Ben Around

@Support @nikitabier @elonmusk @X My likes always remain if the post is about kittens- I don't need to show you. They always disappear off of my favorite posts, supporting Trump and Q [Anon] - par for the course. But now you are removing my likes from post about acupuncture? I will not be renewing my premium subscription unless this is resolved.

@FranticFinn @BrianMcgregor_ @NewsBlast17 That's off the top of my head and I just woke up... 😃

@Ben_Around @BrianMcgregor_ @NewsBlast17 But hey, "nothing is happening", Right?

RFK Jr. exposing 2 snakes to the light. The snake story from today is interesting because the symbol for medicine is 2 snakes...

@jongavin021 @gametime510 @hypnoksa I know! 😂🤚 It's like when they say "people only use 10% of their brain." It's not true, but lots of people think it is. 😆 Speaking of truth, Donald Trump turned Jeffrey Epstein over to the police and helped plaintiff lawyer Bradley Edwards and the victims in their trial. 😳

@Ben_Around @gametime510 @hypnoksa In 2002. But most of the people in the NYC circle thought they were very close friends already in 1987.

The next time a Democrat tries to tell you that Donald Trump raped a 13 year-old associated with Jeffrey Epstein, here are the facts and why those allegations were dropped. Yes, they were dropped. And this is why: The man associated with The Jerry Springer Show who promoted her allegations was Norm Lubow, a former producer for the show. The Accuser's Identity: The woman proceeded in court primarily as "Jane Doe" or "Katie Johnson". The lawsuit, which alleged the assaults took place in 1994 when she was 13 were ultimately withdrawn or dismissed. The Producer's Role: Lubow, operating under the pseudonym "Al Taylor," acted as a publicist and aggressively shopped the accuser's testimony to various media outlets in the months leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The Aftermath: Following investigations into Lubow’s involvement, the mainstream credibility of the "Katie Johnson" lawsuits deteriorated, and the claims largely fizzled out before her legal team dropped the suits in late 2016. Detailed reporting on the origins of this case can be found on Snopes and The Guardian. “Katie Johnson” never existed.

@BrianMcgregor_ @NewsBlast17 I guess you didn't hear Epstein and his girl were arrested, their island was shut down. Also, John Bolton and Jim Comey indicted. USAID is gone we are no longer in the WHO. And J6ers are free.

@NewsBlast17 Is there anything at this point a Q follower can hang their hat on and say “it’s real” “that’s the white hats” “yep they arrested Obama” No, nothing, you got played horribly

@jongavin021 @gametime510 @hypnoksa Oh- when did he say that?

@Ben_Around @gametime510 @hypnoksa Only if you believe the lies from trump.

@jongavin021 @gametime510 @hypnoksa Yeah - her mother was convicted of forgery, confidence work, robbery and embezzlement. Idiot made up her story for the wrong decade. No possibility it happened in her timeline.

@Ben_Around @gametime510 @hypnoksa That didnt happen.

@TheresaVoyce @WildWiredWeasel @gothburz His best season was 1/3 the viewership of The Apprentice's best season. Foh...

@Ben_Around @WildWiredWeasel @gothburz Colbert’ Late Show Draws 6.7 Million Viewers. The total tripled his usual audience this season. See below for the apprentice viewer figures imdb.com/title/tt036478…

