Death Throes of a Talking Head

How Legacy Media Committed Suicide

A comedian on his couch. Digital snowflakes descend across the screen. Sometimes he’s joined by other comics, sometimes his best friend and jiu jitsu coach. They talk about various subjects, but it’s mostly nonsense, and oddly, it’s fascinating to watch. It’s my favorite way to kill time between meetings at my grueling desk job. I keep a small clandestine window open in the bottom right corner of my computer display. I habitually eavesdrop on these conversations between friends from Monday to Friday.

In a short time the couch turns into a home office set-up. Then it becomes a studio. Then a compound. There were others who came before him, but none captured the attention of the global population like he did.

Along the way more comics start their own broadcasts. Authors, intellectuals, regular people with something to say; they all follow his lead into the zeitgeist- many of whom passed through his golden gates and received his stamp of approval. In less than a decade millions of podcasts flood the internet- and those are the successful ones. There are millions more that languish at the bottom of the streaming charts, trampled by the stampede of infinite content.

Since the invention of the radio society at large has fostered a healthy distrust for government and their adjoining media organizations. History is littered with dissenters who dared to push against the narrative. Jesus Christ- the central figure in the religion from which all western nations were built- was himself a direct opponent of the Roman Empire. The term "propaganda" was adopted into our vocabulary as a means of describing mass manipulations by the Soviet Union, and later Nazi Germany, via media outlets in the pre-World War II era (although the word itself has its roots in the seventeenth century). In American culture the 1960's were defined by nationwide protest movements that railed against the Vietnam War and demanded civil rights for all.

During that decade John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X were all assassinated.

The carefully manicured figures on our televisions gave us plain explanations for it all. The world as they reported it was black and white- there were no gray areas. The bad guys are out there, the good guys are in here. That's all you need to know. Most swallowed the tripe they were fed because life was easier that way. Even if something didn't sit right in their minds, if it seemed like there were pieces missing from the bigger picture, what were they supposed to do? 

Information was limited to a single stream they all drank from. There were no alternative wells. Sure, there were fringe personalities like Hunter Thompson, Timothy Leary and others pointing toward hidden truths, and George Orwell before them warning about a very real threat that lied just below the surface of our society and existed as a feature of human nature, but they were eccentrics. They were the outliers. If you wanted to know what was actually happening in the world you watched the nightly news like everyone else. That was reality: simple, bite sized and digestible.

It went on like that for nearly half a century until September 11, 2001.

Commercial airliners smash into the World Trade Center. The western media ramps up to a fever pitch. It begins with speculation. Who's responsible? Was it Russia? Domestic terrorists? Iraq?

Iraq.

The Bush/Cheney regime strained itself trying to draw a line between Islamic terror networks and Saddam Hussein. The political gymnastics were a sight to behold.

"Yellow cake! Depleted uranium! Weapons of mass destruction!"

They screamed with conviction through our television screens. Legacy media ran with the story. Saddam Hussein- the secular Iraqi dictator- was secretly in cahoots with the jihadist Osama bin Laden and his back up dancers in al Qaeda. He was developing a nuclear arsenal capable of leveling North America in an instant. 9/11 was just the beginning. He must be taken out by force.

It was a fairy tale that most of the public would've reluctantly accepted were it not for one great equalizer: the internet.

Homemade documentaries sprang up all over YouTube. Commentators like Alex Jones emerged from the murky swamps of underground radio. Independent journalists, and later even some working for major media outlets, presented deeper, more complicated, and more realistic reasons for not just the terrorist attacks, but also the war in Iraq. The intuitive feeling generations had before us that something wasn't being said, that the official story didn't quite add up, now had a voice and it was booming around the world.

Soon public opinion turned against the Bush/Cheney regime and a bitter hatred for neoconservatives swept across North America. The left wing media joined in this shift since it served their agenda, and the right wing media held onto the threads of the decomposing narrative with a death grip. The critical thinkers began to turn away from mainstream news because no matter the bias that informed their stance on the war, we knew they were all lying to some degree or another.

The comedian on his couch. He became a trusted source of information. He was flawed, foul and at times inflammatory, but he was honest. He was us, or at least, who we aimed to be.

Sometime around 2014 the left took a hard neomarxist turn. Conservatives will blame it on Obama, but it takes far more than one American president to dramatically alter the western milieu, and these ideas took root long before the notion that a black president was even possible. We may never accurately locate the source of the grift, but we know that it trickled down slowly through academia until it seeped into the tapestry of popular culture, reinforced by a media that was hyper-enthusiastic about Maoist level control.

It was too late. The internet was too deep a pool for such a shallow mode of thought, and the comedian had left the couch for a full-fledged studio. If you were paying attention to mainstream news, film and television then you were convinced the world was heading in a strange yet self-described equitable direction. But if you were engaged with the internet beyond the surface level experience of selfies and trending hashtags, you knew the loudest voices in the room were a tiny, grating minority.

Enter Trump.

