The Role of the Media in Distracting from National Failures

by Chris Bray

I’m not sure which part of the employee handbook he violated, but Vivek Ramaswamy was obviously called into a conference with HR.

Federal debt has now passed $34 trillion, is well over 100% of GDP, and is on track to top $40 trillion in maybe two years. What are we going to do about that? We’re going to spend over a trillion dollars a year in the foreseeable future to cover the interest on that debt. Worth noticing?

The United States fought the Taliban for twenty years, accomplished nothing, and then let them take all of Afghanistan instead of just the half they controlled when we invaded. How did that happen? How did we spend thousands of lives and trillions of dollars on literally nothing? We trained and funded the Afghan National Army, which then turned out to not actually exist at the very first moment it was expected to function without us. Should we work to understand that failure? Should we maybe ask where the money went?

And so on. Pick your own top ten things that need to be discussed and examined. Covid policy, the emerging disaster of learning loss from school closures, the failure and increasingly obvious danger of the mRNA injections, our long history of remarkably unwise foreign interventions, the Frankenstein’s monster of our corporate-state merger and revolving door regulatory capture, the ideological rigidity of academic culture, whatever. There are crushingly obvious and disturbingly consequential failures all over our recent national record.

So our presidential candidates are facing persistent and aggressive questioning about…their willingness to denounce white supremacy. Is racism bad? Is racism bad? Is racism bad? Will you denounce it? Will you denounce it? Will you denounce it, denounce it, denounce it?

 
Denouncing things is very important! The commissariat needs to hear a firm, clear denunciation from you to clear your name for the record.

Journalists watched this….

….and then moved on to barking the usual ritual questions about denunciation ceremonies and the phantom “white supremacy.” We examine nothing. We discuss no failures. No serious questions ever break the cultural shell. We fight wars, lose them, and then drop it. Reading a lot about Ukraine, lately?

The function of the news media is to not talk about important things. They exist to distraction-blather about insurrection and racism, into the face of decline and failure, as a way of not talking about the decline and failure. In the United States, in 2023, we have no serious discussion underway at all about the American habit of failed foreign interventions, and no national debate about the growing chaos emerging from a global recognition of American weakness. The Houthis think they can shoot at us, for crying out loud. Wonder why.

 
The back off challenge is a distraction game on the golf course. People shout a steady stream of jokes and insults at golfers to make them screw up their drive.

 
This is the national news media. They exist to shout distracting non-sequiturs to trip people up as they try to do real things. It would be an enormous improvement if they merely became useless.

LINK