For the longest time, the Right, variously understood, has argued that the best weapon of the Left is control of the media. The fact that they own the megaphones of society gives them the ability to overcome the best arguments, merely by putting their message on blast to the general public. When everyone in the media agrees with them and agrees that the opposition is evil, it changes a lot of minds. In a democracy, the people who control the organs of propaganda control the democracy.

While it is true that controlling the propaganda organs is vital to the Left, it misses an important point. That is, controlling the cable news shows or the major print publications is only useful if you know how to use them. The Left not only has control of the media, but they are experts at using this control. A vital part of that mastery is they are experts at anticipating how their opponents will respond to their media campaigns. They are expert showman who account for every aspect of theater.

For example, they have always known that the so-called conservatives crave the chance to make their case to the public. They know the Right seethes when the Left gets to speak in public unchallenged. This knowledge has allowed them to master the morality play, where they bring on a conservative to make his case, but in reality he is cast into a role that emphasizes the arguments of the Left. For decades, so-called conservatives would go onto lefty shows, only to be pilloried.

If you stop and think about how this works, it is rather amazing. The Left controls the media, but manages to convince their opponents that the path to victory is getting on media platforms, controlled by the Left. That means public debate is always an uphill slog in the rain for anyone opposing them. The Left is so good at this they continue to lure in people, even after decades of setting these media traps. It’s like cats convincing mice that the only way to be a mouse is to hang out by the litter box.

This is not just a natural consequence of controlling the media either. When media people solicit people for interviews or media appearances, their go-to move is to tell the intended victim about their opportunity to reach a different audience. They will say something like, “This is a great opportunity for you to get your message out to a broader audience.” That’s the bait and they always use it because they know it works. The Left has a mastery of media and their monopoly of it.

A good recent example is Richard Spencer turning up on CNN. The producers picked him because they know he is desperate for attention and would agree to anything, as long as it got him on television. He would be happy to play the role of cartoon Nazi in the story about the evil orange racist. Not only that, they also knew it would get them enormous attention from the cuck belt that lives to insulate the Left. Dutifully, the typical dullards scolded CNN for having Spencer on the air.

What CNN did was turn their opponents into their marketing department. First, you get the white nationalists promoting a guy who, let’s face it, has been a disaster for their interests. Then the cucks light up like fire flies at dusk, blinking their disapproval at one another. Some choose to denounce the white nationalists, while others blink about how liberals are giving racists a platform. All of it funnels attention on CNN and their propaganda campaign to declare orange the new white.

It was a remarkable three cushion shot for a network that has no viewers, outside of airports and mental hospitals. It shows that even the worst talents in Progressive media are very good at using their tools. More important, they know how to manipulate their audience and their opponents. Mike Enoch has probably mentioned CNN more times this week than he has in the last five years. They triggered a guy, who is quite media savvy himself, into playing along with their program.

The trick the Left has evolved is to use their media power to tell stories. If it is the choice between the truth and an obvious lie, the public will pick the truth. If it is a choice between the unvarnished truth and a lie wrapped in a heroic tale of moral courage, the public will always side with the latter. Thus mass media is an endless series of morality tales, a Dionysia to reinforce Progressive civic morality. All the actors on the stage are cast in service to the morality tale the Left is pushing.

That’s the real lesson dissidents need to grasp. It’s not that the Left controls the media or that they are expert at using it. It’s not even that they have people like Richard Spencer ready to play whatever role they need, as long as he can get on stage. It’s that the Left maximizes this power by always fighting a moral war. They never let facts and reason become an obstacle to their morality play. It’s always about controlling public morality, as that allows them to control public behavior.

If a genuine alternative is going to rise up, it is going to have to provide an alternative to the current moral framework. In order to do that, it must cast the issues in explicitly moral terms. You don’t convert people to a new religion by explaining how their current god is empirically flawed. You offer them a better moral framework, one that allows them to feel as if their self-interest coincides with the natural moral order. That means putting on better morality plays in your own Dionysia.

