☕️ CHARACTERS AND STORIES ☙ Tuesday, December 26, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Tucker's bizarre, Spacey Xmas Eve interview; dissecting the Covidian world view; SADS reality star skin cancer odyssey; and a helpful primer on how Narratives work, so we can better resist them.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! I hope you all celebrated a joyful and rewarding Christmas yesterday, or at least had a terrific day if you don’t celebrate. We tackle a couple big issues in today’s roundup: Tucker’s bizarre pre-Christmas interview with Kevin Spacey; a deep-dive into how realistic Covidians are processing the world; SADS reality star deals with atypical treatment-resistant melanoma; and a primer on how Narratives work to prepare us to deal with what’s coming next year.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 Yesterday, Mediaite ran a story with the improbable but completely accurate headline, “Tucker Carlson Drops Bizarre Interview With Kevin Spacey Floating 2024 Run and Suggesting Netflix Tried to Kill Him.”

The only thing missing from Mediaite’s headline was that during the Christmas Eve interview, Spacey — staying in character the whole time — played the President from hit Netflix show House of Cards, the show that got canceled after the avalanche of sexual harassment claims.

Admittedly, those claims now look a little different in light of how the Establishment purged nursing home serial killer and former New York governor Andrew Cuomo.  But I digress.

It was a strange interview and the hot takes are all over the map. Oddly, the interview triggered both sides of the political aisle. Why would Tucker even host this interview? I have no answers for you, except to say it this is probably a good preview of how weird 2024 is going to be.

💉 At first I was only mildly aggravated. Clearly a first world problem. But slowly I began to understand the inscrutable wisdom inherent in Twitter’s opaque silicon algorithms that were flooding my feed with random covid maniacs. With great restraint, if I may say, I plowed through countless N95 mask reviews, tips on self-quarantining, testing suggestions, how to avoid public events, and best practices for sanitizing public conveyances. After reading dozens or even hundreds of such Covidian posts, I began to see the world (kind of) through the eyes of people who in some surprising ways represent share our worldview.

Things are not good in the land of covid obsession. Like us, they are analytical, passionate, and increasingly anti-government. The difference is they will defend the vaccines (although they aren’t exactly ecstatic about them).

One key fact that we all now agree on is the government is gaslighting everyone and lying about it. Another undeniable fact that everyone seems to agree constitutes the core of Covidian compulsion: a lot of people are still getting sick. Understanding how we and they agree is so important that I rounded up several for you from just the past day or two.

Here’s our first example, which shows a Covidian trying to convince people that it’s easy to miss that a lot of folks are being injured. Notice how he compared covid to Tuberculosis and the plague.

The Covidians are routinely reporting the same phenomena we would label vaccine injuries, except for them the diaspora of disease is broadly grouped into “post covid illness:”

We can assume all these folks are jabbed; they’re the ones who followed the rules. What do they blame? Increasingly they are looking at what they see is a dangerous, probably genetically-engineered, BSL-3 super-pathogen that can’t be killed. For Covidians, every repeat covid infection terrifyingly increases their chances of catching a serious, permanent, ill-defined crypto-infection called long covid.

I was shocked when I saw Covidians conceding that vaccines don’t work and even masks don’t work. Not against super-covid.

Covidians have also become aware that people who don’t have covid are “dying suddenly.”  To them, it’s the virus, concealed inside the victims’ bodies in “viral reservoirs” that somehow cause HIV-like immune problems and, ultimately, can even cause sudden death:

Covidians are trying to make sense of an upside-down world where vaccinated, boosted, masked-up people who did everything the government said are testing negative for covid but still somehow getting sick — and even suddenly dying! — from repeat covid infections, blood clots, heart attacks and cancer. Covidians are reading their own sets of studies — studies focusing on the spike protein rather than the jabs — and concluding (just like we are) that people’s immune systems are systematically being destroyed:

Their studies aren’t wrong; the spike protein is dangerous. So Covidians are carefully studying the spike and are starting to notice its HIV-like elements:

They fact that people without covid are still getting sick — that their immune systems are failing — is a fact now well-accepted by Covidians:

More vulnerable to other illnesses. It’s tempting to just focus on Covidians’ unquestioning devotion to the vaccines, and of course how they’re mad at us anti-vaxxers. Set that aside for a moment and consider how far they’ve come: They no longer believe the CDC or FDA. Neither do we.

The prevailing Covidian view seems to be that the greedy, capitalist government is lying about how dangerous covid still is, so that we can “get back to normal:”

There’s so much gaslighting, it’s not just that they don’t trust the government. They also no longer believe doctors, either. They know from their own personal experience with their friends and relatives that something is happening, even if the doctors claim everything is normal.

Like us, Covidians have even started mocking how suddenly baffled the doctors have become, despite pretending they knew everything there was to know about covid during the pandemic. Substitute the word “vaccine” for “covid” in this next example tweet and you’ll easily recognize the sentiment:

Now that vaccines, paxlovid, and masks have failed to protect people, the Covidians muse about lockdowns, and argue that forced mass isolation is the only thing left that works.

(One suspects his “hobbies” are playing video games.) There’s just one tiny problem: “real” lockdowns would destroy civilization after everybody starved to death. I suspect Covidians magically think that a two-week lockdown — if it included everybody — would somehow extinguish the virus. At least, they seem sore the lockdowns weren’t stricter:

(That’s a wild, obviously-false claim. Thirty-five million is more than 10% of the entire US population of 330 million. Before being too judgey though, recall that we have similar overestimates of vaccine injuries in our threads too.)

There’s a lot to unpack here. First, it is helpful to understand the Covidians’ world view. They are much closer to our position than you would have thought and there is substantial common ground for working together. The Covidians have everything they need to connect the last couple dots between SARS-Cov-2’s viral spike protein, which is bad enough, to persistent, mRNA-induced spike protein, which is a thousand times worse.

So close! Second, we have reached the point where enough people have seen the problems for themselves that nobody believes the official narrative anymore. I first wondered whether the Covidians’ spike-reservoir theory was a clever new narrative to conceal the role of vaccines. But it seems like an establishment narrative wouldn’t direct so much anger toward authorities. Who knows.

This next year, let’s see how much common ground we can find with other Americans who see that things are going the wrong direction, even if they aren’t yet convinced the mRNA vaccines are defective. Now you have some ideas where to start. Start with the spike.

💉 How many melanomas would be enough for you? Disheartened Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Teddi Mellencamp Arroyave, 42, posted a weepy update to fans on Christmas Eve about her atypical, immunotherapy-resistant, multiple-melanoma diagnosis. Her doctors want her in for surgery promptly, today.

CLIP: Tearful Teddi Mellencamp melanoma update (0:53).

“I just had a big ol’ cry,” the reality star sighed in the clip. “I just got the call from my doctor that the immunotherapy did not work, it was not successful.”

Teddi was first diagnosed with stage 2 melanoma in October 2022 and is now dealing with her thirteenth melanoma, if you can believe that. So Teddi’s been nearly one new melanoma on average per month. Earlier in December, Teddi told People Magazine that the twelve prior surgeries to remove her melanomas had been successful and she was now cancer-free. Significantly, she stressed she is not genetically predisposed to skin or any other cancers. 

But Teddi got the bad news right before Christmas. “I found out late yesterday afternoon that the most recent spot biopsied is another melanoma. I can’t even remember if this is the 12th or 13th one,” Teddi tearfully explained. “This means another surgery next week and additional biopsies. At this point, I am starting to black-out these memories.”

Her doctors are now talking about things like wide-area skin grafts and plastic surgeries, which sounds a lot like it might involve a little discomfort, as the doctors always say.

Teddi is a trooper. She told People she’s relying on grit, determination, and her faith to see her through. We pray for miraculous healing, and that Teddi would be delivered from this chronic melanoma.

🔥 What with the elections, prosecution of prior presidents, wars, and everything else going on, I — and a lot of other people — think there’s a flood of official disinformation and psyops coming in 2024. We talk about these “Narratives” a lot, but to help mentally prepare for the new year, let’s talk about how “capital-n” Narratives really work.

Narrative is brain fuel. Just like how cars run on gas, the human mind runs on narrative. To experience any coherent thought, the brain first requires a superstructure of meaning to which a thought can attach. The superstructure or ‘framework’ of meaning into which the brain incorporates new thoughts could also be called a narrative.

Narrative is story.

Helpfully, everything is a story: Your job is a story. Your family, well, that’s a real story. Your friends, your religion, your political party, your house, your car, your gym membership, your hatred of eggnog and your wife’s fear of hairy spiders — all stories. To have any meaning at all, every conceivable notion must be suspended on an existing story the way a dust mote clings to a spiderweb.

Our minds process stories every conscious moment. People even dream in stories.

Unsurprisingly therefore, the wicked security state psychologists who design manipulative memes and mind control tools start with a story. Story is both their toolbox and their most useful tool. Consider a conflict happening in some far-off country, and suppose our current political leadership wants us to choose their preferred side. The mind controllers first need a good story.

If Narrative is story, then Story is characters in conflict.

The most effective characters are colorful ones engaged in an unambiguously-good versus perfectly-evil conflict. Think cerebral vaxxers versus Cave Man anti-vaxxers, trans people yearning to be free versus theocratic Christians, suppressed black folks versus systemic racists, and old-fashioned Republicans versus open-minded democrats.

The best conflicts are those for high stakes: such as if Putin isn’t soundly beaten in Ukraine, then he will attack Poland and the rest of the World. So if you load a Ukrainian flag in your social media bio picture you are helping save the World.

Since “Narrative” is the security state’s main manipulative tool, the deep state has a long-standing love affair with Hollywood. It’s also why spooks constantly use celebrities, who are handy, compelling, pre-mixed characters right on the shelf: in other words, celebrities are an easy way to rapidly publish a new Narrative and demonstrate its core conflict for the audience (us).

There are rules. Conflicts arise between identifiable characters. Not countries. That’s why they need characters like Putin and Zelensky. The conflict has to be simple and easy to explain. A complicated conflict involving the countries’ relative economies and a bunch of decades-old population statistics won’t work. That’s too hard to explain. They need a classic, soundbite-sized conflict. To represent the conflict, they need recognizable characters from Central Casting, memorable characters with attractive faces and back stories and engaging personalities.

As with the conflict, when it comes to characters, the simpler, the better.

In our example, the psy-operators might script a plucky underdog who leads the smaller country again an evil dictator heading the other country — a classic face-off. Sprinkle in a small supporting cast — nothing too complicated! — and then they can start filling in back stories, adding a few strong details, and even designing costumes.

So: Vladimir Putin as the cold, clean-shaven, calculating, evil dictator who always wears a dark blue business suit. Think of a Russian version of Mr. Smithers from The Simpsons. On the other hand, cast Vladimir Zelensky as the nerdy, short-bearded, naive underdog, a man of the people, a French-resistance type who always wears a military-green t-shirt. No beréts though; too metro.

Effective narrative manipulation avoids ambiguity. Moral ambiguity is anathema to a useful capital-n Narrative. In our running example, it’s not good for the two countries to share blame for the conflict. Whose fault it is mustn’t even be arguable. The two sides must be black and white. One country must be clearly in the wrong, and the other country one hundred percent justified. Thus, anti-vaxxers cannot be permitted to have any kind of a point, however minor, because it would muddle the Narrative.

If there’s any wiggle room for reasonable argument about a conflict’s morality (who should “win”), then the Narrative crumbles as any kind of useful mind-control tool.

In fact, they can unravel a Narrative when it is no longer useful just by introducing a little moral ambiguity. For example, two days ago corporate media reported the possibility of compromise in the Ukraine Proxy War — maybe giving Russia a little land could be a good thing —  and it’s a good sign the security state is winding up that tired old Narrative:

A related sign that the Proxy War in Ukraine might be ending is they’re now treating Putin as a rational leader with whom a ceasefire could possibly be brokered. Putin used to be a demonic instrument of pure evil who could never ever be trusted, but must be removed.

For the spook shrinks, the characters in an effective Narrative must be drawn as cartoons, not as real people.  Real people are too messy and introduce moral ambiguity. There must be nothing good whatsoever about Putin (he is not worried about U.S. biolabs!) and nothing bad at all about Zelensky (he is not enriching himself with aid money!).

Even though media is talking about compromises, it is not ending the Narratives. It’s just time for a new one. We can tell because of the media’s latest childlike oversimplification, as though the decision to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war were Putin’s alone, and didn’t also involve the entire Russian government, the country’s 150 million citizens, not to mention a global group of allies, enemies, and complex inter-related military and financial interests.

Nope. It’s only Putin and Zelensky. That’s the narrative.

Starting soon, the Narratives will probably start landing faster and heavier. We’ll try to expose them all. Our first job will be to identify what story are they pushing this time? Is it oversimplified mental baby food? Is the media competently and honestly offering us a cognitive steak dinner, treating us as adults and fellow citizens? Or are they trying to trick us again with a Narrative juice pack of mind-numbing, high-fructose corn syrup-enhanced, creamed carrots?

As the presidential race heats up, I’ll be asking you questions like, what’s the conflict? Who are the Narrative’s main characters? Are they presented realistically, with real human flaws as well as strengths, or drawn as cartoon villains and heroes? How is the media oversimplifying this issue? How are they obscuring the real moral arguments?

I plan on resisting all the new Narratives next year, and I intend to rhetorically disassemble the damned things one by one, even while the media is still building them. And I’ll need your help to do it. It’s going to be fun!

Have a terrific Tuesday! I’ll be back tomorrow morning with a classic C&C roundup of entertaining news and commentary.

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