The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was a little different this year. No president. No comedian. The event featured a mea culpa from an Axios journalist who discussed the media’s complicity in failing to expose Biden’s mental decline. Meanwhile, Substack promoted an alternative parallel event called “Not The White House Correspondents’ Dinner” with an email that announced, “a new media order is emerging.” Legit—or just another conspiracy touting MAGA sham?
Julian reports on the proceedings of both events, as well as how the media landscape is shifting in ways that render the definitions of terms like “independent,” “journalism,” and “unbiased” hard to pin down. Digging beneath the surface on Substack, and outlets like The Free Press, and the increasingly mainstreamed far right cult-rag the Epoch Times, all of which claim in some way to represent this emergent new media order, leads him to ask: where is the real home of fact-based independent journalism?
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This dinner is going to feel a little different than usual.
There's no president.
There's no comedian.
It's just us.
Just a celebration of all of you.
Thousands of people with a shared commitment to the First Amendment, with a dedication to the public's right to know.
That's how the White House Correspondents Dinner started this past weekend, with MSNBC contributor and...
Correspondent's dinner president Eugene Daniels explaining how it would be different this time.
No president, no comedian.
The situation exemplifies the current crisis in the American news media with legacy outlets losing credibility and authority and an ever-rising wave of alternative sources crowding into the Wild West digital space.
As has been the case in each year of Trumpian rule, the authoritarian strategy of demonizing the media I'm Julian Walker.
Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
We'll talk a little today about the White House Correspondents Dinner, as well as a competing event put on at the same time on Saturday, April 26th, by the Political Voices Network.
I'll put all of this into context regarding one of the beats I cover here on the podcast, which is how a strong contingent of digital new media is driving the rightward trending disinformation crisis and...
Therefore, our descent into authoritarian oligarchy.
But the news isn't all bad.
So stay tuned.
This is the New Media Order.
And here's Daniels again from his opening of the official dinner.
Every year we invite the president to this dinner.
For decades, presidents on both sides of the political spectrum get gussied up and join us.
I want to be clear about something.
We don't invite presidents of the United States to this because it's for them.
We don't invite them because we want to cozy up to them or curry favor.
We don't only extend invites to the presidents who say they love journalists or who say they are defenders of the First Amendment and a free press.
We invite them to remind them that they should be.
It's to remind them why a strong Fourth Estate is essential for democracy.
Why, at the end of the day, True to the conflicted relationship between comedy and politics these days, the White House Press Association had first hired and then, within the space of about six weeks, fired comedian Amber Ruffin to be the host of the event.
Daniels cited concerns about a focus on the politics of division, to which Ruffin replied publicly, I thought when people take away your rights, erase your history and deport your friends, you're supposed to call it out.
But I was wrong.
Nonetheless, here is Daniel's version of standing up for free speech in the face of authoritarian pressure.
We journalists are a lot of things.
We are competitive and pushy.
We are impatient.
And sometimes we think we know everything.
We care deeply about accuracy and take seriously the heavy responsibility of being stewards of the public's trust.
What we are not is the opposition.
What we are not is the enemy of the people and what we are not is the enemy of the state.
Meanwhile, the key moment of the evening that would garner the most gloating coverage from Fox News and other right-wing outlets came from Axios reporter Alex Thompson, who, during his acceptance speech on winning the award for overall excellence in coverage of the White House, had a sort of confession he wanted to make, as well as a call to action for the broader media.
This is how conservative Robbie Suave of centrist independent outlet The Hill reported on that moment.
Is the media truly the enemy of the people?
Now, the media denies that characterization, of course, and protests the label, even though one mainstream media outlet admitted there was not nearly enough scrutiny of President Joe Biden's obvious Really,
the big moment that I think is worth highlighting were these remarks by Alex Thompson of Axios.
President Biden's decline and its cover-up by the people around him, It's a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception.
But being truth-tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves.
We, myself included, missed a lot of this story.
And some people trust us less because of it.
We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows.
Of course, this is a significant theme for Democrats doing a post-mortem on the 2024 election.
Many articles and books have been published or are in the works about an alleged cover-up of Biden's true mental decline and fitness for office.
For the right, this is just another example of why the Democrats and their biased liberal news outlets are untrustworthy and why the country gave such a supposedly huge mandate to the very stable genius Don't get me wrong.
The work on the left to understand what has gone wrong and how we've played into the hands of faux-populist culture war spin doctors and opportunistic oligarchs is crucial.
But how the supposed scandal of Biden's mental decline even ranks in the top 20 of all-hands-on-deck crises created by these first 100 days of absolutely chilling insanity and what they portend is frankly beyond me.
But that's the thing.
Democratic politics, institutional expertise, and traditional journalism are all on the back foot in relation to the spiked cocktail of populist propaganda and digital disinformation that has now successfully colonized the United States.
