CNN and MSNBC are now trying to extinguish memers, the Babylon Bee, and other would-be parodists through admirably well-executed competitive inhibition
When corporate-media gaslighting gives way to something a step below Ludovico's technique in "A Clockwork Orange"
It’s one thing for media personalities to lie to their viewers in an effort to cement or change those viewers’ opinions. It’s another when these propagandists reveal that they know you’ve caught on to the lying but demand that you trust them anyway, even if this means reorganizing your entire value system. The absolute necessity of Joe Biden, Jr. (or his replacement) winning the 2024 U.S. Presidential “Election” in November implies that the means needed to deliver this end are morally unbounded.
CNN and MSNBC have both broken into new territory recently, not in terms of outright lying—those networks have been founts of untrammeled prevarication for seven-plus years now—but regarding attempted basic mind control. Instead of merely feeding you fictions about things you can’t see for yourself and hoping you’ve never heard of Substack—e.g., overseas virology labs and Pfizer’s internal 2020 documents about the company’s covid jabs—the “news” networks are telling you more than ever to disregard facts that you can easily confirm for yourself.
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, one of the most organically stupid men to regularly on television with his mouth moving over the past decade, tried this in a Morning Joe segment that immediately went viral as much for its seething overreach as for its undeniable raucous humor.
While it seems unclear exactly what demographic of MSNBC viewers were expected to believe that Joe Biden is just entering his neuropsychological prime, CNN tried a slightly different tactic after the U.S. Supreme Court decided by a 9-to-0 margin that Colorado’s high court was not empowered to bar presidential candidates from its “election” ballots. SCOTUS wasn’t picking on Colorado; the ruling extended to all states, even if Colorado is among the few with a secretary of state who perpetually looks as if a brick struck a glancing blow to the back of her head five minutes before every public appearance.
While MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s twat-clenching theatrics over the decision were the usual treat—a pastiche of genuinely agitated head-flapping, “knowing” “smirks” that scare any youngsters watching, and remorseless bullshitting—the vulpine Dana Bash probably exceeded all of her colleagues across de facto statist news networks in a CNN segment in which she expressed real frustration about the top judicial body in the nation following—sigh—the United States Constitution.
Also, it was funny watching old, purportedly Wokeblown white men like Laurence Tribe and Keith Olbermann openly question the intelligence of the three liberal SCOTUS judges—two of whom are women “of color”—without realizing what they were doing; funnier still is that absolutely no one on the “antiracist” left noticed or seemed to give a sour fart.
I’ve heard from people who intend to vote this fall, and not for Donald Trump, Sr., that the effort to debar Trump from the “election” is ridiculous given both the absurdity of the charges against Trump and Trump being the frontrunner in every recent poll. A lot of Democrats have also grown more restive over the realization that they never had any meaningful choice of other candidates at all, and that they won’t have any say in who is chosen to replace Biden as the nominee in August’s 2024 Democratic National Convention.
If the Democrats cannot produce a single presidential candidate capable of beating an alleged insurrectionist and Putinite and confirmed meta-retard, whose fucking fault is that? And hell, it may not matter, as Trump looks determined to lose supporters without anyone trying to paint him as an authoritarian zealot instead of a mega-grifting boob.
I wonder how far we* are from one of these operatives dropping the term “First Amendment nuts” or “free-speech crazies” into a crapcast. Or perhaps a “legacy outlet” will get there first instead.
Either way,
has an article today at Racket News about the eerily smooth, invisible-to-most transition from biased news to flat-out state TV in the United States that includes other examples of “news” personalities debasing themselves in their ever-more-undisguised alignment with the White House, itself not just an accelerating administrative catastrophe but the campaign equivalent of the Space Shuttle Challenger on a 35-degree launch morning.
(Note: This post was updated soon after its publication, when the International Department of Redundancy’s Over and Over Department of Recursive Repetition contacted me to alert me to the use of “e.g., such as”—a rare and entertaining, but nevertheless incorrect, use of English.)