1/ A THREAD ABOUT NATIONAL SOLIDARITY AND THE CORRUPT MEDIA

I’ve been alive for over 50 years, and I can honestly say that nothing like COVID-19 has ever happened before in my lifetime. Let’s talk about that.

2/ I’m pretty sure my parents could have said the same thing, even though they lived through the Great Depression and WWII.

3/ Why is COVID-19 unique? Because it is a dramatically negative event that is literally shared by all Americans (and all humans, but that’s a topic for another thread).

4/ 9/11 wasn’t really a shared event. We all felt the horror, but other than through our emotions we did not share the burden equally. A Wall Street trader experienced the event in a totally different way than a Seattle fishmonger.

5/ Even the Great Depression and WWII, with their enormous significance, were not fully shared experiences. There were still wealthy people in the 1930s. Not everyone went off to war or had a close family member who did.

6/ But COVID-19? EVERYONE is experiencing this. We’re all locked in or sick. We’re all facing a dread fear of the unknown that can touch ANY of us or those we love. COVID-19 is no respecter of wealth, or celebrity, or intellect, or power—it is an equal opportunity scourge.

7/ Faced with this great equalizer, this shared experience, as a nation we may have never had a better chance to come together as one people: a united, loving family of Americans standing side-by-side to get through this.

8/ But we’re not.

9/ Why? Because we have a massive, powerful institution called the media that WANTS us to hate each other. Largely this is because they hate our President, but it’s also because they hate half the country because it’s different than them.

10/ Where the media could be uniting us, serving as a source of unity and reason and reliable information in troubled times, instead they willfully and deliberately set us at each other’s throats.

11/ It’s despicable, it’s horrible and it’s the most scandalously awful thing an American institution has ever attempted since Jim Crow.

12/ Please spare me any sanctimonious BS about how all they do is report “facts.” The TENOR by which you report facts MATTERS. The choice of which facts you report or don’t report MATTERS. They lie through omission and emotion.

13/ Our media, as an institution, and with very few exceptions, is purposely seeking to tear this country apart when it should be the glue that holds it together.

14/ I’ve run out of adjectives to describe how despicable, how perfidious, how loathsome, how reprehensible, how evil these people are. But they are all that, and more.

15/ I don’t know how to solve this. I think the best we can do is to constantly remind them of what low regard we hold them in, and why. Perhaps one day they’ll pay attention, and change.

Perhaps.

16/ Until then, I am more disgusted than I ever have been before in my entire life. To all “journalists”: SHAME ON YOU.

finis