So what's the antidote?
Surely it must be some new, lean and mean, savvy form of alternative media, right?
Journalism isn't dead.
It's on Substack.
Thus read the subtitle of the email I received on April 25th.
The subject line was, a new media order is emerging, and the sender turned out to be Hamish McKenzie, who is co-founder of Substack and has the title there of Chief Writing Officer.
Now, that subject line, and even the subtitle, if you change the name, of course, could belong to an email from any number.
Of outlets, such as the time we live in.
A new media order is emerging is also a subject line that could as easily be from the Falun Gong-related far-right propaganda vehicle, the Epoch Times, who I'm sad to say I get emails from just to keep up with what they're doing.
Or it could be from Barry Weiss's less sinister outfit, the Free Press, which role plays as open-minded and reasonably centrist.
But is overwhelmingly right-wing in both its culture war content and its funding via politically ascendant big tech oligarchs and media tycoons.
Now, speaking of the White House, the briefing room there now includes correspondence from outlets like OAN, The Daily Wire, the MyPillowGuy Network, whatever that's called, and Turning Point USA, all of which also claim to be independent.
Even while many are in very tight funding relationships with GOP megadonors, and they claim to be overcoming the bias and corruption of legacy media, all the while spouting anti-woke conspiracism.
The Epoch Times are not currently present in the White House briefing room, but they have been in the past under Trump.
They're somewhat unique in this ecosystem.
So bear with me here.
They're not funded by Western tech billionaires for a start.
But the Epoch Times has regurgitated QAnon claims.
They've spread COVID disinformation.
They've promoted far-right parties in Europe.
And they were second only to the GOP in terms of being the biggest purchaser of pro-Trump advertising on Facebook before that platform blocked their ads.
Now, you may be wondering...
Why am I digressing into mentioning such an extreme outlier?
Epoch Times is connected, as I said, to Falun Gong cult leader Li Hongzhi, who has said that alien invaders walk the earth and that modern science and race mixing are part of those aliens' strategy for defeating humanity.
He has claimed to himself have come from a higher dimension to save us from all that.
The digital newspaper, Ebbuk Times, doesn't preach his gospel, though.
They recycle Kremlin talking points about Ukraine, climate denialism, and MAGA conspiracy theories.
But our new head of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr., has said he reads the Epoch Times daily as a courageous source of real journalism.
In 2023, they were a supporting sponsor of CPAC.
Hosting their own video interviews of prominent conservative politicians during that conference.
And then last year, having grown to be the fourth largest subscription newspaper in the country and increased their revenue by close to 700% since 2020, last year Epoch Times CFO was charged in a huge criminal money laundering scheme that might in fact explain their exponential financial growth.
The Free Press, whose tagline is Think for Yourself, perpetuates overblown moral panic about the woke left while sane-washing Trump's catastrophic first 100 days as perhaps being a necessary counter-revolutionary strategy.
Their founder, Barry Weiss, glowingly hosted new National Institutes of Health boss J. Bhattacharya's first official interview, in which he endorsed his boss RFK's stances on maha pseudoscience, and he and Barry celebrated Bhattacharya's rise from being called a fringe epidemiologist during COVID to now benefiting from what she called the karma of his prestigious appointment.
I noticed yesterday that the Free Press published a puff piece about the unofficial and, believe me, utterly banal poet laureate for Trump's America, unofficial poet laureate.
You don't want to know.
Of course, Barry Weiss also hosted the gloatingly reptilian Peter Thiel a couple days after the 2024 election, which together they characterized as the triumph of the counter-elites.
And she's also spoken publicly about overcoming her Trump derangement syndrome.
Here she is briefly on Fox News doing just that from a couple months ago.
There were two things I think that I didn't know in that moment when I was crying at my desk.
One would be the sort of...
The overzealous, out-of-touch hysterical reaction to him and the kind of illiberalism that was born out of the reaction to him that calls itself democratic, that calls itself progressive, but is actually extraordinarily authoritarian and totalitarian in its impulses, and to me presented a very, very grave danger and one that I saw intimately at the New York Times, which is where I went after the Wall Street Journal.
The other thing that I didn't see was that...
Trump was going to do a lot of policies that I agreed with.
I thought the Abraham Accords were historic and excellent.
I thought his policy vis-a-vis Iran was excellent.
The economy was better.
And look, the argument that the country would unravel and democracy would die in darkness and Trump would be this authoritarian, Hitlerian power, it was impossible to make that argument in the run-up to this election.
only because Americans had lived through four years of him and things didn't fall apart.
Now, am I still worried about his character?
Am I worried about things like January 6th?
Yes.
