Unreal

The New York Times has just covered Spencer Pratt’s bid to become the mayor of Los Angeles. Because journalists are thoughtful and creative and accustomed to thinking for themselves, the Times has cleverly discovered that Pratt’s campaign is…

…dark.

Precise uniformity of ritual chanting, the defining quality of contemporary legacy-media journalism.

The story examines a set of claims without examining them. Sample sneer:

As a candidate, he frequently veers into exaggeration and outright vitriol. Pratt has claimed, without evidence, that “90 percent” of the city’s homeless population is addicted to drugs.

I mean, imagine what kind of weird fabulist loser you’d have to be to think that there’s some connection between drugs and homelessness in Los Angeles. Why is Pratt so dark?

On the very same day that the New York Times eyerolls over Pratt’s bizarre claim that drug addiction and homelessness somehow intertwine, a local news report in Los Angeles notes the explosive growth of violence and drug overdoses at a county-funded “harm reduction” center on Skid Row, the heart of the city’s homeless crisis. Opening sentence: “A taxpayer-funded homeless services campus in the heart of Skid Row is at the center of a growing controversy, as dramatic video shows open drug use and drug deals just steps from its entrance.”

How strange! In the same sentence, “homeless services campus” and “open drug use and drug deals.” Why is their vision so dark?

Question for the New York Times: Why does the county health department distribute all that naloxone around homeless encampments? aRe TheY sTRuGglInG wItH a DarK vISioN!?!?!?!?!?

The Times goes on to say that Pratt is supported by “homeowners paranoid about crime,” bizarre and irrational psychological dysfunction that leads people to support bizarre dark politics. Meanwhile:

The entire narrative strategy is to stand in front of a fire and say that…well, this:

The function of journalism is a simple, direct, persistent, sneering denial of obvious realities. Note that the absolutely extraordinary useful idiot from the Times follows Pratt to Langer’s Deli, which puts him about forty feet from massive groups of crushingly obvious open drug use in MacArthur Park. He stands next to MacArthur Park and sneers at the claim that there’s a lot of drug addiction among the homeless in Los Angeles.

“Progressive” politics, and “mainstream” journalism, has become a near-Soviet exercise in the insistent denial of the most obvious realities that are standing right in front of you, waving their arms in the air.

Pratt’s message is resonating in an era of perceived crisis that has gripped Los Angeles and the country beyond it. In a bizarre twist, the traits that might usually disqualify a political hopeful, such as lack of experience, have endeared Pratt to his supporters.

An era of perceived crisis. What a fucking idiot.