News Satire Roundup: December 18th

Sunday, December 18

·        Recap of the Week – Rudy Giuliani’s defamation suit

o   After being found liable in his defamation suit, Rudy Giuliani has to pay the election workers he defamed $148 million.

o   John was amused by the lawyer who frantically tried to distract the press from Giuliani repeating his defamatory statements outside the courtroom – Noting that the lawyer was hearkening back to who Guiliani was 20 years ago, he said, “It is the rare attempt to Weekend at Bernie’s someone who is still alive.”

·        Main Story – Elon Musk

o   Loved it – “He even challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight, to which Zuckerberg replied, ‘Send Me Location.’ And may I suggest to both of them, ‘Interior – Volcano.’”

o   This isn’t a joke, but it is so true and petty, and I love that for all of us – “And then of course, there is Twitter. He now calls it X, but the rest of us still call it Twitter.”

o   Excellent point – “He can claim the twin distinctions of being both the richest person in the world and the first person ever to lose $200 billion, which is hard to even wrap your head around. It’s like hearing someone won a marathon after accidentally running 200 miles in the wrong direction.”

o   I was struck by this quote from OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman – “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.”

o   One NASA official talked about how NASA couldn’t have survived if its launches failed at the rate of Musk’s – John added, “Right. The U.S. government can’t waste billions of dollars just blowing things up in the vague hope that it’ll somehow turn into a success. Unless, of course, those things are Iraq or Afghanistan.”

o   This is one of the most critical points about Musk getting Tesla customers to use the self-driving feature in beta mode – “Even if Tesla drivers volunteered to take part in this high-stakes experiment, the people around them sure didn’t. No one’s getting a push notification saying, ‘Hey, Tesla here! Please consent to take part in the beta test that is currently hurtling towards you. Do hurry. Time is a factor.”

o   As we looked at Musk’s dive deeper and deeper into far-right and white supremacist ideology, John traced its origins back to his obsession with “lockdown conspiracies” in the early days of the pandemic – “Elon didn’t channel his anxiety in one of the normal ways, like spraying groceries with disinfectant, getting really into sourdough bread baking, or tracking down and purchasing one-of-a-kind rat erotica. You know, normal stuff that we all did.”

o   White supremacist Nick Fuentes lauded Musk for how white nationalist has been mainstreamed since his purchase of Twitter – “Using the term ‘white identitarian’ is just not fooling anyone. That is what the word ‘racist’ writes on a job application to make it sound like it went to college.”

o   Another important point was that technology and infrastructure needed for government programs is increasingly contracted to Musk – After an official danced around Musk boosting and affirming antisemitic tweets, John said, “We’re now at the point where the government is explicitly saying, ‘We’ve chosen to look the other way on the antisemitism thing,’ or as it’s more commonly known, a Daddy’s Home 2.”

o   John did a great job summing Musk up – “He’s cultivated an image where he’s simply too visionary, too original to play by other people’s rules, and he waves away the damage that he does as the cost of innovation—saving humanity. But the truth is, that way of thinking isn’t remotely original. We’ve seen it so many times before. The least surprising thing on Earth is a middle-aged billionaire CEO with self-serving libertarian views, increasingly racist politics, and a messiah complex.”

·        And Now This – People on TV Do Not Understand This Holiday Dessert

o   This was about fruitcake – When asked if he’s ever tried it, one news anchor said, “Well, I did once, and I never will again.”

o   Other asked, Have you ever had a good fruitcake?” – Her co-anchor replied, “Um…I’ve heard that they exist.”

·        Finally – Season finale

o   After running through some of the show’s stories and accomplishments from this year, John poured one out for stories they weren’t able to do because it took the AMPTP so long to settle with the writers.

o   They planned a story on designer dogs – “That one would’ve ended with a live dog orgy onstage. We still had the orgy, we just didn’t do the show.”

o   Another was on how car headlights have gotten brighter – “We planned to motivate lawmakers to move faster to address this by pointing blinding floodlights at congressional offices. But we ran out of time and money, and also, legal flagged that move as ‘terrorism.’”

o   Of course, we had to end with the giant pūteketeke puppet before it makes its triumphant flight home to New Zealand.