If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War
I listened recently to Ana Kasparian, of pseudo-progressive online leftist show "The Young Turks" fame. She has undergone something of a live-streamed, slow-burning epiphany on air over the last few years and has, as of a couple of weeks ago, officially declared she had “left the left.” The pundit clarified, pretty well, in my opinion, the importance of expanding one’s sphere of media influences to include as many viewpoints as possible.
Related: Hillary Demands ‘Total Control’ of Social Media Via Censorship
In the interview below, Ana explains her personal evolution by which she came to understand that the rabidly anti-Trump liberal/progressive media environment she has ensconced herself in for the better part of a decade blinded her to political reality. She uncritically took as articles of faith all of the stereotypical Social Justice™ truisms — that America is a massively racist country, that anyone who objects to transgenders invading women’s sports is a deplorable transphobe, that the vast majority of American prisoners are essentially incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses, etc. — all of the progressive orthodoxies you would expect anyone to cling to when their worldview has been forged for them by propaganda.
No one of any ideological bent benefits themselves or society by staying confined — whether of their own volition or because they’ve been manipulated to behave that way — in an information echo chamber.
As an example, PJ Media readers might know that I report regularly — by no means am I the only one, of course — on the goings-on at the White House press briefing room under the stewardship of barely literate DEI hire Karine Jean-Pierre.
(Sadly, the walking, talking indictment of affirmative action will no longer be with us come January.)
Related: KJP vs. English: White House Diversity Hire’s Reading Problem
The value in monitoring these transmissions — from a government that lies to its own constituents as a matter of routine, in service of a neoliberal ideology I find mostly repulsive — is not to reap any true information (imagine that!). Rather, it's to better understand the ruling elites’ objectives and their arguments to justify whatever social engineering program they’re developing or whatever war they’d like to catalyze next.
The same is true of my regular perusal of the entire spectrum of available material: corporate media, more insulated and obscure internet subcultures, libertarian content on Rumble that some might consider “extreme,” etc. — all in the service of better understanding what’s actually going on in an increasingly complex and balkanized information landscape.
If you’ve ever marveled at the dinosaurs in Congress or Morning Joe-type cable news hacks and their seemingly unbridgeable cultural disconnect from the rest of America, especially flyover country, it’s precisely the Ivory Tower they live in that prevents them from understanding their own constituencies. They might as well live on a different planet than the plebs. Martha’s Vineyard and East Palestine, Ohio, are two different worlds.
They’ve lost touch.
Let’s not lose touch, especially now that our guy, as far as most of us are concerned, is in the White House and it’s so tempting to just throw all civil responsibility on his shoulders and hope for the best. Putting your head in the sand, either out of fear or out of blind faith in the governing authorities, no matter who they are, is equally foolish.
/Endsermon
