100000%

Holy **** he took part in the ACORN bs too?

LOL so-called Obama bros
LOL simplicitus

As a Republican funny man, I too join serious respectable liberals and centrists and share their condemnation of all jokes about Jews, they are virulently offensive and shake me to my core as they do all of us, but do hope you realize as a Republican funny-man it is my solemn duty to tell them.

Unearthed Tim Miller tweet: "lol we found a poor child near my vacation home so we ran him over in the family yacht then used his cadaver as a water tube, tons of fun that day, I miss summer"
PSA hosts: "look guys he was only a part time contributor and offered reasonable sensible NeverTrump humor OK?"

So have the PSA guys responded further to this?

FWIW (not much), I listened to them for a few months late 2015/early 2016 and gave up on it pretty quickly. They were very much in the "we need to take this election seriously, bernie can't win" camp, and very much sort of buried their heads in the sand regarding Clinton's many shortcomings. I found their analysis to be like 90% "well when we worked for Obama and this kind of thing came up, this is how we handled it" which is the same useless mouthpiece journalism that we currently get from Haberman et al today, just laundered in a different way.

I don't pay them any attention anyway, but yeah, guys who unironically say "POTUS" out loud turn out to be soulless hacks at best LARPing as hippish bros, whadda twist that's crazy.

PSA is effective propaganda for the Democratic party, which is good. Even the left of median of the Democratic party. They've raised millions of dollars for candidates like Beto and others. What is happening itt is that people found a cudgel to clobber them with - zomg they had a Republican guest on a few times, and it turns out he was ****ty like every Republican - when in reality their dislike of the show comes from the bro-ness of the hosts and their relatively slight establishment bent.

That's a bad read.

Definitely a bad read. First off he was a contributor, not a guest. Second, they posted the article about this research group, acted outraged about it on Twitter and very quickly backtracked the instant they found out that the guy they hired to contribute to their media organization was behind it all.

They obviously didn't know about him weaponizing anti-Semitism on Facebook before hiring him. But once they did, he should have been gone. Instead they doubled down in support of him.

Not sure if they mentioned anything about him on any of their episodes but I haven't seen anything on Twitter beyond them stating that he'll be off the air. I guess they figure that they'd fire him quietly and sweep this under the rug and hope not to lose too many listeners over this.

Cite for him being on their payroll? Also, if he's "off the air" and presuming he was hired in the first place, is that not fired?

He had his own recurring segment called "The Cuck Zone"

Off the air isn't fired. Being fired means you're fired.

Their friend being on their twice-weekly podcast like a half dozen times in the last two years is proof they paid him? Have you confirmed this independently by thinking about it?

If you're being paid per appearance, then being off the air does effectively mean you're fired.

I like your summary. The poker equivalent is that this is like, second level thinking. Which of course is that for critics, this a bit of a cudgel AND that some of the distaste is for the PSA fratbro establishment brand.

But OK, that's the point! That's the third level of this criticism. Why de-couple the notion that the bro-ness of the hosts and their establishment bent is WHY they are completely comfortable with ****ty Republicans, and that's baked into the criticism and the emotion here? I think you're halfway saying that the critics really want to hammer the PSA guys for being uppity white guys born out of the establishment of the Democratic Party, and their critics are cynically using their friendship with a ****ty Republican as a bait-and-switch for the real criticism they want to make, but I'd argue that's missing the point and you shouldn't decouple the two.

I think the ultimate criticism is that progressives who channel a lot of their political agency through Pod Save America style brand (e.g., former Obama dudebros, on a podcast no less, the modern white liberal high art) are effectively lionizing the status quo political ethos -- centrist, performative wokeness but ultimately corrupted and anemic (again, a podcast of former Obama's former white dude staffers where their political effect has, multiple times ITT, referred to their advocacy for Beto, new white liberal scion).

And the longstanding, low-level criticism is that this is white guy co-option, channeling what progressive energies might be out there into the establishment white guy political order.

And so: Tim Miller is proof these people haven't changed, won't change, aren't different, and this is subterfuge, that the worst aspects of the Obama Admin and his politics (genuflecting to the dominant mores and norms of white guy centrism), that a political movement led by Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor where the frontline communication is a podcast is ultimately co-opting the left back into the status quo, centrist, establishment mold. That their woke dudebro act is the pretense, that they're perfectly comfortable with huge corporations and money and Tim Millers of the world, and they're effectively the Pied Pipers of the nascent and growing left movement in the US.

tl;dr summary: your correct to note that underlying a bit of the Tim Miller backlash is a proxy criticism of white guy political hegemony, which ...yeah. That's why people are leery of PSA, that our politics is rife and corrupted by faux leftist white dudes who fraternize and travel in elite circles with Tim Miller types, channel political energies into white guy establishment centrism but sell performative progressivism as a branding exercise.

