Sometimes I think that maybe I am going crazy.   Don’t people obviously see the low quality of modern political discourse?  Political debates are pretty much unwatchable, all politicians say are platitudes with no substance at all.  All commentators on TV are unwatchable except for Tucker Carlson who somehow allowed to stay on Cable News.

Today, journalists will accept almost any lie told by the U.S. Government.  As bad as the mainstream sycophantic beltway Right is, somehow the Left is even worse.  The meida Left believes any and all tales told by U.S. intelligence agencies as long as such tales discredit political enemies.  Most cable news networks are actually filled with former intelligence operatives (for those who are familiar with the intelligence community, there is rarely such a thing as “retired” in intelligence work). The response from the Left is not of skepticism but a strange idolization of intelligence agencies that were once rightly viewed with a huge amount of suspicion.  These were the same intelligence agencies that lied about weapons of mass destruction and put to together the largest domestic spy apparatus that the world has ever seen under the Patriot Act.  Of course, when their party got in power, all criticism of domestic spying and the warfare state ended.  Leftist TV networks became actual supporters of domestic spying and defended the national security establishment.  When Trump came into power I expected the left to flip back to its usual antiwar and civil liberties position.  Instead, they became much worse.  They wanted more war from the Trump administration and now looked at the corrupt intelligence community as a tool to dethrone Trump. Today, a huge amount of people believe the nonsense idea that Russians somehow control American politics, are buying off journalists, and are an ever constant hacking threat.  This has been made up in whole cloth and there is zero evidence behind any of this but this is what people believe.

We are now in some kind of new reality where what is printed in the news becomes the new reality no matter non-factual it is.  Things are going to get weirder and weirder from here as reality becomes almost wholly created on TV and manipulated by Big Tech.  The average public will have almost no means of accessing true information.  How does a democracy supposed to work in such a situation?  Obviously it won’t and the whole idea that democracy can work with self interested multibillion dollar corporations controlling all information is ridiculous.

Liberal journalist Glen Greenwald is one of the few exceptions and from what I can tell is a very principled person that cares about journalist ethics.  He is probably the most famous journalist in the world and his mere existence is a thorn in the side of other journalists by exposing what frauds they are by his example.  Cable TV News hosts come off as trashy and unprincipled compared to Glen Greenwald who takes the principals of journalism seriously.

In the video below Greenwald rips apart the low ethics of the media left in the United States.

It makes me miss the old days when there was intellectual discussion in American politics.