But I would say, you know, the sign of an open mind and the sign of a thinking person is a person that's able to sort of take on new information and adjust your, adjust your priors and adjust your view.
And that's where I'd say I am right now.
Oh, Barry.
She was apparently crying at her desk when Trump won in 2016, but now she has an open mind that can take in new information, and as it turns out, an open bank account that has grown exponentially by leaning into being anti-woke and pandering to MAGA, while sprinkling in some milquetoast criticisms to seem legitimate.
Stay tuned, because we'll get to some voices who are actively pushing back in a couple minutes.
I've digressed.
A bit.
Because the email I mentioned was from Substack, the real home of independent journalism.
The actual fair and balanced ones, right?
Well, Substack does in fact present a very wide diversity of opinion.
At 2.6 million subscribers, their biggest individual account belongs to progressive historian Heather Cox Richardson.
At the same time, the platform has been criticized for publishing top dog pseudoscience anti-vax disinformation peddler Joseph Mercola as well as international authoritarian fluffer Steve Bannon.
Yeah, I was quite proud of those two descriptions.
Our friends at the Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated in 2022 that Substack pulled in around $2.5 million from the top five anti-vax authors on the platform alone.
In 2023, a group of Substack bloggers wrote letters of protest against the platforming of open neo-Nazis and white supremacists, some of whom I should say have since been removed.
Now, full disclosure, my podcast colleague, Derek Barris, is on Substack, and I have myself been dabbling in having a blog there too.
One argument for staying, which has so far been somewhat convincing to me at least, is that alternatives to these voices I'm criticizing should not completely cede this prominent digital territory to the bastards.
But it's not just their outdated and naive free speech policy that is problematic.
One of Substack's first big-money donors was capital management firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Mark Andreessen is currently an advisor to Trump, and according to the Washington Post, has been involved in Elon Musk's disastrous Doge operation as an advisor.
Andreessen was also a megadonor to Trump super PACs like the one Musk created, and another that specifically advocates for cryptocurrency.
Andreessen has also spoken approvingly of Curtis Yarvin's anti-democratic ideas, one of which is central to the Doge decimation of government jobs and agencies, while stacking remaining positions with MAGA loyalists who will do as they're told.
A more recent investor in Substack is Omid Malik.
He's head of an investment fund called 1789 Capital, which is also in deep.
on Tucker Carlson's unnamed new media project, having previously been a backer of the far-right blog The Daily Caller, also associated with Carlson.
Malik has recently acquired an anti-woke online marketplace called Public Square, which features failed Peter Thiel-funded ultra-right-wing Senate candidate Blake Masters on its board of directors.
Now, Public Square claims to be offering consumers a patriot economy.
With products like Covfefe Coffee.
Remember, that's one of Trump's bizarre late-night tweets that made no sense.
It said Covfefe.
So now there's a coffee brand called Covfefe, which bears the descriptor Drain the Swamp Medium Roast.
Another coffee brand is called Making America Classy Again and their Mel Roast.
Has a rendering of Melania on the packaging in a white jacket and stylish hat, her hand on her heart in front of an American flag.
There's also a plush blanket you can get with the Donald's mean mugshot and the words not guilty.
Prints it on it so you get the idea of what kind of products they're selling.
Now, the email.
From Substack was promoting something called Not the White House Correspondents Dinner, which was positioned as an alternative to the official event.
And I have to say that given Substack's tangled web of funding, how it intersects with the current emerging oligarchy, how it has led to the rise of voices of Heather Cox Richardson, as well as the Free Press and Matt Taibbi's strange new incarnation alongside climate denialist...
Twitterfiles alumnus and UFO enthusiast Michael Schellenberger, I had some concerns.
The email invitation from Hamish McKenzie framed the event as a party, which one could purchase via pay-per-view.
Well, I purchased it, and it turned out to be a live-streamed video show alternative to the official dinner, with no actual party in a physical space that I could see, no guests.
No food and drink.
The not-the-White House-correspondence dinner featured pre-recorded routines by what turned out to be a very progressive, resistance-oriented group of speakers, as well as some pretty bad sketch comedy bits making fun of the Trump administration and their surrogates.
So, color me pleasantly surprised by the politics, but mildly let down by the production values and entertainment levels still.
This takes courage, and I definitely give them props for that.
Here's how John Fuglesang kicked it off.
Good evening.
Welcome to America.
We can't afford eggs.
Let's buy Greenland.
I'm John Fuglesang.
Political Voices Network presents the Not White House Correspondents Dinner.
You know, a few weeks ago, comedian Amber Ruffin was fired from hosting the Correspondents Dinner on account of being honest and funny.
I called her up and I said, hey, let's do a big show to counter this.
And she said, how'd you get this number?
And it was a whole thing.
And my parole officer got involved.
I don't want to get into it right.
