It's fitting that you refer to Airplane because every time I here someone run through the newest list of approved pronouns I keep waiting for the jive subtitles to pop up on screen.
And seriously Matt, our entire culture is filled with yoohoos who spout cliches & buzz phrases like they were actually saying shit. Every time I hear some wanker blather on about "taking it to the next level" I always assume that they're discussing how they've managed to shove their head deeper into their own asshole.
Commercials are filled with "you got this" or "you can do this" because there's nothing more inspiring than a pep talk delivered by an actor in a commercial.
Hundreds of women take to the internet with bikini selfies & topless selfies under the auspices of promoting some cause or other when what they're really doing is feeding that narcissistic attention monkey that's riding on their little self obsessed & emotionally needy backs.
Geez, we even have "smart" people literally telling us that finding the right answer to a math problem is racist.
So I think it's pretty safe to say that the dumbing down has worked splendidly. Americans have taken to brain damaged idiocy like a duck takes to a fish filled lake or Hunter Biden takes to a crack pipe.
I think we both know that won't be changing any time soon.
Love you and your work, Matt—twenty years running. But now of all times, you don’t get to pull the whole “bemused and somewhat concerned observer above the fray,” another of those “cringy” op-ed tropes you cataloged.
Sure, when it comes to the Maté-Dore-The Young F*cks matter, there are personal beefs at play. But Dore’s doing something long overdue when it comes to the whole left-liberal “progressive movement” that’s been ascendant over the last decade or so. Now that it’s pretty much run its course and self-liquidated, both unwittingly and wittingly bolstering neoliberal and Democratic Party power, there are some (from left libertarians to social democrats to orthodox Marxists) who think it’s important to at least call out the opportunists and fight The New New Left (DNC-sanctioned/subservient) from the left.
That’s what Dore’s doing—been doing since he saw the writing on the wall at least as far back as 2016 and certainly during the BlueAnon Russiagate conspiracy. And you’ve indicated elsewhere that this thing between Maté, Dore, and The Young F*cks isn’t just some internecine “spat.” It’s a symptom of something much bigger, more significant. The people who frame it as a mere “spat” are the same sort who come at you with “what happened to you man” on Twitwit.
This is definitely a time to take sides and duke it out—making it clear who’s got whose backs, making it clear who’s cashing in by running interference for the ultra-powerful few by selling out the majority of everyday people. Dore’s one of the few high-profile lefties doing it.
I don't think that one has to look farther than the crumbling case against Julian Assange to understand exactly how depraved our government has become and how actual whistleblowers, not the fake intelligence anti-Trump whistleblowers the Democrats spent 4 years blowing, are demonized, vilified, hounded & smeared.
If you're unaware, the key witness against Assange was a sociopath, a convicted child molester & financial fraudster who not only admitted he was lying about Assange but he has also admitted that he continued his crime spree while working with the Justice Dept. & the FBI who promised him complete immunity from prosecution.
"When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are ruled by criminals."
Am I the only "target reader" that wants all references to Dore/Kasparian etc to end? It makes me want to think about it and that adds zero value to my life. No one needs to spend any brain energy considering anything about TYT, past or future. I think about the last interesting thing they did was their live reactions in Nov 2016.
I find your description of the TYT scandal cautiously bland. You present it like a both sided affair although the details go in one direction. When Maté was smeared as being paid by the Russians, what was he supposed to do? And were the people who care about journalism supposed to let that go by as if it was nothing?
Come Matt, come. Come to the Dark Side. Seriously, we on the "right" have been getting the shit all our lives -- or at least since we started questioning the "narrative." Our words are distorted and false motives are assigned. It goes off us now like water from a duck's back. As they say, whatever doesn't kill you . . .
Funny about Brooks and Friedman. They both bring you news and views from the lobby of a 5 star hotel somewhere in the region of what appears to be a war or starving people or something we need to be more "Thoughtful" about. These are the people who would starve to death without credit cards and cell phones.
Thank you. The inside baseball spats between various media players is getting beyond tedious. And petulant af is really not a good look (looking at you, GG). The alt media is starting to become the same circle jerk bubble they became independent to get away from. Work it out amongst yourselves, while those of us uninterested will find other pastures. That talk about things that actually, you know, effect our actual lives.
