Written by Every Wednesday at 9:30pm Eastern time, we host a live video chat for SurrealPolitiks members. They have been a lot of fun, and we post the audio archives as members only exclusive bonus content.
There’s a lot going on today for us to talk about, both in the press, and behind the scenes here at SurrealPolitiks.
Beginning with the news of the day, the so-called Title 42 policy expires tomorrow, and even Democrats are getting a little nervous about the implications. I watched part of Alejandro Mayorkas’s press conference on the subject, and it was plain to see that he doesn’t buy his own nonsense. Even with the policy in place, migrants have been flooding the border and the Administration has done little to slow the flow. All hell is about to break loose and they’re just bracing for impact.
Republicans laid out their case against the Biden Family Business earlier today as well. Much of what they said was repetitive, but some of the details were new, and pretty staggering. I’m still sorting out what’s news and what was repetitive, because, for example, it was news to me that the former FBI director gave Biden $100k for his grandchild, but it turns out that story broke in 2021 and I didn’t catch it while I was away from the Internet. I’ll have more to say on this by showtime.
Tucker Carlson appears set to begin doing a show on Twitter. Elon Musk says they don’t have a contract, but it is not my understanding that he needs one. Twitter already provides the Twitter Spaces function, and paywall features for public figures.
Yahoo News says Tucker was making $8 million a year working at Fox News. It is entirely conceivable he could be making a million a month using Twitter’s paywall functions, and while Twitter is not quite the “free speech” platform he reports it to be, even under Musk, it will be very interesting to see how Tucker makes use of the additional freedom this will provide him.
More interesting than this will be the prospect of audience participation. If viewers are able to interact with the host, this will provide tremendous opportunity for influence, if we play our cards right.
Behind the scenes here, today I’m happy to announce a new member benefit. I’ve updated the prices in the SurrealPolitiks shop with deep discounts for our members. Hoodies, normally $45, are now just $25 for members. T-Shirts, normally $25, are now just $15 for members. Similar discounts have been applied to everything else we sell.
For those of you who aren’t members yet, if you are interested in any merch, the costs signing up for a membership today will be more than offset by the savings. Membership is just $10/month, but you can get 33% off your first 3 months by using promo code agenda33. You may have to place two orders though, because I don’t believe the member discounts will apply until you actually have a membership. In this case, a membership and a hoodie will cost you less than the hoodie alone, so now is a great time to sign up, and join us.
This is motivated in some part by some recent investments I’ve made in the project, and investments I hope to make in the immediate future.
Our live streams have been plagued by technical problems, but with the notable exception of the Twitter Spaces feed, which I’ve since fixed, the most recent episode of SurrealPolitiks went off without a hitch. This impacted not only the video and audio quality, but the performance of your humble correspondent. Tech problems rattle me and make it hard to be entertaining because I get distracted. Monday’s show, by contrast, was long on laughs and largely unscripted.
I won’t get too into the tedious technical details, but one of the things that made this possible was setting up our own video streaming server. Another was a minor adjustment to the settings on my local video card. While off air I’ve been test streaming from my local computer to that video server, and I was able to stream flawlessly without any dropped frames for over 24 hours straight. During live shows, the video server takes my feed from the studio, and pushes it out to Rumble, Odysee, Entropy, DLive, VaughnTV, and Trovo. I can add a near infinite number of outputs to this, and I intend to. This will help us reach more people, and I am very excited about it.
The video server is also a big deal because it forms the foundation of a larger infrastructure which can be applied to a more ambitious project I’ve been hinting at for awhile.
This is RealpolitikRight.com, a WordPress multisite network which can facilitate the rapid deployment of new websites, and share certain features and resources among them.
SurrealPolitiks.com facilitates its membership functions using software which can be so shared, given a $397/year upgrade to the license, and when applied to the multisite network, it can create a shared paywall system for multiple brands and content producers. A “One Paywall To Rule Them All” model, capable of providing a great deal of value to subscribers without creating much technological overhead for most producers.
The video server is hardly the most vital part of this, but it adds to the antifragility of the system, by mitigating the risk of deplatforming, and providing the prospect of a 24/7 live content feed that can be shared among producers. We already have this running in an audio version, as any of you have use the audio players on my websites have already observed. We can publish these feeds to Roku and FireTV channels, once they have steady content that won’t get us banned from the platforms.
I put together a more detailed writeup on this on RealpolitikRight.com today, for those of you who would care to get more details.
I also purchased a new (used, but new to me) computer last night. Some of you have suggested I start doing Omegle video chats and either streaming them or publishing the recordings. The way I currently have things set up, I have one computer capable of doing this, but, sparing the tedious technical details, I’d have to make configuration changes to do this in between the live shows. This is suboptimal, to be switching back and forth several times a week, and in any case, it’s overdue that I upgrade the other computers in the studio.
Once this computer gets delivered, I’ll start doing the Omegle chats, and I think there’s a lot of opportunity for entertainment and enlightenment to flow from this project.
I look forward to speaking with you tonight at 9:30pm Eastern. If you’re not a member yet, join today at https://SurrealPolitiks.com/join.
If you are a member, you can join the chat at https://surrealpolitiks.com/member-chat/ and click the camera icon to jump into the video conference. You don’t need to turn your camera or microphone on, you can just listen if you want to.
Once the show is over, I post the audio archives to the member content section, and logged in users can listen or download the episodes from there. I plan to start uploading videos there soon, more on that in the near future.
See you soon.