Opinion
By Jeff Childers
11/02/24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! That leaves three days till the big day, when hopefully we’ll find out how we’ll be spending the next four years. Your Weekend Edition roundup includes: Times election story reveals real players behind corporate media; WaPo story threads curiously similar elements, establishing liberal permission matrix; baffling Boeing turnaround may signal a return to sanity; more bad news for Burning Man, unexpectedly; and latest pro-Kamala celebrity endorser has hilarious unscripted moment.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥🔥 At first, it just seemed like they are losing their damned minds, but something more sinister developed as I looked into this story. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a cover-page, top-of-website story —not an op-ed— headlined, “Trump, Preparing to Challenge the Results, Puts His 2020 Playbook Into Action.” Before we even begin, note that after getting through the overlong story, readers discover (1) Trump has never said he was “preparing to challenge the results,” (2) there is no actual “playbook,” and (3) the Times’ editors all identify as infant armadillos. Not house trained. (Eww.)
The Times even made up a detailed, lengthy, step-by-step “playbook” that they then attributed to Trump for overturning the election. Except Trump didn’t write the playbook, never wrote one, nor did Rudi Giuliani, Elon Musk, RFK, or Hitler. The Times wrote the playbook. In its ominous subheadline, the Times warned its terrified readers, “Step by step, Donald J. Trump and his allies are following the strategies that caused chaos four years ago.”
Remember that line. We’ll come back to it.
Readers dumb enough to invest any time in this “article” (don’t) quickly discover the whole thing is a Trump-deranged, speculative, liberal mushroom hallucination. It even described literal playbook steps (“Step 1—Claim Victory”) as if it had received some leaked memorandum. But it turns out they made the whole thing up. The unscripted narrative, or “preemptive framing,” pushed to its readers just before Election Day, is: ho hum, Trump ALWAYS claims he lost because of cheating.
Considered through the lens of our working hypothesis that during the pandemic, the deep state wholly or partly captured corporate media (for national security), this story looks nothing like news. It looks everything like classic propaganda. You could easily imagine airplanes dropping this same story on enemy troops as leaflets.
It also looks just like a diabolical, Obama-style “permission structure,” intended to reach Times readers before Election Day, and to teach them to close their minds and refuse to consider any claim of cheating by Republicans, however compelling. They’re simply not allowed to consider that cheating might have happened, regardless of the evidence. For them, the safest thing to do is not even listen to the evidence. They’re supposed to remind each other, listening to that nonsense is just playing right into his hands.
Proving the piece was written by clever psychologists instead of reporters, the story bizarrely connects —in advance!— any and all claims of cheating in the election to the worst day in the nation’s history, a date that will live in liberal infamy, the mythical destroyer of democracy, the carefully crafted psychological trigger called January The Sixth:
Let’s not pass over that ridiculous but insidious passage too quickly. Consider the nefarious message: January 6th has never ended. It’s like that hallway in horror movies where the doomed protagonist starts walking and then the hallway just keeps getting longer and longer and stretching further and further away until madness! Except within the Times’ narrative frame, the hallway is January 6th, and it’s packed with jeering protestors wearing MAGA hats and they are all icky and middle class.
The story’s comments section was disabled, preserving the purity of the propaganda dose and making sure it wouldn’t accidentally be diluted by pesky questions or folks pointing out the obvious problems. In other words, not ruined by free speech.
There’s no good explanation for why the Times would do this if it were operating as a true news corporation, if it weren’t hollowed out by security state operatives. Even if something like this hysterial fantasy were appropriate to be published at all, this propaganda piece should have run in the opinion section. They are spending reputation coins like a 12-year-old at an arcade. This story is reputationally expensive, it erodes the Times’ prestige as a serious news player and reinforces skeptical stereotypes about its bias.
Why would the editors fritter away their dwindling supply of goodwill on a non-story like this?
Maybe they’re not. Maybe someone else is spending the Times’ goodwill. Consider the possibility that during the pandemic, the government’s security apparatus assumed control of corporate and social media, for national security. After all, at the time they were facing all kinds of scary things like: rampant misinformation! social unrest! opportunistic foreign adversaries! election interference! and more!
