Premium Episode 233: George Magazine QAnon Takeover (Sample)
JFK Jr's Magazine - which aimed to make politics sexy - ran from 1995 to 2001. But now it's back! And it's packed to the gills with QAnon weirdness, far-right grievances, poems about Pomeranians and broken writing. Somehow they landed an interview with RFK Jr? Plus they launched a children's magazine! Fun for everyone in George 2.0.
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Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
http://qanonanonymous.com
Welcome, listener, to the 233rd premium chapter of the QAA Podcast, the George Magazine episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rogatansky, Liv Aker, Julian Field, and Travis View.
In September of 1995, John F. Kennedy Jr.
held a press conference where he announced the launch of a new magazine, George, of which he'd be the editor-in-chief.
George's graphics will grab you and its writing will hold you.
Politics isn't dry.
It isn't dull, so why should a magazine that covers it be?
In fact, George just doesn't cover politics, it celebrates it.
We will celebrate it.
Celebrate it as a general rule, but we won't be afraid to criticize it when necessary.
You know what?
In some ways, this was very prescient.
Just the recognition of, like, you know, politics as spectacle.
As, you know, something that's supposed to be as fun and sexy as anything that comes out of Hollywood.
George's slogan was, not just politics as usual.
And the first issue, which JFK Jr.
revealed on a large spinning placard in that press conference, featured Cindy Crawford dressed as a sexy George Washington, midriff exposed.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, I don't know about a magazine that grabs you and holds you.
What else is it gonna do?
Man, I've never wanted to fuck a slave owner so much.
At first, the magazine did relatively well, mostly due to the amount of celebrities involved.
In fact, in some ways, George was a harbinger of things to come.
Here's JFK Jr.
speaking to Chris Matthews of CNBC in 1997.
Historically, Americans have always been frustrated with what they perceive inside Washington and outside.
But I mean, what's interesting to us and what we hear is that I think that, you know, as you know, party identification has never been lower.
People are, I think, intrigued by novelty.
And when you have a new face comes up, you know, people are, it's a way of kind of spicing up what's a long election.
Certainly folks in the media like it.
It makes their job more interesting.
And I think it's the same, it catches people's attention.
The young political scion seemed keenly aware that the American public was seeking more spectacle in politics.
It had to compete with the increasingly flashy entertainment they were being served.
People you're aiming at are your age and younger.
Tell us how you get them excited about politics in a magazine.
Well, yeah, we're really aiming for a group of about 25 to 49, and it actually turns out that our normal readers are about 35.
Women, mostly.
Yeah, well, 60-40, which is good for us, because, you know, women buy most magazines, but yet a fraction of political magazines.
So the fact that we're reaching an audience that never probably bought a political magazine before is great, because that's really part of the original mission.
I think there's basically two things.
One, you have to be visually driven.
You have to really catch people's attention because there's so many things competing for their attention.
And that magazine, you know, if you look at most political magazines, there are a lot of print and not a lot of pictures.
And I think that you need both.
You know, the trick is catching people's attention.
Right.
The only thing that people see are, you know, a bunch of men fighting on television all the time, or negative commercials on television, or acerbic editorials, then they're going to turn their attention somewhere else.
And so we want to try to kind of bring a little bit more fun back into a little levity.
Not, but be serious-minded at the same time.
The people, they need picture books.
They want some text, but the big pictures... Like, text alone, that's too boring.
This is how they're going to understand politics.
It's like, would you pay more attention if Bill Clinton had amazing tits?
Probably.
Look, we need our favorite president costume worn by attractive women.
We need car commercials featuring, you know, your favorite president.
I mean, again, again, very pressing.
He got like everything's just part of the politics is just part of the attention economy, and therefore you have to compete with other things that are competing for people's attention, like entertainment.
Yeah, the idea of just openly admitting that politics as entertainment is the future.
JFK Jr., or John John as the tabloids love to call him, understood the general direction the country was taking.
But the product he pitched as a market solution was archaic.
Not only were magazines on their way out, soon to be replaced by TV and the internet, but consumers weren't craving more sexy politics.
