The latest bullshit the New York Times has pulled is so ridiculous that it demands comment, but other than pointing it out, there’s not much to say, so this is going to be pretty short.
On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that Biden had told an ally that he knew he had only days to salvage his candidacy.
Andrew Bates, the White House Senior Deputy Press Secretary and Deputy Assistant to the President, says (repeatedly) that the NYT gave the Biden team only seven minutes to respond before they ran with it:
Just to be utterly clear, Mr. Bates reiterates:
So the New York Times got something wrong. Big effing deal, right? What else is new?
Ah, but you and I, being sane, non-Woke, and properly cynical about media institutions, are used to the people we trust being treated this way by the New York Times. What’s interesting and noteworthy about this is twofold: one, that they are being this shitty to a Democratic administration. Two, that so many people (even some non-Woke people who just haven’t quite figured it out about media institutions yet) fell for it.
I spent most of Independence Day working on teaching myself my newest creative pursuit, painting, and listening to various political podcasts from YouTube.
Every once in awhile I turn on the “autoplay” feature and let YouTube’s algorithms decide what plays next. I started it on a political podcast — I don’t remember which one, but it could have been almost anything since I listen to a variety of political content from all across the spectrum — and listened just about all day.
Podcast after podcast after podcast loaded, and literally all of them were talking about that New York Times story. They went on and on about how great it was that Biden understood he may have to go, that the New York Times story gave them real hope that Biden was going to do the right thing.
These podcasts will in turn shape the discourse of both Washington, DC’s chattering class and ordinary people, as the media covers what other media are talking about.
And all of it is based on bullshit because the New York Times couldn’t wait more than seven minutes to get a comment from the Biden team.
The New York Times may once have been a proper newspaper; I don’t have any idea.
Today, it is nothing more than a narrative engineer. Anyone who doesn’t recognize this fact is telling you that they are too stupid and/or naive to trust.
Just about all of these podcasts talked about the possibility of another Trump term with the same kind of histrionic fear mongering that we heard in 2015 and 2016, which is part of what prompted me to write something short on Substack Notes, which I will end by pasting here.
SHORT RIFF ON ‘NEW NORMAL’
My friend Josh Slocum and I frequently discuss the ‘new normal’, which can be very hard to define.
I tend to think of it as the post-COVID world wherein many things we used to take for granted are gone — and worse, many people seem to think those things never existed at all.
I just got home from an outing that involved what used to be the standard: polite, respectful customer service. The clerk even corrected my deaf-girl-who-has-only-read-but-never-heard-a-fuckton-of-words-and-says-them-wrong pronunciation in the most polite way possible. She just made sure to use the word herself, pronouncing it correctly, in answering each question. It was such a nice experience, noticeably so—but it used to be normal. Reflecting on these things gave me a small insight.
The anti-Trump shrieking in this election year is, it seems to me, an aspect of ‘New Normal’ — the same absence of memory that has seemingly erased the fact that so many things (bagging your own purchases everywhere, stores having irregular hours due to “staffing issues,” the expectation of never going anywhere if you have even a mild sniffle) are new, has erased the fact that WE ALREADY HAVE FOUR YEARS OF KNOWLEDGE ABOUT WHAT TRUMP IS LIKE WHEN HE’S PRESIDENT.
You may not like his policies, his attitude, or his behavior, but you do know that he refrains from building concentration camps to lock up all the pansexual non-binary demibois with fae/faer pronouns. You do know that he appoints strict constructionist judges and sits back to let states make their own decisions about abortion. You do know that he is perfectly willing to appoint openly gay people to cabinet positions—just not queer lunatics who steal luggage and teach BDSM courses.
And for all the shrieking about January 6 as a “coup attempt,” you do know that Joe Biden is non compos mentis, so whoever is acting as POTUS, it’s not the guy who got elected. So to vote for Biden is to vote for an ongoing coup.
Maybe ‘New Normal’ is a term for ‘parts of life where we pretend not to know the things we know’.
Yeah. Maybe that’s it.
ICYMI: In Case You Missed It
I’ve written a lot in the last ten days, and moved some stuff out from behind the paywall. Here’s what you might have missed:
I did a long, deep dive into Jill Biden’s dissertation, since there’s a good chance she is the acting POTUS at this time. “Madam President’s Midwit Manifesto” has had the most successful 48 hours of anything I’ve ever written.
The discourse around Biden’s mental decline has caused a lot of commentary on ableism and how media covers issues of mental ability, which has been so reminiscent of Lionel Shriver’s recent novel that I moved “Trans Lies Are Lies,” my review, out from behind the paywall.
Part 1 of my debate response, “The Smell Was Elephant Shit All Along,” addresses the complicity of our media commentator class in the pretense, blown up by the debate, that Biden was fit for office. Part 2, “The Elephantgate Debate,” looks at what could happen and gives my prediction for what will happen.
Given how the Democrats seem determined to get him a second term, my model for How to Think About Trump is newly relevant.
Finally, “If Different Perverts Got There First” is a counterfactual proposing that, instead of autogynephilia as the engine for gender ideology, it was a different group of paraphiliacs indoctrinating our kids. The first section is brutal reading. If you can’t handle it, just scroll down to the header “Something Real And Even More Disturbing.”
The New York Times stopped being an actual newspaper about 20 years ago and since descended into political hackery. The are however, still the lead in shaping, or at least announcing, the direction of media narratives so this is a bad look indeed.
Are any major newspapers worth reading because they seem to be propaganda machines