Category Archives: Culture war

The Problem With “The Media”

Mainstream Journalists Are Cloistered Ivy League-Educated Trust Fund Kids

Writes Caitlin Johnstone:

Iraq war cheerleader David Brooks has an article in The New York Times titled “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?“, another one of those tired old think pieces we’ve been seeing for the last eight years that asks “golly gosh could we coastal elites have played some role in the rise of Trumpism?” like it’s the first time anyone has ever considered that obvious point (the answer is yes, duh, you soft-handed silver spoon-fed ivory tower bubble boy).

One worthwhile paragraph about the media stands out though:

“Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.”

Brooks is not the first to make this observation about the drastic shift in the socioeconomic makeup of news reporters that has taken place from previous generations to now.

“The class factor in journalism gets overlooked,” journalist Glenn Greenwald said on the Jimmy Dore Show in 2021. “Thirty or forty years ago, fifty years ago, journalists really were outsiders. That’s why they all had unions; they made shit money, they came from like working class families. They hated the elite. They hated bankers and politicians. It was kind of like a boss-employee relationship — they hated them and wanted to throw rocks at them and take them down pegs.”

“If I were to list the twenty richest people I’ve ever met in my entire life, I think like seven or eight of them are people I met because they work at The Intercept — people from like the richest fucking families on the planet,” Greenwald added.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, whose father worked for NBC, made similar observations on the Dark Horse podcast back in 2020.

“Reporters when I was growing up, they came from a different class of people than they do today,” Taibbi said. “A lot of them were kind of more working class — their parents were more likely to be plumbers or electricians than they were to be doctors or lawyers. Like this thing where the journalist is an Ivy League grad, that’s a relatively new thing that I think came about in the seventies and eighties with my generation. But reporters just instinctively hated rich people, they hated powerful people. Like if you put up a poster of a politician in a newsroom it was defaced instantaneously, like there were darts on it. Reporters saw it as their job to stick it to the man.”

“Mostly the job is different now,” Taibbi said. “The fantasy among reporters in the nineties about politicians started to be, I want to be the person that hangs out with the candidate after the speech and has a beer and is sort of close to power. And that’s kind of the model, that’s where we’re at right now. That’s kind of the problem is that basically people in the business want to be behind the rope line with people of influence. And it’s going to be a problem to get us back to that other adversarial posture of the past.”

This is a major reason behind the freakish sycophancy and empire loyalism we see in the mainstream press. It’s not just the obscenely wealthy owners of the mass media who are protecting their class interests — it’s the reporters, editors and pundits as well.

These are typically fairly wealthy people from fairly wealthy families, who become more and more wealthy the more their careers are elevated. As insiders of the mainstream press have attested, it’s widely understood by employees of the mainstream media that the way to elevate your career is to toe the establishment line and refrain from spotlighting issues that are inconvenient to the powerful.

This identification with the ruling class feeds into the dynamic described by Taibbi in which modern journalists have come to value close proximity to those in power. These are the people they want to be sharing drinks with and going to parties with and invited to the weddings of; the “us vs them” dynamic which used to exist between the press and politicians switched, and now the press see themselves and the politicians they fraternize with as “us” and the general public as “them”.

There are other factors at play with regard to elite education. The number of journalists with college degrees skyrocketed from 58 percent in 1971 to 92 percent in 2013; if your wealthy parents aren’t paying that off for you then you’ve got crushing student debt that you need to pay off yourself, which you can only do in the field you studied in by making a decent amount of money, which you can only do by acting as a dependable propagandist for the imperial establishment.

Universities themselves tend to play a status quo-serving, conformity-manufacturing role when churning out journalists, as wealth won’t flow into an academic environment that is offensive to the wealthy. Moneyed interests are unlikely to make large donations to universities which teach their students that moneyed interests are a plague upon the nation, and they are certainly not going to send their kids there.

“The whole intellectual culture has a filtering system, starting as a child in school,” Noam Chomsky once explained in an interview. “You’re expected to accept certain beliefs, styles, behavioral patterns and so on. If you don’t accept them, you are called maybe a behavioral problem, or something, and you’re weeded out. Something like that goes on all the way through universities and graduate schools. There is an implicit system of filtering… which creates a strong tendency to impose conformism.”

The people who make it through this filtering system are the ones who are elevated to the most influential positions in our civilization. All the most widely amplified voices in our society are the celebrities, journalists, pundits and politicians who’ve proven themselves to be reliable stewards of the matrix of narrative control which keeps the public jacked in to the mainstream worldview.

Is it any wonder, then, that all the sources we’ve been taught to look to for information about our world continually feed us stories which give the impression that the status quo is working fine and this is the only way things can possibly be? Is it any wonder that the mass media support all US wars and cheerlead all imperial agendas?

