Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

đŸŽ¶ Those boots were made for mockin’ đŸŽ”

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Second rate reporter says what?

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

The willow is too close to the house.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Americans barely caring about Afghanistan is so last month.

John Fetterman: Too Manly for Pennsylvania.  Paid for by the Oz for Senator campaign.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

I was promised a recession.

Why did Dr. Oz lose? well, according to the exit polls, it’s because Fetterman won.

This fight is for everything.

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Friday Evening Open Thread: There Will Always Be ‘Useful Idiots’ for Profit

Friday Evening Open Thread: There Will Always Be ‘Useful Idiots’ for Profit

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All you need is an insular upbringing that discourages independent thought, and a strong instinct for self-promotion. But you don’t understand — repping the Monster has been very good for my professional development!

And so — BOMBAST, err, BoomBu$t:

The last programming that viewers of RT America saw, on the morning of March 1, was a half hour of BoomBu$t—the Russian-funded network’s business show. That day, cohost Rachel Blevins, a 27-year-old from Mineral Wells, an hour west of Fort Worth, had led with a roundup of economic fallout from Western sanctions against Russia over, as she put it, “its ongoing military operation in Ukraine,” using Vladimir Putin’s euphemism for his war.

Though that day’s coverage of the conflict on BoomBu$t was mellow compared to the previous RT America show, which had featured one guest averring that “not all Ukrainians are Nazis” and another complaining that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was being hailed as a “hero.” Blevins focused on the negative impacts from the sanctions: higher oil prices, a potential 2008-style global financial crisis, recession fears, and even tensions over the International Space Station. Next: a plug for The World According to Jesse—hosted by Jesse Ventura, the wrestler, conspiracy theorist, and former Minnesota governor—followed by a cheeky house ad that said, “RT is not alt-left or alt-right, but we are a solid alternative to the bullshit.” Then, abruptly, the screen went dark and a message appeared: “This channel is no longer available. DirecTV.”…

Blevins, along with most of the staff, was out of a job. She hadn’t been the most prominent host at RT America, but she was one of its most loyal. She started working at RT America in 2018, just over a year after graduating from Texas Tech University with a degree in journalism. Her last BoomBu$t show was her 196th. In the early days of Russia’s invasion, Blevins’s coverage had been highly diversionary; while the Russian military pressed into Ukraine on February 25, the second day of what RT called a “special operation,” Blevins led the program with a story about a Russian investigation into “genocide” in the breakaway Donbas region of Ukraine that had purportedly been carried out by Ukrainian “neofascists.” Analysts had warned just a week before that Putin would use exactly such a fabrication in order to justify invading Ukraine, as he had done in the lead-up to the annexation of Crimea in 2014…

On February 27, as Russian troops bore down on Ukraine, Blevins took to Rokfin.com—an Austin-based subscription platform similar to Patreon that mostly features wrestling and conspiracy content—to address RT critics. “I’ve never been told by RT what I should or shouldn’t say. I’ve never been told I needed to follow any sort of narrative and that’s why I work for the network I work for,” she said. She went on to defend the way RT covered the war in Ukraine, referring to the “so-called invasion” and linking the conflict to U.S. policy. “For all the people sitting there saying, ‘Well, Ukraine is a sovereign country, they should be able to do what they want to do’—well, to a certain extent, sure, however, that’s not what’s happening now. Ukraine is not acting as a sovereign nation . . . it is acting under the influence of NATO.” …

Blevins’s family moved from Colorado to Mineral Wells, an economically struggling town of around 15,000, when she was eleven. She attended Community Christian School, a small, private religious institution, where she graduated as valedictorian in 2013. A scholarship landed her at Texas Tech, where she began taking journalism classes. After her professors warned that young journalists usually have to toil for years covering local crime and local elections, Blevins said she planned to switch majors—that is, until one of her professors assigned her and her classmates to conduct an official interview with a source. She chose the topic of government control of media. Her father, a regular listener of talk radio, suggested she interview Ben Swann, a TV journalist originally from El Paso who has alternated between stints as an award-winning major-market local TV anchor and an enthusiastic promulgator of conspiracy theories—sometimes at the same time. When they met, Swann had a short-lived radio show on the Republic Broadcasting Network, a fringe Texas-based outlet that has repeatedly featured hard-core white supremacists and Holocaust deniers…

In conversations I had with Blevins, she had no qualms about working for RT and seemed mostly mystified by the backlash toward the network’s coverage of the war in Ukraine.

