Home A Maddow in MSNBCland
Home A Maddow in MSNBCland

A Maddow in MSNBCland

Liberal media succeeds best when it isn’t identified as such. The reason for that can be seen in numerous polls where Americans of both parties identify themselves with conservative values.

The left is adept at selling its agenda through biased mainstream media coverage, but when it discards the disguise of objectivity on radio or television the end result is shrill, irritating and off-putting.

The playwright and director David Mamet achieved an epiphany while listening to NPR. Unfortunately for NPR the epiphany was that he was no longer a liberal. “I felt my facial muscles tightening,” he described, “and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the f___ up."

The unfiltered left with its onslaught of sanctimonious bleating often brings out that reaction.

It’s why Air America not only couldn’t compete with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other conservative talk radio hosts, but it couldn’t even remain solvent. MSNBC, the bastard child of a ridiculous union between Microsoft and NBC, spent years drifting in search of an identity only to become the new Air America.

Why does the left, which is so adept at putting its agenda across in mainstream media outlets fail spectacularly when it puts away the disguise and begins saying what it really thinks?

George Orwell described the phenomenon in his book The Road to Wigan Pier. The behavior he is describing is so familiar that it’s worth pausing to remember that it was written 77 years ago in 1937.

“I do not think the Socialist need make any sacrifice of essentials, but certainly he will have to make a great sacrifice of externals,” Orwell wrote, explaining why the left was failing to make headway with more sensible people. “If only the sandals and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaler… sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly!”

Earlier, Orwell had denounced them as “vegetarians with wilting beards... earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control fanatics.”

Orwell would have found MSNBC familiar, not just because of its inversion of language and perpetual politicization of everything, but that same inbred club of irritating fanatics holding forth to a small audience that agrees dogmatically with their obsessions in every regard.

After drifting without an identity, MSNBC was reborn as a liberal news network and then finally as a network of sandal wearing transgender vegans and shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables.

Orwell was encouraging the left to get in tune with the working class, but MSNBC has gone in the opposite direction, shoving out hacks like Ed Schultz and Alec Baldwin, who for all their faults were somewhat more relatable than Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes and Ronan Farrow. Joe Scarborough is talking about running for office which will leave Chris Matthews and Al Sharpton as the only high profile MSNBC yappers who couldn’t be mistaken for Pajama Boy in a dark ObamaCare briefing.

MSNBC reinvented itself around Rachel Maddow. Its new talkers, Chris Hayes and Ronan Farrow, are cut from the same cloth, delivering nasal lectures with a tone somewhere between passive aggressive argument and ironic detachment. Imagine Air America crossbred with NPR and then mated with Pitchfork Magazine. Their horrible abortion would be MSNBC’s bland hipster ethos of earnest liberals earnestly talking down to their audience while Al Sharpton tries to figure out how a teleprompter works.

The Maddow MSNBC is a leftist student newspaper stridently denouncing racism, sexism, homophobia, claustrophobia, transphobia, pipelines, microaggressions, white privilege, cherry pies, political incorrectness, model trains and obesity. Unlike the left’s highly successful mainstream media apparatus, it is overcrowded with professors of political correctness and Twitter activists who can’t talk to people, only at people, who assume that everyone who matters already agrees with them and that this self-important population is already watching MSNBC.

In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell wrote, “the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”

This magnetic force draws MSNBC’s audience of transgender activists, white privilege professors, terrorist supporters, Israel boycotters, women-of-color microaggression Tumblr bloggers, Whole Foods shoppers going from their egalitarian yoga class to their amnesty protest while sipping a Fair Trade wheatgrass drink and listening to a Decembrists’ song.

Meanwhile everyone outside that drum circle is left out.

MSNBC has lost the ability to talk to ordinary people. Even other liberals are beginning to evince a distaste for it. The hipster breakdown of MSNBC has bigger implications for the left. Behind the scenes, the Obama campaign looked a lot like MSNBC. The original Obama campaign was better known as the Howard Dean campaign, but even Democrats found Dean ridiculously irritating.

Obama was the perfect front man because he had the wiring of a Rachel Maddow or Chris Hayes, but when audiences showed up, they didn’t see a man in retro glasses sneering at them because they don’t understand what the asterisk in trans* stands for.

In his time as community organizer, Obama had learned to do what Orwell had advised the left to learn to do and what the average progressive has never learned to do, talk to ordinary people without making them react as if they were listening to a particularly annoying NPR broadcast. Obama Inc. may have been indistinguishable from the new MSNBC behind the scenes, but it had a human face on it.

