Walter Kirn:

“In a way, censorship is just for the prisoners who’ve escaped the info dome. You know, censorship is just shooting the escapees but keeping people inside the dome and playing that 24 hour news act like music as maybe the main imperative. That is the part that I think will truly blow our minds.”

Walter has perfectly expressed something that distresses me every hour of the waking day. There are vast numbers of people in the US who ingest only the high-calorie low nutrition version of information. I’ve referred to this type of “news” hundreds of times as “corporate news” or “legacy news,” to distinguish it from the work of journalists who rely primarily upon the contributions of individuals who value the quality of the work. The legacy news includes five major players who I have often featured in my posts about the legacy media walking in lockstep to withhold information or to propagandize us. Once upon a time these outlets practiced something more akin to journalism, but we can see and hear with our own eyes and ears (I have posted hundreds of examples) that these outlets are no even trying to tell us what is going on around us, no longer offering conflicting perspectives, no longer putting their stories into historical perspectives and no longer pointing out the hypocrisy of public figures who make claims that conflict with their prior statements each day. Rather, in coordination with the U.S. government (and its many agencies, such as DHS, DOD, CIA as well as CIA’s cutout USAID) our major news outlets work hard to convince consumers of pre-determined narratives–they write these plot first, then they go out to construct the facts. They do it like lawyers representing their clients in court–their is no attempt to be even-handed.  In short, they engage in Censorship and Propaganda: The modern day versions of Scylla and Charybdis.

People who continue trust legacy news outlets have been convinced by these big corporate-monied narrative-purveyors that alternate opinions and dissident voices are radioactive. As they did throughout COVID, they argue that dissidents are far more nefarious than people, way worse than people you merely find disagreeable. Dissidents must be avoided at all costs because the dangers they pose with their facts and opinions are existentially dangerous. This way of promulgating news is a great danger. For example, by pounding a simplistic narrative about Ukraine-Russia, as many as one million people have died and the US Treasury funds have been diverted from helping Americans to going into a big black hole.  As a result of stifling COVID dissidents, they got almost everything wrong (I found this on X recently:

Dozens of people with whom I once experienced mutual warm feelings have cooled. If we bump into  each other, they look at me with suspicion. Some of them have accused me of being a Republican, even though my views are largely consistent with what I’ve always believed, including this: for the 40 years during which I voted almost entirely for Democrats. That said, I have spent my entire life declaring my independence from tribes, political, religious and otherwise. I’m proud of that and I have a lot of criticism for Republicans too, for instance the elimination of the CFPB. My acquaintances on the new Left tend to show intense unwillingness to consider alternative facts and opinions. They are locked down and in fetal position. This is not happenstance–this behavior is the result of one the tectonic plates underlying their media ecosystem. In earlier times, their information diet might have been more varied, but they are now victims of Stockholm Syndrome:

From Grok:

Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological phenomenon where hostages or abuse victims develop a bond with their captors or abusers.

Origins and Naming:

First Identified: The term “Stockholm Syndrome” was coined by the criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot during a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1973. Four bank employees were held hostage for six days. After the ordeal, the hostages displayed unexpectedly positive feelings towards their captors, which was contrary to the expected reaction of hostility.

Key Characteristics:

Positive Bonding: Victims form an emotional attachment or sympathy for their captors or abusers. This might include defending them, feeling grateful towards them, or even romantic feelings.

Negative Feelings Toward Authorities: Hostages or victims might also show hostility towards those trying to help or rescue them, such as law enforcement or support services.

Perceived Humanity: The captor is seen as less of a threat or even as somewhat humanized in the eyes of the victim.

Psychological Mechanisms:

Survival Strategy: One theory is that it’s an adaptive survival mechanism where aligning with the captor increases chances of survival by reducing the likelihood of being harmed.

Cognitive Dissonance: To reconcile the reality of their situation with their need for safety, victims might change their perception of the captor, reducing dissonance by seeing them in a positive light.

Isolation and Dependence: Being cut off from the outside world and dependent on the captor for basic needs can intensify this bond.

