The mainstream media’s normalization of extreme views—particularly those emanating from the black heart authoritarian right which is really wrong—is not a mistake, not a glitch, but a feature of the system as it's been architected. We are dealing here with a grand theater of consent manufacturing, curated by corporate mandarins whose loyalties lie not with truth, but with capital, continuity, and the maintenance of the status quo.
Let’s not mince words: most media companies are not public institutions devoted to democratic enlightenment. They are conglomerates—profit-seeking organisms nested within larger webs of financial interest. Comcast, Disney, News Corp, and their ilk don’t serve the public; they serve board of directors at most and as a second, shareholders. But those people, like fungi, and no offense to mushrooms, flourish in darkness and decay. They do not want systematic reform for the benefit of the majority—they want return on investment for only themselves.
So what happens? You create a media landscape that doesn’t challenge power, but packages it in digestible forms. Thereby, corporate media always undermines more pro-middle class grassroots voices and amplifies more pro-oligarchic astroturf. And that's from what is considered more middle of the road networks like CNN and not even the full Russian style pure propaganda outlets like Fox that Joker spiral. For example, they undermine, second guess, or outright criticize every positive thing from progressive candidates and normalizes the majority of things from a more regressive/reactionary candidate. A landscape where “both sides” are given equal footing, even if one side is trafficking in barely-veiled fascism and the other in tepid liberalism at best or neoliberalism at worst results in a hall of mirrors where genocidal policies are treated as mere “controversial opinions,” and white nationalism is rebranded as “economic anxiety.”
This normalization is not accidental—it is systemic. Because the architecture of ownership determines the architecture of narrative. When Tub girling oil companies, psychotic defense contractors which are really offense contractors, and date rapey tech bro-illionaires own the platforms, you can bet your last molecule of serotonin they’re not going to support radical critiques of cutthroat capitalism, or serious examinations of racial or ecological justice. Instead, they court controversy, not to ignite dialogue, but to drive engagement. Rage clicks are currency. Outrage is the algorithm’s sacred cow.
Right-wing extremism, then, becomes not just tolerated but profitable. It’s reality television with higher stakes. It draws eyes, it generates fear, it creates an atmosphere of perpetual emergency in which deeper systemic change is always deferred—because who has time for climate reparations when there’s a new migrant caravan on the way? And what does this do to the collective psyche? It shifts the Overton window. It makes the unthinkable speakable, the outrageous negotiable. Suddenly the idiocracy is debating whether trans people have the right to exist or whether child labor laws are “overreaching.” This is not discourse. This is necromancy. It is the resurrection of ancient hatreds under the guise of free speech. From the psychedelic vantage point, this is madness. It is the triumph of ego over empathy, of spectacle over soul. A society that cannot distinguish between a lie and a viewpoint is not a society—it is an open-air asylum.
What is needed, then, is not just media reform. But to turn it off. Tune into and drop back into the real world away from scrying screens. Engage in the rewilding of consciousness itself. A return to direct experience. To the logos that bubbles up in silence, in poetry, in sacred communion with nature. We must learn again to feel truth, to taste it on the tongue of intuition. Because the media will not save us. It is the Gorgon’s head. Look at it too long and you’ll forget your name.
The revolution will not be televised—it will be remembered.