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Way back in the olden thymes, there was a pop act called Milli Vanilli. They were sold as an R&B duo from Munich, but both members were black. That added to their appeal, even in the pre-woke 1980’s. Their debut album was wildly successful in Europe and the US, selling millions of copies. They won a Grammy and had a world tour. The whole thing fell apart when they foolishly revealed that neither of them sang the songs on their album and their shows were lip-synced. They were disgraced and that was the end of the act.

There is a whiff of that with the fallout from the Ben Shapiro interview on the BBC that has been making the rounds. He agreed to be questioned by Andrew Neil, without bothering to learn anything about the format of the show. The setup is the host grills the guest, giving them a chance to rise to the occasion and show their stuff. Alternatively, as in the case of Ben Shapiro, it is a chance for the guest to reveal themselves to be a lightweight incapable of playing with the big boys. It was not a good day for Ben Shapiro Inc.

Of course, this exchange confirmed what many people have observed about Shapiro for a long time. That is, his reputation as a great debater was built on beating up emotionally unstable coeds. At one point in that interview, Andrew Neil seems to allude to that before Shapiro starts yapping like a whiny dog and cuts him off. YouTube is full of videos titled “Ben Shapiro destroys…” and the victim is a teenager or a girl. When confronted by an adult male with some skills at debating the issues, Shapiro became the sobbing coed.

What was revealed in that exchange is that Shapiro is a hothouse flower, created by a marketing machine, in the same way pop acts are created. Some talented marketers decided he had the right look and presentation, so he was hired to be the front man of what amounts to a political marketing machine. Shapiro is not exactly gormless, but his status has been inflated by a public relations effort, as well as big money backers, elevating him well beyond his talents. That was revealed in that interview.

Another analogy is the boxer who has built a record beating up bums. The first time he faces someone who can fight back, he does not know what to do. That was largely the case with Mike Tyson back in the day. People who knew boxing saw the flaws in his game, but Tyson mowed through aging stars and over-hyped bums, so the fans and media never noticed those flaws. Then he met a guy who did notice those flaws and trained to exploit them. Tyson was knocked out and never the same afterward.

That’s what you saw in that BBC video. Andrew Neil is a professional, who has built a career pressing his guests. He’s heard every trick by this point, so Shapiro’s efforts to derail him were quickly turned against him. Like that fighter who suddenly realizes the other guy is not going to just fall down. Shapiro started to panic and things got progressively worse for him until he just quit on his stool. The only thing missing was his handler rushing in to throw in the towel and protect his fighter.

In fairness, Shapiro is not unique in Conservative Inc. or even the mass media. All of them are hot house flowers, play acting as intellectuals. Most are smart enough to know it, so they never get in the ring with anyone who can fight back. If they do agree to talk with someone that is actually smart and capable, they make sure the game is rigged. They either scream over the guest or make sure the guest is willing to play along and make the host look good. That’s the world Shapiro is built for, not actual debate.

Getting back to the Milli Vanilli analogy, the thing that did it for the duo is they were an all or nothing proposition. Their back story is what sold them, as much as the catchy tunes created for them. In other words, it was the origin myth, not their music. For Ben Shapiro, what sold him to conservative readers was the legend of him being the super-debater, destroying liberals and bathing in their tears. His catch phrase, “facts don’t care about your feelings” now seems like an ironic epitaph to his career.

That said, there’s a lot of money invested in Shapiro. The sorry state of conservatism, as a firewall between the people in charge from the growing ranks of the disaffected, leaves them no choice but to re-inflate their hero. There are a lot of smart people scripting Ben Shapiro and the rest of Conservative Inc will be told to rally to his defense. There are a lot of suckers willing to excuse the whole affair and remain defenders and supporters of Ben Shapiro Inc. These rackets always find a way to bugger on until the bitter end.

