Here is a little trick I’m passing on to you on ways to spot frauds. Let’s say you are at work; during a team meeting, someone brings up the issue of people taking food that does not belong to them from refrigerators. Assuming you are not the culprit, this is the a sure fire way to find out who the culprit is. Just sit back quietly and observe; the one who gets outraged the most is the person who has been in your coffee creamer, eating up your cream cheese and nibbling on your kale chips all along. When people protest too much, they are trying to hide their own guilt by way of rage and indignation.
Excess indignation is a leading indicator of culpability. What is true of society might as well be a platinum rule when it comes to politics and pundits. The number of hypocrites in Washington DC, Manhattan and Hollywood who preach against the very sins they partake in are too many to count–you’re better off counting the number of times Donald Trump brags about himself. From left to right, we are inundated with a bunch of liars who take to the airwaves to castigate others and wax poetic about virtues that none of them follow. I’ve lost track of how many Republicans have been outed after they spent a career bashing gay people. Likewise Democrats like Hillary and Bill have waged wars on Republicans for going after the poor as the Clintons were laundering money through the Clinton Global Inactive by using Haiti as disaster bait.
I say these things in light of the “outrage” about Harvey Weinstein that is being peddled by corporate media and Hollywood “saints”. In all honesty, I’m barely paying attention to the kerfuffle. Not because I don’t care about women being preyed upon and having their lives turned upside down by powerful men who think they can objectify women as they choose. I refuse to partake in the feeding frenzy because I know this is nothing more than a public relations stunt by the very cabal of Hollywood elites and Corporate State Media punditry who have known about Harvey’s predilections for decades. Not only did they know about Harvey’s legendary profligacy, in most instances the same people you see frothing at the mouth in anger were the ones who were enabling his pathology.
Truth is, these jackasses you see on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN and read in print feigning exasperation about Harvey have been the same leeches on his dole and partying with him all along. Harvey has bought off more media personalities than the number of times George Bush mangled the word “nuclear”–that would be a lot. Harvey has paid off reporters on countless occasions to quash stories about his lewd antics and co-opted media personalities to be his personal PR agents (read How Harvey Worked the Media). This is what happens when reporters and journalists get absorbed by the Corporate State Media; instead of rooting out corruption and reporting on malicious behaviors, profit motives and personal financial stakes gives incentivizes media “professionals” to shield the excesses of the powerful.
When the dam finally breaks and media personalities could no longer do damage control for Harvey, they decide to pivot and turn him into the boogeyman. They are not doing this to stand up for the women who have been maligned or to speak truth to power; they are doing this to protect their own asses. In most instances, the people speaking up the loudest about Harvey’s debauched behaviors have been partying along with him for years. Crooks pointing fingers at crooks in order to hide their hand in the felony. There is no honor among thieves and there definitely is no honor among media personalities.
Think about this for a minute. Is Donald Trump in any place to lead this discussion about Harvey’s transgressions after he had weird sexual ideations about his own daughter on countless occasions during TV interviews (watch at your risk). Likewise, can either Bill or Hillary say anything on this front after what both of them did to Monica Lewinsky and the countless other victims Bill preyed upon only for Hillary to assassinate their character to protect her hyper-predator husband. Trump and the Clintons are the most vivid example of an affluent demography who are the molded upper-crust of society we love to elevate and worship. When people get enough money and enough pats on the back, their souls seemingly get inverted as their ego leads them straight to the gutter. Harvey Weinstein is not an outlier; his brand of indecency and lechery is the norm in the 1% strata.
This whole thing is nothing short of a spectacle. By acting outraged, the same louts who have been reveling and thriving in Harvey’s malfeasance get to present themselves as the exemplars of decency. Besides, feeding frenzies are great ways to gain more eyeballs, enhance clicks and burnish credentials. This is why you are seeing an endless stream of personalities on all sides, from left to right, pretending to be shocked, shocked as if they are raising the spirit of Captain Renault. I should buy stock in Loreal considering the amount of makeup that is needed to cover the two faces of pundits crowding the airwaves these days.
When Corporate media goes into a feeding frenzy and the establishment goes into a tailspin of outrage, just know that there are always always backstories to the story. Ivory tower residents always have hidden motives when they get worked up about immoral behaviors. More than likely, this story broke only because a bigger master than Weinstein decided to make an example of this man. This is not to defend this obscenity of Harvey, but why is a well known story of a sexual predator, who has harassed a sea of women for decades, all the sudden breaking news as if martians landed on the White House lawn? This is very similar to the Bill Cosby story; powerful people revert to scandals or more lasting means to silence those who refuse to play ball.
It’s actually fitting that we have a carnival barker in the White House. A society transfixed on reality show politics and unreal levels of theatrics ends up with a reality show clown as president. Donald Trump is a leading clown marching ahead of a million media clowns, they honk their bugles in outrage as they pretentiously thump their noses at society. There is not an authentic bone in their bodies; everything you see on news shows like the Rachel Maddow show, Sean Hannity and the Corporate State Media as a whole is staged in ways that would impress the hell out of P.T. Barnum. It’s sad, we are being “informed” by a mainstream media that reverts to the childish antics of memes one second to peddling counterfeit outrage the next. All of it nothing but a way to enhance their P/E ratio while they diminish the public discourse.
Meanwhile, as these troupe of charlatans take to TV and print to express abhorrence, everyday Americans continue to get pillaged by economic policies that cater to the wealthy while kneecapping the rest of us. In other news, the military-financial complex continues to loosen hell on this earth but who has time for true outrage when counterfeit rage sells so many subscriptions. Yesterday, a suicide bomber–in this never ending “war on terror”–blew himself up and took the lives of more than 200 men, women and children. Our policy of destabilization and stealing the wealth of nations is bleeding nations throughout the world and burying the masses in America into perpetual poverty. Instead of leading a discussion on these matters, the Corporate State Media and Hollywood elites would rather publicly lynch the very same man they were lauding for decades.
We live in an age of entertainment so it’s poetic that a grand entertainer like Harvey is being consumed by the very media spectacle he helped to create. But those who are jumping on the bandwagon and throwing darts should be very careful and think twice; the same feeding frenzy they are pushing today will be the feeding frenzy that will feast on them one day. For the rest of us, let’s ween ourselves off the Corporate State Media and the poison of the media personalities whose sole interest is to medicate us by way of sensationalism and outrage. Let us pay more attention to a working mother who is having a hard time feeding her children instead of being transfixed by the debauchery of these debased media personalities and the snake oil salespeople who are drowning us with their hypocrisy. #HarveyHypocrisy
“Truths and roses have thorns about them.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
Check out the latest Ghion Cast where I discuss the very issues that the corporate hounds refuse to discuss or lead discussions about as they instead keep us wrapped in the cocoon of outrage and sensationalism.
Teodrose Fikremariam
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