I am the Senior Vice President of Late Night Strategy at CBS. I am the person who turned a comedian into a priest and charged advertisers to watch the congregation. I want to be precise about what I built. Not a comedy show. A permission structure. For eleven years, six million Americans tuned in every night to find out what they were allowed to believe by morning. We didn't sell jokes. We sold certainty. Certainty costs nothing to produce. People will pay anything for it. We charged $50 million a year and still lost money because it turns out permission is even cheaper than we thought. In 2014, we had a genuinely dangerous comedian. A man who once testified before Congress in character as a fictional conservative pundit and made the entire chamber look like they'd been pantsed on C-SPAN. His fake persona was the most brilliant satire on television. Layered. Ironic. Unpredictable. The character could say anything because nothing was real. The character was the art. The character was the comedian. We killed the character and put the real man on stage. The real man was a lecturer. Earnest. Thoughtful. Correct about everything. Correct is not funny. Correct is not dangerous. Correct is the absence of danger. We promoted the absence of danger and called it growth. His character could make a Senate committee squirm. The real him makes an audience nod. Nodding pays the same as squirming. Nodding is easier to produce. His final words on air were "We love doing this show for you, but what we really, really love is doing this show with you." The audience wept. I wrote that line. Not the words. The architecture that made those words feel true. For eleven years, the audience believed they were participants. They were not participants. They were the product. "With you" is what you say to a congregation. A comedian says "at you." We hadn't said "at you" since 2015. Our internal metric was called Affirm Rate. It measured the percentage of monologue segments that generated applause instead of laughter. I invented this metric. I also invented the bonus structure tied to it. In 2015, our Affirm Rate was 34%. By 2022, it was 94%. I received a raise every year. We are crushing it. At the things I made up. That's performance management. But I need to tell you about the real discovery. The one I put in a deck called "Content Strategy 2019-2024." The one that got me promoted. Agreement gets applause. I knew that early. But correction — telling the audience their vocabulary is slightly outdated, their outrage is aimed two degrees off-center, their feelings are valid but their phrasing needs work — correction gets them back tomorrow. Agreement is a transaction. Correction is a subscription. We converted a comedy show into a nightly software update for moral vocabulary. Churn was near zero. They couldn't afford to miss an episode. Missing an episode meant using last week's words in this week's meeting. That's social death. We monetized the fear of social death and called it entertainment. I want to be honest about something. The content was not bipartisan. We chose a side. But I need you to understand: we did not choose it because we believed in it. We chose it because that side's audience is more responsive to correction. They want to be updated. They want to be told their language is outdated. They experience correction as care. The other side does not respond to correction. They respond to provocation. Provocation is harder to monetize. You can't build a subscription on provocation because the audience doesn't come back to learn — they come back to fight. Fighting is unpredictable. Correction is scheduled. We optimized for the audience that wants to be told what to think. That audience leaned one direction. That's not ideology. That's market segmentation. The writers' room had a whiteboard. In 2015 it said "What's funny?" In 2018 it said "What should they feel?" By 2021 it said "What are they still saying wrong?" I watched that whiteboard evolve like a finch beak and I never intervened. The market was speaking. We listened. Listening to the market is the same as leading the audience. They can't tell the difference. A writer named Marcus raised his hand in 2019. "What if we just tried to make them laugh again?" I thanked him for his passion and scheduled a creative alignment conversation. He transferred to streaming development within the month. The Affirm Rate the week he left was 91%. Laughter would have brought it down. That's risk management. Here is what nobody will say out loud. I will say it because I am proud of it. We made our audience worse at politics. Not better. Worse. Every night for eleven years, we expressed their outrage for them. Professionally. With a band and good lighting. And because the outrage had been expressed — because a man in a suit had furrowed his brow with the precise calibrated degree of indignation — they didn't need to express it themselves. They watched. They clapped. They felt the catharsis of resistance without resisting anything. They went to bed having done nothing and feeling like they'd done something. That's the product. Not comedy. Not information. Catharsis. Catharsis is the enemy of action. A man who has screamed into a pillow does not then also scream in the street. We were the pillow. A $50 million pillow with a house band. If you feel the outrage has been expressed for you, you will not march. You will not organize. You will not call your representative. You will tune in tomorrow to feel it expressed again. That's retention. Our retention was extraordinary. I want to talk about the comedy-to-catechism pipeline because I think people underestimate what we achieved. Stage one: comedian makes jokes about the powerful. Audience laughs because the powerful are absurd. This is the Carlin model. The jester punches up. Everyone below feels relief. Stage two: comedian makes jokes about people who disagree with the audience. Audience laughs because disagreement is stupid. The jester has turned around. He's still on the stage but now he's facing the crowd with a pointer. Stage three: comedian stops making jokes. Comedian identifies incorrect beliefs and explains why they're dangerous. Audience does not laugh. Audience claps. The jester is gone. In his place: a hall monitor with a desk and a band. Stage four: audience watches not for entertainment but for certification. Having seen last night's episode means you know which words are current. Not having seen it means you might