For Some Reason, Christopher Messina Had Me on His Podcast...
Have a Listen - He's Great, I'm...OK
To introduce the show, Christopher writes:
Statistically normal people are exhausted and bored by the bizarre linguistic preoccupations of a tiny segment of the population, and are baffled by the weird insistence of the chattering classes that they "must" learn 65 new "pronouns" and 97 new "genders." This particular brand of neo-Marxist madness contributes directly to our decidedly Messy Times. In line with the weaponization of language for political control, the government in a wild-eyed, frenzied assault on the First Amendment created a Board of Misinformation, thereby setting even new lows in American political life. Notably, that Board, chaired by a partisan who repeated every lie ever told about Donald Trump, was never actually abandoned. It was just "put on hold."
A recent piece from Christopher’s Substack - https://christophermessina.substack.com/p/is-there-a-voice-of-america-anymore - expands on this theme and here are the first two paragraphs:
Two men I respect wrote an interesting Opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal this week. In How America Can Win the Information War, Joe Lieberman and Gordon Humphrey make a persuasive case for the resumption of American participation in the global “information wars.”
They are concerned that countries like China and Russia are expending a great deal of effort and money on spreading their respective messages. I am not going to opine on whether or not I agree with their concerns, nor if I think such a concern is worth spending time and treasure on “countering” those messages in a perpetual spiral of competing propaganda.
And now on to the Big Show: