Miss Information Blocks Reality

This is about California, but it’s not about California. It’s about the people Mark McGrath usefully describes as “guardians of decay,” and their desperate, non-stop manipulation of the information environment to prevent people from seeing. You want to click on that last link — it’s a quick read, and well worth the time. I’m going to show you something today that McGrath describes precisely:

Guardians of Decay often flood the space with fear, guilt, and manufactured fatigue. They try to make questioning feel shameful, dangerous, or exhausting. The goal is to associate critical thought with social disruption as if asking what's true is itself the problem.

Next is the relentless use of logical fallacies. Rather than engaging directly, they redirect. Guardians of Decay exaggerate your position into something absurd, then argue against that version.

Yes. All the time.

As California sinks, people keep asking the same question: Why do Californians put up with it? Next comes the conclusion, which is that Californians are getting what they voted for. That’s true, but. One of the things that’s happening is that the California legislature — a full-time, year-round state legislature, a rare creature on the American political scene — introduces something like 1,500 bills a year, and tends to pass over a thousand of them. No one can keep up with it. And the repulsive, shameful spectacle of legislative “debate” in California, a stream of insane babbling from a gaggle of degenerate human garbage, gets almost no direct attention. It shouldn’t. Most people should spend their time on home, family, community, and productive enterprise. If you don’t spend your days listening to Scott Wiener, you’re winning at life. Chris Bray is apparently not winning at life, but let’s put that aside for now.

So we have a small group of people who keep their eye on government for us, is the theory, and those alert, watchful professionals let us see through the fog. They digest information, and let us know when important things are happening, summarizing significant developments. Journalism is supposed to let you live your life, but direct a little time every day to checking in on the larger world around you, without letting that search for understanding consume time that can be better spent. And holy shit is that model broken.

A few days ago, I described a session of legislative debate in California in detail, posting video and screenshots so readers could see what the legislature was doing. The Assembly was considering a bill to make the solicitation of minors for paid sex a felony. The bill, authored by a Democrat, was largely but not uniformly opposed by Democrats, vigorously opposed by Democratic legislative leadership, backed by the Democratic governor, and supported by all Republicans.

So let’s look at the way the Sacramento Bee, the legacy media’s newspaper of record on state politics, describes that debate for readers. In a published discussion, the Bee’s opinion editor sits down with an opinion writer to chew over the details of the solicitation bill. And here’s the way writer Robin Epley describes the effort to penalize the purchasing of minors for paid sex, in a discussion that focuses on Republican support for the bill:

The bill sought to consider any financial gift that ends in sex “solicitation.” For teens, ignorant of the law, that could mean anything from buying the prom tickets or spotting your date for some French fries. California doesn’t need to make actions like that a felony to catch real predators…

A 19- or 20-year-old dating a 16- or 17-year-old isn’t out of the ordinary — maybe they went to high school together and maintained a relationship. Now, those kids could be at risk of becoming felons just for buying their date dinner?

So:

• Proposal: Let’s make it a felony for adults to buy minors for sex.

• Description: OH NO MEAN REPUBLICANS WANT TO SEND HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS TO STATE PRISON FOR SHARING FRENCH FRIES, HOW BIZARRE!

Epley talks about prosecutorial discretion when it helps her, but drops it when it doesn’t. How many deputy district attorneys would file felony charges because teenagers shared french fries while they were dating?

Remember what Mark McGrath said about the guardians of decay, in the quote that I started with: “Rather than engaging directly, they redirect. Guardians of Decay exaggerate your position into something absurd, then argue against that version.” And there it is.

She keeps going, and the tendentious inventions pile up: “I believe it would be used as a cudgel to persecute out-groups — including families that disapprove of queer or interracial relationships.”

Finding this bell in her hand, she keeps ringing it: “There is a serious problem with the sex trafficking of minors in this state, but throwing interracial relationships and queer communities under the bus is not the way to solve it.”

• Proposal: Let’s make it a felony for adults to buy minors for sex.

• Description: OH NO THEY’RE SAYING THEY’RE BRUTAL RACISTS WHO WANT TO HURT GAY PEOPLE!

Zero good faith. Zero effort to describe; a full court press to reframe and distort and misdirect.

Epley is also a gifted mindreader, and she knows for a fact that no one actually cares about the sex trafficking of minors. They’re just pretending: “The Republicans have pushed on this message not because it’s valid, but because they know that clutching pearls works to rile constituencies up.” What’s the evidence for this? The evidence is that she says so. Pushing to prevent minors from being sold to adults for sex obviously isn’t valid, she says flatly.

There’s plenty more to be said about this, if we want to be tedious and go sentence by sentence identifying sleazy rhetorical maneuvers, false fact claims, and logical fallacies, but you don’t have to eat the whole egg to know that it’s rotten. This professional journalist exists to prevent knowledge and understanding. She’s a barrier to information. That’s her job. And that’s why so many Californians don’t see what they need to fix. Their only connection to state politics is that OH NO THE MEAN REPUBLICANS ARE BEING WEIRD AGAIN. Ban the sex trafficking of minors? You mean VICIOUSLY ATTACK GAY PEOPLE!?!?!?

Look at her other work, if you don’t already feel in your bones what it’s going to tell you. She’s the queen of the feelz beat:

She’s a guardian of decay.

Related, on the topic of tendentious misdirection:

I think we all remember how we spent our high school years buying sex from our classmates, right? You’re showering with the boys after PE, you’ve got some spare cash, and…well, you know. What a totally normal argument. Observation from a longtime observer of the California legislature:

It would be helpful to have a newspaper in Sacramento that describes events there, instead of aggressively guarding against the possibility that the people of the state might see the place clearly.