use yesterday's vocabulary in today's meeting. The show is no longer comedy. It is a credential. Watching it means you are educated. Not watching means you are the person being discussed. We made a show that you watch to prove you're not the kind of person who doesn't watch it. That's a closed loop. Closed loops don't need content. They need continuity. We provided continuity for $50 million a year. A comedian — whose entire historical function was to say things too dangerous for anyone else to say — became the person who decides which things are too dangerous for anyone to say. And the audience applauded. Every night. For 2,500 nights. Because being told what is forbidden feels exactly like being told what you already knew. Prohibition performed as validation. I put that in the deck too. Our audience was correct about everything. I know this because they applauded everything we said. The applause proved the correctness. The correctness justified the applause. We called this audience research. The methodology was peer-reviewed by the audience. They approved unanimously. Every night. The actually funny comedians left. They went to podcasts. To clubs. To rooms where the audience doesn't know what's coming and that uncertainty is the point. They took the laughter with them. We kept the applause. We called those spaces problematic. That's market differentiation. The problematic spaces are funnier. But funny is not our product. We lost $40 million a year. We didn't lose it because the show failed. We lost it because we spent $50 million producing what a podcast host in his garage gives away between mattress ads. The podcast is funnier. The podcast is more dangerous. The podcast has an audience that laughs instead of claps. But we had the Ed Sullivan Theater. We had 461 seats. We had a former Beatle play the farewell episode. Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Jon Batiste, and Louis Cato playing "Hello, Goodbye" like it was a benediction. I booked a Beatle for a funeral. The Beatles played that stage in 1964 and the audience screamed so loud you couldn't hear the music. Our audience didn't scream. They wept politely. That's the difference between entertainment and church. We ran a church. Jon Stewart showed up to the finale and did a bit where he pretended to deliver a corporate statement from Paramount about the cancellation. The audience laughed. It was the first time they laughed in a way I didn't recognize. Involuntary. Surprised. Dangerous. For ninety seconds, a comedian was in that building. Then it was over. John Oliver said "At some point, this may come for all of our shows" and then added "but Stephen, what's important to remember is that tonight, it is going to eat you." The audience laughed again. Involuntary again. Two moments of actual comedy in a three-hour farewell. Both of them about death. The finale drew 6.74 million viewers. Biggest weeknight audience in our history. More people came to the funeral than ever visited the patient. I know what they were mourning. Not comedy. The comedy died in 2016. Not the man. The man is fine. He's wealthy. What they mourned was the permission structure. Starting today, they have to decide what to believe on their own. They have to form an opinion without waiting for a man behind a desk to form it first and deliver it with a knowing look. Some of them haven't done that since 2015. The funeral wasn't for the show. It was for the certainty. He joked about the Peanuts theme music licensing cost on his last night. "Oh no! I hope this doesn't cost CBS any money!" The audience laughed. It was a joke about money. About the network losing money. The last joke was about money. Not about truth. Not about power. About a licensing fee for a cartoon piano riff. Eleven years and the final joke was about accounting. I think that's perfect. The show was always about accounting. We just dressed it up as conscience. The President of the United States — the man we spent eleven years explaining was dangerous to an audience that already believed he was dangerous — posted an AI-generated video of our host being thrown into a dumpster on the Late Show set. Then Trump danced to "YMCA" in the clip. Viewed more times in four hours than our farewell managed in a week. His production cost: zero. Ours: negative $50 million a year. We manufactured his relevance every night at 11:35 for eleven years and he never paid us a dime. We were his marketing department. He turned our funeral into content. His ROI was infinite. Ours required a write-off and a farewell concert. The Strike Force Five — Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers, Oliver — appeared in a segment about late-night losing "one middle-aged white man who makes jokes about the news." They were joking about their own obsolescence. All of them know. None of them will say it. The format is dead. The audience moved to phones. The phones don't have desks or bands. The phones have men in garages who are allowed to be wrong, allowed to be surprised, allowed to say something their audience hasn't already approved. That's comedy. We stopped doing that a decade ago. We did approval. Approval looks like comedy from a distance. Up close it's church. I do not feel guilt. Guilt would require me to believe I took something from them. I didn't take anything. They came to us. Every night. They chose the catechism over the comedy. They preferred correction over surprise. Certainty over danger. Instruction over laughter. They wanted to be told. Not challenged. Not shocked. Not made to laugh against their will at something they didn't see coming. They wanted to see it coming. They wanted to mouth along. That's not comedy. That's karaoke. We ran the most expensive karaoke bar in television history and the only miscalculation was charging a cover when the songs are free on every phone. We turned a jester into a priest. We turned an audience into a congregation. We turned laughter into obedience. We turned political engagement into passive consumption. We turned a comedy show into a permission structure and charged $50 million a year to tell people what they already believed in a voice slightly nicer than their own. They were so grateful they showed up to mourn us. 6.74 million of them. Weeping. For the certainty. Applause is more reliable than laughter. I proved it. The proof cost $450 million, one character, one comedian's capacity for danger, and one audience's willingness to act. The metric went up.