When I run into people who have acceded to the censorship-industrial complex, they often float out comments about Musk and Trump being Nazi’s etc. I don’t usually take the bait because such conversations are no more productive than discussing religious dogma church-goers. Instead, I usually short circuit the conversation, asking “Where do you get your news?” I explain to them that, in my experience, people who limit their news diet to MSNBC/CNN/NYT/WaPo/NPR are not willing to explore other viewpoints. These people tend to associate only with others who get their news primarily from these same sources. Therefore, their mindset is mutually reinforced every hour by tribal pressures to conform to the views of their friends and acquaintances. Conversation should be like playing catch, engaging in give and take. Hearing an opposing viewpoint should be seen as an opportunity to learn something from someone else. This is John Stuart Mill 101. Everyone can benefit from civil discourse. This is the basis of the First Amendment, which is now seen as a threat by Democrats, who are strongly pro-censorship.

I work hard to expose myself often to viewpoints to which I disagree, but it often difficult. All of us are prone to getting trapped, unwittingly and often unconsciously in our own moral matrix. Jonathan Haidt offers excellent advise for overcoming this challenge:

The more we can expose ourselves to people who are not like us, the more we can understand the moral matrices of other groups, the more we can empathize with them and the less likely we are to demonize them.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

I began to see that many moral matrices coexist within each nation. Each matrix provides a complete, unified, and emotionally compelling worldview, easily justified by observable evidence and nearly impregnable to attack by arguments from outsiders.

The Righteous Mind, p. 125

When everyone in a group began to share a common understanding of how things were supposed to be done, and then felt a flash of negativity when any individual violated those expectations, the first moral matrix was born. (Remember that a matrix is a consensual hallucination.) That, I believe, was our Rubicon crossing.

Righteous Mind, p. 239

By the 2010s, most Americans were using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which make it easy to encase oneself within an echo chamber. And then there’s the “filter bubble,” in which search engines and YouTube algorithms are designed to give you more of what you seem to be interested in, leading conservatives and progressives into disconnected moral matrices backed up by mutually contradictory informational worlds. Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.

The Coddling of the American Mind, p.130

So the next time you find yourself seated beside someone from another matrix, give it a try. Don’t just jump right in. Don’t bring up morality until you’ve found a few points of commonality or in some other way established a bit of trust. And when you do bring up issues of morality, try to start with some praise, or with a sincere expression of interest. We’re all stuck here for a while, so let’s try to work it out.

Righteous Mind, p. 371

The great challenge we are facing is that the United States is intentionally creating a coordinate attack on organic thought. This artificially creates and enforces narratives that, when pumped out 24/7 creates a super-hardened death star filled with government narratives defended by those who are vulnerable to tribal pressures and unwilling to bear the social costs of challenging government-backed narratives, no matter how ridiculous or self-contradictory they might be.

What follows is a somewhat longer excerpt from Walter Kirn’s long discussion with Matt Taibbi on X:

Matt Taibbi:

A huge part of this USAID money, is funneling it to various groups overseas that will aid American foreign policy objectives. And God knows what that is, in some places, that might go to groups that, you know, that are something less than barbaric, but in some places, they’re going to groups that we’ve judged to be slightly less horrible than the other guys and I don’t want to spend that my money on that, as opposed to fixing the infrastructure in my state . . .

But then there’s also this vast media operation … There’s counter misinformation, which, when you really drill down to it, is building up an entire information ecosystem. It’s not just the censorship, it’s the whole thing. It’s that . . . we’re creating media scoring agencies that tell advertising companies whom to give their dollars to. We’re creating anti-disinformation operations that make recommendations to the platform to take people off. They don’t tell us what exactly these things do . . .

Walter Kirn:

Well, Matt, because if they succeed, they won’t have to tell us anything, right? I mean, NOT telling us stuff is what it’s all about, but it’s also about telling us stuff. And I think that’s as I said, you know, maybe last week we saw the censorship part of the equation. We haven’t seen the sponsorship side of the equation. In a way, censorship is just for the prisoners who’ve escaped the info dome. You know, censorship is just shooting the escapees but keeping people inside the dome and playing that 24 hour news act like music as maybe the main imperative. That is the part that I think will truly blow our minds.