The Monthly Review — July 2024
All of New Outlook's topics, stories, and opinions you missed this past month, in one place.
For the readers who love short, snappy reads. Those who are short on time. In commute. And those who want a quick entry point into exploring bigger ideas.
The Monthly Review is your sneak peek into many of the topics, stories, and opinions I’m typically publishing on New Outlook, from the short notes to the long-form articles. Let’s have a quick dive!
➊ ASSASSINATION ATTEMPTS & A DEMORALIZED CITIZENRY
There are people online actually sharing that they are deeply saddened and bummed that a political candidate was not assassinated in cold blood, in broad daylight. Seriously pause, take a beat, and let that sink in for a bit, no matter your political affiliation.
If you think Americans have not been fully demoralized to a point of no return, you’re sadly mistaken and clearly have not been paying enough attention.
Being so invested in partisan politics that you want an oppositional candidate to be killed for opposing your political party is as low as it gets. You are so far gone and a truly lost cause. But what else did we expect from people who are so damn propagandized that they would literally kill for their party and also would want a candidate to be killed for opposing their party.
What is remarkable is that the same people who are expressing their discontent that a political candidate was not killed, are the same types of people who are likely to have virtue signaling signs in front of their houses that read “In this house, we believe black lives matter, love is love, and kindness is everything.” The irony is ripe.
It’s worth mentioning that all of this always circles back to the corporate media (which is why it is a recurring trend in my writing). It is the news networks and publications that concoct and disseminate the most extreme narratives about politicians they despise (notably Trump) which subsequently inspires vile responses from their viewers.
This is all strategic. The media plays its role to ratchet up the tensions. The people respond accordingly, clamoring for death, massacre, chaos. It is a sign of a nation in decay.
★★★★★ New Outlook Recommends:
Podcast: Conspiracy Theories — A two-part serial podcast episode on Senator Frank Church’s 1975 investigation into the CIA and its assassination plots (among other things) against world leaders and political figures abroad and on American soil.
➋ BEHOLD: KHALEESI, THE BREAKER OF CHAINS
I hope you’re all ready for the headlines come November thru January:
“America Elects First Black Woman President”
“The Glass Ceiling Has Been Shattered!”
“She’s Black. She’s a Woman. She’s America’s President!”
“Sexism Barrier Falls as Harris Elected First Ever Woman and Black President”
“A Moment of History as Harris to be America’s First Black Female President”
Buckle up. And practice your tolerance for cringe identity politics. You know it’s coming. You know it will be insufferable. You can feel it in the air. And you know none of the headlines will have anything to do with policy or vision. Who needs those when you’ve got identity politics.
➌ HOW TO MANUFACTURE PUBLIC OPINION
Written three weeks prior to Biden dropping out.
With the presidential debate as a transitional marker for the DNC, the major news networks must now do their part. They have a singular mission: to get Biden out and install a new candidate. To do that, they must make the decision to stop covering for Biden’s mental and physical fitness and actually report truthfully about the severity of his cognitive decline in order to paint a picture that Biden for a second term is a notion that is dead on arrival. They must manufacture a new public opinion that totally opposes the public opinion messaging they’ve been sending out for the past four years: that Biden is mentally sharp and not a demented patient that has been propped up by his administration and a morally corrupt corporate press that has run cover for said administration since 2020.
NBC News’ latest segment on Meet the Press confirms this strong public opinion pivot, post-debate, with their mashup of political insiders, influencers, outlets, etc urgently demanding that Biden drop out of the presidential race. One of those political insiders and influencers highlighted in the mashup is Jon Favreau, former Obama speechwriter and cohost of the podcast Pod Save America. In May (one month before the debate), Favreau was praising Biden for being “sharp” in an interview. And a few months before that, Favreau said “Joe Biden is gonna fight like hell to stop Donald Trump from taking power again.” Either Biden’s cognitive decline was really difficult to suss out a month ago—FALSE, it was obvious since 2020—or these influencers exist primarily as the propagandistic arms of the administration, government, and media to whip up public opinion toward any intended objective.
While it seems like these news segments and op-ed pieces are making direct pleas to the Biden administration, it’s worth noting that all of them are geared toward you, the prime target. They need you to adopt their new messaging and begin to advocate, in your own personal circles, that Biden step down, even when it goes against the narrative they’d dictated to you for the past four years. This is how you manufacture public opinion.
➍ YOU DON’T NEED TO BE AN EXPERT
For someone like me who knows very little about the historical context behind the Israel-Palestine conflict, it was easy to tune out the constant back and forth of narratives online following October 7th because it was too difficult to track and understand what was going on, and to understand what side was being truthful and what side wasn’t.
