Preaching to the choir
On dividing and conquering, and the inversion of the American left and right
You’ve probably seen pictures of the “record number” of cargo ships waiting to be unloaded in Los Angeles Harbor. And you’ve probably already been affected by the “global supply chain breakdowns” being blamed on the scourge of Covid-19.
On Oct. 15, the second highest-ranking employee of the U.S. Treasury Department went on ABC News and basically said the White House can’t do anything about fixing the logjam of cargo ships because…the unvaccinated!
Calling the empty shelves across the country an adverse effect of “an economy that’s in transition,” deputy treasury secretary Wally Adeyemo said:
“The reality is that the only way we’re going to get to a place where we work through this transition is if everyone in America and everyone around the world gets vaccinated.”
OK. This is problematic on several levels.
First, it makes it sound as though the Biden Administration is willing to hold America hostage to reach its World Economic Forum and World Health Organization vaccination targets.
“You don’t want to get the jab? Fine. No chicken for you! Also, no computers, no car fix, and don’t even think about going to the hospital because half the doctors and nurses quit rather than get the vaccine!”
Even more disturbing is the fact the White House, Congress, and the mainstream media know their dream of universal vaccination is dead in the water. It ain’t gonna happen — at least not this time around.
As reality — in the form of data on the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines from the countries with the highest vaccination rates — continues to seep past the MSM and social media firewalls, unvaccinated Americans are much less likely to take the jab now than they were earlier this year. (When they somehow hesitated or refused the vaccines despite the government’s generous offers of free donuts, free french fries, college tuition, pickup trucks and a shot at special lottery money.)
In a recent piece titled The Cult of the Vaccine, former Rolling Stone political correspondent Matt Taibbi discusses the mainstream media’s frenzied battle to outdo themselves in downplaying positive clinical trial results of Merck’s proposed Covid-vaccine-in-a-pill, molnupiravir.
“Moralizing was exactly what journalists were once trained not to do, at least outside the op-ed page,” Taibbi writes. But since Trump’s surprise election in 2016, it became an indispensable part of the job:
“This was the beginning of an era in which editors became convinced that all earth’s problems derived from populations failing to accept reports as Talmudic law. It couldn’t be people were just tuning out papers for a hundred different reasons, including sheer boredom. It had to be that their traditional work product was just too damned subtle. The only way to avoid the certain evil of audiences engaging in unsupervised pondering over information was to eliminate all possibility of subtext, through a new communication style that was 100% literal and didactic. Everyone would get the same news and also be instructed, often mid-sentence, on how to respond.”
Taibbi sees the American news consuming public as split into two warring faiths: on one side those who trust The Science (TM) and support the authoritarian enforcement of what they believe to be the social good; on the other, those who believe the country is controlled by “corrupt elites lying about everything from election results to vaccine efficacy.”
He points out that the left’s religious fervor in promoting universal vaccination as the only way out of the “pandemic” is eerily similar to the pretentious and hypocritical pronouncements of televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart and Jerry Falwell that we social liberals loved to mock in the 1980s.
I’m enjoying getting reacquainted to Matt Taibbi’s writing on Substack. He’s in fine form these days. Still funny after all these years, perhaps even more so now at a time when the mainstream media companies seem less like news organizations than like rival cult factions competing to see who can commit intellectual mass suicide first.
In The Cult of the Vaccine, he makes an observation that actually surprised me. Namely, that the farcical repetition of boilerplate propaganda phrases such as “falsely claimed” and “Russian misinformation” and “vaccine hesitancy could prolong the pandemic” that has turned reading formerly well-written papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post into an almost impossible chore is not intended for the heretics:
“News flash: the instinct to armor-plate even unrelated news subjects with layer after layer of insistent vaccine dogma is not for the non-immunized, who mostly don’t watch outlets like CNN or read the New York Times. Outlets apply that neurotic messaging for their own target audiences, who’ve been trained to live in terror of un-contextualized content, which everyone knows leads to Trump, fascism, and death.”
The unvaccinated, by and large, aren’t reading the organs of mainstream dogma, Taibbi argues. They’ve long ago switched over to companies like Fox, Newsmax and OAN whose messaging is tailored specifically to their worldview.
“The people gobbling down these pieces by Bloomberg and the Times that have the journalistic equivalent of child-proof caps on every paragraph that even parenthetically mentions COVID really believe that content has been dumbed down for some other person,” Taibbi writes.
“They think it’s someone else who can’t handle news that vaccines work and that there also might be a pill that treats the disease, without freaking out or coming to politically unsafe conclusions. So they put up with being talked to like children — demand it, even.”
What would be the purpose of this strategy, or tactic? I wonder. Then I think of how social media algorithms have divided the country along similar lines, slowly and inexorably trapping people in custom-made echo chambers where they’re fed news and opinions by paid influencers — and fellow mind-controlled users — that reinforce the rightness of their position and encourage them to cancel, ostracize and shout down anyone who holds a different opinion.
Divide and conquer. The oldest strategy in the book, but one we’re still falling for.