the truth deficit has become unsustainable

this is the summers of our discontent

when even MSNBC is no longer buying your claims of “putin price hike” things are not going well for your messaging machine.

frankly, it means you’re losing control of the narrative.

you need to cook up a new tale to tell. something riveting and special and rousing. so you enlist the help of old spinmeisters from days gone by, because let’s face it, those people will say ANYHTING.

enter larry summers, the clintonian treasury secretary and director of NEC under obama. long the strident propogandist, lawrence has really outdone himself here to the point where one starts to wonder whose side he is actually on.

this recent foray into fabulism constitutes a donkey whistle so high pitched that i think there are only about 8 equidae left in all the realm who can even parse this missive and not start wondering “is this a false flag operation to undermine the final shreds of trust and decency remaining to our political system and technocratic institutions?”

truly, the mind boggles.

imagine leveling such absurdist accusations around blaming the lack of trust in government institutions on “right wing denial of insurrection” while at the same time presiding over pro-BLM riot politics and the debasement of institutions and trust around having described the 2016 election as “hijacked” by russia and fueling the trump collusion narratives that have so badly failed to find basis in fact.

then imagine going here: (bold mine)

Summers, who was director of the National Economic Council under then-President Barack Obama, called for greater civility in Washington to help restore public confidence in the government. “I think it’s terribly important that we take the temperature down in Washington, that we recognize behavior that’s just out-of-bounds of reasonable and decency,” he said.

how is anyone save the most rabid echo chamber denizen supposed to take this seriously?

this is a guy calling for queensbury rules while right in the middle of kicking you in the groin and gouging your eyes.

and no one but the most crooked of hometown refs are going to let this one slide…

these are all tactics that work in moderation.

but it’s not a well you can go to too often.

it just gets too blatant and pretty soon everyone knows you’re lying and spinning and telling it like it ain’t.

you cannot say this:

The Hill @thehill

Joe Biden: "The job market is the strongest it has been since WWII, notwithstanding the inflation. [...] Millions of Americans are moving up to better jobs and better pay, and since I took office, families are carrying less debt on average in America, they have more savings."

in the 14th consecutive month of negative real wage growth.

no one will believe you. they feel it in their wallets.

they live daily with this reduction in buying power.

this savages your credibility and and any sense of your being a serious person. it’s deeply ironic to watch the “live your own truth” gang on gender and race and class oppression suddenly seek to tell people that they cannot recognize their own economic well being and need the government to tell them how good they have it.

but people are not stupid.

and more so around their own wealth and buying power than in just about any other field, they rapidly figure out the score.

this reality denial is not a tenable political practice.

it’s just addiction to pathological mendacity entering the late stages of disease where it kills the host.

and this understanding rapidly spreads.

any who will lie about X will lie about Y and Z as well.

and so getting caught anywhere starts to undermine confidence in everything. this is not the fault of insurrectionists undermining faith in institutions; it’s the fault of the entrenched intuitional powers that be running up vast veracity deficits on the public debit cards and then expecting to be able to spend the credibility they no longer have in the bank.

summers is taking out loans to pay the interest of past borrowing and wondering why he’s FICO 400.

not a great look for a one time sec-treas…

he’d like you to believe this was done to his political powerbase by malicious partisans, but the storytime of “all bad things occur because my political foes did them to you” no longer leads anywhere.

aggrievement alley has become a dead end.

the truth deficit is too wide to fund, the narratives and outcomes too perverse to credit.

and it’s not just economics, and public health, and climate, and hallucinatory precepts of personal identify weaponized into indoctrination and preferencing. it’s everything. it gets to the point where you would not trust these people to tell you what was for lunch without a forensic audit of the kitchen. there is a whole narrative created from invented salients and willfully lied about while censoring opposing views.

“shut up,” she said, “we do not allow the other side of arguments here and must have big tech ensure that you have no platform from which to disagree with me” is a pretty dire stance to see the white house national climate advisor take.

“We need the tech companies to really jump in,” she said, because highlighting the costs of green energy is “equally dangerous to denial because we have to move fast.”

this is quite a position for the alleged “side of science” to wrap itself especially in the wake of the last foray into “warp speed” and the debacle of bad science, worse government, and perverse outcomes that that led to because “we had to move fast.”

shutting down the actual discussion of physics in favor of ideology and crony corporatism has a truly terrible history of disaster. this is how you avoid having to admit mistakes, not how you plot a path to technocratic utopia. as long time gatopal™ doomberg is fond of saying:

“in the battle between physics and ideology, physics remains undefeated.”

to be erecting such edifices of inaccurate claims, adulterated data, rush job sciencyness to defend technocratic encroachment, and outright suppression of contrary viewpoints and rights to speak them is not a recipe for trust. it generates a noxious brew of failure and failing faith and everyone sees it and then gets increasingly angry as it becomes difficult to accept such ongoing treatment as anything other than being repeatedly called stupid by your government.

and nothing destroys confidence like watching the side of statist pseudoscience engage in suppression campaigns against not only scientists, but the scientific method altogether.

nothing destroys confidence like watching midwit bureaucrats tell doctors how to doctor and threaten their licenses for dispensing the advice they deem prudent.

nothing destroys confidence like watching economists speak like weimar propogandists to vilify foes for their own short sighted policies.

nothing destroys confidence like being told that the goals of the state are too important to allow you to voice an opinion on their sagacity.

this is always the refuge of regime collapse and of moral, fiscal, and intellectual bankruptcy.

those who cannot convince, compel.

those who cannot lead, lie.

but the ground truth is always the same.

and here endeth the lesson…