iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 14h

I can’t wait until we can openly ridicule this scare workout being subjected to death threats.

UA professors share gender pronouns, sexual orientation by Craig Monger, -819 News

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Seems like “migrant caravan” season gets earlier every two years…

U.S. department of homeland security sharing a dubious Leading Report headline suggesting a migrant caravan is moving toward the U.S. border

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Plenty to criticize the New York Times for but it DOES deserve a Pulitzer for this illustration.

New York Times opinion guest essay, headline "When political reality collides with Ed Sheeran"

Underneath is an illustration by the New York Times featuring a bunch of different cut outs of Ed Sheeran's head (red hair, pale skin, blue eyes) with a blank stare peeking out from behind white clouds in a blue sky.

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Trump cherishes the free press like he loves his children.

The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The only path forward is an openly antagonistic press. No more delicately navigating access. No more attending press conferences or avails. All investigation. All amplifying Trump admin defectors and detractors. Call out the bullshit. Stop being polite.

Trump truth social post: I am proud to announce that, effective immediately, I am banning Fake News CNN, MSNOW (who recently changed their name from MSNBC due to lack of viewership and credibility!), and Politico (The recipients of an illegal and ridiculous $8 Million Dollar subscription, an All Time Record, directly from the United States Government, under Crooked Joe Biden, in order to keep them “alive.” Seems like corruption to me!), from the White House as a result of their constant “reporting” FAKE NEWS! Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America. Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Find you someone who loves you like the New York Times loves the sartorial preferences of right-wingers.

Nyt headline: spains preppy conservatives are having a moment, loafer-wearing young Spaniards, often called Cayetanos, are flexing their countercultural muscles after eight years of left-wing government

Young Spanish men wearing normal looking clothes, button up dress shirts tucked into khaki slacks with loafers

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

When exactly was Donald Trump ever tethered to reality?

NYT Opinion: Trump has untethered himself from reality

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

You know what will provide clarity about candidate strength and voter sentiment? Elections. The only chaos here is in the delusional common sense that we can predict the future by doing math based on past occurrences.

Why Polling Chaos Could Create Big Problems for American Politics
Bad polls. Misleading betting odds. Surveys meant to shape narratives. Ahead of the midterms and 2028, there is suddenly serious confusion about candidate strength and voter sentiment.

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

MAKING THE LIBERAL MEDIA Fall Tour is finalized: 9/24 — Boston, MA (MIT) 10/30 — Brussels, BE (VUB) 11/2 — Paris, FR (UP, Nanterre) 11/3 — Paris, FR (Sciences Po) 11/4 — Geneva, CH (GGI) 11/6 — Odense, DK (SDU) Want to host me? Now booking for Spring 2027!

Making the liberal media: how conservatives built a movement against the press, AJ Bauer

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Mao and Honest Abe just chilling.

Mao Zedong smoking a cigarette with Abe Lincoln

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Michael Jordan and one-armed Ariel Sharon watching an ancient warlord shake down a peasant.

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Hitler listening to Beethoven playing piano while Mussolini holds his nose and Audrey Hepburn does her Breakfast at Tiffany’s pose.

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Mike Tyson ripping a fart while sitting on the floor next to a weary looking Vladimir Putin.

Mike Tyson sitting on the floor next to Vladimir Putin

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Please enjoy the unhinged AI art at this AirBnB. First up: Elvis playing an electric guitar solo over Stalin’s head.

Badly rendered Elvis playing a golden electric guitar behind Joseph Stalin, smoking a pipe and talking to Socrates. Also Queen Elizabeth is there for some reason.

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

When I say things like “public opinion doesn’t exist” and criticize polling for conjuring a fictional entity, this is what I mean: Check out my latest on the history of mass communication research, in Journalism History.