“It frustrates me that taking the stance of providing context to a conflict is automatically seen as supporting that conflict or supporting what the Russian military is doing,” said Blevins, who calls herself “incredibly anti-war.” She added: “And I think that it’s frustrating to come from a standpoint of ‘everything has to be one way or the other. Everything has to be left or right, right or wrong, whatever.’ ”…

She admits to being “surprised” that Russia actually went through with an invasion, but can’t quite process the criticism over the network’s terminology. “It feels like I’m in a place where I can’t win,” she said. “Every single thing I say, every term I use is going to be blown up in one way or another. And at the time, RT as a whole had been using that phrasing, and that was what we continued to use for our show just because we were in a position of trying to find the best way to navigate it, and we may not have chosen the best way to navigate it.”…

With RT America off the air, perhaps forever, Blevins is trying to reboot as a freelancer. Her Twitter account, still bearing that “Russian-affiliated state media” label, looks scarcely different than it did when she was employed by RT. She’s making weekly videos for a tiny paying audience on Rokfin; the most recent had her explaining to fans that she had “struggled with my coverage” of the Ukraine “conflict” and conceding that she “may not personally agree with exactly the way [Russia] has gone about” invading Ukraine, while arguing again that Putin is taking on neo-Nazis.

But as for her time at RT, she says she has few regrets. “The opportunities that I was given there—going from being straight out of college into a reporter position, then going on to hosting an international business-finance show—those are opportunities I would not have gotten anywhere else,” she said. “I will always be so grateful for that.”

Reader Interactions

64Comments

  1. 1.

    matt

    We’re going to have to stop the proliferation of all of these propagandists or our population will become Russia’s population – a completely pliable, deluded mass of fascists.

  5. 5.

    Anonymous At Work

    As Billy Barr would say: No way I would appear on enemy propaganda like that, but I’d watch it before I’d watch some leftist channel like Fox.

  6. 6.

    Baud

    she “may not personally agree with exactly the way [Russia] has gone about” invading Ukraine, 

    Incompetently?

  8. 8.

    Raoul Paste

    It’s just business to these amoral types. Trump would say the same thing. “ A great opportunity“

  9. 9.

    Chief Oshkosh

    Meh. Hopefully she’ll get hit by a truck. On the DC beltway. It’d be a twofer.

  10. 10.

    PJ

    So many so ready to sell themselves so cheaply.

    But it shouldn’t be surprising – there’s a difference between RT and Fox, but it ain’t that big. This young woman grew up marinating in right-wing horseshit.

  11. 11.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Raoul Paste: Yep. It’s the exact mindset of Moonves and the Murdochs and most of our “business leaders.” Sadly, it’s not new. See: Prescott Bush and Hitler.

  12. 12.

    trollhattan

    Twenty-seven? No excuses for her, by that age you either understand how the world works or never will.

    I was [checks notes] still quite a jerk at 27 but had seen enough to have left much of my naivete in a dumpster.

  15. 15.

    Brachiator

    Rachel Blevins started working at RT America in 2018 just over a year after graduating from Texas Tech University. She was broadcasting when the network was kicked off the air.

    I have mentioned it before, barely half in jest, that the government should kick Fox News off the air as well.

    Send Hannity and Tucker to Gitmo. Have the FBI take into custody and interview every GOP member of Congress who spent vacation time in Russia in the past few years.

  18. 18.

    scav

    I can smell the sound moral & ethical foundations from here: anything that benefitted me personally must be admirable and cherished. Bravo Community Christian School and Texas Tech!

  20. 20.

    dexwood

    Let’s see. . . How did that phrase go? Oh, yeah – lock her up. I don’t really want that to happen, but I do want consequences for her. She’ll probably end up at Fox, though.

  23. 23.

    PJ

    @scav: ​
      With the necessary corollary: if I am so successful, it must be because I am better than other people.

  24. 24.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Baud:

    Also too, WTF is the deal with Jesse Ventura?

    some of the blows to the head weren’t fake?

  26. 26.

    Ruckus

    @matt:

    Have you seen the maps?

    Not saying it’s too late, it is not.

    But it does need pushback, our conservative party is trying to conserve the wrong government and ideals. And this is still a time that needs to be made better than anything today’s conservatives think is actual government.

    I’ve stated this before that money is a means of measuring value, not the end all be all goal. Living takes work and effort and when you remove that or make it too difficult for no reason other than greed, it ruins everything. Take Russian oligarchs and leaders – please. We all are capable of greed, and sure not all of us will ever get over it, but it shouldn’t, can’t be the basis of a country. Greed is not the only, or anywhere near the best way to ruin a country and a people but it puts up a damn strong fight for first place.

  27. 27.

    Brachiator

    That day, cohost Rachel Blevins, a 27-year-old from Mineral Wells, an hour west of Fort Worth, had led with a roundup of economic fallout from Western sanctions against Russia over, as she put it, “its ongoing military operation in Ukraine,” using Vladimir Putin’s euphemism for his war.

    I guess I understand why some conservatives might be Republican, and play Democrat vs Republican games on Fox News and in real life.

    But to be the willing tool of an autocrat who would probably dump your poisoned body in a ditch if it served his purposes….

    Did these people hang out in bars and brag about how they helped fuck over Ukraine?

  31. 31.

    West of the Rockies

    She joins the confederacy of traitorous dunces:  all of the Fox opinion creeps, OAN, Diamond and Silk (wherever they can be found), the AM radio shouters, etc.  What August company she is among…

  32. 32.

