So, this Sunday America's annual celebratory monument to Trash Culture, the Super Bowl, came and went. Of course, the controversies go on: the Corporate Media has to milk these events for ad revenue long afterwards. Like the Academy Awards and similar staged farces, the choreographers and producers of 'Halftime Show' has to come up with something to politicize the whole thing on top of its obvious crass commercialism and general superficiality. The City of Seattle is hosting the obligatory victory parade for their hometown heroes, all of whom probably are already in contact with their agents to negotiate for higher contracts and willing to sell their services to the highest bidder.
In a culture where the personal is political, obviously we can't be entertained without making a statement of some sort. The grifters at Turning Point USA---which has had remarkable success with staging these kinds of spectacles---set up an 'Alt-Halftime Show' to balance the Virtue-Signalling from the other side. Today everyone is talking about Bad Bunny and Kid Rock; names which would sound to an impartial observer like a pair of characters from an old Loony Tunes episode.
In a culture where Status and Celebrity matters, it's considered edgy and admirable whenever one of these corporate properties affects to have an independent thought. The fact that all of these Media creations are paid performers never seems to occur to anybody. Since the advent of motion pictures---actually even before to a lesser extent in the days of theater and novels---clever sharpers and marketing analysts learned that audiences vicariously identify with characters. There has always been this kind of conflict between whether entertainment was a performative art or a commercial enterprise. In the early days of Hollywood, this was a much deeper discussion: often leading to clashes between directors and producers. There is no controversy any more as to which side eventually won out.
Following the First World War, some saw the potential of successful wartime propaganda for the wider application of mass psychological manipulation. The Third Reich was really the first government to put the theory into practice. The Regime established an agency, the Reich Ministry of Enlightenment and Propaganda which had control over all entertainment venues. "The Ministry has the task of carrying out an intellectual mobilization in Germany. In the field of the spirit it is thus the same as the Ministry of Defense in the field of security. [...] Spiritual mobilization [is] just as necessary, perhaps even more necessary, than making the people materially able to defend themselves," Herr Goebbels said in a speech to broadcasters in 1934.
In the US, we (for now) don't have the infrastructure of a State-Controlled Media, although Corporate control over such outlets makes the distinction between the two rather blurred. What we are currently witnessing is a shift from so-called 'Legacy Media' to so-called 'independent outlets,' which has been ongoing for some time even before the current Administration assumed power and took measures to accelerate the decline of the former and the elevation of the latter. However, as Kit Knightly pointed out:
"The fact is, legacy media is dying. Which is a good thing. But do you think the establishment doesn't see this? Do you think it hadn't occurred to them to get out in front of it by seizing control of the new media platforms and planting "leaders" in supposedly independent media movements? Like a hermit crab swapping out shells – they will simply slide themselves from their old home to a nice shiny new "indy" one..getting totally accidentally promoted by the algorithm."
Under the Biden/Harris Administration, the Democrats actively acted upon this principle, using paid influencers to promote their policies and making attempts to define what is disinformation and promoting Speech Codes. True to it's reactionary nature, the New Right merely took up where the Democrats left off, including repressive speech codes beginning with phony campaigns against alleged 'antisemitism' and culminating in NSPM-7; they've even set up their own Disinformation Bureau, and many of these supposedly 'alternative news' outlets---including the aforementioned TPUSA---are heavily funded by organizations with vested interests, including the biggest and loudest of them all: the WEF-connected Social Media platform X.
What we really witnessed with the 'Alt-Halftime Show' was just another trend in the movement from a failing Media system to one more concentrated, controlled, and efficient. The collapse of these Legacy Media systems should have been met with de-centralization and effective legislative guardrails against future concentrations of power and abuses of technology. Instead, what we're seeing is the beginning stages of an authoritarian media system, where the worst elements of the old system are both retained and amplified, and the best elements of competition and the Free Market are swept aside.
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