This is how things were set up to be. Our media act like propagandists for a tyrannical regime because that’s exactly what they are.

On the death of Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley

All on the 22nd November 1963

Article by Gary North, titled The Fathers In The Wilderness.

Excerpt:

With the death of John Kennedy on November 22, 1963–also the day of death for Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis–the rhetoric of can-do liberalism was taken up by a crass Texan who knew how to wield power under the old rules, and who proceeded to involve the United States in two losing wars, the Vietnam war and the war on poverty. Can-do liberalism started twisting arms visibly, and by 1968, the humanistic forces of mindlessness, of revolution, and of drugged retreat reacted violently to what little was left of the humanist vision of Camelot. Lyndon Johnson was the invisible man at the Democrats’ 1968 convention, and he remains invisible. Simultaneously, bureaucrats took over the management of the dreams of Camelot, as bureaucrats always do, and “the Great Society” became an economic and foreign policy nightmare.”

Thus, by the early 1970’s, the old liberalism was crumbling ideologically, and by the late 1970’s, it was in full retreat institutionally. The rise of the neo-conservative movement has routed the Intellectual leaders of the old left, and the rise of the New Rights direct-mall politics and the New Christian Right’s voter registration drives among fundamentalists has begun to rout the political leaders. The extent of Mondale’s loss probably sealed the fate of the old left’s Presidential hopes. Some new left vision, some new age vapor, or some crisis-solving blue collar patriotism seem to be the humanists’ only political alternatives. They are in disarray. They control the reigns of power temporarily, but they are no longer being given a free ride by the conservatives.

The Era of Wilderness Wandering

With the rise of the Christian Reconstruction movement in the late 1960’s, and the rise of the Protestant “renewal” movement of the same period, the vacuum of fundamentalism is being filled. On the other side, liberation theology and neo-Anabaptist communalism have arisen to fill the void of the older theological liberalism. Each side looks at its aging leaders and hopes for something better.

What is called for now is a period of rebuilding the foundations. An enormous educational program is called for. The Christian day school movement and the Christian home school movement are the main long-term weapons in this educational counter-attack against humanism. Of secondary importance long-term, but of great importance short-term, are the new T.V. satellite Christian broadcasts and the advent of computerized mailing lists and newsletters.

The New Renaissance And A New Reformation

Article by Gary North from 1985

C. S. Lewis makes the observation in The Abolition of Man (1947) that occultism and humanism appeared in Western history at about the same time, during the Renaissance. They were two sides of the same revival of paganism. Thus, he argued, occultism and humanistic rationalism are not enemies in principle but rather cooperating philosophies that are united against Christianity and Christian civilization. This is the theme of his great masterpiece, the novel That Hideous Strength.

From 1964 onward, a new Renaissance took place–a recapitulation of the Renaissance’s revival of occultism, mysticism, and the quest for power. To this witches brew was added revolutionism. It hit the academic world in September of 1964, when the student riots began at the University of California at Berkeley. That revolution shook the foundations of the older liberalism. It launched a series of “scientific revolutions” or “paradigm shifts” in every social science.

The new humanism and the new occultism of the late 1960’s produced a new world view, which has in recent years begun to be called the New Age movement or New Age humanism. Such phenomena as “holistic healing,” Eastern mysticism, monistic philosophy (the world is one: pantheism), magic, astrology, and outright satanism began to multiply. It started as a campus phenomenon, and in many ways, this new Renaissance ended there, in the spring of 1970.

Continue reading here.

Launch of a New “Doorway to Freedom”

A new organization formed to help people make sense of a rapidly changing and often confusing world

See article by Dr. Joseph Mercola here.

Quote:

Who’s Part of the Global Cabal?

In the interview, Nass goes on to name some of the organizations that are part of the global cabal that is reworking society for their own aims. Named players include the Rhodes organization, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission and Chatham House, which is the equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations in the U.K.

All these groups, and many more, are linked to each other. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger cofounded the Trilateral Commission and was a Rhodes scholar and member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Kissinger selected Klaus Schwab to create the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 1971, and they’ve been working together ever since.

In 1993, the WEF founded a Young Global Leaders program to groom international heads of state. Today, Germany, France, Canada, Finland and other countries are led by graduates of this program.

“It’s not exactly a secret society, but Klaus Schwab and his group have managed to identify people who would go along with their program,” Nass says. “I suspect these are people who are not the most intelligent, who lack imagination and are very obedient.

Therefore, they have been convinced that climate change is a dire emergency, and that they need to take extraordinary measures to deal with it — even if they have to reduce the population, even if they have to reduce our standard of living, even if they have to impose 15-minute cities, get rid of air travel and … eat bugs.”

Website of Door to Freedom.

American Churches Are Eerily Silent When the Country Needs Them Most

So are churches in other Western countries

Article by Brandon Smith.

