The Narrative Has an Impenetrable Shell

Every day is opposite day. Every day is a bucket of fake. The narrative is the narrative; once it’s established, nothing penetrates it. It rattles on down the road, impervious to inputs, convinced of its own truth without regard to events outside the shell. Psychologists have a term for this.

So Politico warns this week that faith in vaccines is falling, and anti-vaxxer narratives are “on the rise.” Sample paragraph, this one describing Health Secretary Xavier Becerra:

The summer of 2023, a claim made in June and credulously repeated in the bottom half of September: If you take Covid vaccines, you can’t get sick, but if you don’t take Covid vaccines, you die. Government leaders who don’t push the 7th and 8th doses of the mRNA injections “choose not to take care of their people.” Meanwhile:

This headline landed over a year before the Politico piece, adding the necessary but boosters subhed to prevent it from becoming crimethink:

But the narrative rolls on, unperturbed. If you’re dying of Covid, it’s because you hesitated to get your 7,369th dose, anti-vaxxer! Maybe you should have stopped being such a Nazi! In the news media, it’s 2021 forever, and the virtuous science-lovers are rolling up their sleeves to rebuke the science-hating morons, who will not survive the….okay, well, who will not survive the next….okay, well, YOU’LL PROBABLY DIE AT SOME POINT because you didn’t get it. You’re facing a winter of severe illness and death by 2054, at the latest. No amount of evidence will force the storytellers to stop telling this story. It’s the story, so they tell it. The Politico thing ends by quoting Peter Hotez, by the way, as you knew it would.

Similarly, The Atlantic warns now that Donald Trump was a time bomb who kept nearly going off for four years, and only the courage of General Mark Milley kept him under control. Look at the premise at the top of the piece: Disobeying, resisting, and undermining the President of the United States, a military officer protected the Constitution.

How well does the story parse the constitutional issues at stake? This well:

The military decided to have an abortion travel policy, and to fund it. A senator is now interfering in military policy and the unilateral executive appropriations of the Department of Defense, a sign of the ongoing constitutional crisis that began with Trump. Typically, you see, in our constitutional order, the military does whatever it wants, and spends money on its own authority however it feels like spending it, but Tuberville is engaging in the “unprecedented” act of suggesting that Congress should decide how to appropriate federal funds and regulate the armed forces, which means that he hates the Constitution. Article I, Section 8 would like a word, in this obviously extremist description of the authority of Congress:

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

And so on. Why is Tommy Tuberville being such a Nazi? Anyway, Donald Trump was a reckless monster who tried to bait North Korea into a nuclear war so he could kill the whole world:

At the top of the list of worries for these officials was the manage­ment of America’s nuclear arsenal. Early in Trump’s term, when Milley was serving as chief of staff of the Army, Trump entered a cycle of rhetorical warfare with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. At certain points, Trump raised the possibility of attacking North Korea with nuclear weapons, according to the New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt’s book, Donald Trump v. The United States. Kelly, Dunford, and others tried to convince Trump that his rhetoric—publicly mocking Kim as “Little Rocket Man,” for instance—could trigger nuclear war. “If you keep pushing this clown, he could do something with nuclear weapons,” Kelly told him, explaining that Kim, though a dictator, could be pressured by his own military elites to attack American interests in response to Trump’s provocations. When that argument failed to work, Kelly spelled out for the president that a nuclear exchange could cost the lives of millions of Koreans and Japanese, as well as those of Americans throughout the Pacific. Guam, Kelly told him, falls within range of North Korean missiles. “Guam isn’t America,” Trump responded.

So: “Trump entered a cycle of rhetorical warfare with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.” Not mentioned once:

In The Atlantic, Donald Trump just unaccountably tried to start a nuclear war with the man whose hand he is, for some reason, apparently seen shaking in this picture that….must be fake? There was no diplomacy. Trump only threatened Kim from a distance. Go read the thing, and see if you can find a reference to any act of diplomacy between the US and North Korea during the Trump administration. This is the story: Trump desired a nuclear exchange, but the generals patiently explained to him that using nuclear weapons would kill people, so they made him back off, like squirting a frisky puppy with a spray bottle.

By the way, go back up and look at the headline and the framing: Milley protected the Constitution from Trump. Now, these paragraphs land something like a hundred paragraphs into an enormously long story, somewhere down in the bottom third of a hysterical narrative about a POTUS who was a sick monster, and let’s go ahead and screenshot this remarkable bit of a story about the Constitution being saved:

He….never ordered me….to tell the military….to do something illegal. Polite of them to mention this, yeah?

Every word of this story is a report from the land of dreams, but let’s just do one more example to make the point:

So there you have it. “They are not burning it down.” Case closed. You see now how the idiot Trump was surrounded by men of flawless wisdom who kept him in check. There were no fires. Citizen, cleanse your mind.

It is good to read The Atlantic, so you can get the true facts. Nothing burned in the George Floyd summer. Donald Trump thought things burned, but he was stupid and crazy. “Shut the fuck up,” the hero explains. The fires were all in our heads. But we understand now.

This is psychosis. When the news media explains the world to you, it pours out a cloud of absolute madness. It can’t be sustained.