[Sorry, essay is by Howard Kurtz, but it's on Josh's site.] He expresses the frustration and, yes, dread that many of us are feeling.
The current moment is so strange and attenuated in part because the robust public debate we’re accustomed to is shorn of any real meaning when one party to that debate doesn’t give a fuck about debating. You can’t debate democracy with people who don’t believe in democracy, or debating, or empirical evidence, or anything approximating truth or reality.
Most of political journalism fails to meet the moment because it has chosen to maintain – or is unable to break free of – the illusion that the 2024 campaign is another in the long line of great quadrennial public debates engaged in mostly good faith by two sides seeking to coalesce the will of the people around their preferred vision for the country. It’s nowhere more painfully apparent than watching the TV networks continue to try to competitively exercise their convening authority to stage the presidential campaign in front of their cameras. We’ve catalogued at length the ways that using the same old journalistic constructs normalizes Trump, creates false equivalencies, and generally allows the anti-democratic forces to pantomime as democratic while denigrating, undermining and delegitimizing democratic institutions, including news outlets themselves.
I'll put it a slightly different way, from the standpoint of an academic, whose profession requires debating according to rules that require my colleagues and I to honor empirical observations, accepted facts, and logic. Now I feel as though all the skills and knowledge I have acquired over a lifetime of hard work have become useless. Facts, even what I would normally consider to be ideas, no longer matter. Somewhere close to half the population has entered another world -- something like what the science fiction writer Van Vogt called Null A -- in which Aristotelian logic does not apply. They have entered into the world of a lunatic, a deranged, damaged and demented person, and chosen to live in his unreality. That the corporate media cannot grasp this certainly compounds the frustration, but I wonder how much it would really matter if they could? These people have simply gone mad.
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I hate to say it, but today's blog is also the view I have of what I would call the new terrible American unreality, where the governor of Florida gaslights the entire population of his state into believing that the climate disasters around them have no cause, and he is allowed to hire a quack surgeon general who convinces people not to take care of their health. In addition, he has been allowed to destroy a liberal college, and turn it into a bastion of conservative lies and bullshit. This truly is insanity.
Moreover, people like the current Republican vice presidential candidate change their names and their stated political beliefs innumerable times, and present their current names to the public as reality, when everything about these people, from their stated name to their gender and sexual preference is probably as much of a lie ... all their shortcomings and flaws are projected onto others as they seek to control women, minorities, personal freedom and the very perception of reality itself.
Like I said. Rupert Murdoch should've been prosecuted years ago.
What is the current characterization of a person who will say anything, including flat-out lies, to get something from you? I remember "used car salesman" years ago, but haven't heard that lately. "Rip-off" or "scam" artist? The point is that everybody fears losing something valuable, usually money, by being conned out of it by a web of lies and half-truths.
But they don't seem to mind giving away one of their most precious possessions, their vote, to people who are doing the very same things to them. And they are proud of being duped! The potential consequences of this scam are far greater than any of the smaller ones they are so afraid of.
The irony is that it is almost impossible to get them to see that they are being made fools of. (That word isn't nearly strong enough, but I just can't come up with one that would properly express the amount of shame and guilt they should feel for being taken so thoroughly.) I don't know how to change this, but the press isn't helping. Two examples:
Mark Milley, former chief of the JCS, said in Bob Woodward's upcoming book that Trump is fascist to his core and that he is the most dangerous man in America . (I don't have the direct quotes.) Pretty newsworthy stuff! It was first reported in The Guardian and The Independent, two English newspapers.
After Trump falsely accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield Ohio of being illegal and of destroying the town, it turns out that of the 199 prisoners in the town jail only one was from Haiti. That should have been a headline demonstrating Trump's lies; however, it seems to be less interesting than Tim Walz's claim that he was in China during the Tienanmen massacre when he actually only got there a couple of months later.
Reminds me of a line in Schiller's play about Joan of Arc, "Against stupidity the God's themselves battle in vain"
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