A Dumb Lie from a Dumb Writer

Max Boot is a turd, one of the IYI fools who constantly explain how stupid ordinary people are while never actually ever knowing anything themselves. Today he coughs up this hairball:

Max Boot 🇺🇦 @MaxBoot

If content moderation is communism or fascism, that would mean that the US was under fascist rule when I was growing up in the 1980s. Back then most people got news from a newspaper or 3 TV networks. Politics was saner and less polarized in those days.

wapo.stOpinion | Elon Musk is the last person who should take over TwitterThere is way too much nonsense online as it is. Musk would only make it worse.

In the 1980s, “most people got news from a newspaper or 3 TV networks.”

In the 1980s, as throughout American history, the country had a vibrant print culture and a deep bench of alternative media sources. New York City has been the home to dozens of newspapers, and you signaled who you were when you sat down to the breakfast table with the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Daily News or the Post, the broadsheets or the tabloids. New York magazine was the birthplace of the New Journalism, the New Yorker was one of the world’s great forums for long-form magazine journalism, the Village Voice was a literate and aggressive voice from the left, and the New York Review of Books and the New York Observer and and and….

But anyway, media used to be narrow and monolithic, and we were all more unified because of it.

I grew up when Max Boot did, and yes: We had three networks. We also had independent local news on several stations, with a bunch of locally famous figures, and syndicated television that gave us people like Morton Downey Jr., and public access cable and UHF TV that gave us figures like Wally George.

Back in the 80s, when media was monolithic and we had no social division

I grew up in Los Angeles, where the center-left newspaper was the (now Woke-plus and shallow) Los Angeles Times, the middle-of-the-road paper preferred in the San Fernando Valley was the Los Angeles Daily News, and people who weren’t a buncha damn communists read the rock-ribbed Herald-Tribune, alongside a massive list of suburban newspapers: The Daily Breeze, the Press-Telegram, the Star-News, the Press-Enterprise, the Register, and on and on and on, plus the African-American Los Angeles Sentinel (founded in 1933) and the Spanish-language La Opinion. Shout out to Dr. Rampershad, who taught civics at Walnut High School and told us that the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin was for rockheads who drank Coors and harbored secret fascist yearnings. (He was not a subtle man.)

Alongside the dozen-plus daily newspapers in Southern California, I grew up on the Los Angeles Weekly and the Reader, the latter eventually giving way to weekly alternatives like New Times Los Angeles.

Alongside all of that, pre-Internet America was the home of ‘zine culture and the mimeographed mail-order newsletter, the John Birch Society circular and a thousand like it, left, right, and everywhere else.

It has never been otherwise; the American Revolution was made, in good part, by pamphlets and broadsides, by print shops. American print culture is historically loud and proud, a two-century explosion of competing voices.

When someone who writes for the Bezos Daily News paints a false past in which he assures you that people used to hear a much narrower range of competing voices, and that they were better off for it, he’s lying. To be sure, he’s an idiot, but he’s also lying. His agenda is simply to narrow the range of acceptable voices, and it’s a garbage agenda. “Politics was saner and less polarized in those days.” No it wasn’t.

This things were better in the old days, when people like you weren’t allowed to speak thing is a strategy, not a depiction of anything that has ever existed.