: https://twitter.com/ericgarland/status/1650628080354971652?s=20
38:00 Burning Man and sexual blackmail by intelligence agencies
41:00 Atlantic: America Is in Its Insecure-Attachment Era, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/04/insecure-attachment-style-intimacy-decline-isolation/673867/
48:00 Daily Beast coverage of Tucker, https://www.thedailybeast.com/keyword/tucker-carlson
49:00 Don Lemon, Tucker Carlson hire a Hollywood attorney who paid out $40,000 to a woman accusing him of participating in a gang rape, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11457431/Celebrity-powerhouse-lawyer-Bryan-Freedman-paid-120k-settle-rape-lawsuit-1991.html
52:00 Chuck Johnson: Government (FBI etc) bust up bad actors in news
53:00 Nxivm cult
1:05:00 Chuck Johnson’s April 26 Space on Tucker, https://twitter.com/JohnsonThought1/status/1651424548409974784
1:07:00 Chuck Johnson on Steven Crowder
1:11:00 Yashar Ali: Video Reveals Steven Crowder Emotionally Abusing Wife. In Statement, Hilary Crowder’s Family Says She Hid His Emotionally Abusive Behavior For Years, https://yashar.substack.com/p/exclusive-video-reveals-steven-crowder
1:15:00 Chuck Johnson on businessman Cary Katz, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cary_Katz
1:16:30 Journos need billionaire sugar daddies
1:17:00 Tucker Carlson is on TV and the billionaires wish they were on TV
1:18:20 Chuck Johnson on Darren Beattie
1:25:45 Chuck Johnson is in the redacted Mueller report
1:26:10 Journalist Ali Watkins, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Watkins
1:28:00 Chuck Johnson and Peter Thiel
1:29:15 Ron DeSantis wants Peter Thiel’s money
1:30:00 In 2018, Chuck Johnson was drinking heavily and feeling suicidal
1:33:45 Tucker Carlson’s personal life fell apart after he criticized Paul Singer
1:34:00 Chuck Johnson says Paul Singer is a proxy for the Mossad
1:36:00 Tucker Investigates: What is destroying rural America?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdwH066g5lQ
1:36:30 In May of 2016, Steve Bannon asks Chuck Johnson for an introduction to Donald Trump
1:38:00 Chuck Johnson says he paid to bring the women to the second Trump-Hillary debate, Sheldon Adelson assembled the planes
1:39:00 Roger Ailes
1:39:45 Greg Gutfeld
1:41:00 Rupert Murdoch funded Weekly Standard when Tucker Carlson was there
1:42:00 Businessman Ken Langone, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Langone
1:44:45 Elliott Blatt joins
1:46:00 Alan Dershowitz says Jared Kushner is dumb
1:46:45 Chuck Johnson felt like he had operational control of parts of the White House
1:48:00 Ted Cruz is not running for president due to his wife and daughter

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Waiting For Tucker (4-26-23)

01:00 Chuck Johnson Space on Tucker, https://twitter.com/ericgarland/status/1650628080354971652?s=20
03:25 NPR: Tucker Carlson Built An Audience For Conspiracies At Fox. Where Does It Go Now? https://www.npr.org/2023/04/26/1172311796/tucker-carlson-built-an-audience-for-conspiracies-at-fox-where-does-it-go-now
15:00 Tucker speaks
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/26/1172311796/tucker-carlson-built-an-audience-for-conspiracies-at-fox-where-does-it-go-now
22:00 Charles Johnson on Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, https://charlesjohnson.substack.com/p/anti-trust-bisexual-phases-and-divorce
29:00 Chuck Johnson on Tucker, https://substack.com/inbox/post/117040234
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/fox-news-tucker-carlson-secret-dossier-oppo-file-1234723855/
30:00 Steven Crowder talks about his bisexual phase
31:30 National Enquirer, New York Post and right-wing media as intelligence operations
https://sfstandard.com/politics/how-tucker-carlsons-sf-mother-became-a-stand-in-for-everything-he-despises/
37:00 Russia Hawks and China Hawks | Robert Wright & John Mearsheimer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1pwgUBkgcU
45:00 NYT: Why Kamala Harris Matters So Much in 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/25/opinion/kamala-harris-joe-biden-2024-reelection.html
1:06:00 Constitutional Dictatorship: Its Dangers and Its Design, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=130386

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What will Tucker do next? (4-25-23)

02:00 Jewish comic Antonia Lassar, https://www.instagram.com/p/CpTA9bdPXSW/?hl=en
16:00 WP: Before Tucker Carlson’s Fox rise, an on-air ‘brawl’ led to his CNN firing, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/04/25/tucker-carlson-fox-cnn-jon-stewart/
27:00 Chuck Johnson Space on Tucker, https://twitter.com/ericgarland/status/1650628080354971652?s=20
31:00 Chuck Johnson on Tucker, https://substack.com/inbox/post/117040234
43:45 MSNBC: Abby Grossberg: Tucker Carlson made ‘my life a living hell’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SHn7ELiMvo
1:01:40 Fox films your high school experience
1:02:30 Afraid of Paul Singer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Singer_(businessman)
1:04:00 Tucker’s reaction to Pegasus: WTF? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)
1:05:00 Chuck Johnson on Sean Hannity
1:08:00 Chuck Johnson says Tucker has spiraled into paranoia, Chuck stopped texting with him
1:12:00 When Tucker went to Africa
1:24:40 Tucker Investigates: What is destroying rural America?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdwH066g5lQ
1:26:00 Tabletmag: Tucker Carlson’s New Crush: The Fox News host goes full anti-Semite in his latest rant, a love letter to Henry Ford, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/tucker-carlson-henry-ford
1:45:00 Dooovid joins
1:49:00 Networks of drug using Jews, such as psychedelics on Shabbos
1:54:00 Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=121464
2:06:00 Dooovid rarely laughs

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