I recently noticed the use of the term “Mainstream Alternative Media” to represent the fake opposition of many “alternative” media entities to the MSM. In reality, the MSAM is just as involved in the dividing of working people to facilitate their domination by the oligarchy as the MSM as well as hiding the reality of oligarchic societal control. To be able to do this effectively, the MSAM have to provide some accurate critiques of the MSM and related “Global Theory Industry” (GTI), as Gabriel Rockhill puts it, of oligarch controlled universities and think tanks. The one thing shared by both MSM and MSAM is the complete ignoring of political economy, as both are deeply neoliberal, focusing on issues of culture to hide that reality.
If within the MSM and GTI we have race grifters during the time of the lowest level of racism within Western societies, in the MSAM we have race-baiters. The newly Twitter-reinstated Alex Jones is a classic case, as recently he shared tweets here and here that attempted to paint the non-white community with the actions of the few, in exactly the same fashion that many race grifters attempt to do with the white community. The first tweet was from a year earlier (early 2023) and the latter was from the UK, it seems that there is such a “war on white people” that Mr. Jones has to draw his net wide and far in both space and time to provide examples. This is of course is simply the opposite of the “all white people are racist” race grifting approach. The reality is that neither are true, and both serve to divide and conquer working people to facilitate their domination.
And of course the CIA and other security services are either now “our best friends” if you believe the MSM or “a leftist anti-American gang” if you believe Mr. Jones. Of course, both positions are ridiculous as the US security services are fully integrated with the US capitalist ruling class. But that’s the one thing that the MSM and the MSAM do not want the general citizenry to understand. At one point, Mr. Jones states a truth “the American people have the same enemy as Russia” but then states that that enemy is some nebulous entity called the “globalists” who are somehow allied with the Chinese Party-state! A great example of mixing actual fact with utter propagandist rubbish to hide the fact that that enemy is the US capitalist ruling class and that China is opposed to that class while being allied with Russia (and Iran). This of course fits in perfectly with the agenda of the domestic-oriented section of the US capitalist elite personified by Trump, who want to disengage with Russia to attack China (and Iran); or even better have Russia become a “junior ally” (i.e. vassal) of the US against China.
Both the MSM and MSAM of course hate Iran as they are both thoroughly Zionist, with both Trump’s favourite daughter and all three of Biden’s children having married Zionists (as has also Kamala Harris) and both happy to employ both Jewish and Christian Zionists in senior positions; for example extensively within Biden’s cabinet and the new Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives. Mr. Jones used to be open about criticizing Zionist influence on US foreign policy as in this case, but then married a Zionist who he had three children with, relies on getting his show broadcast on Zionist-owned stations, being paid by many Zionist sponsors and advertisers, and of course being platformed on a Twitter where pro-Palestinian views are being actively censored after its owner received overwhelming pressure from advertisers and the Zionist regime. While the MSM ignores the Gaza genocide, and Israeli leaders’ openly genocidal statements, and produces distractions such as the Grammys and the Superbowl, the MSAM ignores the Gaza genocide while producing distracting ludicrous fantasies. There is a small area of the MSAM which offers some criticism of Israel, as with Tucker Carlson, but this also tends to identify “Muslim terrorists” as a major problem while pushing for the US to not be “bogged down” in the Middle East so that it can focus on China, and is very much a fringe position within the MSAM.
The MSAM are fully into pushing utter nonsense stories to distract the general population with ludicrous fantasies about space aliens, crisis actors, and an AI singularity (which is many decades, if not centuries away). There is no “I Robot” in our near future just capitalist-elite serving applications of AI and robotics to make life for working people even more precarious. Elon Musk who has absolutely no formal science training beyond the high-school level, is also heavily pushing this fantasy. He is of course also an avowed free-marketer who fights unionization while keeping wages down (until he was recently forced to raise them to keep his workers) and flouting basic environmental regulations while feeding at the trough of government subsidies for over a decade. He also declares that he is for free speech, unless of course that involves pro-Palestinian views, or other views that he doesn’t like, on Twitter. Here is Joe Rogan (another MSAM who mixes significant facts with propaganda and ridiculous fantasies) and Elon Musk “confirming” Alex Jones’ ramblings:
Then there is the special place within the MSAM called the “red pill” of outright misogyny to balance off the MSM gender studies fuelled misandry (and misogyny when it comes to destabilization of the term “woman” and the usage of slurs such as TERF: trans-exclusionary radical feminist). In the red pill world all women are “banging the Chads” in their teens and twenties and then seeking out poor “simps” to wife up their damaged used-up minds and bodies after they have “hit the wall”. With educated women being the worst, initiating divorces 70% of the time! The slight nuance that women with at least a degree get divorced much less than other women (only 25% of the time), and that the 70% statistic relates to when a divorce is initiated, cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the marriage-hating red pill agenda of course! With a little understanding of statistics one knows that the real probability of a man marrying a women with at least a degree and then getting divorced by her is 25% multiplied by 70%, which is 17.5%; damn good odds! The message to men is “be alone” while engaging in meaningless relationships with women if at all, pretty much the male equivalence of the gender studies nonsense; e.g. the fatuous “all men are rapists” delusions and anti-scientific assertions that humanity is not a binary sexually dimorphic species. What happens when you divide the workers by both race and sex? It’s much easier to control them! Now of course there are truths within the red pill word, as their opposite provides easy pickings, but the capitalist ruling class assault on working people’s living standards that has done so much to impact marriage and birth rates will not be one of them.
