MSM went “all-in” on a discredited COVID narrative.

Since the pandemic I’ve been saying that confidence in the mainstream, corporate press has been irreparably damaged. After four years of non-stop Trump Derangement Syndrome so intense that even some liberals were wondering if the press had gone overboard on editorializing – Covid hit, and a lot of normies now see the MSM for what it really is: agitprop and brainwashing.

Cancel culture and censorship reached such absurd levels that we started to see an exodus of high profile reporters (Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, et al) exiting corporate news outlets and setting up on their own, after they committed the sin of colouring outside the lines of establishment precepts (Taibbi and Greenwald having been arguably left-wing commentators, have now been designated “far right extremists”).

Glenn Greenwald & Matt Taibbi were my early journalistic heroes. But nowadays they repeat deluded & dangerous right-wing propaganda. An explanation of how those who see themselves as reasonable can end up swallowing parts of the right’s warped worldview:https://t.co/VCXPJJA46k

— Nathan J Robinson (@NathanJRobinson) June 17, 2021

The MSM went all-in in Covid, but every core tenet of the Covid narrative has since fallen apart:

• This thing came out of a lab
• Ecohealth and Fauci are up to their asses in it
• The lockdowns did more damage than anything else, and
• Everybody was forced to take a vaccine that not only doesn’t work but also seems to be the common denominator in an excess fatality rate that exceeds the pandemic itself.

Not good.

With the tempo being set by numerous media collapses, especially by overtly “woke” ones: Buzzfeed’s bankruptcy, Vice circling the drain – and television viewership plummeting, the stage was set for a few key moments that will be remembered as defining the extinction level event rolling through corporate media:

#1) The Rise of Dark Carlson

After Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, the number 1 pundit on television with the highest viewership today, he didn’t go to a rival network (Newsmax offered him $25 million), he decided to take his own show out on Twitter.

This is a defining moment in the extinction event hitting the corporate media these days. https://t.co/jyly9WROKp

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) May 9, 2023

Apparently, on his own, not part of any deal with Elon Musk, Carlson is just letting it all hang out. In one of his first installments, he called into question the 9/11 narrative (Why did Building 7 just fall into its own footprint for no reason?). It prompted one observer to coin the term “Dark Carlson” for what is transpiring via this channel.

#2) The Schism of RFK Jr. coverage

RFK Jr, having thrown his hat into the ring to challenge Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination, immediately drew fire from the MSM, having unilaterally decided that anything RFK says is automatically “misinformation” (see the closing remarks on “rhetorical circularity”, below).

RFK Jr, for his part, created an account on Nostr.  

Nothing epitomizes the Industrial
Age vs Network Era like these two images – screen capped back to back… pic.twitter.com/7q10zEST7z

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) May 11, 2023

Nostr is a fast growing decentralized social media network, contrast with Twitter – which is governed by the vagaries and whims of whomever owns it – Nostr is decentralized at the server level to relays (which anybody can run) at the the account level to individual users. This protocol is spreading like wildfire and it’s beyond censorship.

The juxtoposition between a sclerotic,  industrial era, mediocre network clutching their pearls over RFK’s “misinformation” and RFK showing up on Nostr tells us a lot.

While this is not seen as much of a big deal yet, this is a signal worth paying attention to.

#3) CNN’s disastrous town-hall with Trump

I didn’t watch it, and when you look at the reporting on it, both left and right traditional outlets are declaring victory – but the reality is that CNN pulled the plug on it 20 minutes earlier than scheduled (ten key moments here).

Love him or hate him, Trump draws attention and viewers unlike any other personality – and the fact that CNN drew the curtain early signals one thing: it was a disaster for the network and probably didn’t hurt Trump. After deftly manipulating a hostile media and leveraging social media cunning to win the presidency in 2016, it doesn’t look like the MSM has learned much.

When the media falls, so does the system it supports

When the Soviet Empire fell in 1989 – 1990, anybody predicting it even months earlier would have been ridiculed. When it happened it took everybody by surprise (even the CIA) and unfolded at astonishing speed (Victor Sebestyen’s Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire covers it brilliantly).

Things move even quicker today – where we are in the early innings of what will possibly be the final financial crisis of the fiat money system.

In another great book about Late Stage Communism,  “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More“, Alexey Yurchak chronicles the hyper-normality that saturated the zeitgeist during “the last Soviet Generation”. The “Dead Irony” chapter outlines the ingenious forms of unauthorized humour.

A contemporary parallel is when you come across a Twitter account that exhibits such over-the-top support for All The Latest Things that you can’t tell if its satire or not. That is a type of performative dissidence called “Stiob” (unless it’s real).

Yurchak’s examination of “the hegemony over meta-discourse” and it’s disintegration ring eerily familiar to those keeping score today. One example is what he called “rhetorical circularity” : in our case it means that anything the MSM refuses to cover is “misinformation”, because there are no MSM citations to support it.

As I frequently comment, we’re in Late Stage Globalism. While many view Covid as the gateway to a “Great Reset” technocracy – it looks to me like it was instead, the a-c-c-e-l-e-r-a-t-i-o-n event of the millenia.

I’m not an accelerationist and the elites are certainly still pushing hard for that WEF-style authoritarianism.

But I’m just an observer and I’m here to tell you, that is what’s happening. Given the nature of technological compounding (“Future Shock”, as Alvin Toffler called way back in 1970), accelerationism is somewhat baked in and we just have to watch the implosion of corporate media (not to mention the self-destruction of Woke capitalism) to know it is happening.

My next ebook is The CBDC Survival Guide and I’m sending it free to Bombthrower subscribers when it’s done (early June). In the meantime, subscribe now and get The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto while you wait. Follow me on Nostr, or Twitter. 

