Dr. Drew’s Awakening About the Corporate Media

How many of us have had comparable stories?  Enough happened over the past few years, we heard so much from the corporate Media that was so highly coordinated yet it didn't add up and the media was stunningly incurious? Even about elephants in the room?

Dr. Drew (David Drew Pinsky):

I am open to everything now. I'm open to things that I never thought I would have been open to. I really think that the door fully came open. And I've realized that everything in the in the news is BS. Everything. There is nothing that I can consume on any legacy media that I can trust. And that is shocking. And that's disturbing. And it makes you wonder how long it's been going on for and I'm concerned, it might have been a very long time.

Dave Rubin:

What are the straws that broke the camel's back on that?

Dr. Drew:

My interview with RFK, Jr. He was so reasonable and so smart, and he had so many interesting ideas and enlightened me to this cozy relationship between the regulators and the pharma companies, which I really wasn't aware of. I mean, I can't let a pharma company representative into my office to give me a pen with a drug name on it, and yet those guys are living together and cross-pollinating. I mean, that's mind boggling to me. [RFK, Jr.] had a very sensible ... didn't necessarily fully agree with it, but a sensible idea about vaccine research that he would like to put forward. Not that vaccines are bad. His family's all vaccinated, my family's all vaccinated. And at the end of that interview, he said to me . . . "Oh, my God, Drew, you are so courageous to talk to me." It blew me back in my chair. I thought, I need courage to have a conversation with an adult in a public setting?

And he was right. This is a time where I didn't realize how much speech was being suppressed. How much was being manipulated, how much. Then what happened after that was the Twitter files and I started seeing what's going on. And it's just, it's just been to me, this is all reprehensible. And what has happened as a result, I don't think I've shifted my political views. I've just really, I never imagined I'd be in this point in my life at this age and place in my career. Freedom fighting and the courage to stand up for it have been the most important things in my life right now. And that's crazy. That is crazy. I live in the United States of America and I have to worry about freedoms. I'm gonna fight for freedom. That is an insanity and I'm hoping it's something that will pass soon.

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Public: Trust in Corporate News Deservedly Continues to Plummet

Excerpt from "It’s Time To Save Civilization From The Pathocratic StateRescuing democracy and free speech from nihilism and psychopathologies will require new institutions — and your support," by MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER, LEIGHTON WOODHOUSE, ALEX GUTENTAG, AND ZAID JILANI at Public. . An excerpt:

[T]he events of the last year make clear that the media and political establishment in the US and other Western nations pose a far greater threat to democracy than the populist movements they relentlessly defame.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the release of the Twitter Files, and the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit revealed how widespread and near-total the Western establishment’s control of the media environment was and is. The picture it presents of itself as neutral, objective, and balanced is a lie. The media and political establishment are anti-populist, elitist, and anti-democratic. They deeply resent the rise of new independent voices through social media because they have long held undeserved influence over what ideas can be discussed, what’s important, and who can hold elected office.

The single word that best describes the professional-managerial class-dominated “deep state” agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, FBI, and others, along with news media corporations that engage in character assassination and disinformation, is “pathocracy.” ...

The good news is that the public increasingly distrusts the news media. Just 32% have some or a lot of trust in the news media compared to 29% who report “not very much” trust and 39% who say they have “none at all.” Nearly every major media organization saw its digital audience decline 13% to 35%. News media corporations will lose $2 billion between 2021 and 2026 due to a decline of print advertising spending from $7 billion to $5 billion, and flat digital spending. And mainstream news media companies laid off 2,681 people in 2023, a nearly 50% increase from 2022.

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The Social Costs of Sincere Truth-Seeking

I founded this website in 2006 primarily as my way of documenting my journey, my attempt to make sense of things around me. I've always tried to get things right, but that doesn't always work out. Looking back, I've found more than a few articles on this site where modern-day me disagrees with the me of the past. There is no way to get everything right, because truth-seeking is a never-ending task. 90% of the recipe is not giving up, staying in the game, not falling prey to tribal impulses.

We live in a tribal world, however. A world were powerful tribal forces are concocted not only organically, but by large media operations, often working in concert with the U.S. government, including the U.S. security state. Many people scoff that that. They are fish who fantasize that they are totally free, not constrained by the water in which they swim.

Many of the people I formerly spent a lot of time with have remained fully immersed in the left-leaning corporate news ecosystem. They grew up with the NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN and NPR. They have trusted these news sources for many years and they continue to trust them because they see FOX as the only alternative. They have been convinced by corporate media that they must avoid all independent journalists. Most of them think they are already well informed, but they have a one-sided understanding of many salient issues of the day, including censorship and warmongering, issues the democrats of ten years ago opposed, but now they largely favor.

How could that be? If you ask them, they have no answer for why they have flipped 180 degrees over the last ten years. They cannot point to any new evidence that explains their enthusiasm for supporting the war, including the war in Ukraine. It was so utterly strange how so many of them got quiet about the war in the Ukraine as soon as the U.S. turned its military might from Ukraine to Israel. How was it that so many of those gold and blue flags quietly disappeared from social media and front porches, without explanation?

