RFK, Jr. has quit the Democrat party to run as an independent, and already, we’re seeing pundits on both sides of the political aisle grousing about how this will potentially impact the 2024 presidential election.
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Whether or not his third-party candidacy will pull more votes from Democrats or Republicans, thus changing the calculus of the Electoral College.
One thing that the media hates about RFK, Jr. is that he holds some questionable beliefs, most notably surrounding vaccines in general (and the COVID-19 vaccine specifically), as well as the topics of autism, his father’s assassination, and that the 2004 presidential campaign is “stolen.”
Do a quick Google search, and top returns are, unsurprisingly, headed by the most far-left liberal rags attempting to downplay his legitimacy by casting him as a crackpot conspiracy theorist who’s unqualified to hold the office of the president.
As though an obviously cognitively-impaired, stumbling, bumbling, rambling buffoon in the current White House administration is a better alternative?
My point is this: our country allows everyone the right to not only hold a personal belief but to express that belief publicly. And unfortunately, in 2023, even stating simple facts can be frowned upon by liberals pushing an agenda. Yet free speech, no matter how unpopular, is integral to our founding as a nation and to a modern society based on liberty.
How telling it is, then, that one of my former favorite haunts online—TreeHugger.com—around 17 Sept 2023, went full draconian tyrant mode by eliminating the DISQUS commenting applet, thereby preventing any responses to their nauseatingly boring HGTV-lite articles that have become de rigueur since management axed Sami Grover, Lloyd Alter, and other editors from their payroll. The occasional non-milquetoast article, which could elicit comments of praise, inquiry, or ridicule, has proved to be too difficult a job for the website’s new taskmasters to police, and so they decided it would be easier to manage controversy simply by turning off all comments.
Against this backdrop, TreeHugger.com has been publishing what can only be described as boring-as-hell articles about gardening aesthetics, home decor, and other mind-numbingly dull topics. The benefit of Lloyd Alter and Sami Grover, among others, was that they did try their level best to bring cutting-edge news about advances in (shudder!) climate resiliency, energy efficiency, construction, and technology. It was entertaining, if nothing else, being able to ask legitimate questions about the costs associated with such technological advances, if for no other reason than to spar against ideologues who can’t see that the emperor has no clothes.
Such discourse, however, no longer exists. Free speech was too great a threat to TreeHugger.com’s bourgeoisie overlords because—heaven help them—someone might be offended by what Joe Q. Public might write in the comment section, especially if it didn’t remain lockstep with the progressive narrative heading up the editorial board. Who knows, they might be RFK Jr. operatives undermining the progressive narrative, and we can’t have that, can we?
Well, to state the obvious, anyone who knows anything about how the internet works could have foretold what would happen to TreeHugger.com’s readership as the last excuse for even visiting the website at all evaporated in their misguided attempt to improve the “readership experience.” And now that a new month is here, we have proof of the rats leaving the sinking ship in droves.
This past weekend, I wanted to check the website’s analytics as they reflect web traffic, but as I don’t have a subscription or ownership of the website, I had to skip Google Analytics and rely instead on an alternative, SimilarWeb. You can find the website traffic breakdown here.
What stands out for me from the information provided is this: traffic overall is down nearly 11%, and the average site length visit is just 51 seconds. More than three-quarters of all readers (76%) don’t even read past the home page before leaving the website, too. Further sleuthing reveals over the last three months, their global ranking online has decreased from #30,820 to #32,992 (translation: lower is better; thus, their “blogsite” stock valuation has decreased.) The abandonment continues unabated, but I suspect none of that matters to Dotdash Meredith, the parent company of TreeHugger.com, who in turn is part of IAC, Inc. As long as young people continue to click through just enough to pay the bills and do so without questioning the narratives pushed, then all is well.
Except it’s not. As we’ve seen over recent months, Bud Light, Target, and Disney all have gone full progressive mode with the sexual grooming of children and suffered mightily for their hubris. Bud Light lost $40 billion in market value and suffered a 27% decline in market capitalization, allowing Modelo to take its #1 spot. Target warned investors their quarterly losses were down over $4 billion exclusively because of the pushback against Rainbow Gestapo-inspired childwear. Disney continues to bleed dollars with every new woke remake of popular animated movies, and the belief that Bob Iger’s return would boost sagging revenue has evaporated more quickly than a drop of sweat falling from the brow of a Phoenician in July.
The common thread throughout all of these examples is that the more woke they’ve become—the less free they “allow” us as consumers to express our objections to progressive communism—the more their bottom line suffers.
IAC Inc. reported around August 22nd that they expect earnings to decline 17.4% per year for the next three years. One has to wonder how much more cash they can bleed before realizing the alienation of their customer base is not the pathway to profitability or sustainability.
Personally, the question is a rhetorical one, in my opinion. There are much bigger fiscal fish to fry that our elected leaders continue to ignore addressing—the Russia-Ukraine war, inflation, and immigration control, to name but three—but TreeHugger.com’s demonstrable decline is a case study in failure that the woke, anti-free speech brigade earned all on their own.
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