Two terms of Obama have given the left an unreasonable degree of confidence in their ideology, but it wasn’t their ideology that won two elections. Polls show that most Americans are not especially fond of what the left stands for, but they do vote for candidates who appear to care about them. The left didn’t win on the issues. It won because it found a good front man for its bad issues who would keep finding entertaining ways to distract the public from the complete implosion of his progressive policies.

The left confused political victories with ideological victories. It assumed that because Americans had been manipulated into temporarily liking Obama, that they also liked everything that the left stood for. MSNBC is what the left actually stands for and it’s a miserable catalogue of petty fascism by control freaks whose only knowledge of life comes through the lens of their favorite pseudo-Marxist theories.

The undisguised left cannot win an election outside of its safe territories where its politicians huddle in padded corners with bearded activists deciding whether they should ban donuts, plastic bags or politically incorrect pop songs next. In these territories where the Subaru station wagon is king, where everyone wears outdoor hiking gear everywhere they go and talk about mulching and recycling as if these were spiritual activities, MSNBC streams over every Roku box.

Occasionally a parka wearer driving a Subaru will find his facial muscles twitching and the words beginning to form in his mind, “Shut the f___ up”; but then his life partner will intervene and he will be taken away for a three week course of wheatgrass juice colonic therapy that will leave him a proper Pajama Boy again.

Outside MSNBCland, the left remains unlikable; its army of activists infiltrates and takes over, but without a charming front man to juggle some torches and distract the crowds from the unemployment rate and their staggering health care premiums, the campaign folds like Howard Dean after a bottle of tequila.

MSNBC has decided that it’s safe to go Full Rachel Maddow and Full Howard Dean. That is a mistake for which the left will pay the price where it always does, in the hearts of its countrymen who frown and change the channel.

Americans do not particularly care for the ideology that consumes the professional leftist. Why are they so suspicious of dogma? It is because they know that a man cannot serve two masters.

Either he is an elected official who answers to the voters or he is an ideologue who answers to his professors of political correctness, to the dead masters who put down the theories by which everyone ought to run their life and to the narrow circle of leftists who treat every disagreement as an offense.

That is why even career leftists like Obama will attempt to pass themselves off as practical men, bipartisan types who are not bound by dogma. They understand that to identify as a rigid fanatic is political suicide. MSNBC’s Phil Griffin is still attempting to claim that his network is non-ideological when its own website identifies it as a “progressive community”.

Griffin has lost control of his network to Rachel Maddow the way that the Democratic Party has lost control of its identity to the left and the way that the moderate left has lost control to the far left. Maddow and her twee clones have won the civil war at MSNBC, but lost the battle.

The left has come out of the closet as the “tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair” that Orwell identified in The Road to Wigan Pier; a control freak suffering from a “hypertrophied sense of order” driven “to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard.”

Americans find that type of Socialist, whether he calls himself a progressive or a liberal, about as appealing as they do MSNBC.

Comments

  1. Just a common 'tater4/3/14

    I am sorry Sultan, but I must disagree with you on this one. The current administration and congress looks like it does for two reasons: 1. The votes were bought and paid for by government handouts or the promises of such, paid for by you and me the taxpayer. 2. The GOP has done a miserable job of selling itself. I don't think they recovered yet from McCain. Palin was not enough lipstick for that oinker in conservative clothing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous5/3/14

    This is the best article I have read in quite some time, unfortunately it is also totally true. Bobble head liberalism is taking its toll on our great country as those who don't take the time to become informed just choose to believe whatever is crafted for them.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous5/3/14

    Yeah, you hit 100% on this one. Rachel Maddow has almost no real life experience; she's academically smart and successful, and almost immediately after leaving academia she began her career as a pundit. Not much life experience, and it shows. So sure of herself....no room to learn anything.
    Jerry

    ReplyDelete
  4. Conservatives fear liberals who work in the mainstream media, because they are the few people who are actually getting some real news out there. Eg, the alleged crimes of Chris Christie and the scandals surrounding his staffers.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous5/3/14

    We will win when we are able to sit and listen to NPR without our face muscles tightening and twitching and curses flowing from our mouths. Only when a man can be unmoved by the insane forces seen in our media and leaders can he be free of them. Their minds are full of hate and resentment, and if we cannot find the way to overcome responding in kind we are done for. It is becoming more apparent to me as I get older that the craziness of the world is what we need to drive us to the truth, we don't see it as the expression of God's love for us, which it truly is.