Matt Walsh, another member of the MSAM will critique both feminism and the red pill quite accurately, but never the oligarchic US capitalist ruling class as he waffles on about “cultural Marxists” (actually the progressive liberal bourgeoisie), migrants (while not calling for the jailing of the bourgeois elite who exploit these migrants to keep US wages down and keeping silent about the US economic sanctions and regime change operations that force many to migrate), a supposed wave of anti-white racism, and the “erasure” of the cover up of the realities of US history (genocide, slavery, class war and empire); all while pushing Zionist propaganda and anthropogenic climate change denial.
Of course, the US men’s rights movement have some reasons to be unhappy with some parts of US society and its institutions but the red pill develops and exaggerates these into an utterly toxic stew; i.e. exactly the approach of the extreme “feminist” sex, gender and trans grifters.
It’s as if working people are facing two propaganda boxers, one from the liberal capitalist more globalist ruling elite factions (global finance, global corporations etc.) and one from the right-wing capitalist more domestic ruling elite factions (domestic resource extraction, domestic property development, domestic-oriented finance) which are constantly punching out any knowledge or understanding of the real world. Its even obvious with COVID, where one side tells us that there are absolutely no problems with the MRNA vaccines and anyone pushing alternative policies and treatments were all either ignorant or malicious (while asserting that COVID is over and ignoring long-COVID) while the MSAM tell us that the MRNA vaccines were designed to cull the population by a globalist elite and that COVID was a complete mind-control hoax and/or was produced in a Chinese lab at the direction of those globalists. The truth again is somewhere in the middle with corporate and state corruption, state incompetence and a push by the capitalist elite to get back to business irrespective of the long term harm to working people.
And now we come to the 2024 election which is basically an intra-elite spat between the Zionist neoliberal globally-focused Russia, Iran and China hating culturally liberal US capitalist elite, and the Zionist neoliberal domestically-focused Iran and China hating culturally-conservative US capitalist elite. Now the cultural-conservative position may be little more than cosplay for many on the right, as the right-wing needs to dragoon the support of the still significant but declining US religious vote; the recurring sex scandals on the right-wing remind us that many so-called "culturally right” opinion leaders are no such thing. As with the openly anti-homophobic Edgar Hoover who just spent most of his spare time with his male “best friend”, and the supposedly homophobic Lindsey Graham “confirmed bachelor”. On the liberal side elites tend to be more extreme than the general population, so there may not be so much cosplay; especially on the issue of redefining pedophiles as a sexual preference of “Minor Attracted People” and giving young people the “freedom” to be raped by adults. The blessed (by the post-modernist non-historical materialist critical theorist “left”) critical theorist Foucault regularly visited Morocco for child-rape trips and we of course have the extensive list of liberal “acquaintances” of memory-holed Mr. Epstein who managed to commit suicide in a supposedly constantly monitored suicide-proof cell.
There is also of course President Biden’s full support for his drug-addicted son who likes them young. No jail time for this self-confessed crackhead it seems.
Then of course there is the “creepy Joe” behaviour around women, and Joe Biden’s great friendship with the racist misogynistic bigot Storm Thurmond; a man who women were warned not to get in an elevator with so as to not risk being groped by this disgusting PoS. Then again, groping and sexualizing female politicians seems to have been both a Republican and Democrat male pass-time.
Here is Joe Biden praising Storm Thurmond for helping him make the drug laws more racist with much greater penalties for crack cocaine (heavily used by the Black community) than for powdered cocaine (heavily used by the white community) with no scientific basis in fact. All while obediently serving the interests of the US capitalist elite while bullshitting about being a man of the people. Even when he is increasingly going senile right in front of our eyes the MSM still praises this warmongering, elite serving, disgusting PoS.
And of course the widespread liberal progressive elite support for Harvey Weinstein until that support became too publicly problematic. Plus the liberal “feminist” elites repeated protection of senior liberals from sexual assault allegations while throwing the book at members of the non-liberal elite who challenge them.
Joe Biden showed his ambiguous political leanings when he allowed the public denigration and bullying of Anita Hill by senators in their derailing of her sexual harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas, one of the most conservative PoS to recently serve on the US Supreme Court. As the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee Biden could easily have put an end to the boys club misogynistic nature of the Thomas confirmation hearings; a nature that is well captured by this Saturday Night Live skit.
And still we don’t have the full Epstein client list, which was heavily populated by liberal progressives, and all those video tapes just went missing. And of course Sound of Freedom was generally criticized by liberal commentators, or even outright attacked, while the actual working people who went to see it in droves loved it.