Well, sincere dudebros is better than pol pot or rospierre at least 6 days a week. It's a country of 330 million people and institutions need to work. Sincere dudebros who are overly charitable to idealogical advasaries may ruin a socialist reading group, but you can do a lot worse when rebuilding from the ashes Trump leaves behind. One need not be as charitable as RBG was to Scalia, but finding common ground with opponents who will mock and injure an even worse enemy is often a good strategy.

I'd love to hear Pol Pot hawk that Blue Apron bull****.

Planting the seeds of your own Killing Fields? Looking to re-educate your company and fix their counterrevolutionary lifestyles and crimes? Look no further than WeWork, the global network of workspaces where companies and people grow together. We transform buildings into dynamic environments for creativity, focus, and connection. And there's even cold brew on tap! Mention the Khmer Rogue and get 5% off your first month, that's WeWork.com.

Personally, I dislike the PSA guys because I disagree with a lot of their policy positions, and think that they're wrong about a lot of stuff. One piece of evidence that shows that they're wrong, is that they pal around with a guy that gets paid to push antisemitic conspiracy theories on facebook, and that they think that that guy is a good dude.

Potentially fallacious, which is why I simply say that the moral politics of the elites like the PSA crew is both wholly degraded and pretensive, which is why they can repeat platitudes about social justice and be considered opinion elites of a party supposed committed to social justice, but are friends with a guy that gets paid to push antisemitic conspiracy theories on Facebook. And they only recognize the depths of the depravity when their hustling for donations off of the back of actually-felt emotions ensnares their contributors and they have to circle the wagons and pretend nothing happened.

And then you take the next step and assert that the adulterating component is capital, and Facebook, turning what might be normal people into amoral ghouls who will do anything for clicks and an audience.

Are their moderate takes wrong? Unknown, at least this incident doesn't really illuminate that. Is their moral compass broken? Probably, we're on much firmer ground there. Why did that happen, what does it say about us and them? Let's explain that.

I harp on this because we should probably be real stark about drawing lines between us and the PSA crew, and that whole group of elites, who have an ultimately niche appeal to the kinds of people almost no one likes, the pretensive rich white elite liberal. I don't want to undersell their usefulness, I mean getting bourgie white liberals to give up their money for leftist causes is a net good, but just make sure the masses are clear that we all recognize these are bad people and most peoples' moral intuition to be very apprehensive about rich white dudebros is sound, see Tim Miller, we hear you, everyone else, these are just guys with a podcast that round up money, they don't speak for us. Like it's trite but important, but a huge huge portion of the public, of the masses, will be inclined to have a seething dislike of those PSA dudes and we want to be clear they are correct to dislike them and that they fraternize with Tim Miller types is exactly why, and that we're all on the same page here. A huge, really tremendous part of the left's failure is way too much public comfort with elite white dudes and their garbage culture and political ethos, and it's important we give a nod to that.

Hold on let me do hours of research and gather paperwork to determine the exact payment of Tim Miller for some nobody on the internet pushing a spurious argument for the purpose of trolling. Go **** yourself.

I'm not going to argue semantics with you. It's a waste of my time. Off the air does not equate to firing as it is quite easy to get back on the air once the heat has died down.

We have to be defensive when it comes to the integrity of those we listen to. What we see here is a group of people who have no qualms rubbing elbows and working with complete scumbags. They are the actions of people who have effectively packaged a product that caters to an anti-Trump audience and act as though they are helping while hiring people who are subverting them. If they cared about their activism, they would be disgusted at him for doing what he did and disgusted at themselves for allowing somebody like Tim Miller to work with them. Instead, they decided that their relationship with him was more important than their activism and opted to defend him from criticism instead of immediately firing him.

Dying on this hill for people who brushed off other people dying on hills (or in Red Cross hospitals and wedding parties) as collateral damage for the administration they served is a pretty silly thing to do.

I listened to the PSA guys during the 2016 election when they were still Keepin it 1600. They were too bro for me to be much of a fan and I stopped listening after the second or third time they had David Plouffe on to shake his finger at bedwetters for thinking Hillary might lose. Just too much condescension towards their audience.

I don't care at all that they had on some gross GOP operative to dump on Trump. I listen to podcasts because they are interesting, funny, or informative, not to curate a feed that is inoffensive to angry leftwing populists like DVaut1. For political commentary, I care about the product, not the moral character of those presenting it, and listening to my political opponents is informative.

lol "I ran my mouth, have no receipts, and how dare you ask for any, sir. My feelz are good enough." **** you.

"I'm not like you snowflakes who seek only confirmation, I like hearing out my opponents*"

"*...unless they're condescending, that's just too much"

I mean el oh ****ing el dude, beyond this "I too dislike PSA but at least it's for high-brow reasons a smart person would value" **** - what podcasts do you suggest we lefties hit up to get some takes on Building The Wall that somehow don't treat their audience like ****ing morons? Where is the place where our very smart opponents hang out that we're simply not woke to like you?

For restaurants, I care about the taste of my soup, not whether or not the chef dipped his balls in it.

I don't care, listen to whatever you want. There are lots of good recommendations in this thread.