    Interested observer in Massachusetts

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous5/3/14

    My husband worked for one of the big three networks for many years. It used to matter quite a lot that any show or enterprise show a profit. Back in the day, Phil Griffin would have lasted six months and msnbc less than a year. Now that they are aligned with other corporations does profit no longer matter ?
    Even if the corporate head lives in hoodies and drinks pulverized grass, he or she still has a payroll to meet and needs advertisers to fund everything..
    I have long advocated for consumers to contact the fools who advertise on msnbc and let them know they will never buy their products as long as they support this joke of a network.
    sophie

    ReplyDelete
  7. The Democrat Party has not lost control of its identity. It has enthusiastically and voluntarily become an anti-American, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian party of hate.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Anonymous5/3/14

    http://spectator.org/articles/57972/ingrained-intolerance-liberal-tolerance

    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous5/3/14

    I am as annoyed by MSNBC as I am with FOX. The only difference is the angle from which the BS is flung.

    As for the Dems winning the previous two Presidential elections... One party took us from surplus & peace to near bankruptcy and a never ending recession, the largest terrorist attack on American soil, unnecessary WAR (Iraq) and the outing of clandestine CIA agents, and then had the temerity to offer up McCain and Queen Quitsalot as a "solution".

    You can forgettaboutit!

    The GOP has offered up NO reasonable candidates. People do NOT believe that Corporations are PEOPLE. And a party that first put forth healthcare solutions similar to what Obama has put forth under both Nixon and by Bob Dole and has instituted Romneycare in Mass has one hell of a nerve calling Obamacare the great evil doctrine of the land.

    The never ending finger pointing about the "Big Government" of the Left while ignoring the "Big Government" they would find itself in people's bedrooms and a woman's womb drives people to the brink of pulling our hair out. It is the pointless, hypocritical, nonsensical, disrespectful foot stomping corporatism and social wedge issues that have been wiping out the Right's legitimacy as representatives of the American populace.

    All that said... I can't stand Obama. He is naïve, two faced, and WAY out of his depth.

    HOWEVER... If given the choice between Obama OR McCain OR Romney.. I will clench my stomach muscles and will vote for him again. I won't like it, I won't enjoy it, but I sure as hell will do it.

    PS. The pretentiousness and politically correct BS on the center/left causes me to grit my teeth. But I have found that MOST of them CAN be reasoned with.

    As a hardcore Zionist I appreciate this blog. Thank you for allowing me to voice my opinion to you. Whether it makes print or not is no matter. As long as you read it.

    Respectfully,
    ~Alexi

    ReplyDelete
  10. sophie, profit now comes from increasingly advertisers who only want young wealthy liberal viewers

    Alexi, the largest terrorist attack on American soil was planned and put into motion under Bill Clinton who chose not to take out Bin Laden, the clandestine CIA agents outing is a scam story and Obama has racked up 6 trillion in debt

    ReplyDelete
  11. Anonymous5/3/14

    Daniel, you may be right, but young and wealthy are in pretty short supply, they always have been.
    Alexi, I am not Jewish but am support Israel in every possible way, as does my spouse who Is Jewish.. I am having difficulty understanding how a self professed 'hard core Zionist' could vote again for Obama, even if doing so requires holding one's nose. I do not see him a friend to even the USA, much less Israel. I am respectfully interested in how you reached this conclusion.
    sophie

    ReplyDelete
  12. Anonymous5/3/14

    p.s. Alexi, I did read your rationale, and frankly, all I took from it is support for abortion rights, and that, quite frankly, is not enough. I have met so many Jewish and Gentile women who are either too old to have abortions, and would never have considered such a thing, even in their youth, who are all too willing to give up real freedoms to support this cause. Some things are more important, better to support birth control, self respect, and the education of women, especially teens.
    Legal abortion may indeed, become less celebrated in the future, and hopefully, requested less frequently, but I fail to see how that is a bad thing. Sixteen year old girls having their second and third abortions have evidently, not crossed your path. Count yourself lucky.
    sophie

    ReplyDelete
  13. Occasionally a parka wearer driving a Subaru will find his facial muscles twitching and the words beginning to form in his mind, “Shut the f___ up”; but then his life partner will intervene and he will be taken away for a three week course of wheatgrass juice colonic therapy that will leave him a proper Pajama Boy again.

    Oh, nothing. Just wanted to see it again! LOL!

    ReplyDelete
  14. Keep in mind: MSNBC is not some self-standing entity; it is part of NBC Universal, which is now totally owned by Comcast...which, if the Time-Warner merger goes through, will have an even larger market share in the US cable market.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Anonymous5/3/14

    Great article! Amazing about Orwell, even the cultural accoutrements of the left haven't changed.