Still, it is a bit of a green shoot. It is a reminder that these people are not that smart and not that tough. Most of their best fighters are like the Greek city-states under Athenian rule in the fifth century BC. Instead of supplying men to fight, they had shifted to just paying tribute to Athens for their defense. They forgot how to fight. Their men became accustomed to seeking favor from men who knew how to use weapons. That’s what you see all over the ruling class. They have power, but the muscles to use it are atrophying.

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Forty years ago, just as the microprocessor was making itself known to people in their daily lives, your news and entertainment options were pretty simple. For most people, news meant the newspaper or the evening TV news. Some cities had competing papers, but most had just one by the 1980’s. Talk radio was just coming on-line, so there was some alternative for politics to the Progressive media outlets. Otherwise, your information about the world came through three narrow pipes, newspapers, TV and radio.

Even if you lived through those dark times, it is still hard to imagine what it must have been like to have such limited choices. If you wanted to interact with a guy like Mike Cernovich, you had to wait until he tried breaking into your tool shed. If you were into Alex Jones type stuff, it meant meeting a guy behind the library where he distributed his mimeographed newsletters. Despite these deprivations, people managed to get along. In fact, there’s good evidence that people were happier without the 24×7 information fire hose.

That’s the first little clue that maybe the proliferation of news and information channels is not entirety driven by demand. Another little clue is the fact that commercial on-line sites appealing to a national audience can’t turn a profit. The rounds of lay-offs at second-tier sites like Buzzfeed and Huffington Post suggest there is no way to make money selling content to a broad audience. Niche sites and small operators can make it work, but their model does not scale up. It requires a subsidy of some sort.

Of course, this tracks with what happened to the local newspaper. When they had a monopoly and dominated retail advertising, they could scrape by. Once exposed to market forces, the daily newspaper has continued to shrink. The ones that make it as a commercial enterprise are very small and the larger ones are the public relations department for an oligarch. In the near future, most small and mid-sized cities will find themselves without a newspaper at all, unless a local rich guy has one.

We’re probably on the cusp of seeing something similar happen with cable television and cable news channels. ESPN has been feeling the pinch as people cut the cord. In most markets, ESPN gets about seven dollars per month from all cable subscribers, whether they watch or not. Cord-cutting is threatening that old model, which means lots of these channels will go away. The most likely outcome is a few services like Amazon, Apple and Hulu that provide your content. No more channels, just categories.

The one area where contraction does not seem to be on the horizon is the amateur content side of things. Live streams are popping up all over. The number of dissident YouTube channels has grown to a point where it is hard to track them. Podcasts exist for every conceivable audience. Again, the small footprint guys can do well enough to make a living from it, but this model does not scale up. One guy making videos from home can do well enough to live. A company with overheads cannot make it work.

One reason internet media operations cannot scale up is that sharing is integral to selling ads for the site. Sharing stories, video and comments brings eyeballs to the site. The trouble is, the cost of pulling that off for a broad audience, exceeds the revenue from selling ads on the site, so the site has to go the paywall route. Paywall content cannot be shared, so this solution actually makes the problem worse. In other words, you can be a paywall site or an ad-based site, but you can’t be both and you can’t be big.

The exception, of course, is when an oligarch owns the operations. Carlos Slim subsidizes the New York Times, so he can guarantee positive coverage in America of himself and his allies in Lebanon and Mexico. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post for the same reason. Oligarchs have different motivations than companies, which is why corporate ownership is not a solution. Verizon expects to make money from the Huffington Post, which is why they are cutting costs and will eventually drop the site.

What all of this suggests is that we could be heading back to the old model of information, where the general public has a few large media pipes they can tap into for news, entertainment and information. If you’re a “prime” citizen, you get most of your information from Jeff Bezo approved sources. If you are an Apple Nazi, then you get your information from sources approved by the current degenerate running Apple. These pipes will not be commercially viable, but they will serve the political interests of their owners.