Research Article
A Paradigm Displaced: Propaganda Analysis Within and Beyond the Field of Mass Communication
A. J. Bauer
Pages 238-251 | Published online: 12 Aug 2026

ABSTRACT
This article tracks the rise of propaganda analysis as a social scientific research paradigm in the early twentieth century, its influence on the progressive media reform movement of the 1940s, and its rightward shift during the Second Red Scare (also known as McCarthyism) in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It challenges the prevailing critical historiography of mass communication as a discipline, which tends to narrate the Institute for Propaganda Analysis as the epitome of a critical scholarly paradigm within the field and sees the subsequent behaviorist turn toward quantification as obscuring that field’s political stakes. By emphasizing the political cultural impacts of notions of public opinion shared across and beyond the disciplinary divide, the article calls for reconsidering the animating fictions of contemporary political discourse—namely the existence of a unitary, agential, and hypothetically manipulable public.

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I have to check a box pledging that I have not run this through AI 🙃

I confirm I have not uploaded the author manuscript to any third party tool and have not use a generative AI to produce the reviewer report

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Nobody told me the Angel of History was smol!

Klee painting from a distance to emphasize small size

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Today would have been my mom’s sixty-ninth birthday. Although academic, my book is a direct engagement with the political milieu she raised me in. That’s why I made her a character in my conclusion.

The morning of Wednesday, November 4, 1992, might as well have
been Christmas. Results from that year’s US presidential race were
tallied the night before—although well past my bedtime. Eight
years old and eager to learn who won, I woke early and rushed outside to
collect my family’s copy of The Dallas Morning News from the front lawn.
As I made my way back inside, I impatiently removed the plastic wrapper
revealing the headline: “Clinton triumphs.” I wept, rushing to my moth-
er’s bedside to deliver the news.
Yes, I was a dramatic little Republican back in 1992.1 My parents had
divorced the prior December, and my paternal grandfather had died that
February. I struggled with the overwhelming emotions that accompany
losses of all sorts, including, it turns out, by incumbent presidents. My
mom struggled too. A tired, working, single mother of two whose own
parents were both in declining health, she felt sentimental when she lis-
tened to music, so she turned the radio dial in our boxy blue Astro van to
the news/talk station WBAP-AM. There she found Rush Limbaugh, whose
political commentary and jokes at the expense of liberals kept her from
crying on long drives around the North Texas suburbs while running
errands with us kids.2 Raised in a Democrat household, my mom joined
the Republican Party in 1980—drawn in, as with so many of her genera-
tion, by Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter. In

Limbaugh she found a lighthearted, conservative kindred spirit, and I
found a lifelong interest in right-wing political culture—back then it was
the air I breathed.
All research is therapy if you really think about it. This book started
as a dissertation that sought to tell the prehistory of Fox News. When Fox
launched in 1996 under the slogan “Fair and Balanced,” to whom did it
appeal and why? A lot happened in the decade it took me to answer that
question. When I started, Donald Trump was a failed real estate mogul
with a reality TV show and a side hustle slandering the country’s first Black
president. Now he’s in his second term as president, having rebuilt the
Republican Party, and much of the modern conservative movement, in
his own garish image. When I started, my mom was alive and still con-
servative, still half-jokingly asking me questions like, “You were raised on
Rush Limbaugh, what happened to you?” Now she’s dead from cancer and
Limbaugh is too.
The critical disposition toward the press that I uncovered while
researching conservative media activism, I’ve come to realize, taught
me how to search for it. Republicans (unsurprisingly, if you’ve made it
this far into the book) largely blamed the press for George H. W. Bush’s
loss in 1992—for focusing on his many gaffes and for taking interest in a
relatively young and charismatic governor from Arkansas. Bush cam-
paign staffer, and later George W. Bush FCC appointee, Robert M.
McDowell captured this sentiment in the form of a bumper sticker:
“Annoy the Media: Re-Elect Bush.”3 As a die-hard Bush supporter and
Limbaugh Ditto Head, I too cultivated a critical disposition toward the
mainstream press. I too believed in liberal media bias. I honed my youth-
ful conservatism not only by listening to Limbaugh but also by reading
The Dallas Morning News against the grain each morning alongside my
mom at our kitchen table. Not that the Morning News was particularly …

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

The Republicans on the other hand…

Ny times editorial board opinion the democrats can’t go on like this

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Three years later, joke’s still fresh.

