067: You Asked, We Answered [Preview]

Mike and Jared check in during the post-holiday lull to answer questions submitted by their Patreon supporters. They share their takes on the state of the news media industry, explain how they got started covering the Radical Right, check in on the careers of Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, and much more.

Settle in with "hot chocolate mimosa" and come hang for this casual Q&A before we take off on the second year of Posting Through It.

Listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon: http://patreon.com/PostingThroughIt

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
This one's from Justin. Got this one as an e-mail.
As someone who has been following the way mainstream
media has handled the growing right wing conspiratorial nature
of our country, it seems that disinformation the the
disinformation journalist beat has actually gotten smaller
rather than grow as you would expect it to as the issue

(00:21):
becomes more pronounced. Figures like Kosh Patel were
obscure Q Anon grifters, but nowthey have real institutional
power. And yet it seems there is less
coverage of the antics of these people than around 2020.
It must be frustrating as someone in your line of work to
see how much of the bad faith BSthat these people engage in has

(00:45):
been normalized as truth and facts fall by the wayside, and
perhaps even less average peopleare hip to just how bad things
are. What is the most frustrating
part about covering this sort ofbeat like you do?
That could be its own podcast episode, probably.
But what you're picking up on, the fact that there's less

(01:08):
people doing this work right now, is real.
There are less journalists on this beat.
This beat practically, with somerare exceptions, just does not
exist as a full time enterprise.You know, your people aren't
getting freshly hired as disinformation or far right beat

(01:29):
reporters anymore. And even, you know, these
research organizations that historically have done a lot of
this work, a lot of them are quiet and they're not really
publishing a whole lot these days.
Or it's like kind of adjacent, sort of, you know, they're
trying to thread some kind of needle there.
But that struggle is real and has been in a literal sense in

(01:52):
both my career and Mike's career, us both being guys that
were pushed out in one form or another.
Mike's case much more severe. And you'll hear about it someday
from these big nonprofits. A lot of these places have just
kind of rolled over and swallowed the gaslighting that
these assholes have directed at their line of work.

(02:14):
And it's really unfortunate. And I, I think the term that
applies to me anyway, is what's the, it's like moral, moral
injury. Moral Injury.
Yeah, yeah. I feel, I feel let down.
That's just me. What about you, Mike?
What's the the most frustrating part about covering this beat

(02:37):
these days? Well, I'm going to just tell you
one thing and let it be symbolicof everything else, which is
watching Jack Pozobic, specifically Jack Pozobic
succeed in a profound way, getting everything you could
possibly want from life and more.
I, I, I, I don't even have wordsfor that because it is really

(03:00):
one of the most fucked up thingsthat my mind can actually
probably I can't. I should say, let me go back.
My mind actually cannot process the fact that he's gotten
everything he wants in life. It's not like all of this shit
about him is not readily available, immediately public,
the first thing that comes up when you Google his name on his

(03:22):
Wikipedia page, etcetera, etcetera.
But he just looks at them and he's like they're lying and
that's it. Well, just I mean for people who
have been with us for the whole year, I'm sure there's a lot of
people new here. We grown a lot over the last few
months, but we did, if you go back, we did this the first

(03:43):
installment of Jack Pozobic story was the first who the hell
is episode. And we were we're going to do
follow up on that because we we stopped actually after only a
year. And if you listen to that, I
mean, even even his first year of being a public figure, it is
so damning. I, I can't even think of anyone

(04:04):
who's more damning, who's a, who's a, who's a well known
person than Jack Pozobic. And your, your, your question
was about disinformation. And it's not just Pizzagate,
which he did do. And it's not just the rape
Melania stunt, which he did do. And it's not just, oh, there's a
pipe bomb in, in Washington, DC.We'll cover that on the future

(04:24):
1. He said where he claimed that
like at the Korean War memorial that left us had left the pipe
bomb there went extremely viral in an effort to try to stoke
violence against leftist, or at least that's the way I perceived
it. That that is all he did.
That's all Jack did. He was a disinformation
personality. It's it's not just that he did

(04:46):
those things, right? It's that he only did those
things. Yeah, he's never done anything
legitimate. Yes, he would sometimes post
bullshit about like I miss the old Pizza Hut and he would do
that, but like, you know, the overwhelming content of his
output was surrounded, lying, just lying, outright lying,

(05:09):
making things up wholesale and it's just one thing after
another. I don't know if you remember
this and we'll cover it in the future.
Who the hell is with him? He brought microchip onto OANN
to claim that he did Q Anon as away to kind of distract stuff
from Trump and try to get the things back on track or
whatever. He he fed the Internet with the

(05:31):
idea that Antifa did January 6th.
Yeah. So seeing this guy, I mean, it's
not just that he one thing or another, it's his whole life is
this. And obviously I spent a lot of
time reporting on him. And it is.
Yeah, it is deeply frustrating to see him now going on State

(05:53):
Department trips, getting tons of money.
He's going to inherit a lot of what Charlie Kirk's operation
was just so, you know, in terms of fame, you can't get rid of
this guy. He's really close with the vice
president who, who, who may wellbe a future president.
I, I mean, yeah, we can reserve our judgement.
But like, I mean, he's, I think the top person on on most

(06:14):
betting lines and whatever rightnow because of obviously his
proximity to power already. Jack Pozobic is, is one of the
worst people that we cover. I really believe, I believe that
he has very little compassion for other human beings.
I think he's like, you know, really sociopathic, you know,

(06:35):
that's, that's my perception of having studied him for a while.
Yeah, having spent time around him in person, I feel the same
way. You know, I, I would like look
in his eyes when I was talking to him and it's just like glass,
dude. There's nothing there.
There's nothing back there. Scott Yeah, yeah.
So I don't know, I, I, I, I mentioned this as an example, I

(06:59):
mentioned Jack. I mean, there are, there are so
many other examples, but let this be a symbolic answer.
It's just to see these people rewarded for it.
That's what bothers me so much. Their lives are so fucking
great. Like, you know, Jack Pozobic is
that he's got everything he wants and he's done it in the
most duplicitous, awful, disgusting fashion.

(07:23):
This is a guy who, you know, forall intents and purposes should
have been suspended from Twitterand would have had no career at
all to speak of, you know, back in 2016.
But instead he has been from Jack Dorsey all the way up to
the president rewarded. And you can you can extend that
to Ian Miles Chong. You can extend that to Mike

(07:44):
Sternovich. You can extend that to every
single one of these people who looked at the Internet and
decided I'm going to make a splash here based around
producing hate and lies. And that's I'm looking at the
I'm looking at the chess board and I'm, these are the moves I'm
making, right? So that's how I feel.

(08:05):
I that, that, that I feel so disgusted when I see these
people now. And I really hope there is a
reckoning.