Interesting to me personally as of late - financial stuff mostly. And art-related, as it happens to be my lane. Money laundering via Hunter Biden, Tony Podesta art voodoo. Crypto currency and nft tokens and everything involved with that. Environmental issues, Elizabeth Warren eyeballing a regulatory framework.
Also looking for a comb-through of Biden's latest slate of exec orders. One that stands out, and as a Good Thing - scrapping non-compete agreements, especially for low wage jobs. Dunno if Marty Walsh had anything to do with that, but it was a big problem here in Mass. For low - wage jobs, as well as for tech workers.
Let’s be clear, the media isn’t the one crafting the narratives, they’re not that clever. From “Stay Home. Save Lives” (the only alternative being leave your house and murder people) to “Russiagate,” to the 2003 Iraq war, these are carefully crafted campaigns created by the intel agencies and then fed to the media. The Five Eyes establishment is essentially what creates the narratives based on actual subversion operations.
The Russiagate narrative was literally created by a British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele. Christopher Steele was mentored and backed by none other than Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6 during the lead up to the Iraq war. That circle put out the WMD “dodgy dossier” back then in 2003.
The media does not shape the narrative, they are simply parroting stories fed to them by something much more sophisticated. That more sophisticated operation should be the real subject, not the silly left right hangouts that are still considered acceptable talking points.
People have to see who’s actually manipulating them. This is no different from how Venice manipulated countries to kill each other and destroy themselves hundreds of years ago. This is how ideological warfare works.
Rather than a colonial system of control, it’s largely through finance, the shaping of perception, subversion, and covert ideological warfare. The media is simply the modern instrument of that. The whole Venetian empire was literally based on this kind of stuff, profiling everyone, knowing their weaknesses, using that to destroy them, all without the targets ever knowing that they were being targeted. The media is just a more advanced and modern mechanism, but the strategic goals and approaches are the same.
So let’s stop all the left right bullshit narratives. If someone still thinks it’s a left and right not getting a long thing, or just a few bad apples spoiling the batch, or “regulatory capture”, then you really don’t get it, you don’t understand how intel operations work, how brainwashing works, and who’s doing it.
Much of the left has been brainwashed by a very coordinated media and messaging campaign, but this wasn’t organized by the media, they themselves have been brainwashed in the process.
The right was brainwashed a long time ago, it’s just been a long process of deconstructing and depatterning both sides. Then there is the increasingly aware and independently thinking grouping emerging from both sides. That grouping has to understand how these brainwashing operations were run and are still run because they’ll never stop until you can actually point them out and blow the cover of those running such operations.
The real solution is for both sides to come together, swallow their pride, realize they’ve been subjected to very sophisticated behaviour modification and brainwashing operations (real brainwashing, not the cartoonish stuff you see on television). Not wanting to believe such things have happened means they will be allowed to keep happening unnoticed.
Since the post-war period, it was known that the suggestions introduced within the group only stuck if the individual targets or “patients” were not aware that such suggestions were being made.
To unbrainwash oneself, we’d need to first start with the assumption that were we to have been brainwashed, we wouldn’t even see it or be aware. The whole thing depends on subtlety, on things appearing “normal” and that everything is just as it appears.
The way to break out of that is to actually ask yourself where your ideas come from. Most of the idea we have come from somewhere else. So the only question is do we know where they actually came from? Whether they are real ideas, or just artificial beliefs intentionally spread? How can you tell if an idea is a real idea or a subversive opinion? It may sound like an abstract question, but unless yo can tell the difference, chances are you probably hold some of these artificial subversive ideas and beliefs…
How can we tell real authentic ideas apart from fake subversive bullshit intentionally peddled and inserted into the public discourse? Unless one can make that distinction, they’re doomed.
A while back, I was a regular consumer of TYT's main show. I dabbled in some of their other stuff, but tended to like Cenk's read on politics. Then, as one should, I was taking in other points of view and became aware of what seemed like dishonest presentation of some topic too long ago to remember. And I saw the interview with Sam Harris and the unreal depiction of it afterward. TYT isn't really something I can listen to much now.
Krystal & Saagar at Breaking Points seem to be trending that way. At The Hill, their content was focused on politics/economics/social issues (and the occasional UFO story - TY, Saagar). But since launching the Breaking Points venture, they're full-tilt-boogie on stories about how bad the MSM is and, implicitly, how much better they are. It's tedious. It's preaching to the choir.
