By Wayne Allensworth
It’s easy to push the proverbial “panic button” these days. Just turn on your TV, scan the “news” on the Internet, or watch any popular movie released in recent years, or decades for that matter. Take TV, for example, beginning with something as seemingly innocuous as The Weather Channel. From what I can gather from a quick web search, The Weather Channel was launched in 1982 as a, well, weather channel, giving us forecasts, storm coverage, and what you might expect from a source so named. In the 2000s, it was ominously sold off by Landmark Communications to a triumvirate of NBC Universal, Bain Capital, and the Blackstone Group, then it changed hands again in 2018, purchased by another faceless conglomerate called “Entertainment Studios.” Tens of millions of viewers, who supposedly judged TWC the most reliable “news” station last year, tune into The Weather Channel, but I wonder what they are looking for these days.
For the record, my family started turning on TWC in the morning before work back in the 1990s, just checking on the weather forecast, and, quite naturally, enjoying the personalities that fronted the weather reports. As noted in a recent article, “news” morphed into another form of entertainment a long time ago, but I can’t recall the channel being especially ideological or doing a lot of scaremongering then, at least compared to more recent decades.
At least since TWC was taken over by the NBC Universal, Bain Capital, Blackstone triumvirate, viewers have been flooded with a steady stream of panic, with sometimes ghoulish “reporting” on the latest catastrophe—with lots of pictures of shaken residents whose homes have been destroyed by tornadoes and hurricanes, relatives mourning lost loved ones, and sky-high estimates of how much it’s all going to cost. They love this stuff, even as they adopt a collective long face at the “news,” and it’s a bit off-putting when the constant drumbeat seems to pick up the tempo with every revised estimate of the number of dead or missing. Up to a point—and where that is, I’m not sure—it’s understandable. Sensational journalism is hardly new. Scaring people into evacuating when a hurricane is approaching isn’t entirely out of bounds, either. But the constant politicized propaganda on “climate change” is a bit much, at least for your humble servant.
Let the record show that a number of reputable scientists, including a couple of Nobel Laureates who have predictably been “canceled,” have doubts about the “global warming”/“climate change” ideology. And it is an ideology, a political religion. We have good reasons for skepticism, at least about the climate change commissars’ most exaggerated claims. Most of those panicky claims are given wide “coverage,” if you can call it that, on TWC. Now, one might think that the job of a news organization would be to report on the arguments, pro and con, particularly about a loaded term such as “climate change.” I don’t for a second believe that anyone, or any organization, is without prejudice. But it isn’t too much to expect fairness or neutral reportage. You won’t get it at TWC, which has turned into a 24-hour panic propaganda machine: We are all going to burn up, the ice caps will melt, cities will be underwater, Earth will be a wasteland planet in a few decades, etc, etc, etc.
TWC browbeats and “shames” its viewers constantly about their “carbon footprint,” growing and mowing a lawn, and driving a gas-powered car—and they love it, they love doing it as much as they love showing destroyed homes and wreckage after a hurricane. There’s something creepy, sadistic, and even masochistic about TWC acting as Big Brother’s dedicated weather-related agit-prop organ. Do any of those TWC personalities have any doubts at all about the self-righteous Nurse Ratched-we’ll beat you over the head because it’s good for you, smiley-faced policing they do?
Let’s back up a moment. As readers might well surmise from some of my previous articles, I am not a pave-everything over-because it’s good for the economy libertarian or “conservative.” I think care for our land, its wildlife, and its ecology are or should be conservative issues. They very much are in a number of other countries. Only in America, as they say, has destroying the landscape been treated as an article of faith by the “conservative” version of progressive ideology touted by self-styled right wingers for as long as I can remember. The American “right” has been as Promethean in its way as the left has been. They are branches of the same tree and share common roots.
Furthermore, it would serve us well, and has served us well in many cases, to try to reduce pollution, save wetlands, conserve endangered species, and all the rest. It could well be that industrial pollution has had some effect on the weather. I don’t know, and I doubt that anyone else can say for sure, or to what degree. The weather has changed for inexplicable reasons many times in recorded history. A reasonable person would, I think, call for some prudence—and some perspective—before…before what? Handing over total power to the Davos Politburo and its Central Committee members who dominate every society in the developed world? The same people who exaggerated the Covid virus while expanding their control network over us. The same people who used 9/11 as a lever to get us more deeply in the grip, and under the watchful eyes of, the national security/surveillance state. The same people who lied us into the Iraq war and kept us in Afghanistan for reasons nobody could quite explain. The same people who, pardon the expression, trumped up “Russiagate,” a pure fantasy, and have continually created enemies abroad while expanding their own power. The same people whose associates in Europe are attempting to strangle private farming and place the entirety of agricultural production under their watchful agents. And lest I forget, the same people who have created a border invasion so that they can “solve” that problem by effectively dissolving our borders. And it’s all for our own good. Therapeutic totalitarianism.
American Remnant has warned of the agenda of the globalist/managerial regime since the inception of this website. The powerful always want more power, and a globalized elite now has the technological means to place us all in a digital Gulag. A “digital currency” may be the next step in tightening the noose around the neck of a population it sees as a mob much in need of managing. Crises serve their interests and the constant scaremongering, panicked tone, and screeching about impending disaster have done the job of placing the “experts,” who have lied to us about everything for as long as I can remember, in control of our lives to a significant degree.
In a country with a population of 330 million people, especially when chaos and a lack of law enforcement also serve the interests of the managerial class, something bad happens somewhere every day. Cars crash, people are murdered, homes are robbed. And in a world of 8 billion with saturation “news” coverage, riots, wars, epidemics, and natural disasters are endless. One of them occurs somewhere every day. You can drive yourself mad locking in on whatever crisis of the moment the managerial class has decided to focus on, including wars in countries most Americans had previously barely heard of. Fixing the entire world — the hubris of the global managers is such that they think they can “fix” things — is a utopian dream that will become a totalitarian nightmare very quickly.
It’s not enough to rail about “Biden.” The time for bumper-sticker patriotism is long past. And don’t become one of those who in their own way enjoys, even relishes, the show. Turn off the media propaganda machine. Refuse to pay attention to the latest crisis the managers want to shove down your throat. Resist the lies when you can. Crises in your own backyard abound, and this very night your soul might be required of you.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
