Author: Shelton Bumgarner

I am the Editor & Publisher of The Trumplandia Report

The Vision Thing: How To Save The Newspaper Business By Disrupting It

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I have given this some thought and I realize that rather than a “top-down” disruption of the newspaper business, you would need to do a “bottom-up” approach. I say this because it’s highly unlikely you could find an egotistical billionaire willing to put up with the slow-mo mentality of the legacy newspaper organization. But if you told them you were going to completely disrupt the newspaper business with a fleet footed startup, I think you might be surprised.

So, what I would do is, rather than buy up newspapers and convert them to a social media platform based on Usenet, I would design such a platform and use it to strike at the jugular of the traditional newspaper business. What you do is, you design the platform in such a way that quality content bubbles up to the surface and journalists would be make money off of the content they contributed to the system. You might have a few well-paid journalists to seed the system at first, but those people would not be the point of the platform.

The point of the platform would be to completely destroy the traditional newspaper business. You would do so because of how it was designed. You would give journalists an entire page to work with and that content would be threaded. End-users would also be given the ability to in-line edit what you had originally written. You start the service off somewhere like New York City where there are a lot of journalists hungry to make money. Once you get the kinks out, you expand the service to the cities across the country. The point of all of this would be to provide a platform for world, national, local and hyperlocal coverage. If you loved covering city hall, you could do that and the the system would provide you with a platform to that and make money.

Now, I think Korea has something similar to this but I don’t think it’s a social media platform. That’s the key difference. This would be a social media platform designed specifically to promote and reward quality content. Everyone who contributed to the service would be graded by users and they would also receive points for the number of views or clicks they got.

You would have to be sneaky though. If you didn’t do it right, the entire media industry would gang up on you and scream bloody murder for you killing the traditional notion of how news is distributed. It’s one thing to kill the taxi industry and quite another to kill the newspaper business. But the newspaper business is dying anyway and this would be an example of burning the village to the ground to save it.

It’s possible that Reddit could co-opt all of these features if your service became popular enough, but, then again maybe they wouldn’t. But this is definitely something to think about.

How To #Disrupt The Online Media Business #Startup

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I have talked about something like this before, but I feel like talking about it again. It seems pretty obvious that the media business is ripe to be “disrupted.” But how to do it? It seems to me that if you designed a social media startup that updated Usenet concepts and paid professional journalists to inject it with quality content from the get-go, that would knee-cap Twitter pretty easily.

I have gone into great detail about the feature set of this proposed service, but in general the idea is you would have full paged posts that were threaded int the context of Conversations in Groups. You would make the whole thing inventive and easy enough that even the most stressed out journalist or entertainer could use it and ta-da, you kill Twitter and make a lot of money.

The most important thing of it all would be the full-page post that was threaded. That’s really powerful. It’s powerful because instead of posting in an online magazine or newspaper, you would skip the middle-man and post a story — that could be inline edited in the context of a thread — directly into the platform. That’s pretty cool. And given that you were paying journalists to contribute to the service as you grew it, they would have a vested interest in helping you use-test the admin aspects of Groups so it was really, really easy.

This is all so obvious to me that I am sad that no one else has thought of it. I want to use this platform because it’s such a great idea.

V-Log: Thinking About Starting A Podcast

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I have been thinking a lot about starting a podcast devoted to talking about Trump, but I won’t do anything formally until I get some traction, any traction. If even a few people tell me they would be regular listeners / viewers, I would do it. But not unless that happened.

Anyway. Here are some samples of what I’m able to do. If you are interested in helping me out in some way, let me know.

I Believe The Trump Pee-Pee Tape Is Real

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I think it’s pretty obvious that the Trump pee-pee tape is real. It’s got to be. How else do you explain Trumps surreal softness on the Russians? The huge question, of course, is he willful in his traitorous behavior or is he just an idiot? That’s a question we may never know.

Another question is, will we ever get to see the pee-pee tape. I doubt it. It would make no sense for the Russians to release it when they can simply uses its release against Trump as long as he’s in office. Anyway, the below videos are really interesting and I suggest you watch them. They go into a lot of detail about all of this and its implications.

V-Log: Thoughts On A ‘Twitter Killer’ #startup

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Instead of going into great detail via text about all of this, here are some videos I’ve done. I think you’ll think they’re pretty cool. I’ve already written a lot about this before, so again I know no one will notice or care.

Enjoy

V-log: A Liberal Ponders Trump Maybe Actually Spooking The DPRK

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

For once, at least, it seems that Trump has managed to if not do something “right,” managed to cause something beneficial to happen. It’s too bad that in this case the “madman theory” is in play and we happen to have an actual madman in the White House.

Anyway. Watch the below video, it’s fairly interesting.

Trump Is Probably Going To Survive & Prosper, Sad To Say

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I don’t have any secret knowledge that would lead me to believe this, but I do have a general sense of what’s going on. I have a feeling that in the fall of 2020, all the characters associated with the Trump Administration’s many scandals will still be on TV, still talking about how it seems Trump is going to leave office sooner rather than later.