Small operators will exist, but as vanity projects and boutique businesses serving a niche audience. If you are really into the local sportsball team, you will have a pay site you can join where you get custom content just for that sportsball team. These kinds of sites have a proven model, where they have one or two owners, who keep the overheads low and stick to a very narrow audience. They can supplement their revenue by feeding the bigger players information, as long as they pose no threat to the big pipe.

Of course, given the outsourcing of censorship by the state to these commercial players, it means dissident content will be back to guys distributing mimeographed newsletters in the supermarket parking lot. Maybe the oligarchs will tolerate a limited amount of it on-line, as a relief valve, but they don’t appear to be the tolerant types. Even so, the public will be happy to return to their old ignorance, so returning to an updated version of the old model will probably be embraced, as long as it evolves slowly and gently.

Way back in the before times, when you got news and opinion from TV, newspapers and magazines, you just accepted the authority of the source. If you were a liberal, you were required to swear oaths about the objectivity and integrity of the news media. If you were a normal person you understood that all of it was biased. Alternative sources of information, however, were thin on the ground. If you were lucky, your city still had a paper run by normal people, like the Detroit Free Press or Manchester Union Leader.

Otherwise, normal people had to read their local paper or the news magazines with an eye for the bias. Some columnists made a career out of being lefty wackos, even getting a national reputation for it. Eleanor Clift was a proto-cat lady in the 1990’s, as a barking at the moon lefty for Newsweek. The late John McLaughin would have her on as a regular, mostly because she was such a loon. In the Clinton years he nicknamed her Eleanor Rodham Clift because she was such a ridiculous Clinton rumpswab.

The thing is though, the columnists were always people who had spent a long apprenticeship in the news business. They started out as local reporters for local papers and then advanced onto bigger stories at bigger outlets. The typical newspaper columnist was a middle-aged man who had been a reporter for a couple of decades. Every city paper had a columnist who used to cover city hall, until he got bumped up to writing polemics about the people in city hall. That was his expertise.

Even the TV people had been in the business for a long time. Eleanor Clift would argue with Pat Buchanan about politics. Both had served as reporters covering campaigns, until they got columns. Their TV persona was as a columnist with expertise covering politics as a reporter for decades. They would salt their opinions with references to events they covered. That was their basis of authority. Their expertise was from long experience reporting on politics at all levels. They were professional reporters.

Whatever one wants to say for the old model of the journalism career, there was a winnowing process to filter out the extremely stupid and dishonest. The Der Spiegel scandal is mostly due to hiring a charismatic greenhorn into a prominent position, without having put him through an apprenticeship. Odds are, the people who hired him had never been local reporters or had to edit copy for a small publication. Like Claas Relotius, they popped out of good schools and the right families into elite media.

This is, of course, the problem faced by all media now. For example, this post in The Atlantic is supposed to be expert speculation about the Treasury Secretary’s maneuverings in response to the bear market. The Atlantic is a prestige publication of the ruling class that is supposed to provide informed opinion and commentary. The post, however, does not rise to the level of daydreaming. Like everything you see in the prestige media these days, it is pointless drivel written by an airhead.

The authoress is someone named Annie Lowrey. A quick search reveals she reports on politics and economic policy for The Atlantic magazine. She also went to Harvard. More important, she is married to Ezra Klein. He went to UCLA. Nepotism is nothing new in the media, but shouldn’t she be covering something for which she has some qualifications, like the Westminster Dog Show? You don’t have to know anything to report about a dog show. She just has to like dogs and being around gay men.

Of course, it raises an obvious question, how in the hell are these people getting into Harvard? It’s not hard to see why the Asians are angry about admissions. They may lack social skills, but they can do math. Ezra Klein appears to have no useful skills. If he is, as they claim, a top-1% intellect, he has yet to display a hint of it in his career as a mover and shaker in the media. His career, according to his bio, is devoid of anything that would prepare one for having an opinion anyone should consider.

