lies, damn lies, and post-truth media

long ago when the earth was green and young, there was an adage:

“you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.”

ah, what halcyon times were those, kinder days, gentler days, days filled with consensus reality and if not always reason then at least aspiration thereto. this provides heady contrast to days ravaged and ruined by the smooth-brain post-truth era of “of course i am entitled to my own facts” in which astonishing lengths are pursued in order to distort reality by the distortion of verity.

this seems the untenable offshoot of the post-modern subjectivist era. there is no world, there is just how i feel about the world, a world where adulterated data is used to underpin vast grifts and scams and where truth is, by design and desire, sent begging, a world where “jussie smollet really was lynched!" pervades and the made up hoax of it is lost upon many simply because when a whole side lies as one, over and over in parrot-like repetition, the noise drowns out the signal and the lie becomes the truth.

history and happenstance are edited, and reality is lost.

one of the common criticisms of this idea is that it somehow requires a grand conspiracy of talking points and lockstep reality-denial and as such that it’s simply implausible/impossible.

with this i vehemently disagree for two reasons:

1. such conspiricies clearly exist. the talking point lists have been found, the influencer paymasters revealed, and whole ecosystems of reporter embedding to push climate and race and who knows what else established and unearthed. much of the news and the feeders for the news (like AP) are pay for play activist organizations.

2. where you have sufficiently intense ideology, no conspiracy is required. cognitive dissonace will suffice. when you believe X firmly enough, you will reject evidence that contradicts it. this is an ingrained human trait and one made more acute and irirresistible by the peer pressure of conformity demands. if you are committed and your tribe demands your commitment, contradictory data is simply discarded. and this is the axle upon which modern propaganda practice turns.

at the confluence of these two processes. you have a fertile field of those who want to beleive X even and especially if X is clearly false. the more X is disproven, the greater the need to appeal to some authority to “prove” that it’s true. every time some dude in a dress dominates a sporting event for women, you need some claim to cling to in order to deny the evidence of your eyes.

and this is what the propagandists provide.

they trot out some ridiculous study claiming there is no difference between men and women authored by some captured, coin operated clown with letters after their name. the purpose is not to convince, it’s to convince those already convinced not to change their minds. it’s an excuse, a permission structure.

the fact that it looks absurd to you is not the point.

you are not the target audience.

but as the spell of societal hegemony and monopoly on speech breaks, that which has been said starts to look increasingly problematic.

the hallucinations one is asked to swallow become too severe and sleepers awaken. trust is lost.

this leads to doubling and trebling down on the lies because once one is deep into fabricated worldview, fewer and fewer facts may be countenanced or integrated. perception basically goes insane and departs from reality entirely because the cherished worldviews espoused cannot survive contact with what is.

it’s all smear, all fakery and the people faking the temperature or inflation data feel like heros for their fabrications or, more insidiously, cannot perceive them as lies at all so far gone are they in their ideological obsession. “the thermometer must be busted” is easier to imagine than “my life has been a lie.”

this spreads to every field, every topic, every person. the necessity of the lie becomes guaranteed and the only question remaining becomes one of whether it was witting or unconscious.

let’s take the example of karen attiah (seemingly so perfectly named for such outcomes as to make one wonder about whether we truly do inhabit a simulation).

karen was a reporter at washpo. she was recently fired over some matters related to charlie kirk.

karen claims this is unjust.

we shall cite her own claims in her own, unedited words here:

her claim is that she merely quoted charlie.

and her backers on this claim are many and powerful.

so then, one might ask, what is the problem? where is the lie? surely allowing reporters to quote people is both ethical and reasonable. so why should we not take her side?

well, there seems to be quite a good reason which is that “her quote is a lie.”

she altered it meaningfully and maliciously to make it appear racist.

and that is both journalistic and ethical malpractice. it’s race baiting and partisan poo flinging.

and for that, she absolutely should be fired.

let’s look at the basic facts:

1. charlie literally did not believe in race as a real construct, even genetically. he believed in this so strongly that i actually disagree with him as a matter of basic biology. this is not dispositive, but it goes to motive and character. this is useful context.

2. what charlie did see as an issue and what he did oppose was “DEI” and any sort of preferencing, quota, mandated or proscribed association by race. and he railed often and effectively against the beneficiaries of such preferencing, frequently taking them at their own words to do so. this is an example.