They weren't growing bored like JFK Jr.
and his socialite ilk.
They were becoming restless, anxious, and spiteful.
In retrospect, they wanted grotesque, cartoonish figures to brain each other on live television.
They wanted their bloodlust to be sated.
The solution to keeping their attention, in the long run, would be to substitute culture war issues for real political arguments and to cultivate hatred, not horniness.
In a way, he felt like he saw the way the winds are blowing and he provided, I don't know, a better solution.
Okay, let's just provide people with more stimulating images and sexier concepts rather than the anger and hatred and, you know, endless culture war bullshit that we're living in today.
Well, that's because he was in the class of people to which the money was being redistributed upwards.
So he felt no pressure.
There was no anger.
There was no feel of diminishing opportunity.
He was just bored.
He was like, fuck, man, like, I'm in this political thing.
And like, all I like to do is party and fuck women.
Maybe we could combine these.
In the editorial offices, tensions grew between top-ranking staff and their editor-in-chief.
JonJon wanted more celebrities.
They wanted to make it a more serious publication.
Shouting matches ensued.
People were fired.
And Georgia's circulation and ad sales continued to fall.
In their March 1998 issue, Spy Magazine wrote an extremely catty article about George's increasing aimlessness and slow-burning failure with section titles like, Birth of a Bad Idea, Running on Fumes, and my favorite, Chest Hair Prostitute.
Which is a reference to the beautiful hairy chest of John John.
So, I thought we would read from this article, which, honestly, if Trump was good at writing, this is the kind of shit that he would write.
I wish Trump was good at writing.
Can you imagine?
I know!
Imagine if he could write a good catty editorial.
God, he'd be killin' it.
Possibly worse than the covers, in the degree to which they reveal the unworkability of the magazine's central idea, were its departments, the regular sections within each issue of George.
Rather than introducing new magazine formats inspired by its daringly fresh subject matter, George had relied on shoddily executed clone versions of the same cheesy sections every other celebrity magazine had been using for decades, only this time with cute political sounding names.
The de rigueur opening roundup of news snippets, for instance, which tends to be called upfront or appetizers in generically bad magazines, was in drawers titled primaries.
Reader mail was to be found under yeas and nays.
And an abysmal party pic section bore the effortless, embarrassing tag, we the people.
What finally happened, according to one staffer, was that they ceased trying to define what George was and just focused on getting the fucking magazine out, scrambling for celebrities with tits as often as possible to put on the cover and often trying to figure out what that person had to do with politics.
After a while, the truth became inescapable.
George was running out of subject matter.
Spy took great pleasure in denigrating JFK Jr.
as a bimbo and a fail-son.
Here's from the article again.
Nude fun.
September, 1997, and John is posing clotheless in the pages of George, staring up at an apple for some reason and referencing yet more of the Kennedy mystique.
The interesting part, some might say, as he lambasts his cousins as poster boys for bad behavior.
Cartilaginous supermodel Kate Moss is on the front cover, also nude, creeping through a murky mock-up of the Garden of Eden.
Somewhere on the cover, according to a note inside, you can make out the face of George Washington if you look hard enough.
He is veiled in shadow, like a jilted ex-girlfriend staring unhinged through one's kitchen window at night.
The media make hay with the poster boy quote for a while, then they move on.
Perhaps, in idle moments, some of them start preparing arbitraries for the formerly slightly further from its natural extinction magazine, as stories circulate among New York media types that Hachette is planning to pull the plug.
From a publishing point of view, George Magazine has one chance of survival.
Become a magazine about John Kennedy.
If George survives, it will be because Kennedy scoured his conscience and determined he is ready to take his place on the newsstand next to Body by Jake, Jane, Martha Stewart Living, and any other magazine that markets itself as a direct line into somebody's personality.
The enormity of this shift should not be underestimated.
For someone whose status as a personality has always been noble and passive, live through telephoto lenses rather than behind podia, the challenge of flogging himself sufficiently that George doesn't go under is roughly equivalent to that the late Princess Diana would have faced should she have chosen to start her own cable access porn show.
So brutal.
Jesus!
Yeah, no, they're horrible.
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