Many of these same people, formerly ferocious opponents of censorship, now advocate for censorship. So much so that many of them deny the existence of the Censorship Industrial Complex, despite abundant evidence from the Twitter Files. Michael Shellenberger recently posted this graph on Twitter. Notice how Democrats have become big advocates for censorship:

Most people I know are intentionally and proudly ignorant of the decision of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision of Missouri v. Biden. They are sure they don't need to know anything about this decision even though they no almost nothing about it.  They run away when I try to tell them about these dystopian findings by the Fifth Circuit:

The Individual Plaintiffs have not sought to invalidate social-media companies’ censorship policies. Rather, they asked the district court to restrain the officials from unlawfully interfering with the social-media companies’ independent application of their content-moderation policies....The Plaintiffs allege that federal officials ran afoul of the First Amendment by coercing and significantly encouraging “social-media platforms to censor disfavored [speech],” including by “threats of adverse government action” like antitrust enforcement and legal reforms. We agree... [Article continues . . .]

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The Lies that Destroy Institutions

Do you ever wonder what is keeping you from saying the simple, good-hearted and obvious statement: "All Lives Matter"? It's the modern version of woke totalitarianism. Through the use of lies and cancel culture, it is destroying most of America's institutions.

Michael Shellenberger, author of "Totalitarian Manipulation Of Language Behind Woke Destruction Of Harvard, New York Times, And Other Elite Institutions. It's time for counter-Wokeism."

Investigative reporters have exposed a pattern of plagiarism by Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, that directly violates the university’s policy. . . .

The first salient feature of the above episodes is the willingness of institutional leaders to lie about what they are doing. The first response from Harvard’s Board of Directors was to deny that President Gay had committed any instance plagiarism and to threaten the New York Post with a lawsuit if it reported the opposite of that. The New York Times similarly lied about the op-ed piece it had published and effectively asked the oped page editor to lie about his departure. And similarly, the AAA falsely claimed that the anthropologists who wanted to discuss biological sex on a conference panel had not accurately represented their topic.

In each case, the institutional leaders lied in order to cover up unethical behavior. Harvard was covering up both the plagiarism of its president and the unwillingness of Harvard to do anything about it. The New York Times misrepresented the substance of the op-ed in order to disavow it and, perhaps, to justify forcing out the op-ed page editor. And the AAA lied about what the dissident anthropologists did in order to justify its blatant censorship.

And those lies and unethical behaviors all rest upon a set of underlying lies. Harvard lied when it claimed that it had selected its president on the basis of her qualifications, even calling Gay a “scholar’s scholar” despite her having a below-average scholarly record. The New York Times and the Harvard president, when she was still the Dean of Arts and Sciences, had been misrepresenting Black Lives Matter protests as peaceful and driven by a genuine epidemic of police killings. And AAA’s cancelation of the panel was based on the organization’s claim that biological sex is a spectrum rather than dimorphic. All of this lying is characteristic of totalitarian regimes...

Woke totalitarianism advances values that are contrary to the ones it espouses. It claims to be opposed to racism and sexism and yet promotes them through perpetuating the idea that people, by dint of their race or sex, are either victims or oppressors. It claims to be liberatory and empowering of those individuals designated victims while promoting the idea that they cannot escape their victim identity. And Woke totalitarianism promotes the notion that it is wise and truthful despite promoting such monstrous lies."

What is the solution? It's not going to be pleasant or easy, but we need to confront those who are tearing down our institution with their corrupted language.

Once we understand Woke activists and leaders in elite institutions as being in the grip of an anti-social and dehumanizing dogma which uses dishonest esoteric language to manipulate emotions and people, we can know to take them seriously, but not literally. At an interpersonal level, the best way to deal with narcissists is to ignore them, thereby depriving them of the attention they seek; at an institutional level, they must be confronted in a public way.

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Sasha Stone: How to Remake America

On a recent podcast, Sasha Stone condemned the Biden administration, offering some words of support for Donald Trump. Unlike Stone, I would never consider voting for Trump. Nor can I in good conscience vote for Biden, as I did three years ago. That said, I very much agree with Stone about the many ways the United States has gone off the rails during the Biden years. An excerpt:

Four words on a red hat. Make America Great Again.

Make America able to take a joke again.

Make America understand basic biology again.

Make America the land of the free and home of the brave again.

Make it okay to be white, a Christian, a male, a Jew, a woman, a mother and American again.

Make Thomas Jefferson a hero again.

Make movies watchable again.

Make America a country where we can still say what we think without fear of banishment, public humiliation or the loss of our jobs.

Make America tolerant again.

Make reality cool again, make it okay to reward merit.

Make it okay to be friends with people you don't agree with.

Lots of the hysteria is happening on both sides. It has to do with algorithms and their effects on our brains and our perception of reality.

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