Last week, I noted that the mainstream media was largely ignoring Hurricane Helene. As the outrage grew and the eyewitness accounts became more damning, the journalists finally awakened and revealed to all the real problem with Hurricane Helene — the lying liars who were lying about it.
Here are some screenshots on the topic from October 11’s Google News.
We are getting more eyewitness reports from Appalachia as the flood waters recede. Once upon a time journalists would have risked everything for a story like Helene as it happened. But that was then and this is now, and we can hardly expect our current crop of underpaid keyboard-tappers to show such an adventurous spirit. Still, we must give credit for small favors.
The death of 11 family members in Fairview, North Carolina has received some coverage. Biden and Harris have made some soothing words about relief for victims of Helene and Milton. But overall the sufferings of Appalachia, and now Florida, are still being greeted with a collective yawn — or blamed on “disinformation” spread by bots, Putin supporters, racists, conspiracy nuts, and Trumptards (but I repeat myself).
What happened to American journalism? It’s a long story. Let’s start by following the money.
As close to a consensual view as you get in America is that “everyone in America should have equal opportunities to get ahead.” A whopping 97 percent agreed with that statement in a 2007 survey by political scientists Lawrence Jacobs and Benjamin Page. But Wall Street and powerful allied economic and political interests are making a mockery out of this commitment and, indeed, raising questions about whether anyone else besides them can get ahead, period. That’s the source of the populist anger—call it aspirational populism—that is driving this movement and will continue to drive it in the future, if it picks up steam.
Ruy Teixara, “Why a Majority of Americans Are Getting Behind Occupy Wall Street”
New Republic, October 20, 2011
From September 17 to November 15, 2011 protestors occupied Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan’s Financial District. While the protestors came from different races, creeds, and political backgrounds, they were united in their distrust of big banks and big government. The Great Recession of 2007-09 had led to enormous bank bailouts with little attention paid to those dealing with a stagnant economy.
While the professional and managerial classes had largely been spared the brunt of earlier downturns, the Great Recession was felt by prosperous and poor alike. They gathered in New York, and many other cities, to make their displeasure known. They put aside their differences and took on a new identity: the 99% held down by the wealthy and super-wealthy 1%.
Many thought this was the beginning of an American populist movement. But after the encampments were closed, the Occupy Wall Street movement died without a whimper. And the autopsy report suggests this was no death by natural causes. Occupy Wall Street was willfully murdered by the people who had the most to lose should it succeed.
To keep the rabble from complaining about income inequity, the .01% turned the discussion to racism, sexism, ableism, fatphobia, homophobia, and just about any oppression you can name that didn’t involve class struggle. Struggles against “White Supremacy” and “Queerphobia” received lavish funding from private NGOs and corporate donors after OWS.
On September 21, 2012 brothers Omar and Rafael Rivero started a Facebook page they called "Occupy Democrats." This page had little to distinguish it from the many other strident Facebook pages on all sides of the political spectrum. But it channeled the momentum from Occupy Wall Street into partisan Democratic politics. At first those efforts were geared toward Bernie Sanders and other left-leaning democrats. But by September 17 Omar Rivera was bragging to the Miami New Times "If Hillary would have given me $20 million, we wouldn't have President Trump. That's a guarantee."
While it became notorious as a disinformation fountain, Occupy Democrats soon became one of the Left's leading sources for news and information. By May 2020 nearly half the top-performing Facebook videos which mentioned "Trump" were from Occupy Democrats. Those who once protested in the streets now content themselves with sharing memes for likes and upvotes.
In August 2019 I was smeared by the Maine Beacon as a “New Jersey White Supremacist.” After a bit of digging, I discovered that the Maine People’s Alliance accepts donations through ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising platform. I also discovered that while the Beacon and the Maine People’s Alliance were purportedly non-partisan, they were oddly silent when it came to criticizing Democratic candidates and officials. Organizations once dedicated to progressive causes increasingly came under control of Democratic officials and operatives who massaged the message to their own ends.
Lacking class consciousness, the American Left grew increasingly contemptuous of the homophobic, racist, misogynist Christofascist working classes. They also developed a badly skewed class consciousness of their own. Income inequity and siphoning of money from the lower classes to multinational corporations and hedge funds meant there were fewer opportunities for the petit bourgeois Professional-Managerial Class. (Ahnaf Ibn-Qais and I had a great conversation about this with ACP member and Executive Director Eddie Liger).
As their economic condition grew increasingly tense, the PMCs grew more strident. They channeled the fears that fueled Occupy Wall Street into the loud new religion of “wokeness.” Those who questioned any of the tenets of the new faith soon found themselves ostracized. (Ask me how I know this). Instead of supporting economic justice, the “Left” now mocked the Trumptards with their rusty trailers, missing teeth, and battered pickup trucks. Instead of protesting wars they enthusiastically stood with Ukraine. Instead of questioning the government-pharmaceutical complex, they demanded that COVID vaccine skeptics be rounded up in concentration camps. And of all the PMCs, few were more enthusiastic than the journalists.
It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.
In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.
Uri Berliner, “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust”
Free Press, April 9, 2024
NPR Senior Editor Uri Berliner was suspended and ultimately resigned over his Free Press article. Berliner was no closet conservative: he admitted in his essay that he had “voted enthusiastically against Trump.” What troubled him was a loss in journalistic integrity.
