Even I'm Surprised At MSNBC's Assassination Meltdown
Even I'm Surprised At MSNBC's Assassination Meltdown
This week on MSNBC has been so exceedingly bizarre that it leads me to wonder if Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast, even watches the network he manages. The rhetoric on the network over the past year has been a consistent drumbeat of dog-whistling cries for someone to assassinate Donald Trump. Literally, as the assassination of Trump was happening on Saturday, a guest was on Jonathan Capehart’s program shouting that Donald Trump was a conman, a criminal, and a traitor.
The post-assassination coverage hasn’t been any better. Rachel Madow described JRR Tolkien as a favorite of the far right and alt-right when discussing the name of JD Vance’s VC firm. Joy Reid has continued to peddle conspiracy theories that Donald Trump was not actually shot. And Alex Wagner said JD Vance’s wish to be buried with his relatives is an “easter egg of white nationalism.”
But that’s not all. Watch:
I'm not sure it still exist, but the USSR had a 'newspaper' called TASS. Americans came to expect every single thing it said was an outright lie..
It's pretty close to that point with MSNBC.
My base theory on what is wrong with these people is this.
First, it derives from Jordan Peterson and other psychologists that explain how the human animal pursues status in the social hierarchy as a primary motivation over everything else except the basic survival needs.
Changes to the economy where so many pathways toward earning a good life through productive enterprise had been destroyed by the Global Order and the pursuit of globalism, combined with the increase in college-educated and technical progress that resulted in everyone being connected to a screen 24x7x365... it has stacked too many highly-educated, entitled, status-seeking, upper-class people into a career hopper where the supply of pathways or productive achievement are fewer than the demand.
Social media came along and the US shifted to an entertainment economy. People could monetize likes and clicks and become mini celebrities without do much real work. At the same time the fall from productive enterprise that had been mortgages away to China and Mexico and other countries, looting and mooching took over as a preferred way to achieve power and wealth... and the higher social status that was always the driving motivation for both. Wall Street was generating the wealth. Public sector "servants" started being paid much more than the private sector including million dollar retirement packages. Successful new tech enterprise exploited the Internet to optimize and cannibalize existing industries (Amazon and traditional retail, Uber and Lyft the taxi industry, Google the traditional advertisement economy, etc.).
For these elites that have figured out how to navigate this new entertainment, looting and mooching status-making environment, Trump is a threat to it. They also see the old productive merit environment as a threat, because they lack experience and capability to achieve their demanded level of hierarchical Statius within that environment. Frankly, they are too lazy and too risk-averse to start and grow their own productive enterprise. This is why they hate the working class and Elon Musk. They see that productive cohort as a threat to rise again as the premier admired people... people that invent, make, build, grow and fix real things. They have built their pathways to achievement, however destructive to the country, and are going to fight to the bloody death to prevent the productive class from taking back the top position of status.
This is why DEI and ESG came to be. They are desperately trying to rig the system to no longer reward productive merit, but identity along with prestigious higher learning credentials. They are also pushing the climate crisis narrative and related regulatory extremes to hamper small business starts and growth that would provide the productive pathways for others than them, because they are never going to get their hands that dirty. They want more corporate consolidation because when in power they can collude with these few people running the corporations in a giant quid-pro-quo arrangement that benefits both in securing and locking-in their wealth and power (status) generating sandbox.
They have more money today. They have more attorneys supporting them, because by nature lawyers are looters in the economy. Few of them do work to produce any new value in the economy. They tend to take from the productive economy, and thus have common interests with the upper class coastal and big city political elites that call the Democrat party their home.
Unraveling all of this is going to be more complicated than what the current feckless GOP can handle. We are probably looking at decades of back and forth until we reach more of a rock bottom. I suspect we will have another World War and from the ashes, we will learn and rebuild back to something normal.
But one start is to shift our entire education system to adopt a singular mission to prepare each student for the next step toward achieving an economic self-sufficient life. At the same time we can pull back manufacturing and industry that we allowed our greedy Wall Street owned corporations to export to China and Mexico and other countries. We can apply more tariffs to foreign goods to match their blocks on our access to their markets. We can provide subsidies to industries that locate in labor surplus areas of the country to help them get established. We can stop sending kids to earn useless degrees from expensive colleges and universities... and instead push more to trade school.
What we need to do is to raise the profile again of the productive man and woman over what is now the dominance of the elite looter... the vulnerable narcissists that both demand you bow down to their superiority while also recognizing their victim status. The money and power needs to be in the hands of industrialists and productive workers again. The pathways to a good life need to be returned to one of production and not entertainment and looting.
Trump is the only leader that offers even the slightest hope for this. That is why they want to kill him.