That's what I like about TK coverage. It covers some media problems. But the stories are about the subjects, not promos for TK. Your analysis on why the MSM missed the Trump phenomenon - it was something I just never heard before. It was like being shown something I didn't know I already knew.
Matt, as much as I admire you, I can't give you a pass on this. I had this nailed in 1981. I was living in Bogota, Colombia, in 1980, and subscribed to Time magazine. I read about ABSCAM, and how eight congressmen were arrested in a bribery sting. The only one whose party affiliation was indicated was a Republican. I thus stupidly deduced that all were Republicans. That was the point.
I returned to the US at the end of 1980 and eventually looked into ABSCAM. The other seven members of congress were Democrats. As were the thirty-plus others sent to jail. Which sent me on further investigation. You're an investigator, you know how it works. With a few interruptions, I had been a WaPo subscriber for two decades. I picked up on something so consistent it had to be part of their Style Book. Every story with something good to say about a Democrat had his party affiliation in the first two paragraphs; if it reflected poorly on the individual, his party affiliation was buried deep in the article. The reverse was done for Republicans.
I finally figured out that there was no liberal bias in the press, there was partisan bias. I found this in NYT, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, Boston Globe as well. There was no corresponding lock-step favoring Republicans; public employee unions were actually two steps ahead of the press. This isn't recent at all. I formally left the Democratic Party in 2009, although it had left me nearly three decades earlier.
i am having a problem, and i mean this seriously, that there is not one single news source that i trust anymore. There are some individual writers but no website or network. i don't feel good about that.
Five Corporate commercials- We are all the core demographic when we drink Pepsi, sequence of pod people asks their doctor for the drug that might kill them, Dumb man can’t take care of himself without reliable woman, witty and relatable guys really don’t care if you buy insurance, We swear to god this Hyundai is a luxury sports car
"Our target reader used to be the person sipping coffee at a moment like the present, a cool Saturday morning, lazily turning pages as birds chirped outside the window." Well . . . I read that on a Saturday morning, sipping coffee, listening to the birds chirping outside the window! Ahhh . . . the good life!
It's fitting that you refer to Airplane because every time I here someone run through the newest list of approved pronouns I keep waiting for the jive subtitles to pop up on screen.
And seriously Matt, our entire culture is filled with yoohoos who spout cliches & buzz phrases like they were actually saying shit. Every time I hear some wanker blather on about "taking it to the next level" I always assume that they're discussing how they've managed to shove their head deeper into their own asshole.
Commercials are filled with "you got this" or "you can do this" because there's nothing more inspiring than a pep talk delivered by an actor in a commercial.
Hundreds of women take to the internet with bikini selfies & topless selfies under the auspices of promoting some cause or other when what they're really doing is feeding that narcissistic attention monkey that's riding on their little self obsessed & emotionally needy backs.
Geez, we even have "smart" people literally telling us that finding the right answer to a math problem is racist.
So I think it's pretty safe to say that the dumbing down has worked splendidly. Americans have taken to brain damaged idiocy like a duck takes to a fish filled lake or Hunter Biden takes to a crack pipe.
I think we both know that won't be changing any time soon.
Love you and your work, Matt—twenty years running. But now of all times, you don’t get to pull the whole “bemused and somewhat concerned observer above the fray,” another of those “cringy” op-ed tropes you cataloged.
Sure, when it comes to the Maté-Dore-The Young F*cks matter, there are personal beefs at play. But Dore’s doing something long overdue when it comes to the whole left-liberal “progressive movement” that’s been ascendant over the last decade or so. Now that it’s pretty much run its course and self-liquidated, both unwittingly and wittingly bolstering neoliberal and Democratic Party power, there are some (from left libertarians to social democrats to orthodox Marxists) who think it’s important to at least call out the opportunists and fight The New New Left (DNC-sanctioned/subservient) from the left.
That’s what Dore’s doing—been doing since he saw the writing on the wall at least as far back as 2016 and certainly during the BlueAnon Russiagate conspiracy. And you’ve indicated elsewhere that this thing between Maté, Dore, and The Young F*cks isn’t just some internecine “spat.” It’s a symptom of something much bigger, more significant. The people who frame it as a mere “spat” are the same sort who come at you with “what happened to you man” on Twitwit.
This is definitely a time to take sides and duke it out—making it clear who’s got whose backs, making it clear who’s cashing in by running interference for the ultra-powerful few by selling out the majority of everyday people. Dore’s one of the few high-profile lefties doing it.
