By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with Alison Porchnik on Morningside Heights
You wake up, working hard to greet the new day with hope, if not delight. Then you decide to check whether anything has happened that you need to know about. Whether your chosen medium is a newspaper, the television, or your trusty phone, the first response is invariably the same: fear and loathing, although possibly not in that order.
It's as if you entered a strange new world, a one that neither you nor Howard the Duck ever made. In some ways it feels the same: the New York Times still prints its six-column front page, the social media feed scrolls endlessly, and Heather with the Weather is still yucking it up with Pam on the Jam Cam.
But something is terribly wrong. The stories are horrifying and shocking. And yet it is presented to us as if it's just another day in the belching smokestacks of the news business.
The United States, once considered a model of stability and democracy, has degenerated into a dysfunctional tyranny whose every act threatens the lives and health of billions around the world. And yet all of this chaos and destruction is presented to us as if there's nothing to see here, people, move along.
Even worse, the same people who are presenting the intolerable as ordinary have started to remark on the phenomenon.
Here's a recent thumbsucker from one of the chief culprits, The New York Times:
Mr. Trump accused Mr. Obama of “treason,” and posted a fake video showing his predecessor being handcuffed in the Oval Office and imprisoned. He followed that Saturday with a fake image of Mr. Obama in the role of O.J. Simpson driving a white Bronco being chased by police cars, including one driven by Mr. Trump. A president posting such images of another president would once have been seen as shocking, but with Mr. Trump it has become business as usual.
That's Peter Baker scrivening away in his hot dog suit. How'd that happen, Peter, you may ask him or at least yourself.
In fact the current occupant of the White House has been doing and saying batsh*t crazy cruel bigoted insane crap since he launched his first campaign by announcing that Mexicans were sending us their assassins and rapists, who have been demonstrating just how vicious and evil they are by abandoning their life of crime and instead picking American crops in the broiling sun, toiling in restaurant kitchens, and hammering nails on American construction sites.
Recently, a website staffed by apostate Republican hacks, The Bulwark, noticed the vileness of White House communications:
ONCE UPON A TIME, THE PEOPLE TASKED with speaking for the president of the United States were not just excellent communicators but also known for their good sense, composure, diplomacy, truthfulness (for the most part, at least), and tact. Think of the late Bill Moyers, who served as press secretary under President Lyndon Johnson....
Now, as with so much else, those norms have been shattered. President Donald Trump’s top-ranking communicators....are known for their rashness, haughtiness, vulgarity, mendacity, and pique. They radiate contempt for members of the media who dare to ask tough questions, even obvious ones, and demand subservience in return. Instead of offering perspective, they promote misunderstanding. Instead of encouraging discourse, they deploy invective to shut it down.
The Bulwark chose a few receipts from the bulging file:
[Karoline Leavitt]...the nation’s youngest-ever White House press secretary (age 27).... referr[ed] to Joe Biden as having been “a brain-dead president.”
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| White House Communications Director Steven Cheung |
One example of the level of competence Leavitt has brought to the job was presented in March when she attacked a federal judge who ordered a pause to mass deportations under the clearly inapplicable Alien Enemies Act. Leavitt, at a press briefing, railed against Judge James Boasberg, who she said was “a Democrat activist” appointed to the bench by Barack Obama.
As one of the reporters in the room, Garrett Haake of NBC News, felt obliged to point out, Boasberg was actually appointed by President George W. Bush....
And she's the most civil of the entire Pol Potbelly pledge class. Here's her boss, former pro wresting carnival barker Steven Cheung:
In April, Trump’s director of communications blasted the Daily Beast’s chief content officer, Joanna Coles, for making an inquiry regarding the 79-year-old president’s apparent weight loss. Cheung, in a post on X, called her “a piece of shit, clearly suffering from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome rotting her pea-sized brain.”
....Cheung followed that in May, when he launched an unhinged attack on HuffPost reporter S.V. Date, who had the audacity to ask why most of Trump’s public remarks are not made available on the White House website. “You must be truly fucking stupid if you think we’re not transparent,” Cheung declared. “The president regularly does multiple press engagements per day and they are streamed live on multiple platforms.” In a case of look-who’s-talking irony overload, Cheung went on to urge Date to “Stop beclowning yourself.”