Does anyone doubt this? Does anyone seriously claim the government did NOT micromanage the media during the pandemic?
Now the question now: when did the government let go? Put another way, did the government ever release its tight media control? Or are there new post-pandemic departments of government-employed writers feeding demented propaganda pieces to papers like the Times for national security? Why? To maintain narrative stability. To prevent riots, enemy interference, domestic terrorism, and what have you.
But how well is the government’s skeletal hand guiding its media victims? Not well. Axios, two weeks ago:
It’s the cordyceps fungus all over again, and it’s killing the host. Media has been hollowed out by increasingly desperate national security state working overtime like swarms of zombified ants to stabilize the narrative. That’s why we get ridiculous, WWII-style, over-the-top propaganda like this stupid, commentless NYT article.
Remember: this kind of thing only works in the dark. They can’t survive any transparency. So shine some light on it. Call it out when it happens.
Some of you will inevitably focus on the other implication of this story, that the deep state clearly expects Trump to lose again, and they obviously expect the circumstances to be highly suspicious again. I don’t doubt they think that, or at least are working toward that result. We are, in fact, in a war. Battles over the election security are happening at many different levels, some seen, some unseen.
We should only focus on what we can control. Don’t get distracted. Vote and nag others to go vote.
And remember, Christians, Jesus commanded us to not worry. Secular folks, it’s time to whip out your copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.
🔥🔥 Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a story with an astonishing connection to that Times’ story, headlined, “GOP leaders in some states move to block Justice Dept. election monitors. Like the Times story, it wasn’t news. Several red states, including Texas and Florida, have refused to let DOJ “election monitors” inside state polling places since 2022 when Trump wasn’t on the ballot.
On an irresistible aside, look at how the WaPo sees the two candidates in this ridiculous sketch:
They deleted all her Asian and African features. They whitewashed Kamala! But I digress.
As I said, the “banned election monitors” story was non-news. But unsurprisingly, I discovered the same psychological trickery in the WaPo article as was in the Times’ article. They’re trying to link the basic concept of election security with the emotional weight and overwrought imagery of January 6th. (And notice how they carefully placed Trump’s name right after the reference to that super terrifying day:)
Whoever is writing these articles has one goal: creating a powerful psychological association amplifying liberal fears and preemptively framing all election security policies as threats to democracy. The strategy redefines the term “election security” in an implicitly partisan way: anything that doesn’t align with federal oversight or DOJ involvement is suspect, potentially dangerous, and anti-democratic.
In other words, whoever was behind the Times article was behind this one too.
🔥🔥 Finally! It’s about dang time. They held out as long as they could. Bloomberg ran the story yesterday headlined, “Boeing Dismantles DEI Team as Pressure Builds on New CEO.” The company’s brand-new CEO has announced a radical, controversial new hiring concept that you probably never heard of: they call it merit-based hiring. Ideas like that are why these CEOs make the big bucks and you and I aren’t even in the running.
Maybe it’s fairer to say that Boeing’s new CEO makes the big bucks by being brave enough to even saying merit-based hiring out loud. Doesn’t he realize that hiring for merit is inherently racist because of patriarchy and other woke buzzwords?
If he didn’t know that, I bet he finds out soon.
And guess who blew out Boeing’s DEI door plug? None less than Cuban-American conservative filmmaker Robby Starbuck, who corporate media likes to call an “anti-DEI activist.” Robby only asked, that’s all:
Robby deserves tons of credit, but at this point, having marooned several astronauts, crashed their newest plane, being under multiple criminal investigations, and after shedding plane wheels faster than a toddler carrying an open can of puffed cereal, I’m guessing all Boeing needed was an excuse.
Boeing was, in many ways, as much sinned against than sinning. As a massive federal defense contractor, Boeing was subjected to the vicissitudes and vagaries of the ever-shifting, sulphuric winds of political correctness blowing from Washington. My personal theory is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was enemy action, probably Chinese, evidenced by the fact that DEI does not exist outside the West, and even exists in Western countries, like the Nordics, which lack any history of minority oppression.
