Mainstream media – willing accomplices

Only universal outrage among all media could possibly have done justice to Joe Biden’s divisive, menacing September 1 speech. But we did not get that kind of outrage, except in the alternative media. The Mainstream Media, and some of its “art-house” supporting organs, offered universal praise for all but the staging. (And even that was a minor quibble, and the subject of debate.) That speech was a test of the media community. And the Mainstream Media failed that test. For that reason, CNAV makes no further apologies or accommodations. We condemn the Mainstream Media as willing accomplices of a would-be tyrant. And we half expect the major organs to embed some of their reporters as war correspondents when bully-boy elements of the United States Army – or a real-life Internal Security Force – start rounding people up for imprisonment, or execution, summary or otherwise.

The speech …

CNAV has already covered That Speech. We compared it to Cicero’s Orations Against Catiline, in form and in implication. The dire implication comes from Cicero’s last major act as senior consul of Rome: having five Roman Senators summarily executed.

In this context, CNAV should mention the incredible sleight-of-hand Cicero used. A senior consul could not even recommend a penalty, so Cicero told the Senate they would have grounds to propose summary execution. The motives of various Senators to vote for execution don’t matter. What matters is that Cicero gave those Senators their prime excuse. And it must have been a “good” one, because execution without trial violated every concept of the mos majorum, the “customs of the greater number.” (In fact, Senator Publius Clodius Pulcher, a few years later, proposed a bill of attainder to send Cicero into exile. He stated as his reason Cicero’s having Roman citizens executed without trial.)

Not only that, but in announcing the executions as accomplished facts, Cicero knew he mustn’t utter the end-of-life word. So he said, “They had lived!” (Latin Vixerant!).

Euphemism characterized Cicero’s action, and similar euphemism characterized That Speech. But more than that, Joe Biden issued a ringing call for “Glorious Conformity.” What might the late Rod Serling think of that? To his way of thinking, “Glorious Conformity” was a right-wing concept, not a left-. But Joe Biden made it a left-wing concept, and no mistake.

… which Tucker Carlson predicted

We now turn to the reaction. The best negative reaction, the Control, came from Tucker Carlson at Fox News. He wrote this piece before That Speech, but he could as easily have written it afterward. His was a reaction to many things Joe Biden said before That Speech. But take a closer look and you will find in That Speech everything Tucker Carlson cited the day before. For instance, he said this to “Morning Joe” Scarborough on MSNBC:

Imagine, Joe, if you turn on the television in Washington, D.C., and saw a mob of a thousand people storming down the hallways of the parliament, breaking down the doors, trying to overturn an outcome of the election and killing several police officers in the meantime.

By the way, we all know that the January 6 event was a false-flag pseudo-operation. We have Ray Epps, famously exhorting people to go “into the Capitol.” Then now you see him on an FBI wanted montage, now you don’t. A reporter for The New York Times admitted as much, and to Project Veritas, no less.

More to the point, no Capitol Police or other law-enforcement officer died that day from a blow landed in anger. In contrast, one protester died from a bullet that a half-crazed officer fired without cause.

Negative reaction

Tucker Carlson knows most of this, especially about the death of Ashli Babbett. And he fully expected everything we saw in That Speech, except maybe for its staging. Here is how Carlson closed:

Remember a year ago? “Stop the shouting. Lower the temperature. Unite our nation.” That was last year. Not anymore, Nazis. They’re taking off the velvet glove and we’re about to feel the steel beneath it.

Which Biden did in That Speech.

After That Speech came several theories from the alternative media. Did Joe Biden agree to this as a desperate measure? Are his fellow Democrats in the House so scared that they begged him to pull a stunt like this? Did he or someone else let his anger cloud his judgment, especially with the staging? Has Joe Biden taken alarm because Republicans have openly teed up plans to impeach him?

Or, as JD Rucker warns, did Joe Biden deliver That Speech as an ultimatum? Does anyone remember this line by voice-over actor Paul Frees in Colossus: The Forbin Project (1973)?

Obey me and live, or disobey and die.

Do Joe Biden’s handlers have a plan in place to declare martial law? Perhaps another false-flag pseudo-operation that will give the President an excuse to declare it? That warning assumes that enough rank-and-file in the Army would go along with it. (And how many Marines? Is that why Joe Biden had two Marines in the background?)