    The problem with the left is that they base their opinions on emotional reactions shaped by world views based on failed political theories detached from their consequences, a distorted, self-loathing view of history and politically pre-determined pseudo-sciences. They are uninterested or incapable of logically deducing an opinion from facts and don't believe facts if they run counter to their opinions. They believe in their invalid opinions with religious devotion while hating those who do have real religious faith.

    Yet the Republican Party continues to let the left define the topics, manipulate the language, defy the law, undermine society, weaken the military and bankrupt the country. The Republican Party refuses to act in defense of the country and threats those of us Tea Party types (who believe in the US Constitution as the real "law of the land" and fiscal responsibility in government) as the enemy.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Anonymous5/3/14

    Daniel,

    In regards to hunting U.B.L., A.Q., and the Iraq fiasco...

    How many warnings did GWB have with regards to an impending A.Q. attack?

    The intelligence warnings from other Nations security ministries with regards to who & what were numerous leading up to 9/11. (most of that traffic was initially initiated by Mosad btw).

    The attack could have been planned in the dark ages for all the difference it makes. I could say that it is Reagan's fault for arming the Mujahids and leaving the country for all intents and purposes in the hands of the ISI.

    "Claim: The Clinton administration failed to track down the perpetrators of several terrorist attacks against Americans.

    Status: False." http://www.snopes.com/rumors/clinton.asp (check it out)

    GWB actually disbanded the UBL team headed by Michael Scheuer (who on a personal note I find to be an anti-Semite scumbag). I 'm not even going to touch on Tora Bora.

    The torture of prisoners does NOT work, as any expert will tell you. Having to Waterboard someone 183 time is classified as highly ineffective. And we prosecuted our own troops for the very same thing back in Nam; referring to it as "torture".

    It is, however, one hell of a good recruiting tool for the enemy; and makes us look like hypocrites; therefore undermining many types of cooperation we need abroad.

    Re Iraq: Ariel Sharon warned Bush that any attempt to occupy that country, to enter minus an exit strategy, would lead to disaster. It would destabilize the region.

    It has, it did, and it is still a disaster that will takes decades to sort out. For all intents and purposes we now have Iran and "Iran 2" to deal with, along with the crazy Mullahs seeking the Holy Shiite bomb.

    Outing of Spies: V.P. Wilson was an "N.O.C." (No Official Cover). N.O.C.s get the most sensitive assignments. Her's, coincidentally, was W.M.D. With cover, if blown, they can pretty much just kick you out of the country. Without cover? You might spend 19 years in prison before you die there like Redmond who got nabbed in 51.

    What message does that send to all other N.O.C.s out there in the field? We will hang you out to dry for politics?

    What happened to her legend? How many others do you think were using "Brewster-Jennings & Associates" as a cover? Or something akin to it? How many ambassadors wives are now getting a double take by foreign agencies? How many contacts and assets and agents she recruited got burned to the ground because there are records of who she spoke to, met with, hung out with, while she was overseas? Who got hauled in for questioning and interrogation? What did they spill?

    Re the Debt: I ain't happy about it either. ;-)

    Sorry to get emotional; but the Val Wilson outing was the final straw for me with that Admin.

    ~Alexi

    I do not stand by any party, nor tow any line other than what I see as rational and effective (stronger sanction against Iran for example). MSNBC may be a bunch of horn tooting, whining, petulant, politically correct, Subaru driving, granola eating, bunch of Miley Cyrus fans.

    But none of that absolves the GWB administration of it's 8 years of unmitigated disaster and incompetence.

    We may simply agree to disagree. I'm ok with that. There are problems of much greater importance than my opinion of MSNBC's of the world.

    I thank you for posting my previous comment. And if you read this and discard it, I'll be disappointed, but not heartbroken. I thank Hashem that people like you are posting Pro-Israel and are dedicated enough to do so with conscientious regularity. We need good Hasbara. Keep it coming.

    Am Yisrael Chai!

    Best, & Respectfully,
    ~Alexi

    ReplyDelete
  17. Again Clinton repeatedly had the chance to take out Bin Laden and didn't do it. For that matter, Obama didn't intend to kill Bin Laden, he wanted to use him to hold civilian trials.

    Blaming Bush for it is like blaming Reagan for the Cold War. Clinton blew it on terrorism and left the mess around for Bush.

    Scheuer is Bin Laden's pal. I don't even see the point of citing him.

    Waterboarding does work. It doesn't always work, but it works better than the 'be nice' to them approach that left keeps pushing. Most countries that deal with terrorism on a regular basis do use some form of torture.

    Muslim terrorists don't need waterboarding as a recruiting tool. They aren't fighting us because we waterboard, but because they believe that the world should live under Islamic law.

    Joe Wilson began playing political games and this was par for the course by those who were trying to undermine the government using lies and false intel. This culminated in the fake intel estimate about Iran in 2007.

