The Monthly Review — November 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 or 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 TRUMP AGAINST WHISTLEBLOWERS
I recently read an article from The Guardian titled “How to survive the broligarchy: 20 lessons for the post-truth world.” It’s written by Carole Cadwalladr, a so-called investigative journalist, but the piece is teeming with fear-mongering and propagandistic talking points—a staple of the corporate media. In true New Outlook fashion, I chose to quickly debunk a few points in the article.
In response to Cadwalladr’s point in #2 (left image below), I responded with the words below, delineating the tactic she and other corporate journalists tend to employ to actively mislead readers from understanding the original context of what was said (right image below):
2. Misrepresent what was said about prosecuting people in the media and people in the justice system who break the law or weaponize politics (see second slide pulled from a hyperlink).
Following my input, I serendipitously stumbled upon a short video produced by The Intercept in 2019 titled Why You Should Care About Trump’s War On Whistleblowers. The video carefully laid out Trump’s attacks against whistleblowers during his first term in office. It was as though the video was speaking directly to me given that I hadn’t paid much attention to Trump’s first term in office (I didn’t care much for politics at the time). While Cadwalladr’s piece was written in such a way to be misleading and fear-mongering to readers—both Obama and Biden prosecuted journalists, whistleblowers, and innocent protesters under their watch but Cadwalladr made no fuss about that—her point still held a kernel of truth. Upon realizing this, I immediately offered up a correction (seen here).
Jeremy Scahill, journalist at The Intercept, was on Democracy Now in the segment below (2019) to speak about that timely video.
I implore you to watch the interview, as well as the video, featured in full in our Recommends segment. There’s no better time than now, weeks before Trump’s inauguration.
★★★★★
New Outlook Recommends
Why You Should Care About Trump’s War on Whistleblowers
2019
Five years ago, The Intercept produced a harrowing short documentary on how President Trump, in his first term as president, expanded the playbook perfected by President Obama on how to attack, indict, and destroy the lives of journalistic sources. “This is about criminalizing journalism,” the video description reads. “It is about increasing the secrecy and decreasing the transparency. It is an assault on the very idea of a democratic society.”
➋ HEROES AND TRAITORS
There are two types of people in the world:
One who fundamentally believes that US intelligence agencies should not be able to clandestinely spy on or actively work to censor its citizens, and that journalists or whistleblowers who expose these acts are actually heroic for having done so, on behalf of the public.
One who fundamentally believes that journalists or whistleblowers who readily work to expose clandestine operations of US intelligence agencies (spying, censoring, entrapment, etc), are criminals and traitors to their country and should be punished as such.
For some reason, people seem to have grown accustomed to conflating patriotism with eliminating their inalienable rights, prostrating themselves, in servitude, before the State, and submitting themselves to subjugation.
➌ HILLS TO DIE ON
If there is one hill to die on, it’s that highly-trained propagandists are always well equipped to disseminate propaganda, on cue. It’s precisely what they're trained to do—to regurgitate information that has been passed down to them from the authorities, and masterfully spin narratives whenever the situation calls for it. Such propagandists are never critical thinkers, they are never truth seekers, they can never be convinced of anything that does not confirm their own narrative because their first allegiance is to ideology/agenda, not truth.
➍ FIRST COMES DEFEAT…
Self reflection is not in the Democrat party lexicon.
Instead, it’ll be more calculated schemes and strategic plots to avoid facing the reality of defeat. Failure is never the fault of the Democrat. Failure is just an additional reason for why more corrupt, political schemes and hoaxes are required.
We should all be wary of what will follow.
➎ GREATEST LOSS OF ALL TIME — (GLOAT)
They did everything but kill their political opponent, and they still lost.
I don’t think any person or group has suffered a loss this bad in the history of events that record wins and losses.
➏ JOURNALISTS WE TRUST
We trust independent journalists who are able to remain as objective as possible, principled in their beliefs, and ethical in their practice because it puts us at ease knowing that the story will always remain the priority, not their emotional ties to the story or their “lived experience.”
To better achieve some level of sensemaking about the world, we need people who can consistently model what it looks like to calmly navigate chaotic events while everyone else may be prone to fly off the handle.
➐ US VS. THEM
Being on Substack, at first, makes you think:
“Who am I to say I have a publication?”Then it quickly makes you come to the realization:
“Who are these corporate news media outlets to have a publication?” What can they do that you cannot do? Why can their platforms exist but yours can’t? Why can they use their outlets to lie and propagandize Americans but you can’t use your outlet to spread the truth to Americans? What separates us beyond institutional support, an industrial operation, and historical prestige?
If one thing is clear, it’s this: we are capable of one thing they’re not: telling the Truth.
➑ “WHO DO WE NEED TO BAN?!”
AOC on Instagram asking Trump voters for the podcasts, accounts, and people they like has to be the most desperate thing I’ve seen in a long time after the Democrat party’s embarrassing defeat.
It should be noted that she’s only asking because she’s desperate to once again find all of the podcasts, accounts, and people that conservatives like so she can add them to her next list of “disinformation” and “misinformation” accounts that need to censored and banned off of social media sites.
She pretends to be trying to bridge the gap and this is why people absolutely hate her guts, and people of her ilk (and for good reason).
➒ A WORLD OF DISTRACTIONS
Because of the way the world is set up, we have to busy ourselves with debunking illusions, propaganda, and blatant lies, instead of simply engaging with the world as it actually is.
➓ UPSIDE DOWN WORLD
We are truly living in a parallel universe:
In my late teens, Jon Stewart and his type (pundits) represented the closest thing I knew to alternative media that broke away from the mainstream. And Tucker Carlson and his type represented the thing I knew was clearly wrong with political coverage and ethical journalism.
Today, Jon Stewart and his type (pundits) represent what is wrong with political coverage and ethical journalism. And Tucker Carlson and his type represent a fragment of what I consider to be alternative, independent media that has broken away from the mainstream.
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.