To their complete and utter surprise, the legacy media have discovered that not many people trust them any more. Why on Earth would that be? It must be disinformation and conspiracy theories, they say.
It certainly couldn’t be because they’re a rabble of elitist liars.
I mean, if you’re one of the more than half of Americans struggling to even feed your family, let alone afford skyrocketing fuel and electricity prices, stop worrying – the media are here to tell you that it’s all just your imagination. The Biden economy is booming!
Did you know the economy was booming? This may come as a shock to anyone out there who a) is alive or b) has to buy things, but it’s definitely true. MSNBC and the New York Times said so.
And they never lie, after all.
NBC report “President Biden’s approval rating has fallen to lowest level of his presidency despite booming economy”, and Mehdi Hasan just doesn’t understand why people would be “unhappy with the way Biden is handling the economy” when wages are growing and they’ve added a “record 6.4 million jobs” in 2021.
Just ignore the fact that Americans lost 20 million jobs during the first two years of the Biden presidency.
Now, OK, that reported 4.5% wage growth is lagging way behind inflation, meaning in real terms people are being paid less.
Yes, alright, the “new jobs” were really just (some) of the people who lost their jobs during lockdown being rehired.
And fine, the reason spending is increasing could be that everything costs more.
But seriously, we’re fine, it’s booming.
So what kind of denier or Russian disinformation peddler would claim that the US economy is really tanking?
They’ll probably point out that inflation is at a 40 year high, and likely to keep on rising.
That the current price of gas is the highest ever in US history.
That the US is expected to enter a recession by the end of the year.
That house prices are increasing so fast that experts are predicting a “housing bubble”.
That “homeless camps” and “tent cities” with populations in the thousands are popping up in dozens of cities.
That the “crippling sanctions” placed on Russia seem to have “accidentally backfired” and hurt the US economy badly.
And, most of all, that moves are afoot which could see major oil trades being done in Yuan, not dollars. A change that could potentially cause the death of the petrodollar, the end of the USD as the global reserve currency, and send the US economy into a death spiral somewhere between Black Monday and Weimar Germany.
Clearly, this is all just conspiracy theories and nonsense. The economy really is booming.
“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it… with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporise anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grammes.”
George Orwell, 1984
People cannot afford gas or heat or food or rent. The price of everything is increasing even as wages lag behind inflation. Everywhere you shop you buy less and spend more.
If all of that can be translated into “booming”, then “the economy” itself becomes a nonsense concept so abstract and removed from real-life experience that it is either entirely fictional or completely irrelevant […] Economically, educationally, spiritually…we’re going backwards. And behind this decline is intent.
Off Guardian
As Theodore Dalrymple has observed of Soviet propaganda, the purpose of such obvious litanies of lies is not to inform or persuade, “but to humiliate”. When we are forced, on pain of being denounced as “misinformation” and un-personed from the digital public square, we become complicit.
“A society of emasculated liars is easy to control,” Dalrymple says. The legacy media are made up almost entirely of emasculated liars and, as Jacinda Ardern has discovered to her endless benefit, they are very, very easy to control.
The only remaining question is: how many of us can they control with their lies.
Now remember: the American economy is booming under Joe Biden. It was always booming under Joe Biden. Anything to the contrary is Russian disinformation.