But other than The Bulwark, the daily White House outpouring of scurrilous and potty-mouthed insult comedy passes without media comment. Which means that it becomes the vile new normal, like official White House memes featuring photos of alligators ready to devour helpless civil immigration detainees.
And that's not all the media has normalized with its silence. We've already discussed at great length its near-unanimous refusal to cover the proliferating examples of Pol Potbelly's raging dementia.
There's also the normalization of the massive flagrant corruption of Pol Potbelly trousering as much as $7 billion on various crypto schemes while blocking all legislative efforts to bring these hot air merchants under effective regulation. (Hint: since crypto gains are based on the efforts of others and crypto has no intrinsic value (unlike commodities), crypto “coins” are obviously securities and can easily be regulated as such).
Sure there are (good) stories detailing individual get Trump rich quick crypto schemes, but the next day the corruption is accepted as normal. Just last weekend, he spent millions of taxpayer dollars to promote his pisspoor Scottish golf clubs by showing how much fun it is to cheat at golf. Nobody in the media said a discouraging word.
Even more fundamentally, the fact that the current President tried to incite an insurrection against the United States Government and then pardoned more than 1,500 insurrectionists, many of them convicted of violent attacks on police, seems to be unworthy of media recollection. This not-ancient history would seems to be highly useful background any time that Pol Potbelly attempts to further subvert the rule of law by for example siccing his Justice Department on both his political opponents, including former Presidents, and sitting federal judges.
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| 1,000,000 years ago in America |
Nor has Pol Potbelly's sadistic and blatantly illegal assault of immigrants, including those in the process of obtaining legal relief that would allow them to remain in the United States, occasioned any sustained media coverage, although there were stories outlining the legal jousting around for example the law-free effort to use the Alien and Sedition Acts to asport immigrants to a foreign concentration camp for indefinite torture.
They have now been sprung, a fact that has been reported for one day, but the grotesque tortures they endured because of the Pol Potbelly regime's criminal conspiracy seem to have generated almost no media attention. The coverage has mostly been limited to enterprising web sites like ProPublica, which reported:
The men said beatings by the guards were random, severe and constant. Guards lashed out at them with their fists and batons. They kicked them while wearing heavy work boots and shot them at close range with rubber pellets. One man we spoke to said he suspects he will have a lasting injury from a hard kick to the groin.
Colmenares recalled seeing one man defecate all over himself after a particularly severe beating. Guards laughed at him and left him there for a day, saying that the Venezuelans weren’t “real men.”
Are we suppose to regard this as the new normal for U.S. immigration policy? The lack of wide media attention to these appalling true stories suggests that the answer is yes.
Apologists for the media can make several points in their defense. One of the worst is the media's frequent refusal to cover scoops broken by others, like ProPublica's vivid accounts of the torture of Kristi Noem's Salvadoran kidnap victims.
The second point is more fundamental and plausible: the news is by definition what happened today. What happened seven months ago, like Pol Potbelly's mass pardon of violent insurrectionists, isn't news.
There's something to that, but we know how the media can by constant repetition and echoing reaction coverage keep a minor story front and center for months on end.
Exhibit A:
Remember what happened next? Ask CNN:
A similar pattern is playing out today, with massive daily idiotic coverage of Democratic New York Mayoral Nominee Zohran Mamdani. Did you know he says that a phrase that offends many Jews has a number of meanings and uses, not all of them antisemitic? If you did, why do you care? Rest assured The New York Times cares a lot more about that than it does about the ongoing subversion of the United States Government by its current President and his enablers.
This lack of context reduces the daily outrage (the Director of National Intelligence makes fraudulent accusations of criminal conduct against President Obama?) to just another one-day sickening jolt. We consume these unconnected tidbits thinking this is not our beautiful government, but our media send the message that it's just water rushing underground.
But, by letting the days go by, our media is ensuring that the once-in-a-lifetime demolition of institutions and norms becomes the new reality. What sickens alarmed citizens on the Upper West Side becomes the normal background noise at the apocryphal Ohio diner.
An entire generation is coming of age believing that it's OK for a President to grab women by their p**ssies, pervert government into a machine to line his own pockets, subvert the Constitution he is obligated to preserve and protect, and persecute political opponents with both legal attacks and the vilest invective.
To which we say: fuck that.
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