So, in that sense, DEI was inflicted on Boeing and other companies. Of course, these companies also failed to resist, even as their planes’ engines kept bursting into flames every time they turned around. Boeing yielded to greedy temptation; at first, DEI came packaged with delicious free candy in the form of incentives like competitive advantages for lucrative, overpriced government contracts.
At bottom, on a personal level, DEI is bad enough. But it also casts ripples of toxic downstream side effects that corrupt corporate culture. For one thing, DEI destroys accountability, and not just for the DEI hires themselves, who sport DEI armor against any and all criticism of their poor work product, bad grammar, or being late. That kind of criticism can only, after all, be racist and sexist and homophobic and on top of that, most recently, white supremacist.
Arguably even worse, DEI destroys managerial accountability. First, it shifts corporate managers’ incentives away from performance-based metrics toward goals related to hiring people with particular skin colors and atypical sexual preferences. Managers get double-bonused for hiring people both with rare skin colors and who also have unusual sexual appetites.
That is bad enough. But DEI hiring quotas also give managers unaccountability armor similar to the anti-criticism force fields surrounding their bonus-eligible hires. If a middle manager’s department or unit underperforms by delivering quality products or services, that manager can just explain away the underperformance, as a necessary cost of meeting the higher priority goal of hiring people for their inherent characteristics that have nothing to do with their job skills.
It was, in hindsight, completely predictable. If companies wanted to quickly pack the ranks with people who look a certain way or have sex a certain way, to increase their federal bid-review scores, then merit must take a back seat. It’s simple priorities. One easily imagines upper management de facto relaxing traditional performance standards in light of requiring middle managers to compromise on merit.
At first, this tradeoff could actually have been worthwhile, since higher DEI-based bid scores conferred measurable advantages in securing fabulously lucrative government projects. But once all the big companies had followed suit, so that they all earned similar DEI points, the contracting advantages evaporated, with the result that SpaceX blew Boeing off its launch pads.
Anyway, I am glad to see Boeing returning to something resembling sanity. With any luck, other companies will follow Boeing’s lead.
🔥🔥 Unexpectedly! Yesterday, the San Fransisco Standard ran this expert-baffling headline:
In other words, “Drug Party Runs Out of Pizza Dough, Seeks Venmo’s.”
Anyone who’s been following the C&C Burning Man coverage knows we take a dim view of all this excess in the desert, and have tracked its long, slow rise alongside various cultural red flags, and count its rapid fall as generally good cultural news, procured in this case largely by Bidenic economic pressures and extremely wet weather.
Burning Man, Inc. is now seeking donations. It’s anyone’s guess why donating to this insane, irreligious, hedonistic desert concert is necessary, appropriate, or charitable in any way. It apparently needs $20M by this time next year to stay afloat, or at least avoid a price increase that the CEO warns will make the concert “less diverse.”
A twenty million dollar shortfall. For a “grassroots” concert venue, on nearly-free land, where people bring their own accomodations, food, supplies, and supposedly are roughing it. What could possibly be so expensive?
Burning Man is fake. Fake, fake, fake.
The article includes a link to Burning Man’s own proprietary donation page, where it explains that donations are tax-deductible. For some reason. I did not make that up.
Non-profit laws desperately need refreshing.
🔥🔥 Enjoy this hilarious clip of sex worker and Kamala Harris celebrity endorser “Cardi B” completely unraveling at a Harris rally after her teleprompter crashed. It was ugly. And I’m not just talking about the rapper. She ended by reading her speech off a cell phone.
CLIP: Democrat party luminary struggles for coherent thought (1:25).
In many ways, Cardi B is the perfect celebrity to stump for Kamala Harris. They are similar in so many ways. I’m not saying it. But you know.
Have a wonderful weekend! I’ll see you back here on Monday morning, election eve, and we’ll get ready together.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
