February 19, 2026 6:00 am
February 19, 2026—I had an idea years ago. . . . Well, it was more of a question than an idea. The question was: could you create an alternate world by feeding increasingly false information to the public through the media.
Personally, I had no way to run an experiment to find an answer to this question. Unfortunately, certain members of the billionaire class, nominally led by Donald Trump, and the monopoly media decided that they could run this experiment. We’ve been living in this imaginary world ever since—with a brief intermission during the Biden presidency.
It’s like backwards day, but it goes on and on and on.
The reason I call it backwards day is that, except for the looting of the American treasury, which has been conducted with laser focus, everything else in public life seems backwards.
The latest example of this was the effort by the FCC to squelch Stephen Colbert’s interview of Texas state Rep. James Talarico, candidate for the Democratic nomination to take on Republican Sen. John Cornyn in the fall. This was backwards in a couple of ways.
First, if you wanted to deprive Talarico of an audience, getting CBS to prohibit Colbert from airing the interview on their network was pretty much the opposite of what you would want to do.
The result was that Colbert simply said “FCC You” and put the interview on YouTube.
Predictably, this meant that way more people became aware of James Talarico than would have, had the FCC done nothing. What were they thinking? They are calling it the Colbert bump.
The second backwards thing is the “regulation” that FCC Chair Brendan Carr used to stop the on-air interview. Carr has been trying to revive the old Fairness Doctrine that required over-the-air broadcasters to give equal time to opposing views. In this case, CBS would have been required, presumably, to interview Cong. Jasmine Crockett who is running against Talarico in the Texas Democratic primary and/or Sen Cornyn. I don’t know why Colbert would have had a problem with this, but CBS did.
The thing that’s backward about this is that Ronald Reagan got rid of the Fairness Doctrine back in the eighties in order to enable the growth of Fox News and other right-wing media. The new media landscape makes the old over-the-air requirement at least partially obsolete. But the mere fact that they are trying to revive this rule says to me that they are more interested in creating levers of power without a clear idea that levers work two ways. (Or even a clear idea what their purpose is—outside of sheer corruption and power-lust.)
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So, the Trump regime is afraid that James Talarico is against corruption. Talarico is one of the front-runners in the race for the Democratic nomination for Senate in Texas. The other front-runner is Jasmine Crockett. (Businessman Ahmad Hassan is also running.)
I like both of these candidates. But I don’t live in Texas. Crockett seems to be the hard-hitting type and, these days, we absolutely need her.
Talarico’s appeal to me is that he clearly identifies the backwardness of Christian Nationalism and how the Christian right has coopted a fake version of Christianity that opposes everything that Jesus would do. Colbert’s audience loved that. Jasmine Crockett probably agrees with this totally (though I haven’t asked her). We absolutely need Talarico.
Too bad both of these candidates can’t win. Either one would be a strong force in opposing the backwardness. Hopefully one of them will beat Sen. Cornyn. And hopefully the other one will go on to take on Gov. Abbott or Sen. Cruz in a future election.
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Posted by eightoh9
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Politics, psychology
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