Becoming David Sirota

I blogged earlier this week about my latest quarterly blogroll updates, news, and I threw a sharp elbow at David Sirota with this among the new additions:

The Daily Poster, the latest news-and-opinion site affiliated with David Sirota or vice versa. That said, while it doesn't have a Substack-based URL ... its front page, including with the "no, let me read it first" clickable link, looks EXACTLY like a Substack blog front page. In that case, Sirota is another of the media 1 percenters enhancing his wallet, with others along for the ride. And, if you click through the "About" page, at the bottom, you find out it IS a Substack site. So, it too may be gone in three months, also since I don't think Sirota is necessarily all he cracks himself up to be, starting with the fact he's never dipped a toe outside the duopoly.

And, I knew I had thrown a sharp elbow or four at Sirota before, so I decided to double down and collect them here.

There was this, from the one 2020 Democratic presidential candidate debate, where Sirota couldn't even really defend Bernie the Gun Nut Lite for 24 hours, and then when he DID weigh in on Twitter, it was nothing more than handwaving, and worse, only via a retweet. (See about halfway down the piece.) I included the same material, with a closer focus just on Bernie in that debate, when I blogged about the showdown between Sandernistas and Madcow Maddow.

To give him credit, Sirota was right on wanting Bernie to go negative against Status Quo Joe. (In turn, his failure to do so indicates that Bernie 2016 was motivated in part by some still less than fully clear to people not named Bernie or Jane Sanders animus against the Clintons.)

But, Sirota has other problems. A full decade ago, he was dipping his toes into the SJW world, Major League Baseball umpiring division. Paging Angel Hernandez. Look, I believe that a certain amount of implicit as well as explicit bias is real. BUT! The existence of implicit, as well as explicit, bias has to be confirmed by evidence and, in this case, it wasn't.

And, someone from his team at Substack thinks the DSA Roseys are actual socialists.

Sirota's not all bad. But, he strikes me as a bit of John Nichols mixed with Have Gun, Will Travel as far as not being settled at one place. (And, I'm not sure which of the two that insults more.)

 

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Re Substack and the Daily Poster, add weird tidbits like this. A post about fast-food restaurants and a $15 minimum wage, which it says was co-published with Newsweek (this post), which has a soft paywall that is easily defeated beyond the five-article monthly limit. Just saying ...

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As far as Sirota's simollians? If Substack is paying Glennwald $1-2 million a year, and reportedly offered Missy Breunig $200K, Sirota's surely getting at least that lower number. Sirota may not live in Glennwald's Brazil, but he also doesn't live in NYC, as his wife ran for a state leg position in Colorado last year.