'Against the Corporate Media'

We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more

Regular Pipeline readers are by now aware that we have a new book coming out this fall: Against the Corporate Media: 42 Ways the Press Hates You. This new volume, available on Sept. 10, is the second of what we plan as a continuing series of policy books on urgent contemporary issues; it’s currently the top new release in Political Philosophy on Amazon and we’re still about two months before publication. The first book in the series, as you may recall, was Against the Great Reset, which appeared in October of 2022.

On Monday, I appeared with Sebastian Gorka, the former adviser to President Trump, to discuss our latest endeavor, to which he and 40 others have contributed. Gorka’s piece, “How ‘Woke’ Conquered the Media,” speaks directly to the current mania for counter-factual argumentation wherein the speaker makes a series of untrue statements, weeps when they are easily refuted, and then turns to violence: what Elon Musk, a surprise champion of free speech on his platform Twitter/X, has called the “woke mind virus.” You can find the complete Table of Contents here at the Pipeline site, where from now until publication we will be running short excerpts from each of the essays, which we hope will whet your appetite for the book. You can follow me on X: @theAmanuensis.

Our conversation, which came during the show’s “Manhood Hour,” began not with Against the Corporate Media but with an earlier work of mine: Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All is Lost. This book came out in December of 2020 and promptly sold out during its first week of availability — an indication of the audience’s hunger for stories about masculinity and heroism, especially in a hostile, feminized age in American history during which the male virtues of strength, courage, duty, honor, and country have been via “Critical Theory” attacked and besmirched, to no rational end and for no apparent reason other than resentment.

Thanks to its success, Last Stands will now be followed by another historical study, A Rage to Conquer: Twelve Battles That Changed the Course of Western History, which will be released in January of next year. The new book treats battles from the Trojan War to the Battle of Bulge, and features an in-depth look at their contexts and their commanders, many of whom shared similar personal traits and military philosophies. They include Alexander, Caesar, Constantine, Aetius, Bohemond, Napoleon, Pershing, Nimitz, and George S. Patton, Jr. You can pre-order both Against the Corporate Media and A Rage to Conquer now, at the links provided above.

What unites these disparate projects is the overwhelming need at this critical juncture in American and Western history for full-throated, spirited defenses of our lands, cultures, and civilization in the face of attack from all sides, from within and without. As someone who’s observed the Left up close and personal for more than half a century, nothing they do surprises me because I’ve seen it before and I know how deadly serious they are. Always moving forward incrementally, they despise the country-as-founded, its original peoples, and its Constitution. They instinctively side with the nation’s avowed enemies (hence they can simultaneously cheer on both Communists and Islamists while wearing their “Gays for Gaza” buttons) but hate it when you “question their patriotism.” In their houses, they always believe the Current Thing, including Joe Biden, until it suddenly vanishes and is replaced by something even worse. On the old Soviet theory of omelets and eggs, they assume no responsibility for the consequences of their actions, and will deny the evidence of their senses right up to the point at which the stench of their policy failures becomes overwhelming.

For these and many other reasons, they must be decisively defeated. This is not simply a political argument, but a cultural one. Lincoln famously said that a house divided against itself cannot stand, but the present conflict has now become an existential question. Which is more important, freedom or state-imposed “security”? How free can speech be when you can be punished for state-defined “hate speech”? How much personal agency do you have when the Internet of Things snitches on your every move, even when you open the refrigerator door? As I said on X the other day, “We're in a war to the death between the Nation and the State. The Nation must win, and regain control of the State.”

Enthusiastically aiding and abetting this coercion is the Corporate Media, an industry in which I worked for 25 years, at Gannett, Hearst, and finally at the pre-eminent newsmagazine of its era, Time. None of these journalistic institutions bears the remotest resemblance to the ones that formerly employed me. Objectivity and fairness have long since gone out the window while ideology has flown in, roosting where once real newsmen used to sit pounding their Underwoods, their editors replaced by commissars.

As a foreign correspondent for Time in East Germany and the Soviet Union during the closing years (1985-91) of the Cold War — I was in Russia when Chernobyl blew up and in Berlin when the Wall came down — I’ve seen what a monolithic, Stalinist media can do to the psyche of a Nation being crushed under the jackboot of the State, and it’s not a pretty sight. I’d rather not live through it again.