Then there is the MSM and MSAM double-teaming on anthropogenic climate change. For the MSM its all about bullshitting about anything actually substantive being done to address climate change for the past thirty years, which would require the capitalist elite to downsize their lavish wealth and lifestyles, while pushing capitalist elite beneficial solutions. The MSAM then pushes utter science denial telling us that the science is all bullshit pushed by a global conspiracy of climate scientists and pushing such ridiculous and simplistic manipulative slogans as “carbon dioxide is plant food”. All of course to protect all of those massive fossil fuel corporations that would lose much of their value if humanity decided to keep fossil fuels “in the ground”. The much better answer of actually properly planning for the reduction in fossil fuel use while managing the fallout in a balanced way that would impact the rich much more than the poor is of course not on the agenda.
A very smooth operator for the MSAM is Tucker Carlson who pushes the “Russia good, China bad, its all climate change alarmism” message while a-historically claiming that the United States used to be “free” sometime in a supposedly bucolic post-WW2 America. Yes, free for the white capitalist elites as McCarthyism destroyed the New Dealers aided by widespread spying by an FBI that was the puppet of the reactionary Hoover and CIA manipulation of the academy and the media. Oh, and segregation and lynchings of course.
McCarthy’s aide Roy Cohn, one of the more disgusting and corrupt elements of the US elite, was a mentor for the young adult Donald Trump in the 1970s and 1980s.
So with the dual boxers trying to divide and conquer from two different propagandist bases, while also attempting to confuse us so much that we cannot properly comprehend what is reality and what is not, are there some outlets that steer between the two bases and much closer to the truth? There are a very few, such as The Grayzone, Empire Files, The Duran, and The New Atlas which tend to be pretty accurate, but most others have blind spots that reflect their political leanings. For example. those from the Trotskyist-left tend to view any society that was not the product of a perfect socialist conception as bad, thus equating communist China with the capitalist West and treating Stalin worse than many right-wing commentators. Those from the right tend to treat anthropogenic climate change and COVID as some form of “globalist” originated hoax, while getting other things right. Some basic markers to judge information sources:
Do they understand that Russia, China and Iran are allied against US (and Western) capitalist ruling class domination?
Do they condemn the Gazan genocide while understanding the outsized role of Zionist influences within especially US but also in Western politics?
Do they understand that anthropogenic climate change represents a direct threat to modern human civilization?
Do they understand that both COVID (including long COVID) can be very real AND that the MRNA vaccine could be a highly dangerous profit-driven human toxin? In fact, they could be reinforcing each other in dis-regulating human immune systems.
Do they talk about the domination of Western societies by a capitalist extractive oligarchy that is reducing general living standards and economic and social stability through their extractive profiteering?
If they pass the above (I am sure that readers can come up with other tests) then they are probably neither MSM or MSAM but may actually represent a truly oligarch independent alternative view. But separating the wheat from the chaff becomes more difficult by the day, with the Zionist regime’s attempts to bribe alternative providers of information into being Zionist shills being just the latest attempt to shut down truly alternative views.
What you are writing about is a combination of mass hysteria and a psycho-pandemic which forms a smokescreen around socio-political realities.
What unites these manifestations is a refusal to look at the 'man behind the curtain' the capitalist system in all its panoramic glory.
The world is dominated by capitalism which spends enormous amounts of energy in encouraging people to 'be original', 'think for themselves' and move beyond the 'tired old scapegoating' of capitalism which puts all in mind of the 'failures' of socialism-in all of its forms- which is the keystone of modern ideology (which is not an ideology or an ism, god forbid, but a recognition of the way things are, must be and always have been).
Unhappily the Universe does not seem ready to tolerate this endless game among mediocre minds.
While idiot "a" is explaining (not for the first time) that Co2 is used in greenhouses to ripen fruit or that the wine froze on Louis XIV's Versailles dinner table in May or some other such sub-factoid from the back of a chewing gum wrapper, the temperature is rising, ice is melting and the possible end of the lives of billions (greatly to be desired no doubt in some quarters) or even human life itself looms ever closer.
And climate change is just one of the morbid symptoms of a capitalist system, embracing the entire world, that the media of which you write, together with the actual (dying) remnants of the mainstream's, avoids noticing.
Another, of course, is disease-epidemics and pandemics in particular- which emanate not from one of Dr Evil's labs, from demand stoking elements of Big Pharma or from Lizard HQ but from the way that unplanned, un-thought through, unregulated, profit fuelled essays into nature's last refuges leads to unwanted results.
And there are a myriad other alibis for avoiding the very simple truth that in order to thrive human communities must be self governing: democratic and egalitarian, bringing all our brains, experiences and ideas to bear on the problems that affect us all.
Apropos of your "two propaganda boxers":
It is sometimes said that two competing propagandas cancel each other out...(but) far from cancelling each other out because they are contradictory, (they) have a cumulative effect. A boxer, groggy from a left hook, does not return to normal when he is hit with a right hook; he becomes groggier.
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda - The Formation of Men's Attitudes, p. 181.