Thread by @wesyang

Once you see the media as the orchestrators of an ongoing passion play expressing the values of a new quasi-theological monoculture that it has become, its behavior becomes more readily explicable andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/when-the-nar…

What's interesting is that in addition to the 16 pieces of propaganda restating the dogma, there is still that one piece of reporting that undermines the other 16 that still runs in their pages. You can still reconstruct reality based on what appears in the mainstream press.

It just takes a lot of effort of critical analysis that is most visibly being done these days on four Substacks -- Greenwald, Taibbi, Sullivan, and Yglesias

We haven't truly entered the Successor Regime until the that one story that disrupts the rest has been entirely suppressed.

But we are already at the inflection point where the balance of forces within the media look like this:

https://twitter.com/AliceFromQueens/status/1373113068264296448?s=20

So have this third role of "Substack Based Narrative Scrutinizer" that of course the Narrrative Enforcers are desperate to dismantle

But the most expeditious path to their total dominance is to successfully suppress the legacy reporting function that allows that one story that upends the rest to appear

The internal struggle sessions are designed to create a chilling effect so powerful that reporting that challenges the narrative doesn't appear in the first place.

People are trying to get Aaron Rupar in trouble for spreading a misleading video. But all the major networks already ran with the narrative he seeded. To the casual news consumer, the fake story already is the true one, and questioning it is the weird thing.

Of course, this is why 65 percent of the public told Pew pollsters that they don't trust the mainstream media. It's just that the 35 percent who still do trust it comprises all the great and the good in America society, and the rest are a rabble.

Too bad that Sullivan piece is behind a paywall. I was able to read it last night. It's a thorough fisking of the Narrative.

Here's a link to an unpaywalled version of the Sullivan post. Read it! andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/when-the-nar…

Here's the 16 to 1 passage

Being paranoid about MSM has always been a gauche, declasse thing. The new Narrative Enforcers exploit this legacy fact to enable them to make the MSM ever less trustworthy.

I'm of the view that there's no conspiracy, just individual actors responding to peer pressure

And yet the ability of social media to coordinate the direction of peer pressure massively expands its impact, such that we have nearly perfect uniformity across all platforms