It’s not just that these two have zero useful experience. It’s also that they raced ahead to take up senior positions, decades before it was normal. In the old system, Ezra Klein would have just landed a job with a major daily, covering politics. In a couple of decades, he could expect to get his own column, where he could opine about the people he covered for decades. In other words, the major media is now populated with people who know nothing useful and have not had the time to observe people who actually know things.

This is a familiar rant, of course, but the puzzle is how the mass media has evolved into a weird playground for the stupid children of rich people. One clue is the guy who runs The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg. He is a serious guy who used to take pleasure in torturing Palestinians on behalf of his people. No kidding. His vice, however, is he likes to be surrounded by shiksas and toadies, so The Atlantic is now festooned with silly girls from good schools and young men fond of hearing Goldberg’s IDF stories.

What seems to be happening is the modern mass media selects for the ability to ingratiate oneself with the powerful. Ezra Klein has a reputation for being a world-class rumpswab, but also a ruthless courtier, who would stab his mother in the neck to gain favor with the boss.  That’s how he rose so quickly in the Washington media ranks and why he is now installed in a seven figure job at a media outlet with no customers. His wife knows how to play on her boss’s vanity and inclinations.

The old joke about the new economy is you can’t have society based on everyone selling each other insurance. The modern mass media is trying to build a business model around people who wash each other’s balls. A media ball washer writes a column and the other ball washers tweet about it. The same is true when one of them writes a book. The ball washers slobber all over it, claiming it is the greatest book since the Bible. It’s no wonder that the rest of us are slowly tuning out or turning to alternative media.

Piers Morgan is one of those guys who is infamous, rather than famous. people know of him, if they know of him at all, for his many ridiculous moments on CNN. Of course, hardly anyone watches CNN, unless they are stuck in an airport. The reason they hired Morgan was to boost ratings, knowing his reputation in Britain for making a fool of himself on their chat shows. Now the internet brings news that CNN have finally pulled the plug on the Piers Morgan.

There have been times when the CNN host Piers Morgan didn’t seem to like America very much — and American audiences have been more than willing to return the favor. Three years after taking over for Larry King, Mr. Morgan has seen the ratings for “Piers Morgan Live” hit some new lows, drawing a fraction of viewers compared with competitors at Fox News and MSNBC.

It’s been an unhappy collision between a British television personality who refuses to assimilate — the only football he cares about is round and his lectures on guns were rife with contempt — and a CNN audience that is intrinsically provincial. After all, the people who tune into a cable news network are, by their nature, deeply interested in America.

CNN’s president, Jeffrey Zucker, has other problems, but none bigger than Mr. Morgan and his plum 9 p.m. time slot. Mr. Morgan said last week that he and Mr. Zucker had been talking about the show’s failure to connect and had decided to pull the plug, probably in March.

Crossing an ocean for a replacement for Larry King, who had ratings problems of his own near the end, was probably not a great idea to begin with. For a cable news station like CNN, major stories are like oxygen. When something important or scary happens in America, many of us have an immediate reflex to turn on CNN. When I find Mr. Morgan telling me what it all means, I have a similar reflex to dismiss what he is saying. It is difficult for him to speak credibly on significant American events because, after all, he just got here.

I received a return call from Mr. Morgan and was prepared for an endless argument over my assumptions. Not so. His show, he conceded, was not performing as he had hoped and was nearing its end.

“It’s been a painful period and lately we have taken a bath in the ratings,” he said, adding that although there had been times when the show connected in terms of audience, slow news days were problematic.

The implication is that Americans are just too provincial for an urban sophisticate like Piers Morgan. Never mind that he was no such thing. It was all an act. He is a prol striver with a middling education and even less of an IQ.  In the UK he worked for trashy tabloids. His role on CNN was to be the snobby Brit, lecturing the provincials about the proper way to think about politics. Since the few people watching CNN are far Left, that was bound to be a bad formula. Now the experiment is over.