NewsBolt 2.0

Newsletter changes coming, book link roundup

Welcome back to The Flashpoint—some info here for how the newsletter is going to operate going forward.

A few years ago, my friend Jordan Uhl and I started a website called NewsBolt. It was a blogroll, like in the good old days, a collection of links about the news of the day so you could access articles all in one place as opposed to hunting on an increasingly difficult social media landscape.

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to start sending out a version of this blogroll once a day. It will usually drop around 5pm ET, though not always.

In order to facilitate this, I am turning paid subscriptions back on. If you were a paid subscriber, you will receive an email alerting you so you can opt out of subscribing if you would like.

As of now, content will not be paywalled—but if you want to support this effort and make it easier for me to devote my time to this work, your support is appreciated.

On the book front, Owned continues to receive positive feedback. My appearance on CNN from February 26 is now up in full (the audio only plays on the left channel, sorry).

I wrote about Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss at The Nation.

Taibbi’s decline strikes journalist Sana Saeed, a media critic whom I interviewed extensively for my book, as notable for how far he fell. And his shift to the right doesn’t leave many options; he doesn’t have much of a future in a Trump administration. With nothing original to say and no credibility left to leverage, there’s nothing right-wing audiences get from Taibbi they can’t already get from conservatives they already trust. Even Elon Musk, who gave him access to the Twitter Files in the first, wants nothing to do with him, but the connection to the tech billionaire continues to tail Taibbi.

“He allowed himself to become a collared dog for one of the most wretched billionaires who feels comfortable enough doing a Nazi salute at the inauguration,” Saeed said when we talked for this article.

That’s all for now—I look forward to this new blogroll experiment and, as always, I welcome your thoughts.