The Mainstream Media give three cheers

In sharp contrast we see the Mainstream Media shouting hip, hip, hurrah and tallyho. First we see CNN saying it’s too bad a President should have to give anything like That Speech. Worse, they justify it! The times, they say, call for it! And they make much of Trump’s promise to pardon, fully, all who now languish in prison, on trumped-up charges (forgive the pun), arising out of the January 6 event. As far as CNN is concerned, all such people should rot in prison for life without possibility of parole. If they don’t actually deserve execution. Beyond that, CNN hopes voters will forgive the mess Biden has made of the economy, to Save Democracy!

The Atlantic leads the supporting cast, chiefly of glossy leftist magazines. They headline their piece “The Speech No President Should Have to Give.” They do quarrel with the staging, suggesting it played into Trump’s hands, especially that Red Light Backdrop. Beyond that, they wonder why Biden did not specifically call on rank-and-file “mainstream Republicans” to rise up and loudly denounce Trump as a strutting pretender and all his followers as deluded, vindictive soldiers of insurrection. But beyond that, they say Biden had the duty to give a speech like That.

The author makes an interesting criticism of Biden’s touting of his legislative achievements. The Atlantic seems to think he should have left those out, but only because they detracted from focus. Biden needed to focus on the danger from Trump and his voters.

We’ll give three cheers, and one cheer more!

Vanity Fair tells Republicans to shut up and take a large dose of “the truth.” “Stop threatening democracy!” they scream, not in quoting That Speech but in cheering it before reviewing it.

The New Yorker also cheers on the tone of That Speech, though perhaps they, too, quarrel with the staging. Their quarrel is that the staging detracts from the words. More to the point, the editors of The New Yorker are very much afraid that Trump will win. What will follow, they say, will be their impression of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The Guardian gave a few cheers, saying much the same as The New Yorker did but pretending to be neutral. But they expressed fear that Doug Mastriano would win his governor’s race in Pennsylvania and appoint a Secretary of State that would change election procedures in that State.

MSNBC actually praised Biden for having the Marines in the background. (Which CNN did not like.) They denied that having the Marines broke with speechmaking traditions. But that didn’t mean they considered that normal. Instead they said Biden deliberately had the Marines present to show that the American military will back him. Back him in what? MSNBC would have us believe, to back him against “another” insurrection. But maybe Biden means the military will back him in martial law and rounding people up. Of course, neither MSNBC nor any Mainstream Media organ would dare say that.

The Mainstream Media disgraces itself yet again

Last we have the Associated Press, whose editors can’t seem to make up their minds whether to praise Biden for saying what they themselves think, or warning that he disturbed a hornets’ nest without good reason. They quoted Larry Diamond, a Hoover Institution fellow, as saying Biden faced a choice between two equally unpleasant alternatives. Diamond actually called the prospect of a Republican win at Midterms “an important challenge in the defense of democracy.” But he also observed – correctly – that too many (from his point of view) will see That Speech as partisan.

That Speech is more than partisan. As CNAV said yesterday, this is Cicero Against Catiline type stuff. Dictators make that kind of speech before they send the Internal Security Forces to round up their ordinary-folk opposition and haul them off to prison – or to the gallows, the guillotine, or the wall, or the gurney. When Whittaker Chambers read Atlas Shrugged and said that from every page he saw a command:

To a gas chamber – go!

He could have been talking as easily about That Speech.

From Mainstream Media to Department of Information

But not one voice in the Mainstream Media noticed. Or if any of those writers and editorialists did notice, they buried that impression. Instead of sounding any alarm from That Speech, they cheered it on, continuing the government’s Other-ization campaign. They behaved as if they were actually the Ministry of Truth (read Propaganda) in an authoritarian country.

And maybe some of those editors are preparing their curricula vitarum for Senate confirmation hearings for the post of Secretary of Truth. In any case, they can no longer claim membership in that “press” the First Amendment exists in part to protect. They have become part of a government, the chief executive of which made a dictator’s Speech. That is the final shame to their prestige, and reason enough to treat them as the Irish treated Captain Boycott. And for the same reason.