He noted how NPR journalists repeatedly interviewed Adam Schiff, one of the loudest “Russiagate” proponents. But when the Mueller Report found no evidence of Russian collusion, NPR simply let the story die rather than owning their role in promoting a falsehood. And in 2020 NPR repeatedly claimed the Hunter Biden laptop story was “disinformation,” then once again memory-holed the issue once it became clear that it was indeed Hunter’s laptop — and after Joe Biden won the election.
Berliner also noticed something else which held true for the Woke movement in general: despite NPR’s increasingly frantic efforts to support different “affinity groups,” most of its listeners were as White as a lacrosse team drinking pumpkin spice lattes and dancing badly to 80s music.
In 2023, according to our demographic research, 6 percent of our news audience was black, far short of the overall U.S. adult population, which is 14.4 percent black. And Hispanics were only 7 percent, compared to the overall Hispanic adult population, around 19 percent. Our news audience doesn’t come close to reflecting America. It’s overwhelmingly white and progressive, and clustered around coastal cities and college towns.
Another issue lay in centralization. By 2011, 90% of American media was controlled by six media conglomerates:
GE/Comcast (NBC, Universal)
News Corp (Fox News, Wall Street Journal, New York Post)
Disney (ABC, ESPN, Pixar)
Viacom (MTV, BET, Paramount Pictures)
Time Warner (CNN, HBO, Warner Bros.)
CBS (Showtime, NFL.com).
But despite this stranglehold, all these companies saw themselves losing viewers and money to social and independent media. Journalists with spines and souls walked away from corporate journalism and started podcasts and blogs. Interested viewers watched events happen in real time on Twitter and later Telegram.
To be fair, the quality of online discourse was decidedly mixed. There were diamonds to be found, but you had to do some digging in a very large and smelly dungheap. And bad actors from around the globe used bots and paid trolls to promote their ideas and disparage their opponents.
Taking advantage of this opportunity, the beleaguered conglomerates attacked their competition for spreading dangerous lies. The government hopped in to pressure social media companies to limit discourse on an ever-growing list of forbidden topics. And partisan posters (that is to say, just about everybody) learned to dismiss uncomfortable questions by attributing them to agents for Putin, Trump, Netanyahu, or their bugbear of choice.
Once upon a time there were journalists and readers across the political spectrum. Today the audience has polarized. Fox has become the most popular conservative mainstream news outlet largely because it is the only one. The rest have united in a crusade against fascism, racism, sexism and the Bad Orange Man who embodies all these things and more.
As Melkor became Morgoth and Mairon turned into Sauron, so the PMCs were renamed “NPCs” for their rote recitation of talking points. Even those browbeaten into following the script come after a time to believe it. When everyone around you believes X, you’re inclined to think that there must be something to X after all.
The victims of Hurricane Helene were to this captured audience what Palestinians are to Israeli settlers. They saw them as dangerous enemies that threaten America’s very existence. And when a flood of eyewitness reports threatened to chip away at the disinterest and hostility, the media mobilized to dismiss them as lies and frauds. This provided a boundary for the NPCs: question this and you’re one of the Bad People. And so, as it has been for at least the past 8 years and counting, those who Trust the Science and Spout the Tautologies made their ritual rejections of Fake News.
While disinformation campaigns may convince the choir, they do little to win converts. For those who distrust the media, “fake news” tags serve as proof that the information is true. What was intended to restore social order has instead become yet another tool promoting discord and division.
In the 19th Century Horatio Alger helped create what became the American Dream. Anyone could succeed if only they worked hard and were honest. Alger’s stories gave hope to men who toiled in factories and assuaged the factory owners’ guilt. After World War II, it seemed that American Dream was finally coming true. Two generations of prosperity culminated in a moon landing that gave us another dream, the Space Age. That American Dream is currently on life support and will be dead before the last Boomer checks out.
Today’s journalists are tasked with building Potemkin villages for little pay and less job security. Many of the more successful have begun checking out for independent media, where they have more freedom if not always bigger paychecks. Others are moving into different careers with more stability and better income. Those who remain may soon find themselves replaced by AI journalists who can string together words and create propaganda for a mere $20 per month or so.
One of the great indicators of social unrest is an abundance of impoverished petty nobles. They may not talk about it, but our PMCs continue to feel the sting of income inequity. This has led many to double down on their politics as status symbols. But this behavior only creates resentment from the Great Unwashed — a group which may not have a lot of power, but has (for now) guns and voting rights. Others decide they will do better fighting the system than bowing before it for scraps.
Those who can sway opinions with words have a power that they can use for good or ill. They might content themselves with honeyed lies in service of their superiors. Or they might use that power to change the world. Pamphleteers and journalists sparked the American, French, and Russian Revolutions. Those journalists who walk away from their corporate jobs may lose friends, family, even their lives. But they might just trigger a storm that cannot be ignored.
Useful idiots that “stay loyal”, will invariably be shot, should an actual civil conflict break out. By their own side for being “too dangerous a tool to leave lying around”, and by the opposition for their betrayal.
@elonmusk
Free resources to help your family cope with natural and manmade disaster are available at two places.
The American Civil Defense Association
https://tacda.org/
American Tactical Civil Defense
https://poetslife.substack.com/
TACDA has been educating American families about how to prepare for and respond to disasters since 1962.
I have been the volunteer vice president of TACDA for 15 years and written over 15 articles in the Journal of Civil Defense.
American Tactical Civil Defense is my free Substack with tactics, information, web links, and useful information for how to keep your family safe.
Enjoy and please spread the word to other good Americans.