You have been, too.
I don't think that one has to look farther than the crumbling case against Julian Assange to understand exactly how depraved our government has become and how actual whistleblowers, not the fake intelligence anti-Trump whistleblowers the Democrats spent 4 years blowing, are demonized, vilified, hounded & smeared.
If you're unaware, the key witness against Assange was a sociopath, a convicted child molester & financial fraudster who not only admitted he was lying about Assange but he has also admitted that he continued his crime spree while working with the Justice Dept. & the FBI who promised him complete immunity from prosecution.
"When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are ruled by criminals."
-Edward Snowden
Snowden was right. On. The. Money.
Am I the only "target reader" that wants all references to Dore/Kasparian etc to end? It makes me want to think about it and that adds zero value to my life. No one needs to spend any brain energy considering anything about TYT, past or future. I think about the last interesting thing they did was their live reactions in Nov 2016.
I find your description of the TYT scandal cautiously bland. You present it like a both sided affair although the details go in one direction. When Maté was smeared as being paid by the Russians, what was he supposed to do? And were the people who care about journalism supposed to let that go by as if it was nothing?
Come Matt, come. Come to the Dark Side. Seriously, we on the "right" have been getting the shit all our lives -- or at least since we started questioning the "narrative." Our words are distorted and false motives are assigned. It goes off us now like water from a duck's back. As they say, whatever doesn't kill you . . .
Funny about Brooks and Friedman. They both bring you news and views from the lobby of a 5 star hotel somewhere in the region of what appears to be a war or starving people or something we need to be more "Thoughtful" about. These are the people who would starve to death without credit cards and cell phones.
We’re into the purity spiral phase, when everybody is outbidding each other for moral position. It never ends well.
Thank you. The inside baseball spats between various media players is getting beyond tedious. And petulant af is really not a good look (looking at you, GG). The alt media is starting to become the same circle jerk bubble they became independent to get away from. Work it out amongst yourselves, while those of us uninterested will find other pastures. That talk about things that actually, you know, effect our actual lives.
Interesting to me personally as of late - financial stuff mostly. And art-related, as it happens to be my lane. Money laundering via Hunter Biden, Tony Podesta art voodoo. Crypto currency and nft tokens and everything involved with that. Environmental issues, Elizabeth Warren eyeballing a regulatory framework.
Also looking for a comb-through of Biden's latest slate of exec orders. One that stands out, and as a Good Thing - scrapping non-compete agreements, especially for low wage jobs. Dunno if Marty Walsh had anything to do with that, but it was a big problem here in Mass. For low - wage jobs, as well as for tech workers.
Have a great weekend.
Let’s be clear, the media isn’t the one crafting the narratives, they’re not that clever. From “Stay Home. Save Lives” (the only alternative being leave your house and murder people) to “Russiagate,” to the 2003 Iraq war, these are carefully crafted campaigns created by the intel agencies and then fed to the media. The Five Eyes establishment is essentially what creates the narratives based on actual subversion operations.
The Russiagate narrative was literally created by a British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele. Christopher Steele was mentored and backed by none other than Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6 during the lead up to the Iraq war. That circle put out the WMD “dodgy dossier” back then in 2003.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/05/28/american-shadow-creatures-exposed-but-will-empire-still-win-day/
The media does not shape the narrative, they are simply parroting stories fed to them by something much more sophisticated. That more sophisticated operation should be the real subject, not the silly left right hangouts that are still considered acceptable talking points.
People have to see who’s actually manipulating them. This is no different from how Venice manipulated countries to kill each other and destroy themselves hundreds of years ago. This is how ideological warfare works.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C9Ss7ztvPtY
Rather than a colonial system of control, it’s largely through finance, the shaping of perception, subversion, and covert ideological warfare. The media is simply the modern instrument of that. The whole Venetian empire was literally based on this kind of stuff, profiling everyone, knowing their weaknesses, using that to destroy them, all without the targets ever knowing that they were being targeted. The media is just a more advanced and modern mechanism, but the strategic goals and approaches are the same.
So let’s stop all the left right bullshit narratives. If someone still thinks it’s a left and right not getting a long thing, or just a few bad apples spoiling the batch, or “regulatory capture”, then you really don’t get it, you don’t understand how intel operations work, how brainwashing works, and who’s doing it.
Much of the left has been brainwashed by a very coordinated media and messaging campaign, but this wasn’t organized by the media, they themselves have been brainwashed in the process.