But so then Political Voices Network called me and said, hey, let's do a thing.
So we have assembled a terrific crew of comedians, broadcasters and influencers all here to give their very brief versions of the White House Correspondence Center.
Next up was Alison Gill.
She's formerly been better known by her podcast name and Twitter handle, Mueller She Wrote.
And she gave a withering critique of Newsmax, Fox, and the Trump administration in the context of her being ousted from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs for her coverage of the Mueller investigation.
Her routine was intercut with footage from previous actual White House Correspondents Dinner events.
And laugh tracks as a kind of spoof.
And after that, National Press Club award winner Brian Karam gave a non-comedic address from his office explaining why he no longer supports the White House Correspondents Association for their enabling of Trump's crackdowns on the free press.
Here's a taste.
He has taken over, picking seats for the members of the press.
He has decided who will cover him.
In the press pool.
And Donald Trump has not once shown up in the press briefing room.
He doesn't like a large amount of people pushing back against him.
In fact, the one time when Caitlin Collins from CNN this past week walked in and said something to Donald Trump that he didn't like, he said, why can't you say nice things?
Why can't you come out and just admit that we're doing great stuff?
Because most other reporters in that room are pushing back with, gee, Mr. President, can you tell us why you're so great?
Gee, Mr. President, can you tell us why everything is rainbows and curly fries?
Trey Crowder, who also goes by the liberal redneck, shared a video he had recorded sitting in his car that was essentially a commentary on the GOP victory and the carnage of the first 100 days with some jokes sprinkled in in his redneck accent.
And then Arab-American lawyer, comedian, and radio journalist, as well as CNN contributor Dean Obidala, gave a quite funny rapid-fire routine which featured this analysis on Trump's shifting anti-Muslim rhetoric.
Listen.
I must say Donald Trump is slightly different than his first term and during his 2016 campaign.
That one, he demonized Muslims nonstop.
You might remember him saying, Islam hates us, calling for a total complete shutdown on Muslims.
We didn't hear that in 2024.
And in office so far, he's not demonizing us.
Why?
Well, when he left office, Saudi Arabia gave Jared Kushner $2 billion and gave him hundreds of millions of dollars to run their golf tournaments at his country clubs.
So Trump went from, like, Muslims' worst people ever, gotta ban them, $2 billion, greatest people.
I love the Muslims.
Abdul's?
I know all the Abdul's.
Abdul Akbar.
Trump is even transactional in his bigotry.
There were more mildly entertaining second-rate Saturday Night Live-style comedy sketches.
And then someone named JoJo from Jurors did some bitingly clever stand-up from her living room, which led with the conceit that the new administration was filled with incel boys getting revenge on the world for their sexual insecurities.
She called Stephen Miller a haunted ventriloquist dummy.
And Donald Trump, a human-esque pile of deli meats animated by a cursed toupee with a retribution streak.
And she went on to say...
Of course...
Trump's favorite furniture fluffer, J.D. Vance, looks like the kind of sad bastard who tried to fuck his couch, got rejected, and then wrote a think piece blaming feminism for his blue balls.
He's got the raw sex appeal of a spent condom left in a Walmart parking lot and the emotional range of a potato on Xanax.
His idea of a smoky eye looks like he let a 12-year-old girl with a grudge and a fistful expired eyeliner scribble on his face during an earthquake.
I mean, it's kind of refreshing, right?
Fuglesang returned in decent form, cracking jokes about Musk and Trump's tariffs and calling Pete's Hegseth the secretary of Jägermeister.
And then Alonzo Baden rounded out the fairly predictable comedic material, followed by a lawyer and podcaster who you may have come across, Glenn Kirshner, and his serious takedown of Trump's defiance of rule of law and democratic norms, as well as attempts at spoof humor about the clown car cabinet appointments.
Notable mention here, too, for Brooklyn Dad Defiant, Hal Sparks, Chuck Nice, and Elaine Boosler.
I know, this has not been a rave review for the Not the White House Correspondents Dinner event.
But listen, the real thing has never really been an entertainment extravaganza.
More of a celebrity who's who with some occasionally funny remarks.
So overall, I think they did great.
And I want to give a shout out to Political Voices Network, which, yes, is on Substack as an extension of Stephanie Miller's syndicated progressive talk radio show.
I also want to acknowledge Hamish McKenzie for promoting this event to the entire Substack mailing list, which is a welcome counterbalance to a lot of their content.
So, is there a new media order emerging?
I don't know.
Is there a new world order emerging?
Certainly, everything is in flux.
Everything is in disarray and transition.
I think we're all feeling the effects of that.
So I'll end today by wishing you well.
Take good care of yourself.
I'll see you soon here on the podcast.
If you would like to support our version of independent media, please do so by joining us on patreon.com slash conspirituality.
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