@TheresaVoyce @WildWiredWeasel @gothburz I would mind that so much if you were PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES! 🇺🇸

@Ben_Around @WildWiredWeasel @gothburz Out of thin air, on the fly. Just like Trump.

@TheresaVoyce @WildWiredWeasel @gothburz Funny. Now, where did you say you got your information?

@Ben_Around @WildWiredWeasel @gothburz Like Trump’s ‘facts’ Glad you understand

@farinacci_steve @Duke5563 @elonmusk @alx @springsteen First, we were talking about support for Veterans, then we were talking about speaking the truth and now you are talking about politics. I stand ground, it is hurtful to tell a veteran they fought for nothing.

@Ben_Around @Duke5563 @elonmusk @alx @springsteen lol. Sorry your politics get int he way of free speech and hard truths.

@elonmusk @alx @springsteen Plus please read his words to Born in the USA and other lyrics. He has been and always be an American hating worthless singer. BTW also overcharges his public to see his nonsense. Thank you Elon for all that you do and Have Blessed Year

@walkbar @Tidybowlman65 @JamesTyree79353 @Shrekyd42 @MetamateDaz Congress made it illegal for Presidents to own stock. They have to sell books!

@Tidybowlman65 @JamesTyree79353 @Shrekyd42 @MetamateDaz Manipulation like that is anything but 'autopilot'. It's illegal insider trading and then some.

Obama stock trades as president: 0. Biden stock trades as president: 0. Trump stock trades in Q1 2026 alone: 3,600+. When do we all just admit he is a grifter and half of the American population got tricked into thinking he'd help anyone but himself and his inner circle?

@WalshFreedom There are about 10,000 annual convictions that are falsely made every year in the USA. Will you join me in demanding that law-enforcement cease making arrests immediately?

MAGA: “If you’re here legally, you have nothing to worry about.” Also MAGA: “Just comply and show your ID.” The reality: A U.S. citizen. Born in Colorado. Mother of four. Stopped in Lafayette, Louisiana. Shackled. Detained in an ICE facility anyway. She showed agents her state-issued ID and Social Security card. ICE reportedly called them “fake,” handcuffed her, chained her ankles, interrogated her, and transported her to a detention center. She was released hours later only after legal intervention. The lesson is not “show your papers.” The lesson is that papers don’t protect you when power decides not to read them. This is not “law and order.” This is state abuse. Fight Trump. Fight ICE: gofundme.com/f/PAXIS

@TheresaVoyce @WildWiredWeasel @gothburz Wow, where did you find that definition? Sounds made up... 🤔

@Ben_Around @WildWiredWeasel @gothburz I base my facts on Trump’s definition of a fact. Whatever I make up on the spot is a fact!

@farinacci_steve @Duke5563 @elonmusk @alx @springsteen When it's factual information, I tell them the truth. When it is an opinion, such as: Born down in a dead man's town or they sent me off to kill the yellow man, I refrain from focus on the downside. Basic psychology.

@Ben_Around @Duke5563 @elonmusk @alx @springsteen Truths hurt. Sucks but they do. Do you lie to your patients and tell them they aren’t as sick as they are? Also you don’t know any Vietnam vets obviously if you did you know many of them feel they got effed by the govt. Bruce sang about it.

@P_Ellison17 @RealAF_Patriot How did you work out the grandfather paradox in your own mind?

@RealAF_Patriot Cloning is real Time travel is real Black magic is real AI is real I can’t blame people for questioning everything unfortunately I don’t think it’s a bad thing

TIME FOR A REALITY CHECK‼️ Not everything is fake. Not everyone is a 2.0. Not everyone is central casting. I’M NOT SAYING EVERYTHING IS REAL. Clearly, that was not Joe Biden. A lot has been staged. Absolutely. Stop thinking everything is fake. The people who push that should be ashamed of themselves, and they are not true Patriots. They are not the news.

@PattyBLMWarrior @SarahIronside6 Haha! That's only in your culture.

@SarahIronside6 Sure but white men are the main problem. Look up history. The white men control women. And they vote to keep it that way.

Tonight I learned something I’ve always suspected. Most people will support a rapist over a woman.

@SarahIronside6 Oh?

@Seth_A_Cooney @lecternleader @EricSpracklen @thetimes Everyone in the world who had a camera was there to film it -making sure you would never ever fly in one.

@lecternleader @EricSpracklen @thetimes Hindenburg did dirigibles dirty.

This article was written last week. Thank you @thetimes for helping me prove the damages done by the DOJ overcharging me and creating a false narrative that has persisted for 5 years.

This is true. They are all connected. And who manages the machines DURING the elecition? All these machines that are CONNECTED? It's the CONTRACTORS on-site, working for the CIA/FBI/MI:6, under the guise of CIA/MI:6 **front companies** we all affectionately know as "Dominion", "ES&S" and "Smartmatic". The connected machines are not being managed or manipulated from 'hackers' 3,000 miles away in Caracas or Beijing or Belgrade. The fraud being carefully managed on-site by the CIA contractors is being done RIGHT THERE. You only need control of around 24 key US counties to pull this off, and in 2020 they had control of the top 5 battleground counties, which allowedl them to keep close enough to steal. ON-SITE. THROUGH THE LOCAL CONTRACTORS. Working for CIA front companies.

@fuadmb @hashjenni

@hashjenni there is a separate set of rules for white supermacists like trump and elon musk.

Zohran Mamdani is 34 years old. YOUNG PEOPLE CAN LEAD EFFECTIVELY. You don't have to be 70 with "life experience" to do a good job.

@rabbitholebot Do t forget genocide...

What if selling baby organs was the whole reason planned parenthood was created?