I was joking about our putative leaders substituting PR for policy, but only slightly.

This is important because our whole worldview is constructed from narratives that we’ve decided are true.

The only problem for the powers that be is that after Trump the whole narrative thingy is wobbly. Americans have gotten to the point where their trust in the corporate media is at an all time low. The majority of people get that the news is at least somewhat bullshit; the problem is there’s no consensus on why. Is it incompetence? A liberal conspiracy? Or is it simply he plutocratic class, which owns the media, protecting its interests?

If you answered C give yourself a cookie.

As I’ve mentioned before my MO is to ignore the narrative and follow the money, weapons, resources and what our feral elite are really doing. Jeffrey Epstein, anyone?

However, I do seem to be an exception with most Americans lacking the time and diligence to make any sense of the world without their trusty tribal narratives to guide them. For instance, conservatives believe the narrative promulgated on FOX News, while liberals take their cues from CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times.

The Biden administration certainly appears to be following the tribal script, with the corporate media playing along.

Rouge journalist Matt Taibbi, has this to say about the efforts of the corporate media to massage the message. “With a partisan divide wedded to a hyper-concentrated landscape, commercial media companies can now sell almost any narrative they want. They can disappear the past with relative ease, and the present can be pushed whichever way a handful of key decision-makers thinks will sell best with audiences.”

The fact that the Biden administration is doing it rather than Trump seems to make all the difference in the world. This has so much been the story of Biden’s presidency, which is certainly less chaotic than Trump’s and does have some clearly different ambitions, but in many ways represents continuity with both his predecessor and his predecessor’s predecessor.

Unfortunately, we are entering an extremely dangerous period of world history, where the US, as the dominant world hegemon, is losing primacy and threatening war with Russia and China. In this super-charged atmosphere tribal narratives are extremely dangerous, emboldening the bi-partisan National Security State to play chicken with nuclear armed rivals, where any misunderstanding has the potential to end life on earth.