Are you old enough to remember when “news” in the legacy media was, well, calmly presented factoids (accurate or not) that might get you upset, but the emotional content wasn’t heightened or enacted by the hairspray heads in front of the camera? Those days are long enough past that they might never have happened, as Chris Bray illustrates:
Spend a minute of your life looking at a chart that shows how much countries spend on their militaries as a percentage of GDP. The US spends about 3.5%, while Germany spends about 1.4%. For years, hawks have argued that the US should spend 4% of GDP on defense, in a well-known debate about reasonable funding for security. NATO members commit to a target of 2% or better, and many don’t make that goal. Donald Trump says he told the leaders of NATO countries that they should make or beat their military spending targets to ensure their own security, and as a negotiating ploy he poked at them and said that he wouldn’t bother to defend people who wouldn’t bother to pay for their own defense.
You can agree with his argument or disagree with his argument, and make whatever argument you want about the carefulness or recklessness of Trump’s rhetorical style, but none of this is obscure.
And so now we’re living through an ORANGE MAN LITERALLY HITLER CRISIS, as Orange Satan Drumpf tells the Putin Devil to absolutely MURDER all the Europeans and the world teeters in agony at the very brink of a harvest of slaughter. Here, let Forbes just give you the news, straight and factual and to-the-point:
THE MEAN MAN SAYING FOR THE PUTIN DEVIL TO MURDER ALL THE LITTLE BABIES professional journalists calmly explain, absolutely biting through the rubber nipple on their pacifiers. Sackcloth, ashes, endlessly refillable SSRI prescription: journalist starter kit.
In the car a few minutes ago, I turned on the radio mid-interview to hear a hysterical NPR anchor begging a European pundit to agree that Trump is a vicious monster, and the European — I missed his name — sighed and said that look, this is a debate that we’ve been having for a while, it’s a pretty normal discussion. BUT DON’T YOU THINK HE’S AN ORANGE MURDER DEVIL!?!?!? Then they played an important clip of Slow Joe Biden slurring and fake-shouting about Trump’s un-American cruelty, sounding almost as angry as he was when he talked about how many actual chips they put in the potato chip bags. This is why I listen to NPR in short bursts, like a gun run from an A-10. Brrrrrrrrrt, and off.
But what’s inescapable about this extremely dull moment, yet again, is that an allegedly elite layer of political, academic, and media figures are taking something routine and willfully inflating it into a five-alarm global crisis. It … must be a day ending in -y? Nothing is ever bad, or disagreeable, or arguable; every event is The Absolute Worst. Every development must be discussed in hyperemotional terms; every objectionable act is devastating, terrifying, destructive, ruinous, treasonous, unforgivable. No one disagrees with us; rather, they are ENEMIES OF EVERYTHING WE STAND FOR!!!!!