    ReplyDelete
  18. When Maddow eventually and surely goes belly up, would Saturday Night Live want to revive the Roseanne Roseanna Danna character, so effectively played by Gilda Radner? It would be a perfect fit. Just frizzy up Maddow's boyish coif and make a few other alterations in her appearance. That would be the right fit for Maddow.

    ReplyDelete
  19. Anonymous6/3/14

    Daniel,

    I appreciate the reply. We will agree to disagree.

    Keep up the Hasbara.

    Best,
    ~Alexi

    ReplyDelete
  20. Anonymous6/3/14

    Both the left and the right are stuck in their own echo chambers.
    "Two terms of Obama have given the left an unreasonable degree of confidence in their ideology, but it wasn’t their ideology that won two elections."

    It wasn't the right's ideology that won either. The right did not put forth credible candidates. McCain looked centrist until he picked Palin. She turned people off who were repulsed by the thought that she was one McCain heart attack away from being the President, and it was not only the left but also the center, and possibly some on the right who may have ended up not voting for anyone. McCain himself was a problematic candidate but before Palin he was attracting voters from outside the right. It also did not look like the right cared much for McCain, and that they may have even preferred Palin, so why would anyone want as a President someone his own party did not care for.
    Romney was the right version of Kerry. Also another dud candidate not enough appeal across political lines. To think that Obama won two elections merely because you think he made people think he cared about him, it the right wings myopia. As bad as Obama was the right wing candidates who ran against him sucked more in the elections. The right needs to think about why the candidates they are putting forth now are unable to do what George Bush did - win. Why was Bush who did not come across as any genius able to appeal to enough voters while McCain and Romney couldn't.

    ReplyDelete
  21. I almost completely agree with you -- many talking heads said that Romney lost the elections because of Latino vote or he was not aggressive enough, etc. -- the truth was supported by many polls that Romney lost the white middle and lower class votes because they believed that he was a rich guy who would not understand their needs.

    I don't agree with you regarding wheatgrass, Wholefoods and vegetarianism -- I am a conservative, but I buy organic quality foods at Wholefoods, minimize my food from animal protein (for health not ethical reasons), and eat a lot of vegetables -- being supportive of healthy life style does not make one a liberal.

    ReplyDelete
  22. I'm quoting Orwell's characterization of the left of the day as eccentric, not attacking vegetarians personally.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Has Maddow solved the Bridgegate case yet? It seems every time you turn on an MSNBC show, especially, Maddow, the topic is Chris Christie. I mean, really.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Interested observer in Massachusetts:

    "In 1989, Edouard Cardinal Gagnon, who served as President of the Pontifical Council for the Family, described a conversation he had with [now-Blessed] Pope John Paul II:

    'The Pope told me, ‘Error makes its way because truth is not taught. We must teach the truth, repeat it, not attacking the ones who teach errors because that would never end—they are so numerous. We have to teach the truth.’ He told me that truth has a grace attached to it. Anytime we speak the truth, we conform to what Christ teaches and what is being taught by the Church. Every time we stand up for the truth there is an internal grace from G-d that accompanies that truth. The truth may not immediately enter into the mind and heart of those to whom we talk, but the grace of G-d is there and at the time they need it, G-d will open their heart and they will accept it. He said that error does not have grace accompanying it. It might have all the external means, but it does not have the grace of G-d accompanying it. This encouraged me very much.''”

    Quoted by Thomas Langan, The Catholic Tradition, page 371

    ReplyDelete
  25. My shallow question in response to all this is: " When Maddow was a little girl did the Adam's apple give it away or did she have that implanted later?"

    ReplyDelete
  26. It was probably a diet heavy on broccoli.

    ReplyDelete
  27. Anonymous9/3/14

    Brilliant! Although--this type of astute description frustrates me all the more....the Left monopolizes what the general population of Low- and No-Information-Voters digest for news. The typical American does not even recognize they are being duped and manipulated by the "mainstreamers" like ABC, CBS, Yahoo News, et al.
    Until our spokespeople repeatedly sound the alarm during interviews (preferably Live, where editing can be preempted)--"THE NEWS AND ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA ARE LIBERALS, PROMOTING LEFTIST, MARXIST IDEOLOGY!!"...we will just keep preaching to the choir, and not changing the game.

    ReplyDelete
  28. Anonymous10/3/14

    Wait just one minute here...

    I live in the rainy PNW, and drive to the ski areas. I have a Subaru Forester AND a parka that I wear almost everyday, and I can't stand Obama or MSNBC. A characteristic is not necessarily an affectation.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

You May Also Like