Ask A Genius 1069: Pseudoscience in Rick’s Lifetime
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/08/06
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How did the phenomenon of pseudoscience evolve in your lifetime, in the United States in particular?
Rick Rosner: All right, there’s a lot of money in being a right-wing pundit. Which includes a lot ofbullshit. All the prime-time talent on Fox makes $25 to $35 million a year. Hannity owns close to a thousand rental properties. He takes his millions and plows them into condos and apartment buildings. He likes that as an investment.
He makes a shit ton of money. Alex Jones sells shit to his rubes and has accumulated… he’s on the hook for like a billion dollars. He is trying to shield his billion dollars from creditors after he lost a lawsuit for making the lives of the Sandy Hook families hell. He’s got to pay them a billion dollars. His lawyers are trying to shield his money, and he’s trying to hide it, but he made a ton of money.
In my lifetime, I don’t love these topics because we’ve talked about them a bunch of times. So I’m repeating myself about some of this stuff. However, right-wing rich people have agendas that are counter to the interests of regular people, and they can spend much money to support the propagandizing of people who are conservatives and susceptible to it. Social media makes it thousands of times easier to spread bullshit and bombard people with it until they get lost in it.
We used to interact with people in the ’60s and ’70s by saying words to each other face-to-face or on the telephone, but even the telephone was limited because long-distance costs money. When you started saying a bunch of crazy crap, people around you would say, “Hold on there, asshole,” but now you can absorb tens of thousands of words a day and hours of video a day telling you bullshit via social media. So yes, people are a lot more susceptible. Some interests want people to be propagandized.
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
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