☕️ THE ORTHODOX EXPRESS ☙ Thursday, September 5, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Insights about the character of the deep state and of our corporate media enemy. Plus more good news from the culture wars.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Much is happening this week, but due to having to get to the hospital early this morning we are hitting the highest points. Today’s edition features a keen insight about the character of the deep state and of our corporate media enemy. Plus more good news from the culture wars.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 Yesterday’s zaniest story ran in the Washington Post headlined, “Republican Liz Cheney says she will vote for Kamala Harris this election.” Well, of course. Who else? That’s her “jam.” How is this even ‘news?’

When I read it, that headline produced a strange echo. The other day, I described a slightly surreal conversation with a liberal relative. When I read the Journal’s caption, I recalled how my relative mentioned disgraced former Congresswoman Cheney in the exact same context. He’d urged me to consider how “lots of big Republicans” supported Harris. Skeptical, I asked, like who? Earnestly, without any sense of irony or self-awareness, he tossed out Liz Cheney, adding for emphasis how she spoke at the DNC last month.

Putting two and two together, I realized my relative was regurgitating MSNBC talking points. Aha! A new narrative! It was like spotting a blue-beaked crested wren or something. (Apologies to bird watchers.)

Corporate media is busily slinging its new narrative to Democrats, not to we Republicans, who reflexively emit horse laughs just hearing the name Cheney. Let’s not dwell on Dick, either.

It’s a rollicking narrative, too. Explaining the breaking news that Cheney “broke with the Republican Party on Wednesday” —but not before!— the Wall Street Journal scribbled her roundly despised name onto its “growing list of Republicans against Trump.” The Journal’s expanding list has two names on it so far, and I’ll give you one guess who is the second:

The article failed to mention that Cheney and Kinzinger were the only Republicans who “served on the House select committee,” or that they already broke with the party back in 2021 to do so. While it did note that Cheney lost her seat in the primary, the article didn’t mention the same thing happened to Kinzinger, nor did it bring up the fact both politicians are now homeless pariahs relegated to making the rounds on late-night MSNBC news panels.

So I went looking for the narrative, and immediately found it everywhere:

If endorsements are newsworthy, then conspicuously absent from this week’s corporate media reporting was the much more interesting story about Tim Walz’s extended family, which came out for Trump:

The Post’s ridiculous parody of a news narrative, dripping with simulated sincerity, provides a useful framework for learning something critically important about how our sold-out media works these days. Let’s tackle that next.

🔥 On Wednesday, podcaster Chris Williamson (2.6 million subscribers) interviewed “intellectual dark web” member Eric Weinstein in an electrifying videocast episode titled, “Eric Weinstein - Are We On The Brink Of A Revolution?” It’s worth watching, especially the first 40 minutes or so, but since it’s over 3 hours long, I’ll hit the high points for you.

Eric Weinstein is a multi-talented mathematician, economist, physicist, and managing director at Thiel Capital. A classic liberal, he became deeply critical of conventional physics, particularly “string theory,” which Weinstein considers an unfalsifiable, fake, deep-state invention enforced by government grant-driven orthodoxy and groupthink. And it’s dumb.

Although not labeled “anti-vaxx,” during the pandemic, Weinstein broke with conventional covid narratives, questioning the lack of transparency, the rushed vaccine development, and the destructiveness of lockdowns and other forced mitigation measures. He was among the first scientists to question the now-debunked “natural origins” narrative for the virus.

As a result of his intolerable heterodoxy, like the Biblical scapegoat of old, Weinstein was professionally banished to the academic wilderness. He now publishes his work in his own podcasting and direct-to-public venues. Ironically, having been excommunicated from academic circles, Weinstein now enjoys more freedom to criticize the creaking, ossified, bureaucratic establishment.

In the podcast I linked above, Weinstein provided one of the most insightful, well-described analyses of the current woeful state of our ‘democracy’ that I have yet seen collected in one place. Fair warning, Weinstein is not optimistic. But he admitted that the best thing Trump ever did was prove in 2016 that The System is not omnipotent or omniscient, but can screw up and can be beaten.

🔥 Weinstein has a broad and more discrete view of what the ‘deep state’ is. He describes it as an alliance of government, academic, and corporate interests that live off the established “rules based order.” Weinstein suggested NAFTA as an example.

However “bad” a deal the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) was for America, government actors and big corporate interests feast off advantages and benefits cleverly buried in the text of the incomprehensibly complicated laws. When someone like Trump comes along, and threatens to toss the whole deal out and replace it with something simpler (and less amenable to exploitation), it threatens to disrupt a carefully balanced ecosystem of benefits and sinecures that elite groups have spent decades building.

Not surprisingly, this coalition of elite interests fights more ferociously than a pack of starving coyotes to preserve their rewarding sinecures.

In other words, Weinstein suggested that the "deep state" isn't an ill-defined, shadowy cabal, but instead is a vast and intricate network of incentives — an alliance between bureaucracy and capital that thrives on complexity. This makes it devilishly difficult to dismantle, because even modest proposals for reform can trigger widespread institutional rebellion.