Excerpt:

Woke is a vehicle, a mask for a greater monster, and it is being forced into the public consciousness. There has been an active and violent attempt to condition the populace to far-left ideology, and this ideology is deeply hostile to Christianity. You would think there would be a nationwide effort to take a stand on the part of the various denominations to ensure that this cult does not continue to gain ground.

I’ll be the first to argue that the liberty movement (as we sometimes refer to it) is an array of different movements joined together by a singular value – basic freedom.

Not the hedonistic freedom that the political left promotes, which asserts that conscience and reality are subjective; making all behaviors no matter how evil acceptable. No, natural freedoms are what we value, along with the non-aggression principle which dictates that you cannot harm me or take my freedoms unless my behavior is directly damaging the life and liberty of other people.

But what if the love of freedom alone is not enough to rally humanity together to fight the darkness we face today? What about the love of future generations? What if you and I have to fight and die for a freedom we will never personally enjoy? What if what we do today does not benefit us, but it benefits the next generation? What about the act of struggle and sacrifice for a greater cause, even a divine cause? Maybe the liberty movement needs a guiding hand – Maybe we need more Christian groups to step into the fray?

The Religion of Statism

From the book: 'The Mission of Gd', by Joseph Boot

From chapter 4 of Boot’s book:

“The Puritan missiologist, however, is neither a retreatist pacifist nor a neo-Marxist, but believes in the necessity of civil government, qualified by the biblical conviction that the state only has abiding legitimacy where it surrenders to its limited God-ordained role as minister (diaconate) of justice in terms of God’s authority (Rom. 13:4)

[. . .]

“As soon as the state steps outside this sphere it plays God and offers every form of counterfeiting of the Word of God. [. . .] Such a state will be judged by God and once a state commands what God forbids, if Christ is truly Lord, then the Christian has to religious duty to resist. [Emphasis in the original.]

[. . .]

By moving outside its God-ordained sphere, the state thus progressively destroys localism and with it, liberty, as it asserts a messianic (saving) role for itself in the centralized politics of power that exists to serve itself. This is done by attaching to itself the prerogatives of God. It is fascinating to observe in this regard that the theological categories of God’s word are inescapable to all people, and if denied to God are typically transferred to the individual (anarchism) or the state (totalitarianism). When examined through theological lenses, statism involves a pretending to deity by offering everything from usurped sovereignty and law (in terms of human autonomy and positivistic law-making), to providence (cradle-to-grave security through state welfarism), predestination (by social science and planning), incarnation (by the implementing of man’s ‘word’ and idea), atonement (via political reparations, payments, and the politics of guilt), salvation (through a growing world order) and judgement (by threatened environmental and social catastrophe for disobedience) and thus a counterfeit kingdom – the dream of Babel.

Eric Metaxas and “Letter to American Churches”

Discussion with Jordan Peterson

I haven’t heard of this author or his new book with the above title before but he sounds immensely interesting. Not least because he, having grown up in America, has a Greek (father) and German (mother) background. His mother having lost her father in the Second World War.

Here’s the video description:

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Eric Metaxas discuss his most recent book, “A Letter to the American Church,” which argues a betrayal of faith by those who stay silent in the face of tyranny. They parallel the arbiters of speech across history against those populating today, and detail the responsibility to act against falsehood that is intrinsically present in the Abrahamic tradition, yet increasingly absent in the American church today.

Eric Metaxas is an American author, speaker, and radio host. He has written award winning biographies, such as “Bonhoeffer,” as well as children’s books like “Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving,” Metaxas hosts Socrates in the City, a recurring popular event where he interviews writers and thinkers on theology, moralism, and philosophy. He also hosts the nationally syndicated Eric Metaxas Show, more broadly referred to as “The Show About Everything.”

In the podcast (1 h 33 min, on Youtube here, on Bitchute here), Metaxas explains that in his new book he says that the American churches are making the same mistakes the German churches made in Nazi Germany. They looked the other way and narrowed themselves down to “thin theology”. Some did speak up, but not until it was too late to achieve anything meaningful.

(I would add that this “letter” should be addressed to churches “in the American Empire”, which includes the UK and all of Europe.)

Another thing he says is that churches that defied the Covid measures and stayed open during lockdowns “increased four to fivefold”, while those that locked down “withered”.

I can certainly believe that.

He has an amazing personal conversion story that involves a dream, at the age of 25, about picking a golden fish out of the water. He knew in the dream that the fish is Christ.

He has previously written an impressive number and range of books, including biographies about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther and William Wilberforce. According to Wikipedia, the latter was “the companion book to the 2006 film [on Wilberforce: Amazing Grace].”

In 2021, he published a book titled “Is Atheism Dead?” and last year the aforementioned “Letter to American Churches.”