Turning off the news is not the answer.
Most of us by now are well aware that the mainstream media model is broken.
A ubiquitous focus on maximizing audience size and revenue rather than audience intelligence has led to a dreadfully ill-informed, increasingly polarized populace and far too many disastrous government policies.
We like to blame the politicians – and in many cases, we should – but often they are simply seeking to placate the misinformed masses.
Most of us are starting to realize that we have been misled regarding such issues as pandemics, climate change, and energy transition. Even former bastions of editorial integrity such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Globe & Mail have been getting things horribly wrong over the last few years as they engage in agenda-driven advocacy rather than good old-fashioned investigative journalism.
I have heard from far too many people lately that they have simply stopped watching/reading/listening to the news.
“It’s all trash!” is a typical assessment.
Another common refrain: “I don’t have time to sort through all the garbage.”
However, when you get your news from social media feeds or that friend who never stops talking, you will have little or no understanding of what is actually happening.
When you stop paying attention to current events, you become highly susceptible to the propaganda to which well-informed humans are immune.
You become a useful idiot. And useful idiots are among the most dangerous people on the planet. Useful idiots help really bad people carry out nefarious agendas without even raising a hand to challenge the validity and intent of prescribed actions.
The label “useful idiot” is credited by many as originating with Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin in the early 1920s in reference to gullible westerners who would support even the worst of atrocities perpetrated by a communist regime so long as the actions were marketed as being “for the people”.
In modern times, useful idiots are generally part of the woke movement. These people will throw their support behind just about anyone with a cause. They latch onto those who signal virtue and join in looking down on anyone who does not toe the line.
Many millions of useful idiots have become so through their devotion to the sensationalism and misinformation that characterize mainstream media coverage. Others have earned the title by shutting off the news.
The ill-informed and uninformed are unwittingly working together. In either case, useful idiots are almost always unaware that they are useful idiots. They typically believe that they are white-hat heroes when, in fact, they are black-hat bad guys.
With that in mind, I present my Top 5 Signs That You Are a Useful Idiot (with each point, I include the type of good journalism that prevents you from becoming a useful idiot – or cures you of the menacing mental malady – courtesy of your friends at BIG Media ):
- You believe that we are all doomed to perish from the “existential climate crisis”, that ice sheets are disappearing faster than Frosty the Snowman on a Jamaican vacation, that global sea level is rising faster than Pfizer’s most loyal male customers, and that there is a garbage patch the size of a continent floating in the Pacific Ocean.
- Funeral for a glacier
- Sea level is rising – should we be worried?
- Taking a critical look at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch
- You believe that in 2020 and 2021 it made perfect sense for western politicians and medical officials to stifle our lifestyles and use mandates to pressure even healthy people into taking an unproven vaccine that did not stop transmission of the virus it targeted … and had the bonus of many proven side effects … all to supposedly combat a virus that was almost exclusively a major threat to very unhealthy people.
- You believe that carbon is an uncontrollable enemy to humanity.
- You believe that Net Zero emissions targets are practical and realistic.
- You believe that fossil fuels do more harm than good, and that oil will be rapidly phased out of the global energy mix.