But as the narratives expanded and the justifications for unnecessary death became more and more outlandish, it suddenly became EASY to understand that you don’t have to be politically adept to come to grips with the fact that we should not be normalizing a genocide (even that word has now lost its gripping meaning), we should not be tolerating the complete destruction and massacre of a people (the fathers, the mothers, the sons and daughters, the babies), we should not be okay just sitting in silence, being numbed to gruesome death, we should not be okay with human rights violations, with losing our collective sense of humanity because of divisive political beliefs or religion! You do not need to be an expert to have a heart.
➎ THE BLUE PILL OR THE RED PILL
“As an American, you are subjected to an avalanche of deceit and propaganda, and outright lies from the people [in the government, the media, and corporate institutions].”
— GLENN GREENWALD, Independent Investigative Journalist
It is your choice to bathe blissfully in the pool of your ignorance, or make the first, critical move to begin deciphering the magnitude of the avalanche of deceit and propaganda you’re swimming in.
Subscribing to New Outlook can help you with the latter! ;)
➏ MAYBE YOU’RE THE PROBLEM…
American voters must suffer from the same condition that the current President is afflicted with. What is it, dementia?!
Every four years, they forget (or worse, aren’t even aware of) how they were manipulated, duped, and propagandized by their respective political parties. And so, they get back in the voting line to do the same thing they did last time, to no success.
“This time, it’ll be different,” they say.
“We can’t have an evil dictator figure in office,” they say.
“We have to protect our democracy,” they say.
“We have to vote for the lesser of two evils,” they say.
“We’re only going to vote for this guy to prevent that guy from getting into office just this one time,” they say.
The justifications are endless. But the results are always the same. And before they realize they have been conned once again, four years has passed and they’re ready to do it all over again.
As George Carlin once said, your politicians suck because you—the public—suck!
When you think about why the country is in dire straits, and why there are no good leaders of conscience to be found anywhere (in politics, media, government, etc), take a look in the mirror. You voted for it four years ago, and four years before that… And you’re currently getting ready to vote for it once again.
Take responsibility. Do something different. Anything!
➐ AMERICAN MEDIA: THE BROKEN CLOCK
They say a broken clock is right twice a day.
The only time corporate liberal publications and news outlets go into overdrive and collectively do anything remotely close to honest journalism, domestically, is during one of two scenarios:
When an opposing political party is in office, especially if the figurehead is widely despised. (Even in this scenario, they still propagandize, over-inflate stories, print lies, and induce fear — but left-leaning “journalists” find their deeply buried courage during these times to investigate any and everything that is likely to expose the institutional powers they do not like or approve of.)
When a Democratic candidate has soured on the powerful interest groups, and they need to swiftly oust said candidate and find a replacement. In this particular scenario, these publications and news networks will finally have the green light to report on ALL of the noteworthy issues and stories that they aggressively spent years ignoring and covering up at the behest of the Democratic Party.
Even in both of these scenarios where they report truth claims, these publications and networks are still wholly untrustworthy because the reporting is primarily driven by a partisan agenda, not the sheer interest of keeping the public thoroughly informed.
➑ “OUR DEMOCRACY”
Whenever you hear “our democracy” or variations of “this is a threat to (our) democracy,” allow your ears to perk up, because there’s a propagandistic meaning that the phrase has taken on, especially when deployed by the news media, political organizations, and powerful figures. You can find the meaning in the monthly decoding series below.
➒ AN EMPIRE THAT RUNS ON ILLUSIONS
No one at a WWE event wants you pointing out to them that the fights are staged and that the wrestlers are actors putting on a scripted show. They simply want to be entertained at any cost.
In the same way, people who are invested in American politics do not want you pointing out to them that the elections are in fact selections, that the animus on display between candidates is not real, and that the politicians are actors putting on a show where they’re willing to say whatever they need to say in order to have a seat at the table to do the bidding of their biggest donors. These people simply want to believe, at any cost, that they do not live under a soft, repressive, tyrannical government.
➓ WANT TO BUILD A RESILIENT SOCIETY? TELL MORE TRUTHS
We need more people who are willing to be honest AND polite, even when their opinion may be perceived by others as unpopular, insensitive, or politically incorrect.
We need fewer people who are willing to be polite BUT knowingly dishonest because they believe that validating other people’s warped version of reality to make them feel good takes precedence over upholding the fundamentals of reality.
That’s a wrap! Hope you enjoyed this installment of The Monthly Review. If something resonated, leave a like, leave a comment, open the floor up for discourse. Or share this with a friend. Thank you for reading, subscribing, and supporting this project. Until next month.