HOW I FEED MY HEAD.
The only way to "beat" a ceaseless barrage of cable-certified propaganda is to assemble a ruthless defense. But the facts are hardly consoling: For most people, the U.S. is a sucky and worsening place
Executive summary: This post includes a nearly complete list of the sources of information I rely on to avoid being as ignorant as almost everyone else. If you want to skip through another round of overbaked justifications for what inspired me to ditch all traditional news sources and just scan the list, scroll down until you see bullets.
I feel like this is overdue.
In addition to covering specific instances of malfeasance within the broad subculture known as “running”—an environment in which noisy, nonrunning slugs and their corporate pimps control a sizable chunk of the conversation and wield far too much flabby influence—I’ve used this space to complain about the overall decay of the corporate-news environment and social media into a set of platforms that broadcast government propaganda, censor inconvenient facts, and allow debate only within a very narrow set of ideas, the latter perpetuating the myth that you, your campaign contributions, and your vote matter one bit to the people running the country through its elected and appointed officials.
Some of you have been reading what I write for a long time and are aware that I spent many hours in decades past blogging ruthlessly about the perils and idiocy of fundamentalist religious sects and the policies their members agitate for, as well as bashing Donald Trump and his loathsome family. Others came on board when they discovered my categorical intolerance for lying, grifting, and canceling people under the aegis of a more equitable world.
As a result, those intent on discerning a stable political philosophy from all this—and these days, most people can’t help but apply a simple label to the people whose work they read—are perhaps at a loss. I’ve mentioned my long history of casting votes exclusively for the more ostensibly progressive candidates in all the elections I’ve bothered with, yet I seem to be precisely against the concept of “social justice.”
I hope this is the last time I have to state explicitly that I am anti-bullshit and nothing more. If you’re trying to achieve political gains by lying, you’re a low, low being whether you’re an anti-gay Baptist preacher or his worst nightmare, a black transgender lesbian ACLU lawyer. There is not and never will be any excuse for this behavior.
This whole project is nothing more than an earnest attempt to dispel false realities and home in on real ones. It didn’t begin from a sense of personal resentment, though that’s largely why I continue because the result is the same either way, plus or minus a few gratuitous insults. I’m clearly not trying to get rich. I’m also not trying to make enemies or gin up controversy, although if people getting pissy is the result of challenges my writing poses to their wonky narratives, tough. If you honestly can’t tell a pussy from a cock-and-balls ensemble on sight, at least do the world the courtesy of removing the SCIENCE IS REAL sign from the lawn in front of the house your parents rented for you. And because even gentle attempts to engage the people I now just unpretentiously dump on in conversations about their output failed miserably, I have no choice but to just lob missiles at them and hope that the explosions yonder are some combination of effectual, entertaining, and humiliating.
All corporate-owned media outlets are controlled by billionaires and openly scaffolded on framing professional liars “formerly with” the FBI, the CIA, and other intelligence services as insiders eager to give you the skinny on how stuff really works in the belly of the Deep State. I genuinely pity anyone who believes that James Clapper and John Brennan are telling you the truth. Both lied to Congress during the Obama administration without consequence.
CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post are presently the worst of the lot, because these outlets all support and promulgate the corruption of the current U.S. presidential administration. CNN has taken a financial hit lately because its new president is trying to steer the operation back toward real news, starting with the expunging of talking turnip Brian Stelter, whose show Reliable Sources was as hilariously named as a store next to a police station called Free, Legal Fentanyl.
For now, conservative outlets such as Fox News, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal are at least taking facile potshots at the various cultural insanities introduced by fascist pseudo-liberals under the aegis of “social justice” (although I think even the Wokish have stopped pushing that sham descriptor). But if Republicans take nominal control of the U.S. Government in January, these outlets will shed their integrity-of-convenience and return to their traditional low-information, high-provocation state.
Five years ago, I would have agreed that CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal all bore transparent—and for the most part, unapologetic—political slants. But I was unaware of the extent to which reporters and their bosses simply invented stories and continue to do so. Specifically, they push false narratives invented by the same government of which the media is supposed to be endlessly skeptical.
Russiagate, the alleged inside-job bounty placed on the lives of American soldiers in the Middle East, the denial of Hunter Biden’s delirious screw-ups: All fake. These were not earnest mistakes or mistakes at all. They were lies aimed at feeding people’s need to be petrified of Donald Trump and his nationwide army of racist cops and other bogeymen, so they could behave even further to the right in practically every way than the Trump administration ever did. If you believe this to be untrue, you’re uninformed.