The right was brainwashed a long time ago, it’s just been a long process of deconstructing and depatterning both sides. Then there is the increasingly aware and independently thinking grouping emerging from both sides. That grouping has to understand how these brainwashing operations were run and are still run because they’ll never stop until you can actually point them out and blow the cover of those running such operations.
The real solution is for both sides to come together, swallow their pride, realize they’ve been subjected to very sophisticated behaviour modification and brainwashing operations (real brainwashing, not the cartoonish stuff you see on television). Not wanting to believe such things have happened means they will be allowed to keep happening unnoticed.
Since the post-war period, it was known that the suggestions introduced within the group only stuck if the individual targets or “patients” were not aware that such suggestions were being made.
To unbrainwash oneself, we’d need to first start with the assumption that were we to have been brainwashed, we wouldn’t even see it or be aware. The whole thing depends on subtlety, on things appearing “normal” and that everything is just as it appears.
The way to break out of that is to actually ask yourself where your ideas come from. Most of the idea we have come from somewhere else. So the only question is do we know where they actually came from? Whether they are real ideas, or just artificial beliefs intentionally spread? How can you tell if an idea is a real idea or a subversive opinion? It may sound like an abstract question, but unless yo can tell the difference, chances are you probably hold some of these artificial subversive ideas and beliefs…
How can we tell real authentic ideas apart from fake subversive bullshit intentionally peddled and inserted into the public discourse? Unless one can make that distinction, they’re doomed.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dbSzuxAxJ4w
A while back, I was a regular consumer of TYT's main show. I dabbled in some of their other stuff, but tended to like Cenk's read on politics. Then, as one should, I was taking in other points of view and became aware of what seemed like dishonest presentation of some topic too long ago to remember. And I saw the interview with Sam Harris and the unreal depiction of it afterward. TYT isn't really something I can listen to much now.
Krystal & Saagar at Breaking Points seem to be trending that way. At The Hill, their content was focused on politics/economics/social issues (and the occasional UFO story - TY, Saagar). But since launching the Breaking Points venture, they're full-tilt-boogie on stories about how bad the MSM is and, implicitly, how much better they are. It's tedious. It's preaching to the choir.
That's what I like about TK coverage. It covers some media problems. But the stories are about the subjects, not promos for TK. Your analysis on why the MSM missed the Trump phenomenon - it was something I just never heard before. It was like being shown something I didn't know I already knew.
Thank you!
Matt, as much as I admire you, I can't give you a pass on this. I had this nailed in 1981. I was living in Bogota, Colombia, in 1980, and subscribed to Time magazine. I read about ABSCAM, and how eight congressmen were arrested in a bribery sting. The only one whose party affiliation was indicated was a Republican. I thus stupidly deduced that all were Republicans. That was the point.
I returned to the US at the end of 1980 and eventually looked into ABSCAM. The other seven members of congress were Democrats. As were the thirty-plus others sent to jail. Which sent me on further investigation. You're an investigator, you know how it works. With a few interruptions, I had been a WaPo subscriber for two decades. I picked up on something so consistent it had to be part of their Style Book. Every story with something good to say about a Democrat had his party affiliation in the first two paragraphs; if it reflected poorly on the individual, his party affiliation was buried deep in the article. The reverse was done for Republicans.
I finally figured out that there was no liberal bias in the press, there was partisan bias. I found this in NYT, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, Boston Globe as well. There was no corresponding lock-step favoring Republicans; public employee unions were actually two steps ahead of the press. This isn't recent at all. I formally left the Democratic Party in 2009, although it had left me nearly three decades earlier.
i am having a problem, and i mean this seriously, that there is not one single news source that i trust anymore. There are some individual writers but no website or network. i don't feel good about that.
Five Corporate commercials- We are all the core demographic when we drink Pepsi, sequence of pod people asks their doctor for the drug that might kill them, Dumb man can’t take care of himself without reliable woman, witty and relatable guys really don’t care if you buy insurance, We swear to god this Hyundai is a luxury sports car
"Our target reader used to be the person sipping coffee at a moment like the present, a cool Saturday morning, lazily turning pages as birds chirped outside the window." Well . . . I read that on a Saturday morning, sipping coffee, listening to the birds chirping outside the window! Ahhh . . . the good life!
Nice! I laughed at Liam Neeson’s Revenge!