The media is out of touch. That much we know.
All one really needs to do is look at how it hypes up the idea of President Donald Trump’s impeachment and then compare it to the tidal wave of Trump supporters who think it’s a dumb idea to know that. Even the polls are indicating Americans don’t want impeachment, nor should they. It’s a sham, and many people know it, but the media assumes everyone thinks like them. That’s the danger of living in a sturdy, ideological bubble after getting your journalism degree from the safety of your ivy league school bubble.
But politics is easy to gauge, and I get tired of talking about politics real fast. It’s not that I don’t have an interesting in it — I do write for RedState, after all — it’s just that today’s politics has become like a rerun of a show I was bored with the first time I watched it. Its plot is the same every episode. Orange man bad, try to impeach orange man, fail at impeaching orange man, and repeat. It’s more formulaic than old Power Rangers episodes.
Instead, I want to show you just how out of touch the media is by turning to how it judged the public’s reaction itself when it comes to the media it watches.
Perhaps the media has programmed the public enough times to think that we become the media we consume. To be sure, they’ve been very successful in the past with it. I can’t imagine something as failed as socialism would be as popular as it is without the help of a friendly media who won’t ask people like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the hard questions.
It’s maybe due to that that the media believes that if the public consumes media that falls outside the bounds of what it deems appropriate, they may start acting dangerously.
Case in point, I want to look at the way the public handled two different films, and we’ll first look at the way they handled the recent “Joker” movie that had breakout success.
(READ: Review: “Joker” Is a Superb Movie That I Never Want to See Again)
A deluge of tweets and articles were released by the leftist mainstream media about fears of violence popping up in theaters thanks to what they considered the theme of the movie “Joker;” downtrodden white men acting out violently.
It’s a racist take to be sure. Many a white man is downtrodden in our society and never commit a violent act. Violence typically comes as a result of a history of violence and mental illness. Still, mainstream media would rather not talk about that because it’s more politically viable to just blame white men and guns, but I digress.
Refinery29, always a bastion of deep thought and thorough consideration, wrote an article asking if we needed a movie about a violent white man:
I think the answer to that question is no. Ultimately, Joker is a story that empathizes with a violent sociopath. Fleck is a clown-by-hire and aspiring comedian living with his mother. The most ironic and tragic cruelty of his life is that he’s got a condition that causes him to laugh maniacally at inappropriate times. He is bullied and beat up — by a group of kids on the street, his coworkers, some rich suits on the subway — and the film uses these encounters to explain his murderous origins. “Joker is the antihero the alienated and angry have been waiting for, and that’s precisely the problem,” wrote Sarah Hagi in a column about the film for the Globe and Mail. “I do yawn at the idea of another story in which white men are offered a sort of understanding for their violence.”
That’s exactly why I couldn’t enjoy the film, even though I concede that it’s really well done. The message that “well, of course he became a mass murderer, society gave him no choice!” is dangerous on its own. But if you consider the larger social context of turning “a supervillain into a kind of folk hero” in a world where Dylann Roof, Elliot Rodger, and Faisal Hussain exist, it’s even more distressing.
In other words, white men are dangerous and watching “Joker” will inspire more of them to lash out with violence. It’s a blatantly racist thing to say, and all you need to do to gauge that is replace the word “white” with “black” and see how it flies.
These kinds of concerns were echoing all around the leftist mediasphere, such as the Guardian and Vanity Fair. It was brought up in interviews with lead actor Joaquin Phoenix and Director Todd Phillips, the former of whom walked out on an interview, and the latter denounced SJWs in anger.
(READ: “Joker” Director Todd Phillips Smacks Social Justice Warriors and Their PC Culture)
Reading between the lines, you got the sense that the media wasn’t asking if “Joker” was going to cause violence, it was when.
And “when” never came. People walked in to see “Joker” and walked out completely unmolested. Violence never arose as a result of it. The media failed to predict the future or claim a scalp. It didn’t get the violence it wanted. While it may seem horrible to say that it wanted it, I’ve seen enough reaction to actual violence to know that they love it. As Dana Loesch once said, “many in legacy media love mass shootings,” and she’s not wrong. Mass shootings result in a chance to push agenda and garner ratings.
The media never really said anything about the peace and quiet from the public after the movie’s release. You’d even figure that after it took the number one R-rated movie of all time you’d at least get a few “boy, am I glad I was wrong!”
Nope. Radio silence.
Now let’s look at a different movie’s release. “Blue Story” is a film about gang violence in southeast London, and on the night of its release, a bunch of youths showed up and began committing violence with deadly weapons against families who had come to see Frozen 2 with their children.
You read that right. According to The Independent, the anticipated Disney movie had a gang of machete-wielding teens show up to a theatre in Birmingham in the UK — including one teenage girl and three boys — where they proceeded to gang up on one girl. This then turned into an all-out riot with around 100 people engaged in a brawl. Police were quickly called and showed up in force. The police then engaged in a battle with the teens resulting in six injured police officers, one of whom apparently suffered a blow to the face.
It’s still not clear what the purpose of the attack was or who started it, but a picture has been released of the perpetrators.
Birmingham tonight. Look at the kid with the machete. Age?
Hope the police officers are OK. pic.twitter.com/oLjpWwq8Cu
— (((Dominic Farrell))) (@DominicFarrell) November 23, 2019
Here’s the thing. I’m not blaming “Blue Story” as the reason these teens did what they did. I’m sure many people walked in and out of that movie without a violent thought in their heads. What’s more, it’s not yet clear if the teens even saw the movie, or why the teens decided to show up and begin assaulting people yet, and I’ll wait until we have a full understanding.
What’s not being mentioned is a few elephants standing in the middle of this respective room. For one, this gang clearly consists of kids of middle eastern descent.
Wait. Before I hear claims of “racism,” I think something else needs to be made clear here. Digging into Burmingham results in a very loud fact. According to the New York Times, Birmingham has become a place of recruitment for terrorists. In fact, some high-profile terrorist attacks can be linked back to Birmingham. There’s often trouble within the city seemingly due to it.
While it’s still unconfirmed, if I were a detective looking into the why of the situation, I would start by looking into their connections with possible terrorist groups or jihadist organizations. Seeing as how that seems to be a common thread for Birmingham, it’d yield the highest percentage chance of finding out the cause.
Needless to say, none of this is being mentioned by anyone on social media, and no interviews with police reveal a quote like that, and despite this being the highest probability, people are still blaming the movie “Blue Story.” They’ve apparently begun shutting down showings of the film in various theaters across the UK.
Do they really consider us in the general public so stupid that a mere film would make anyone with a sane mind become insane? Can we honestly start labeling art so dangerous that people shouldn’t be able to see it because it might cause trouble, even though it’s pretty clear that the film isn’t to blame?
The media can inspire us, but it can’t change our mental makeup. A peaceful man watching Death Wish isn’t suddenly going to become a vigilante with a bone to pick, yet the media seems to think that this is the case. Its collective head is so firmly lodged into its own rear end that it thinks we’re too stupid to differentiate between fact and fiction.
It’s so out of touch that it thinks we lose sight of reality at the drop of a hat.
Clearly there’s something else they need to look at first when it comes to violent events. Yet, if anyone in this proverbial room is too stupid to get something, it’s the media, who won’t look beyond shallow reasoning.