It’s not super controversial. Over the last four years we have seen that battle violently erupt onto the social and political stage. With that in mind, Weinstein believes this deep state coalition has completely captured an increasingly bizarre and unhinged corporate media, which slavishly serves the interests of its corporate controllers.

This brings us to Weinstein’s explanation for why corporate media pushes absurd narratives like “Republican Liz Cheney endorses Harris” on people like my relative, and why they uncritically and unquestioningly cling to those ridiculous narratives more tightly than an old man gripping his bus ticket.

🔥 Weinstein proposed that captured corporate media’s only job is to publish orthodoxy. In other words, stories like “Republican Liz Cheney endorses Harris” aren’t actually meant to convince anybody that there is some rising groundswell of Republican opposition to Trump. Rather, corporate media is signaling to the orthodox establishment’s members what is permissible for them to think and say.

People whose careers depend on established institutional structures implicitly understand this. If, like Weinstein, someone decides to challenge or break with the approved narrative, they risk losing their careers and reputations. Questioning the narrative means losing invitations, opportunities, promotions, and killing your career.

In this way, the corporate media serves as the day-to-day mechanism for rapidly disseminating ‘safe’ groupthink. The participants —especially those in government, academia, and international corporations— know that straying from media-established boundaries means risking scapegoat status and excommunication.

After all, Weinstein should know. That’s what happened to him.

Over time, corporate media has evolved from being a source of investigative journalism and watchdog reporting into a mechanical device for reinforcing consensus among elites.

Weinstein’s theory helps us understand how in 2023, Time could rail against ultraprocessed foods, but one year later in 2024, after the Trump-Kennedy alliance, can turn on a dime and publish silly headlines like “What if Ultra-Processed Foods Aren’t as Bad as You Think?”

It also explains why corporate media seems blithely unconcerned about its historically low levels of trust. There is a simple explanation. It doesn’t care about public trust, because its mission is to maintain cohesion among the elite class, not to provide honest, transparent information to the masses. Thus, publishing false or exaggerated stories that serve a particular political or corporate interest are useful for keeping the right people in alignment.

In other words, the general population’s trust is secondary or even irrelevant because the real power brokers —decision-makers in government, business, and academia— are still receiving and aligning with the messages the media sends. As long as the right people (those with influence and authority) continue to trust and engage with corporate media, the public can be safely ignored.

Even more dystopian, the erosion of media trust doesn’t even hurt its mission at all. If anything, it might even help maintain the status quo, by keeping the unwashed general public out of the conversation.

When we see media’s narrative spin machine working, like when it tells us ultraprocessed foods aren’t really that bad, or that Republican Liz Cheney is breaking with the party, or that America is systemically racist, we must not frame those narratives in terms of how horrible the media is, but rather understand that media is telling Democrats and captured elites how to think.

The best vaccine for these virus-like mind-control narratives is mockery. Every narrative has a simple anti-narrative waiting to be discovered. That’s why memes are effective, and it’s why the deep state coalition cannot tolerate free speech.

🔥🔥 In much better news, conservative filmmaker and anti-DEI crusader Robby Starbuck also made the Wall Street Journal. Headline from yesterday: “Ford, Coors Light and Other Brands Retreat From a Gay-Rights Index.” Boomerang! The sub-headline explained, “The Human Rights Campaign used a ranking of companies to advance same-sex benefits; now an activist is using the index to pressure CEOs.”

Harley-Davidson, Tractor Supply, Jack Daniel’s distiller Brown-Forman, Ford, and now Molson Coor’s have all “scaled back” their “diversity initiatives” — after Robby Starbuck called them out. Starbuck pointed out that the corporations’ support for LGBTQ groups means conservative customers are being forced to support and subsidize stuff they hate, like sexually transitioning employees’ transgender children.

According to the story, “Ford, Molson Coors and other companies plan to stop providing data for the Corporate Equality Index produced by HRC’s foundation.” In other words, they are entirely opting out of the gay scoring system. They don’t want their companies’ names appearing on LGBTQ allies lists.

For his part, Starbuck has been taking a well-deserved social media victory lap and marveling over how easy his job is getting:

CLIP: Robby Starbuck discusses his successful anti-DEI crusade (2:51).

Robby Starbuck is one guy. He’s not even a particularly large influencer, with about 600,000 followers, an appreciable but non-competitive figure. Most of his followers joined in the wake of his campaign to out conservative companies embracing DEI.

One struggles to find comparable influencers like Starbuck on the left. Dylan Mulvaney? Rebekah Jones? Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me like the right owns this influential anti-narrative space. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the Democrat party is wholly owned by the fascistic coalition of deep state groups Weinstein described. Purely as a disguise, the Democrat party apparatus —whoever that is— loudly advocates for grievance groups that do not threaten its entrenched interests.

But that is a topic for another post, and I am already behind schedule this morning. Let me know what you think about these heady issues in the comments.

Have a tremendous Thursday! Return here tomorrow morning for more essential news and commentary.

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