If people are stupid enough to think the left is the solution to the right, or vice versa, rest assured they’ll try electing another big-mouth media figure to run the country sooner or later, confident that because it’s not Trump, it’s bound to be an improvement. Plenty of media celebrities are ignorant, sociopathic morons, though, so it’ll still end badly.
Newsman Don Lemon, for example, says he thinks he could fix most of America’s problems “lickety-split” if he were president, which may be the most insane and (not coincidentally) the least-libertarian thing he’s ever said.
The social and economic filters by which people become celebrities and leaders aren’t random, after all. The whole process selects for egomaniacs and narcissists, and that has moral fallout for the billions of saps looking to them for guidance.
More broadly, to use the four major types of low-empathy psychosis catalogued by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen two decades ago, I think it’s reasonable to predict major-media gigs will attract narcissists (they want to be “seen,” to use the current omnipresent slang), political gigs sociopaths (out to control everyone, no matter how wonderfully they think that’ll turn out), the academy/sciences autists (not necessarily evil but likely tone-deaf and a bit inhuman), and theatre/arts borderline personality disorder cases (colloquially, unstable “drama queens” good at drawing the unwary into their messes).
To stop the overall problem, I think we need to end several basic institutions of human civilization, from government to religion. Note that I’m saying it calmly and non-histrionically, though—and I am not suggesting you put me in charge.
Given how little trust bigshots should engender, I take it as something of a healthy sign that some people suspected NBC News anchor Savannah Guthrie might’ve had a hand in the February disappearance of her mother, much as I hate to add to the family’s distress by casting aspersions. Presumably Savannah is innocent of plotting against Nancy Guthrie, but who better than a news anchor to maintain a false front if trying to get away with something, right? (The gossip show TMZ predicted on April 3 that the case would be solved within weeks, so maybe we’ll find out.)
Adding a layer of uncertainty to the already-unsettling, Savannah released an ostensibly heartfelt plea on video to the kidnapper or kidnappers to release her mother, and as many noted, that plea was worded almost exactly like the (fictional) plea to a kidnapper in the 1991 horror movie Silence of the Lambs, right down to instructions that if you “talk to her, you’ll see” as you gaze into Nancy’s eyes what a valuable person she is, delivered with what I think most actors would recognize as the same intonations.
The three most obvious explanations for this similarity are all at least a little bit unsettling: Savannah might be a faker (and murderer) who continued faking in the plea video; Savannah might be such a media narcissist that she looks to Hollywood for rhetorical models even in the depths of extreme family crisis; or the FBI might be so stuck in its bureaucratic ways that it has been using exactly the same template for people talking to kidnappers and trying to humanize victims for at least 35 years, assuming Silence of the Lambs got its lines from the experts.
Almost as weird, Savannah’s husband (who also may well be innocent in all this) ran a little P.R. biz for the Clintons that handled scrubbing embarrassing things from the Net. Since the Guthrie case broke the same week as news that the Clintons would finally give testimony to Congress about Epstein, some guessed the Clintons might’ve orchestrated the kidnapping to put pressure on old associates to stay silent. Probably not, but again, the bigshots don’t engender trust.
If it turned out that Savannah simply plagiarized her appeal from Silence of the Lambs, that should perhaps spark public discussion about plagiarists-in-general being narcissistic—so narcissistic that they often think no one will notice their wrongdoing, as if they’re insulated from the causal and moral ties of the rest of the universe, and as if on some level they really think they came up with it themselves.
By mid-March, a month after the disappearance, Sheriff Chris Nanos found himself facing a massive recall election push due to making no progress on the case. By then, it was considered possibly just a burglary gone awry, though you’d think disappearing someone takes more effort than a typical burglar would like to expend. Now, the prevailing theory is that it was a kidnapping for ransom that went awry in some way, likely leading to Nancy’s death, meaning perhaps no resolution is close at hand.
Contrary to what I think most psychologically-normal people would intuit, sociopaths seem to flourish in bureaucracies, where they can manipulate various social relationships and hierarchies, rather than alone out in the wasteland somewhere.
Maybe your best bet for finding a sane, decent journalist, then, is to look to the driven DIY types, the occasional good autists with a mission, not to the smiling, cheery meteorologist aching for the morning talk show slot and happy to parrot major-party talking points (think with fear of another 1990s thriller, To Die For, with Nicole Kidman as a homicidal weather girl with ambitions—and maybe be a bit afraid of the real-life Kidman to boot, given her former proximity to the upper levels of Scientology and her newly stated interest in becoming a “death doula” who counsels people through the dying process, not that I’m saying the world has no need of hospice services).
Though I’d disagree on many issues, especially economics, with the longtime WBAI radio host Amy Goodman, I get the impression from the great new documentary Steal This Story, Please that she’s a nerd dynamo powered by moral conviction, backed by only two or three assistants as she crosses the globe mostly reporting and commenting on the undeniable political worst-case scenarios to be found out there, like endless wars and the massacre she lived through in East Timor that, as reported on by her, helped put that place on the map.
Goodman doesn’t pretend to be perfectly objective—a sequence about her visiting relatives’ World War II graves in Ukraine struck me as a very left-Boomer-NPR-set-pleasing way to sidestep whether she uncharacteristically supports NATO and war on that front—but she doggedly asks embarrassing questions of even the most powerful personalities, and that is more than most journalists dare to do.
She makes me even more comfortable saying that if we want journalistic independence and free-roaming inquiry, we can abolish state-run media such as NPR and PBS (to the extent they still get government grants, largely now displaced by private donations, which is great). Government reporting news is an obvious First Amendment violation. Let weird mavericks do it.
But then, as the YouTube channel Moon explains in a new video, from Marvel to Meet the Parents to the original midcentury animated adaptation of Orwell’s Animal Farm (long before the current woke-ish one), the CIA often pulls or at least subtly tugs on the strings of mainstream media, and that’s creepier than the aboveboard tax-parasitism of PBS. (If it has its hand in many Hollywood projects, maybe the CIA should be pressured to explain why the date 9/11/01 appeared in Agent Smith’s paperwork in The Matrix, two years prior to the real day arriving. Couldn’t resist tipping your hand, boys?)
Maybe we’re safer in a way with the embarrassing, noisy intra-right media clashes now going on between Trump and some of the pundits who were his most ardent supporters only yesterday, including Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones. Trump now says they have “low IQs,” mainly for not supporting his Iran adventure. But better to have such people screaming at each other in the public spotlight than whispering coldly and rationally in secret about how to manipulate the rest of us.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey.