Corelessness

For years, the progressive news organization Democracy Now! has gone after Big Pharma hammer-and-tongs, slamming the greed and manipulation of a powerful industry that, in their telling, profits from the sleazy manipulation of sickness and pain.

Here’s a 2007 story about a documentary, Big Bucks, Big Pharma: Marketing Disease & Pushing Drugs, introduced like this by host Amy Goodman: “We move now to our last segment with a look at how illness is used, manipulated, and in some instances created by pharmaceutical companies to make greater profits.”

Here’s a 2013 story about another documentary, this one describing how Big Pharma’s capitalist greed murdered people in Africa.

And here’s a story from this year, about yet another anti-Big-Pharma documentary, looking at the way pharmaceutical companies created an opioid crisis in the service of their own greed and wealth.

The narrative has been consistent: Big Pharma is greedy, shoddy, manipulative, and dishonest, pushing disease and thriving from manufactured crisis. Democracy Now! is where you go for criticism of the pharmaceutical industry, and for skepticism about its products and methods.

It’s also where you go, now, for the message that the anti-vaxxer morons who hesitate to take COVID vaccines are idiots who don’t believe in science, because they’re selfish and mindless and they’re probably a bunch of halfwit right-wingers who love Trump. Imagine not trusting a pharmaceutical product! You’d have to be so stupid!

Here’s an interview from January of this year in which a doctor warns that a “globalized anti-science movement” is a threat, “because now people are tying their political allegiance to not getting vaccinated, to not wearing marks, to not social distancing.”

Here’s a story from this August in which a journalist slams the “white privilege” inherent in the choice to decline COVID vaccines.

Here’s a story from December of 2020 about a horrible anti-science Republican inviting anti-vaxxers to come speak to a Senate committee.

And here, for a personal favorite, is an interview from this summer with Dr. Leana Wen, appearing under the calm and reassuring headline, “We Can’t Trust the Unvaccinated.”

Democracy Now! contains multitudes. It’s the place to go to read that Big Pharma lies, cheats, celebrates misery and pain, and sells shitty products with fake science because they’re capitalists who are just in it for the greed; it’s also the place to go to read that anyone who declines Big Pharma’s most profitable new product is a fool and a science-hating unbeliever, and how dare you not take your pharmaceutical products. Big Pharma is evil — and you better stop asking questions and take the shot, you idiot.

So what principle organizes the narrative at Democracy Now!? (That awkward explanation point collision is not my fault.) What do the people who work there and run the place believe?

Or try this one: For decades, every good liberal has known that the FBI is a political instrument that shouldn’t be trusted, a foul machine born from the dark mind of J. Edgar Hoover. Here, for example, is a good liberal at the Washington Post complaining that the FBI headquarters building is named after that “little tyrant,” the totalitarian rat bastard who wiretapped MLK and RFK.

Then, outrageously, that son-of-a-bitch Trump criticized the FBI, an agency that all decent people know to be above reproach. Fortunately, the New Yorker reported, the decent, rock-ribbed patriots at the Bureau had the courage and the decency to return fire, politically, nailing the Republicans for daring to attack an agency that should be treated with unyielding respect. What nerve the Orange Hitler had, attacking the FBI! Can you imagine?

If you had the energy, you could tell the same story about bien pensants and their views of the CIA, a gang of thugs that viciously plot to overthrow legitimate governments overs— I mean, a band of patriots that stood up to Trump!

Here’s the Guardian — the fucking Guardian, ladies and gentlemen, which has its own record on the topic — publishing an opinion piece under the headline, “Why is Donald Trump attacking the US intelligence community?”

I mean, if there’s one thing the Guardian won’t tolerate, it’s criticism of the US intelligence community. They would never!

Or here’s Hakeem Jeffries, a senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, warning us that we need to stop throwing people in prison:

Hakeem Jeffries @hakeemjeffries

End. Mass. Incarceration. Defund The Prison Industrial Complex.

And also letting us know that — well, let’s let him tell us:

Hakeem Jeffries @hakeemjeffries

Lock up Kyle Rittenhouse and throw away the key.

What do these people believe? When politics and news are lifestyle products, a way of signaling status and class, what’s the place of political discourse except to mimic the effect of fashion choices or the car you drive?

Writing today, Glenn Greenwald describes “those whose worldview is bereft of universally applied principles, and based solely on tribal allegiances.” It’s an accurate description. We’re cursed by a politics without any politics in it, an endless series of positional maneuvers that leap up and do a 180 on the regular. Arguing with it is like arguing with a Mercedes-Benz hood ornament. And yet it consumes the public sphere: emptying it, then re-filling it with noise. I have no solution to that problem, but as a start, let’s turn the circus off.

An0maly @LegendaryEnergy

This two minute @JimBreuer clip is better than anything you’ll see on SNL this year