I don't think even he could have predicted a victory in 2016. And while the left wing media, backed by that small yet shrill woke minority, would have you believe his election was a revealing look into the ugly nature of white America, his election to president was actually a resounding rejection of radical leftism. It wasn't Trump most Americans were voting for, it was the neomarxist postmodern left they were voting against. They were willing to hedge their bets on a bloated, obnoxious real estate hustler rather than risk the Pandora's box of "diversity, equity and inclusion" that was certain to ooze from a Clinton administration.

The American public spoke and the liberal media lost their collective mind.

This was the final crack in a buckling dam. Trump was an ultraviolet light illuminating the cum stains of leftist media and establishment politicians. They gnashed their teeth, snarled, attacked, drummed up accusations of corruption and Russian collusion, and with every swing of their withering sword they revealed their weakness. They were the madmen screaming in a padded room, the only ears listening were those of the other psychopaths in their ward. The rest of the public had moved on. In their attempt to take down the big bad orange man they had so thoroughly soiled themselves, and their reputations, they were reduced to the status of pigs rolling around in their own filth.

The comedian's studio expanded to a compound.

If Trump was the last crack in the dam then Covid-19 was the collapse and the flood. From the onset of the pandemic, western governments, and the hydra of talking heads that had grown out of every festering sore on the body politic, were now clearly pushing three great leaps beyond the absurd. Whether it was the origin of the virus itself, mask mandates, death rates, off brand pharmaceutical treatments or mRNA vaccines, they had sunk to levels of propaganda leagues below the floor of anything that came before. The agenda was laid bare for anyone who dared to look directly at it. The World Economic Forum even released a book titled, The Great Reset- a phrase echoed by every western leader wrapped in the tentacles outstretched from a mysterious source in Davos, Switzerland. When confronted with the contradictions between pandemic policy and actual scientific data, the politicians repeated their scripted lines and the hydra spun into a manic rage, rampaging against dissenters, tearing flesh from the limbs of rational minds.

They even went after the comedian. They accused him of every phobia within the postmodern lexicon. It would be an easy win, they presumed. After all, they were Goliath and he was David, and in the real world, David is always crushed beneath the giant's heel. That's the harsh truth about life.

And they were right about that. David almost never defeats Goliath. But where they were wrong was in their perception. After all of the spins and transparent deceit; after all of the shilling for "The Great Reset" they had significantly shrunk in stature. The entire time they thought they were staring down when really they were staring up. The comedian was not one single man, but millions of them combined. He was a figurehead that represented a greater will; the unshakable belief in truth that exists across every race, culture and nationality; the thread that runs through us all and binds us together. When they attacked him, they attacked the ideals we all aspire toward, and in turn even the most naive members of society began to question their legitimacy- if only in private.

We've now entered a world of permanent instability- one where our legacy media, governments and associated institutions have reached an irreparable state of decay. The pandemic brought them to the furthest extent of power that can be achieved within the loosest interpretations of democracy; manipulating a terrified population at will; convincing them to relinquish their basic human rights in exchange for the illusion of safety, and were it not for the tidal wave of voices washing across the internet, assuring those whose instincts told them something sinister was at work that they were not alone, we may have lost our connection to the ethical and moral tethers that lift humanity above the barbaric aspects of our nature altogether. We came to the brink of catastrophe and it was those figures who had a wide enough audience, and the courage to say what we could all see but were too afraid to acknowledge, that held us back from falling over the cliff.

In response to this, western governments have made a concerted attempt to censor free speech and access to information on the internet. In Canada we have bills C-11 and C-18; bills that purport to increase diverse Canadian voices on social media and streamers like YouTube, but in actuality they effectively give our federal government the ability to instantly censor any ideas or opinions it doesn't like. The bills would also criminalize the use of VPN's so there would be no work around to these totalitarian measures without breaking the law and suffering whatever repercussions come under a technocratic dictatorship.

The stage has already been set as the Trudeau Liberals have adopted the buzzwords of the day to describe the exchange of free ideas. Anything that seeks to challenge their agenda has been deemed misinformation, disinformation or malinformation: nouns applicable depending on the angle in which the idea enters public discourse. They've concocted a wildly delusional narrative where Canadians are unknowingly being propagandized to by a malicious Russian campaign that is rapidly eroding the symbiosis between the painfully gullible public and their angelic institutions. The message is clear: Trudeau is Jesus, Putin is Satan, Biden is John the Baptist, and we need a Messiah to act as a barrier between us and the devil. It's through this work of fiction that bill C-11 was rammed through parliament and is actually being considered in our senate.

But as I wrote previously: it's too late. The comedian and the ripples emanating from his tsunami have engulfed the establishment. It's now impossible to view Trudeau and his cult of false prophets as anything more than empty vessels for insincere leftist virtue and puppets for a nefarious globalist plot. The minority group of critical minds has now swollen to become the majority. The public are beginning to question the narrative if not outright rejecting it en masse. The attacks on free speech will continue, but they will fail because in order to successfully suppress the truth, such a measure requires the population to not know what the truth is, and we crossed that threshold the moment the words "great reset" were uttered on live TV.