Late Stage Globalism Is A Tale of Narratives vs Networks

Over the past few weeks in my weekly #AxisOfEasy newsletter I’ve been covering how Big Tech and the corporate media tried, unsuccessfully, to keep a lid on the Wuhan Lab origin narrative. At one point I half-joked “I’ll shut up about this when it’s safe to talk about Ivermectin”. This week, I did end up writing a piece about Ivermectin, namely how doctors can’t even mention it in their videos or podcast appearances without being penalized by social media platforms.

Brett Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist who has studied bats (from which COVID-19 purportedly originated) was recently on Triggernometry, the UK based podcast that my company, easyDNS, has been sponsoring since mid-2020. It turns out that neither Weinstein nor Triggernometry can say the word “Ivermectin” in their shows. If they do they’ll get an automatic takedown by YouTube and a strike on Facebook for violating community standards.

Matt Taibbi recently posed the question “Why has ‘Ivermectin’ become a dirty word?” He cites Dr. Pierre Kory in his testimony to a US Senate Committee hearing on medical responses to COVID-19 in December 2020. Kory was referring to an existing medicine that was already FDA approved that he was describing as a “wonder drug” in treating COVID-19, that drug was Ivermectin.

This Senate testimony was televised and viewed by approximately 8 million people. YouTube removed the video of this exchange. They later suspended the account of the United States senator who invited Dr. Kory to speak. (Kory also appeared on Brett Weinstein’s show and they took down that as well).

Associated Press for their part “fact checked” the senate testimony, and because, in their words “there is no evidence that Ivermectin is a ‘miracle drug’ against COVID”, they labeled it as false:

CLAIM: The antiparasitic drug ivermectin “has a miraculous effectiveness that obliterates” the transmission of COVID-19 and will prevent people from getting sick.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. There’s no evidence ivermectin has been proven a safe or effective treatment against COVID-19.

First, I find it a little presumptuous for a wire service to be fact checking senate testimony. Isn’t the job of the committee holding the hearing largely that of fact-finding? Isn’t that the entire point? The ostensible role of the press should have been to simply report on what happened. What we got instead was an editorial wrapped in a logical fallacy (appeal to ignorance) that was passed off as some sort of objective truth.

The coronavirus has accelerated the timelines on a lot of tectonic shifts that were already in motion. It’s pulled forward effects that would otherwise would have taken years or possibly even decades to play out. One of those dynamics is that the mainstream corporate press has self-immolated their own credibility in the eyes of their rapidly dwindling audience.

Until now the masses seemed to be inculcated with the slow burn of endless propaganda and sermonizing from as far back as the days of Edward Bernays (who coined the word “propaganda”). Now with the pandemic and all this talk about a Great Reset and the New Normal because of a virus that was made more infectious in a Chinese lab funded by US technocrats, this is all beginning to look (in the immortal words of The New York Dolls) like “too much, too soon”.

It may turn out that there is a saturation level of manufactured narrative that the public can be led to believe or tolerate and beyond that point it all begins to look like hyperreality. Not only do fewer people believe it anymore, more of them are done with even pretending to believe it.

With too many things that were presented to us as truthful information over the last year turning out to be wrong, or a lie and almost everything that was dismissed as “already debunked conspiracy theory” turning out to have more substance, we may be crossing that point now.

Mainstream media audiences are in secular decline.

The biggest audiences to be found aren’t on CNN or MSNBC anymore, but most of the people still watching TV are watching FOX, mainly because Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham are calling b/s on nearly every establishment talking point.

But I’m looking beyond that, outside of network TV. The hottest news outlets are fast becoming independent journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, self-publishing via their Substack. That’s mainly email.

Joe Rogan has a larger audience than Rachel Maddow and Don Lemon combined. So too does Steve Bannon, btw. The few times I’ve been on his Warroom I was astounded at the reach of his audience. According to company sources he’s doing between 2.5 and 3.5 million downloads per day. The last people I would ever expect to be tuning into Bannon are telling me “I saw you on Warroom”. (It’s mind-blowing).

Zerohedge has more traffic than Huffington Post, Vox, Vice, The Atlantic and pretty well any of the other bluecheck nurseries for aspiring establishment shills.

It’s because of independent, renegade journalists and people writing outside of major outlets that these stories are starting go mainstream despite the best efforts of Big Tech, enforcing whatever canon the corporate press deems to be truth, or the establishment anointed “fact checkers” who try to step in whenever something looks to gain traction:

The Wuhan lab origin was suspected for over a year (and the Fauci emails prove it). Zerohedge was on it almost immediately and got deplatformed for their troubles. It was finally pushed over the line in a Medium post by Nicholas Wade over a year later.

Ivermectin may be next round and it looks like if it gets anywhere it will be thanks to people like Matt Taibbi and Brett Weinstein.

What is the common thread here? It’s the power of decentralized networks and open source protocols vs narrative control that is promulgated from global governments, amplified by the corporate media, and enforced by technocratic platforms.

This is why crypto currencies won’t die. This is why things like Signal, Telegram, Mastodon, Keybase are spreading like wildfire. This is why the best way to build an audience in this day and age is still email. Everything I wrote in my book on defending from cancel-culture and deplatform attacks is even more relevant today than when I released it last year (I made it available for free a few months later).

It may seem like the censorship is absolute and that the narrative and the spin is overwhelming. But take solace that it only appears that way because the facade is breaking. As more people realize that the centralized technocratic system is failing, those who’s privilege and position are premised on it have to double down, triple down. They have to burn the boats. They’re fully committed now and because they have no other choice they have to overstep and overreach. Too much, too soon. Too late.

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