    Urza

    @Cacti: So did Tom Hartmann and several other people from Air America Radio.  Sometimes you need a paycheck I guess.

  36. 36.

    Brachiator

    @PJ:

    But it shouldn’t be surprising – there’s a difference between RT and Fox, but it ain’t that big. This young woman grew up marinating in right-wing horseshit.

    I don’t know. I still find it wild that conservatives took a neo-Orwellian jump that made it OK to be pro-USA and also gung-ho for Russia.

    I was going to say, especially in Texas. But then again, I guess that when the godless Soviet Union became pro-God Russia, it was easy for some people to overlook all that authoritarian murderer thing.

  39. 39.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    It was in response to Gibbons saying to Mandel “you’ve never been in the private sector in your life”

    Fighting words!

  40. 40.

    SpaceUnit

    Honestly, in its early days RT didn’t come across as sinister.  I remember watching snippets of it now and then, and it seemed as though it was providing a window on a society that was shedding its Soviet Union identity, opening up, and beginning to experiment with democracy and capitalism, actual journalism.

    I guess it became corrupted over time as Putin solidified his grip on power.

  44. 44.

    Brachiator

    She chose the topic of government control of media. Her father, a regular listener of talk radio, suggested she interview Ben Swann, a TV journalist originally from El Paso who has alternated between stints as an award-winning major-market local TV anchor and an enthusiastic promulgator of conspiracy theories.

    Sounds like this woman grew up in a kind of pro-conspiracy bubble. Maybe there are many more like her. They don’t have to be “turned” or recruited. They are just attuned to wackiness, because otherwise her life was fairly ordinary, and she seemed to b bright enough to do well in school.

  47. 47.

    zhena gogolia

    @SpaceUnit: Yes, I have the same recollection. They used to have a supplement in the NYT! It was pretty apolitical, just informational.

  49. 49.

    mrmoshpotato

    she says she has few regrets. “The opportunities that I was given there—going from being straight out of college into a reporter position, then going on to hosting an international business-finance show—those are opportunities I would not have gotten anywhere else,” she said.

    And why do you think that is, you idiot?

  52. 52.

    Jay

    @matt:

    take the polls, ( there are two) with a grain of salt. In Putin’s Russia of late, ( and one of the polls noted that), there were a bunch of people who were “non responsive “ to taking part in being polled.

    Probably a wise choice given the number of open 5th story windows in Putin’s Russia.

  55. 55.

    geg6

    @Kay:

    OMG, it’s a death match of hilarity. It’s gonna be crazy here, too, so I should just shut up.  But damn.

  59. 59.

    Citizen Alan

    @PJ: Is RT really right wing bullshit though? My last exposure to it was their coverage of the Green Party in 2016, and they were talking gleefully about “destroying capitalism.” TBH, my personal suspicion is that RT and the Greens both exist to provide platforms to simultaneously weaponize far Leftism against the Democratic Party while also making genuine Leftism seem utterly ridiculous.

  60. 60.

    NorthLeft12

    Ms. Blevins is the type of person who, as she admitted, would work for anyone in her chosen field. Moral calculations just don’t enter into these decisions. Is the pay good and will I get experience that will allow me to advance my career is all that matters with these people.

    I worked for a chemical company like that. They were an environmental menace, a safety hazard, convicted of price fixing, and treated all employees, union and staff, like garbage. I was hired by the new plant manager who told me he was trying to change the culture. They also hired an actual HR manager at the same time. My boss was canned in three years, and I escaped about six months later. Needless to say there was no change in how the company operated and they shutdown permanently about a year after I left. I took a large pay cut when I moved to my new job, but it was worth it.

    After that experience I always advised any young engineers that it was important to feel good about whomever you worked for and that it was important for your long term mental health.

  61. 61.

    Sloane Ranger

    As I posted in an earlier thread the UK has followed the US in taking RT off air. I’ve never watched it so I don’t know much about its editorial position, but I do know that it employed people like former Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond as hosts. Salmond is probably not ideologically supportive of the Putin regime BUT, he was given a platform to continue to argue for Scottish Independence because the break up of the UK would weaken NATO.

    Even if an independent Scotland were to join, the disruption caused by trying to disentangle finances and the military would weaken both the remaining parts of the UK and Scotland making our contributions to any joint undertaking less effective, especially as SNP policy is that an independent Scotland would insist on the removal of the UK nuclear submarine bases from Scottish soil

    And this furthers Russia’s interests.

  62. 62.

    Chris T.

    @matt:

    … stop the proliferation of all of these propagandists or our population will become …

    That’s a powerful profusion of plosives! Punchy!

    (ETA: Don’t mean to sound like a nattering nabob of negativity here. Just thought the alliteration was funny.)

  64. 64.

    Steve

    I don’t know how they did it, but the Austin Lounge Lizards quoted her accurately, decades in advance. Look up “Old Blevins”.

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