by Jeff Childers
I’ve long argued corporate media’s job is not to inform, but to enforce political orthodoxy and police the allowable boundaries of approved thought. So I was intrigued by yesterday’s otherwise useless New York Times article headlined, “‘Pod Save America’ Won’t Quit.” The article was just free advertising for a far-left podcast, but it included an astonishing admission.
This particular podcast launched in 2016 right after Trump’s election as a part of the ‘#Resist’ movement. Seeded with Soros funding, this far-left show with its three white male hosts is now arguably partisan Democrats’ most popular podcast. “They were the Obama government in exile for eight years,” explained Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of far-left news site Semafor.
Pod Save America is everything you would expect.
Now set the PodSavers aside for a moment. I have long argued that corporate media’s main job is no longer reporting news or investigating stories. Apart from misleading people and distracting everyone from important developments, corporate media’s primary function in 2024 is to promote globalism and depopulationism by messaging Democrats about what they are allowed to think and say.
Democrats accept playing a Game of Life where the rules provide they’ll be socially ostracized and professionally canceled for holding heterodox thoughts and words, but socially and professionally rewarded for their conformity. The carrot and the stick.
It’s a self-fulfilling prediction; liberals energetically police themselves and each other with gusto. They only need to know what’s permissible and what is verboten. Approved liberal orthodoxy is as flexible as a 12-year-old Romanian gymnast. It can turn on a dime, fly through the air with the greatest of ease, and change by the day.
Now, masks must be for everyone. (A few months later.) Now, masks are optional for anyone who thinks a seasonal cold is more dangerous than inhaling microplastics.
The media as Overton Window-setter is actually and literally mind control. That its subjects are willing participants makes them no less manipulated.
Back to Pod Save America. According to the Times’ article, the PodSavers were the first machine-Democrats to publicly question Joe Biden’s fitness after his disastrous debate with Trump. That first post-debate podcast, argued the Times, started the political wrecking ball swinging and ended with Kamala Harris’s selection for the ticket.
Now look how the Times described the PodSavers’ Biden-questioning podcast:
There it was! They know about it, too. For discussion topics to “once be unsayable” necessarily requires the existence both of rules of discourse and enforcers of those rules.
And, of course, they minted a multisyllabic term for this kind of mind control: “permission structures.” It’s something quite difficult for we conservatives to imagine since, while we have our own problems, we face nothing like punishing, self-reinforcing group orthodoxy.
Permission structures weren’t always the Democrat default; it’s probably a neo-Marxist feature. After all, they used to call the Democrat Party the “big tent party,” meaning it covered a diverse group of related political viewpoints. But now, the Democrats’ big tent has been shrunk to something like a clown car, and you must wear the outfit if you want to cram yourself in.
This kind of agenda-setting was well described in George Orwell’s 1984, where the Party didn’t just control behavior, but it also regulated what people thought through a combination of fear and linguistic manipulation. It could also be compared to the Soviet Union’s “approved narratives.” Or to its precursor, the 1960’s fascinating ‘agenda-setting theory.’
In its most technical definition, “permission structures” are conceptually larger than just media manipulation defining the boundaries of acceptable groupthink. As used by Obama officials, the term referred more broadly to a psychological process of lobotomizing someone’s deeply held beliefs and getting them to accept things they used to find inconceivably repulsive.
Exhibit A might be transgender surgeries. Don’t make me show you the pictures again.
Merely recognizing the fact of media’s cognitive manipulation through ceaseless creation and enforcement of ‘permission structures,’ its Marxist agenda-setting, and its Stalinist-approved narratives helps immunize us against its insidious effects. The tactics are wielded against all of us, even if the most successful example is “creating necessary spaces for Democrats to talk publicly about what had once been unsayable.”
Resist corporate media’s permission structures.