3. which brings us to the question which is dispositive: did charlie actiually say what karen quoted him as having said? and the answer is no. “find the source of this quote” was put to her and she could not. and that’s journalistic malpractice and ethical malfeasance because she altered the quote to make it appear a general case racial statement instead of a statement about some specific people that did no more than echo what they themselves had said.

this appears to be the source material for the fake quote:

he names joy reid, michelle obama, sheila jackson, and ketanji brown as people who have identified themselves as beneficiaries of affirmative action.

he says they have admitted this.

in response he says

“we know. you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. you had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”

(transcription mine, bold mine, please correct any errors)

we can argue about whether his take is right or wrong, but facts are facts: there are limited places at top schools and jobs and if we give some of those to some people because of their race or gender, someone else does not get to go or get the job. (and for the record, we could also argue about whose slot was stolen and i suspect that a number of asians might wish to be included in that discussion) but the idea that this was some categorical racism is just not supported by the text.

contrast this to karen’s claim of “his own words on record.” (bold mine)

“black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. you have to go steal a white person’s slot.”

this seems to lack some obvious fidelity to the original in a number of fashions, missing words, etc. but the glaring one is the dramatic shift of subject and loss of context.

“you (4 people who said you used DEI to get where you are) do not have the brain processing power”

becomes

“black women do not have the brain processing power.”

the specific becomes the general, a claim about four people becomes a claim about a race.

and that is journalistic malpractice. it’s unethical and it’s dishonest.

it’s alteration of fact to move the story to very different footing and claims about the unjustness of DEI become incitement to race war.

and at this point, i run out of patience with karen and her protectors.

context matters in media and it has been sorely lacking for many years from the “fine people” hoax to claims that tyler robinson was triple super MAGA.

what’s changed is that people are now being held to account.

and they need to be.

when someone takes the quote of “i have some serious problems with people saying that hugo chavez was a good leader” and runs off with “gato said ‘hugo chavez was a good leader,’ clearly the cat is a communist!” that’s not journalism.

that’s lying.

sure, i wrote those words in that order, but stripped of context they invert meaning and if you want to survive in the reputation economy of the modern, open agora you better be ready to get not just your facts but their contextual embedding checked. hard.

i have had my differences with elon musk, but i don’t think the world will ever understand the extent to which his acquiring and re-opening twitter saved it or the extent to which this changed forever the whole of the debate in america by bringing back the other side.

it was a rescue.

it was a turning point.

the unchecked and uncorrected horror of modern media beforehand was surreal. karens like karen were free to malign, misquote, and stir up hate, and they abused this liberty as propagandistic praxis to tell their own side what to think about the other side with whom they would never engage and to whom they would never deign to listen.

the alternative was pure owellian reality denial and made up facts.

you would never have known charlie, only the hard left partisan media pastiche of him.

you would have had no way to check facts, no army of fact checkers helping you, just more pay for play reality distortion and denial.

obviously, this has not been cured and the reindeer games of “accuse then quietly retract” go on, but things are changing and changing fast.

no reporter would have lost a job for this in 2021, no talk show host or squawking head would have faced censure and shunning for their dishonest shillery. no one would have fallon upon their sword. (sorry)

it’s a new day and what the sad dependents upon old media bias are feeling is that the culture they helped to distort is no longer with them and has rounded upon them. it has learned that they were the villains, the agents provocateur.

media lives downstream of that culture and tolerance for their messaging mendacity has ended.

the bugs are utterly over having the jar shaken until they fight and the vast silent center is surfacing like krakens from the deep.

and this will upend everything.

we the people are simply not willing to be lied to and baited into conflict with one another anymore and we will rise and we will take back the society that is ours.

and if this scares media, perhaps ask why.

these cuts do not even go into effect until 2027… (also, note the author)

though it often expresses that way, this is not about partisan, it’s about decency and honesty, and if one can muster neither, then what case can be made to leave you in posts of influence upon others and their world views?

we’re just fricking tired of the lies.

the great gap in america today is how many are sure they know that which simply is not and was never so.

and re-entry to reality will be jarring and feel like erasure and abnegation.

but it has to happen.

society scale reality denial is too expensive a luxury belief to be countenanced.

so facts will be checked and their purveyors held to account.

relentlessly.

and better days will come.