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Hey @nytpitchbot.bsky.social, the Washington Free Beacon is stealing your bit lol

Jon Levine tweet

NEW from me

I called up David Duke to ask about Darializa Avila Chevalier's criticism of interracial relationships — He was a fan!

"I think that people have the right to preserve their particular heritage," Duke tells me

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

A perfect example of the absurdities of fact checking as a practice. The problem here isn’t whether or not Trump’s uncle mentored the unibomber, it’s that Trump thinks that’s something to brag about.

Although my uncle was at MIT one of the great professors, 51 years, whatever, he was the longest-serving professor in the history of MIT … Kaczynski was one of his students”

President trump in a speech July 2025

This lacks evidence

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Update: the story I posted about 1819 News seems to be fake and possibly AI generated? If so this is all the wilder! Who is crafting AI conspiracy theories about real hyper-local right-wing media outlets?

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Setting up the book’s main argument.

Critics of conservatism have long suggested that the “liberal media”
claim represents little more than an attempt to “work the refs” in the con-
servative movement’s favor or serves as “flak” designed to discipline the
mainstream news media against growing too critical of capitalism or US
imperialism.3 Such metaphors overlook the long-standing and entrenched
conflict between the modern conservative movement and the press, and
how that conflict has shaped the lived reality of conservatives at the grass-
roots. Making the Liberal Media shows how that conflict emerged. As we
will see, from the modern conservative movement’s earliest formations in
the late 1940s to Trump’s authoritarian return to power in 2025, belief in
structural liberal media bias has played a central and constitutive role
in the formation of modern conservative identity and movement strategy.
It has also profoundly altered our media culture, giving rise to a distinct
right-wing media sector that is actively competing with professional jour-
nalism over the cultural authority to tell the “true” story of public life

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

Yes fascism is ruthless and stupid. But it’s also pathetic.

Image of Donald Trump. One million true maga responses needed. Alert. Respond before midnight

Will you stand with me even if your friends told you not to? Yes. No.

What would you say to me right now if you saw me in person? [leave a message for President trump]

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Actor-Network Theory ass headline

The reflecting pool appears to be rejecting its makeover

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

"The things we do aren't evil enough. We need to SMELL stereotypically evil."

Wall street journal: Everyone in Trump’s Cabinet Is Eating Sauerkraut
JD Vance, RFK Jr. and other officials swear by a diet of grass-fed meat and fermented foods, even when the sulfurous odors cause friction at home

photo of a fork picking sauerkraut out of a jar

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Convoluted way of saying “Trump loses war with Iran.”

NEWS ANALYSIS
Trump Demanded Iran’s ‘Unconditional Surrender.’ He Got a Surprise Instead.
While the Iranians suffered substantial losses in the war, they emerged from a confrontation with the world’s most powerful military having proved they can use economic chaos as a weapon.

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

It’s like the universe knows I’m on my way to link up with @thrasherxy.bsky.social.

Subway ad for NYPD corrections officers featuring four police officers who appear to be people of color

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Then you leave your hat at Spicy Village and they save it for you.

NYC vax champ hat in front of Spicy Village restaurant

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Then you leave your hat at Spicy Village and they save it for you.

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Maybe if the Pope really let his freak flag fly those tech billionaires would stop playing god, but alas.

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Here is more famous (Capital) grave. Not a labubu in sight.

Marx’s fancy grave with a giant sculpture of his head. Flowers and assorted tributes but no labubu

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

I brutally mogged Karl Marx causing his cortisol levels to fatally spike. (Pictured here at his original grave, his Grundrisse grave, if you will).

AJ Bauer wearing floral print shirt at Karl Marx’s original grave

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A.J. Bauer @ajbauer.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

My book talk at Goldsmiths was waylaid by senior management who abruptly decided to stop paying its faculty, who are engaged in a marking and assessment boycott against austerity. Had a nice chat about the book and US/UK politics at a pub instead. #FreeGoldsmiths