I’m not buying. I think Trump is going to not only survive, but thrive for eight long, long years. There just doesn’t seem to be anything on the horizon that is going to get rid of the man politically. In fact, we aren’t anywhere near “peak Trump.”

If Trump should start a war with either Iran or the DPRK in the coming months and years, well, he’s only going to get even ore power. So I would suggest we use our power and energy for being politically engaged.

Oh, Come On, People, Why Aren’t We Talking About Barbara Moore & Trump?

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

Now, I am the first to admit that The Daily Mail is a trash publication, but is Trump a trash person so why can’t we at least get people a little bit interested in this story about Trump having an affair in the 1990s with a Playboy bunny named Barbara Moore.

Nothing illegal happened, of course, but Trump is the president and so by definition anything as salacious as this that he’s done in his life is news. I just think we should at least be talking a little bit about it between all the commotion about Sean Hannity.

Of Hope In The Trump Era #Resist

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It is easy in this sad period in our nation’s history to assume the worst will happen in regards to the Trump Administration. And, yet, for some reason I am beginning to have an inkling of hope in this otherwise strange, surreal moment in our nation’s history.

I say this because I have found myself in the last few days pausing to soaking up the extraordinary situation we have found ourselves in. I find myself thinking that we’re living through an epic historic moment the likes of which we’ve not seen since at least Watergate.

Or, to put another way, I’m beginning to get a grasp of the ultimate endgame when it comes to this enormous clusterfuck that Trump has managed to bring upon us. I feel like the institution that have kept America the open, constitutional democratic republic that we all love.

This is not to say that things aren’t going to get bumpy or that there won’t be some serious consequences to all of this. I guess if you look back at Watergate 45 years later, you could say the same thing. But the republic survived, even if the whole thing left us a little bit banged up. Some of the things that Trump will change about the republic would have happened regardless of who happened to be the Republican president in office. Any Republican President would cram the Federal bench with completely bonkers, surreal, young Right-wing nut jobs with an agenda. That was going to happen, no matter what.

This, of course, works on the assumption that Hillary Clinton was going to lose. In hindsight, she was obviously such a bad candidate that she was bound to lose to any Republican that happened to be her opponent in 2016.

In fact, one could suggest that given how grossly incompetent Trump is as well as his complete lack of any set ideology, we’re actually better off in some ways than we would be had, say, Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio become president. The real danger of Trump is his complete disregard for the democratic norms that we have come to enjoy over the last 240 odd years.

The question is what, if anything, will be the consequence of that.

That is a very deep question. It could go either way. Trump could so screw with our norms that we may go past the point of no return, or things may snap back into place. I am of the opinion that things will snap back into place. That’s where my hope comes from.

We survived a civil war that was a far greater attack on the republic. That’s not to say this isn’t a surreal moment in our nation’s history, one that won’t have a lot of damage on us going forward. But I just believe in my heart that though I seriously doubt Trump will be convicted if he ever happens to be impeached, I still have the hope if nothing else Trump will peacefully leave office as is required in either 2021 or 2025.

But I guess we’ll see.

We’re now entering a new phase of this crisis. We’re leaving the issue of law and now we’re entering something significantly more basic and that’s the social contract. Are we, as a nation, as a populace willing to allow Trump to trample basic civil norms.

Even more unnerving is even if we do try to pressure the government it’s possible that nothing will happen. And that’s a real chance that such a thing will happen. There’s a real chance whatever consequences are, we may have to wait nearly a decade for us to figure out how to deal with them. There’s a real chance that Trump will not only survive, but prosper.

But you could very well have said the same thing about Nixon in late 1973. So, I have hope. I have some sense of hope that maybe we’ll bounce back from this horrible moment in our nations history.

A ‘People’s Impeachment’ Is Needed If Either Rosenstein Or Mueller Are Fired

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It is growing ever more apparent that the Constitutional rot our republic is experiencing goes far deeper and is more extensive than we thought. The Resistance has been so busy worrying about protecting Bob Mueller, that we have missed the fact that Steve Bannon has concocted a plan to do a slow-motion Saturday Night Massacre 2.0 by having Trump fire not Mueller — which would take a while as person after person quit rather than do it — but his boss, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein.

So we have to now all vow that if either Mueller EITHER / OR Rosenstein is fired by Trump, we’ll take to the streets. We have to tell each other we’re ready to lace up or sneakers and do what the South Koreans did a few years ago and protest until we get rid of Trump. Until we force the hand of the Vichy Congressional Republicans so they have to do something about Trump.

We have to do this now before Trump fires Rosenstein and dramatically redefines the scope of Mueller’s probe. We have to treat Rosenstein’s canning as being equal to Mueller being fired. If we don’t do this now, Trump will steal a march on us get away scott free.

So whatever plans you might have had should Mueller be fired, you have to apply them to Rosenstein being fired, too. The entire GOP is so complicit that it’s heartbreaking. The will of the people is the last gasp of freedom in the United States and otherwise the dark shadow of true autocracy will descend upon this once great nation.