So, between stating outright that these outlets are not merely “biased” but categorically corrupt and often attempting to demonstrate the same principle through incessant (and to many people, surely tiresome) screenshots showing various forms of unmitigated media failure—hypocrisy, lying, denial, narrative-shifting, diversion, and undisguised puppeteering and manipulation by intelligence agencies—I’ve established that I reject most of the “information” many and perhaps most of you consider at least somewhat true. And I include the so-called tech giants—Meta Platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), Twitter, and Google (including YouTube) as media outlets, since these platforms are, I believe, the primary source of news headlines for Web-surfers. That monopolization of headline-distribution sucks, since these platforms all engage in sometimes-systematic, sometimes-whimsical episodes of flat-out truth suppression, along with promoting the spread of government-based misinformation like “The coronavirus vaccines help prevent the spread of the coronavirus.”
If I’m right about these outlets being wrong, I have to be getting my correct information from somewhere. I’ve linked to a few sites sufficiently often to clue in astute irregulars, but it’s probably time for an explicit listing.
The thread linking most if not all of these writers is previous employment at major corporate media outlets. They are not nobodies who developed large followings after cutting their teeth as conspiracy-mongers. They are mostly folks whose insistence on doing real journalism got them canned or compelled them to quit outlets that have become staffed almost exclusively by narcissistic, waterheaded illiterates with legacy Ivy League degrees using journalism to process their limitless psychological issues and whiny white dingbats pretending to share the pain of America’s urban poor.
Also, most of them are, like me, attacking the left-dominated corporate media from the longtime left or at least a left-of-center position. This is what has made the popular ones such scourges: Liberals are used to hand-waving away anything uttered by an established Fox News regular, National Review editorialist, or Daily Caller columnist, but when a previous nominal political ally breaks ranks by choosing facts over desired in-group outcomes, they really go bonkers. (We* see the same principle in effect with Christian apologists; they might not adore vocal longtime atheists like Richard Dawkins, but they are far warier of, and antagonistic toward, apostate Evangelicals who start spilling the goods from within and explaining why they believed the things they no longer believe. Your real enemies are those closest to you, or words to that effect uttered by Mark Shakespeare.)
I pay for a few of these, but most of the paywalled posts they make (if anyway) offer enough preview material to allow readers to grab the main points.
Substack
Caitlin’s Newsletter (Caitlin Johnstone): Johnstone is an absolute jewel. She reminds me of the smartest person I know personally, except that Johnstone is a woman from Australia instead of the American Midwest. She describes herself as wanting to live in a socialist utopia, which makes her artful snipes at the left easy to understand in the eyes of those who understand the 2022 “left” and confusing to people who still quaintly regard the political left as oriented toward working-class people.
Even her poems are good, and I can’t read poetry for comprehension unless it’s in Latin and deals with sea monsters.TK News (Matt Taibbi): Taibbi, who wrote for years for the now-worthless outlet retaining the name Rolling Stone, is the most entertaining writer I read. He’s my age, from the same general part of the country, roots for the same teams with the same sardonic expectations of failure, and is a classic liberal who believes in free speech, honest reporting, and humor.
Taibbi to me is at his best when he writes about banks, financial markets, and their regulators, since he conveys information about developments there in ways finance-naive people like me can easily understand.Glenn Greenwald: Greenwald is a lawyer turned reporter, and this background manifests in both his writing (not a great thing) and his journalism (the only reason I read him). Greenwald is determined and fearless. He’s not perfect, but he is intent on rooting out government corruption, which makes him necessary.
Greenwald is married to a man and favors every liberal social policy you can name, but his critics call him a right-winger anyway, because that’s typically the only answer they have when he exposes their lying.
Greenwald co-founded The Intercept, from which he resigned when its editors refused to run a true story about Hunter Biden shortly before the 2020 election. The Intercept is an example of an outlet that prioritizes Trump-bashing over facts despite being created specifically as an alternative to corporate-news bullshit.Singal-Minded (Jesse Singal): Singal focuses mainly on the way the media mishandles (to be kind) research about trans people and how society is affected by lies and absurdities in this area. Because trans activists are some of the sickest and nastiest people ever born, he’s gotten a lot of death threats and other opprobrium merely for pointing out, among other things, that almost all of the research suggesting that teenage depressives shouldn’t hesitate to have their tits and peckers lopped off is flawed.
FAIR Substack: The Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism is a group of scholars and professionals drawn from minority communities who focus largely on “critical theory” nonsense being taught in schools (if you believe it isn’t, that’s another lie you’ve internalized). Its members write very polite letters to school administrators and others when they receive reports of Wokism taking academic institutions far off the rails guiding schools’ intended missions.
