THURSDAY 5/25/23
By Todd Lassa
A bunch of tech bros – female as well as male, but mostly male – enter a Twitter space called Twitter Spaces and fumble with the technology for 20 minutes. Until minute 21, the man of the hour is nowhere to be heard (it’s audio-only).
Preparation?
Elon Musk sycophants being the type of sycophants that give Trump sycophants a run for their money, the tech bros stumble over each other trying to explain how this sh*t show is a sh*t show only because Musk has too many followers (no mention of how many might be the bots the new owner promised to root out when he dropped $44 billion on the company) clogging the system.
Anyone familiar with Musk’s Tesla quarterly earnings calls with analysts would recognize his performance Wednesday night.
One tech bro – the female in the crowd – compares Twitter Spaces’ technical issues with Musk’s SpaceX “intentionally” blowing up the biggest-ever space rocket on purpose. There’s the beta test.
“Ron DeSantis just crashed Twitter,” one tech bro exclaims. “Imagine what he’s going to do to Donald Trump.”
Jake Tapper had 568,000 viewers on CNN the previous night, another tech bro says. Musk already was up to 728,000. Tech bros just love big numbers.
These are tech bros rationalizing the sh*t show behind Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis long-awaited declaration he is running against former President Trump for the GOP presidential nomination.
DeSantis tells all the listener-“viewers” he is declaring his candidacy “ to lead our great American comeback.”
Issues?
The mess at our southern border. Drugs coming in through the southern border. Crime in our cities. A president who takes his cues from the woke mob.
“We must restore sanity to our nation.”
“Woke” will become a drinking game for DeSantis stump speeches.
Embracing energy independence; the DeSantis version of “drill, baby, drill.”
“We must reject attacks on our law enforcement,” DeSantis declares, using a talking point that could cut both ways, against the January 6th insurrection as well as “defund the police.” The governor promises to actually build a border wall. as an “energetic executive who will take on the issues” as well as “reconstitutionalize the executive branch.”
DeSantis touts his lax COVID lockdown and how Disneyworld was open when Disneyland was not. By the time “journalist questions,” including one about the Second Amendment by ex-Brietbart News/ex-NRA flak Dana Loesch concludes the Musk sh*t show incumbent presidential candidate Joe Biden has trolled DeSantis with the tweet, “this link works,” to his campaign website. Several pundits from the other side say Twitter Spaces had much lower viewership – as low as 139,000 – than the tech bros had claimed. The Daily Mail runs a Trumpian front page headline: “Ron’s Desaster.”
Still, Loesch proclaimes she will vote for the Florida governor in her primary (leaving open the likelihood she will vote for Trump in the general). Musk’s free-speech open forum is full of hard-right pundits, asking the same sort of fawning softballs that New Hampshire citizens lobbed at Trump during his CNN Town Hall.