Dog bites man is not news: man bites dog is.
That defines news-as-freak show.
Right-wing freaks tend to be scary. They have short hair and boots. Or they are big and fat and coarse. They have very firm beliefs about who this country belongs to and express those beliefs in simple, Anglo-Saxon, terms. Even if they are suave, they come across as harsh and unsympathetic. It is very difficult to express right-wing ideas in a way that gains public support.
Left wing freaks are more friendly. They are victims. They are often female. If male, they are soft and squidgy. They want to give shelter and welfare to everyone. They want Equality. They want to be nice to people from other countries they have never met and will never live near. They look helpless and sympathetic in photographs, and better still, some of them look sexy. They REALLY BELIEVE. They are sincere. And somehow they aren’t threatening. They espouse beliefs that many of us think we should have if we were Good People.
So the left-wing freaks get the media coverage.
So people with real political agendas, with real consequences for taxation and quality of life, use the left-wing freaks to front their message. Someone organises those marches. Someone decides who gets hit by #MeToo. Someone chooses the targets for the SJW Twitter Army. Someone arranges the caravans from South America through Mexico. It’s not the same someone, and those different someones might not know each other. Someone else, many someone else’s, fund them. For reasons best known to themselves.
The same way that certain activist groups look around their communities for men who are psychiatrically-troubled and can be manipulated into driving a truck along the promenade at Nice. Or blowing themselves up in a nightclub. The activists can hide behind the man’s mental illness. The Police will go no further. MI5 will, but the public won’t see that, so the commentators say nothing is being done.
The point is, the mentally-ill truck driver and the left-wing marching protestors are fronts. Useful idiots. The issues the useful idiots promote aren’t the real issues, but are there to achieve other ends.
The freak-show isn’t real. What’s real is what’s behind the freak-show. If there is anything behind it except mislead, deluded rich people donating money to a cause that only exists to provide its organisers with salaries and grants. Sometimes, that’s all there is: a bunch of charities and activist groups whose first purpose is fundraising so they can meet the payroll.
Stop paying attention to the media coverage of the freaks, or of the latest faded forty-something to take down a man who got rich by luck, and is now going to be less rich because he’s dumb as rocks about women, or of the latest outrage faked up by a charity that has a big grant up for renewal.
You’re smart, you’re media-savvy. You know when it’s fake.
It’s all fake. Right now. Even more than it ever was. Lord Rothermere said it, Randolph Hearst said it: the news is what somebody doesn’t want the public to know, all the rest is advertising. Editors know this, and all they publish is advertising. Do you really think scandals about MPs’ expenses and rich people’s tax arrangements are news? These are stories that suit the Liberal-Elite Narrative. Advertising for Good Think.
Read a good book. Watch a black-and-white movie. Take a walk. Clean your kitchen.
You’re not disengaging.
Because you never were engaged in the first place.
Not through the media.