If you actually care about social justice and think I’m only crying about Wokesters because I’m a middle-aged white guy, this site may become your favorite.Freddie deBoer: deBoer, a former college professor, was once a flat-out communist, but realized that not only was the U.S. never going to switch to decommodification, but that most so-called socialists didn’t care if this happened or not. He detests the false piety of post-liberal leftists who pretend to represent the interests of traditional Democrats, but are mostly short, bald white dudes who look like dildos with ears and tweet as they do mainly in an effort to get laid by someone on Twitter.
When deBoer is on, he is absolutely hilarious. He’s had many years of struggling with mental-health issues—serious stuff like dissociating from reality when not taking his meds—and when he writes, he puts everything he can of himself onto that diabolical white screen in front of him.
These I read semi-regularly:
Podcasts
Blocked & Reported: This is co-hosted by Singal and Katie Herzog, an amazingly witty presence. Both are liberals who tired of Wokish insincerities, inanities, and lunacies and decide to start a podcast. Theirs is mostly about Twitter fights leading to serious consequences.
Funny stuff if you’re into schadenfreude, even if you may not learn anything important.
YouTube
The Hill Rising: This is technically a corporate outlet, but it operates more like a version of The Young Turks hosted by smart people instead of utter imbeciles. Robby Soave, who also writes for Reason Magazine, is my favorite among the regular hosts, even if I can’t go all the way down the libertarian road from which he beckons. Briahna Joy Gray is the most cogent technically woke (small “w”) person in history and my favorite ex-lawyer.
You’ll get a variety of valid perspectives from this channel. It’s become my go-to among news sources that make noises.
Russell Brand: Brand is a comedian, a skeptic, and a committed humanist. He will make you feel better to live in this world no matter what he’s talking about. I can’t see anyone other than rich rat-bastards disliking the guy.
His channel has close to 6 million followers. I get a lot of my “images only” screenshots from stories Brand’s videos cover.The Jimmy Dore Show: Dore is not funny enough to be just a comedian, and not smart enough to be just a political analyst. But he is a passionate old-school liberal Democrat, in fact a Bernie Sanders “socialists,” and having the very insightful (and clever) Kurt Metzger as a sidekick helps him a great deal.
Dore’s videos overlap significantly with The Hill’s and Brand’s material, but I usually watch three videos on three different screens when I watch them at all, so I’m able to avoid getting bored or confused.Useful Idiots: Taibbi used to co-host this Monday-morning series dedicated mainly to marauding the previous weekend’s bullshit on Meet the Press and other political-”news” programs. Now, Aaron Mate’ has replaced Taibbi, who’s writing another book, and may be even better in the role than Taibbi. Mate’ is a good source of real insight into the always-humming American war machine.
If you give these sources a chance, you’ll inevitably confirm—not to your overall merriment—that the companies whose behavior and media products they chronicle are genuine agents of purposeful and persistent destruction. The reason is simple: These outlets aren’t just “openly partisan”; they don’t just “spin” things for humorous effect here and there; they don’t find themselves innocently misled by their sources. They lie. And the effects of their lying have been catastrophic to society, because those lies have all come with imperatives—not just to embrace something, but to violently reject those who do not embrace that same thing despite its demonstrable lack of universal value. These lies rend families and sicken friendships.
My life is not made materially worse by Lindsay Crouse making up stories to make herself feel better, like a blubbering child, and broadcasting them in The New York Times. If shoe companies would rather give money and gear to psychotic, polybigoted gluttons than sub-2:10 marathoners, great. If unattractive-feeling white women want to pretend their support for transwomen and distaste for white men is driven by a yen for social justice and not sour grapes, well, no one believes you, but HOO-RAH anyway—at least they’re fighting for position, however pathetically.
But when this bullshit is sautéing in the flame of far more widespread and consequential lies, it’s far harder to take. Crouse should have been fired years ago—there is no argument against this except the ones moral degenerates might make. She’s a sorry-ass person for what she does.
These assholes get away with lying because even people who consider themselves skeptical news consumers have so thoroughly fused their thinking to their political convictions that their minds have barricaded anything redolent of “the other side.” Democrats smugly consider themselves educated stewards of information, and dutifully respond the same way the people they see as cranks respond to polls: “We don’t trust the media.” But then almost all of these people repeat the lies in these outlets anyway. When the CDC admits it has “made mistakes,” the typical MSNBC watchers responds by trusting them at least as much if not more than they did before.
Please, please stop doing that.
