THE SILOS: First the trenches, then the camps!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2023

This war is fought from the silos: As we recollected on Monday, the so-called Great War was fought from the trenches. 

The war which followed was marked by the existence of the camps. 

We refer to the extermination camps maintained by the madness of the Third Reich. They coexisted with the vicious forced labor camps which, when they're discussed at all, are known by the common term Gulag.

Along the way, a well-known writer issued a well-known phrase—"the banality of evil." 

We wouldn't recommend the use of the more loaded term to describe the great civil war in which we're now engaged, but the era's banality is defined by the widely-ignored existence of the silos.

Our current war, the war of the silos, was well underway as of 6:06 this morning. At that time, on Fox & Friends, the highly telegenic Ainsley Earhardt recited, for the ten millionth time, her channel's BizzaroWorld account of the way "the president" went to Ukraine in 2016 and fired Viktor Shokin.

In this account, Shokin is described as an idealistic prosecutor, one who was threatening the corrupt arrangements of the Biden Crime Family. Earhardt failed to explain how Joe Biden, who was actually vice president at the time, could have arranged to force such a firing when he still held that junior position.

Earhardt told the preferred story for perhaps the ten millionth time. In this morning's New York Times, David French quickly tells the story as it's told from within the blue silo:

FRENCH (9/14/23): Some Republicans are pointing all the way back to the long-debunked claim that Joe Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire the Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin in part because the Ukrainian energy company Burisma was paying Hunter a lavish monthly consulting fee. (In reality, firing Shokin was a priority for both the Obama administration and its Western allies, and they wanted him terminated because he was ineffective at combating corruption, not because he was diligently pursuing Burisma.)

As far as we know, that actually is "the reality" of this particular incident. But people who live within the red silo have never heard the story told that way.

They've heard the story as Earhardt told it, and they've heard it ten million times. They don't know that basic facts are being omitted. Because Earhardt is one of their cable news "friends," they assume that her story is accurate.

(Anthropologically, our deeply flawed species is like that.)

At any rate, so goes in the ongoing war conducted from within dueling silos. Our own blue tribe hears from our own friends. The red tribe hears from theirs. 

For people living within the red silo, that includes the ranting Mark Levin, a.k.a. "The Great One." It includes the four members of The Five who recently took turns talking over their program's lone liberal, Jessica Tarlov, as she attempted to tell the fuller story about the firing of Shokin.

This is the way a war is waged when it's waged from within dueling silos. Until recently, the rules of engagement were different.

In Monday's report, we recalled the shape of the prior regime. In the years before Jon Stewart struck, the red tribe's friends and the blue tribe's friends were forced to confront each other every single weekday night on the cable show Crossfire.

Viewers heard from the red tribe, then heard from the blue. There were no silos then.

Now, denizens of the dueling tribes hear from their own friends, and they hear from no one else. Here are the wages of this sick arrangement:

The people who watched Ainsley Earhardt this morning didn't know that they were hearing a highly selective tale.

Just last week, TV's Bill Maher authored a rather strange claim. He seemed to say that a certain amount of crazy was coming at denizens of the blue silo, from our own blue tribe's friends.

In fairness to Bill, he rejected the claim of equivalence all through his interview with TV's Ari Melber. But he said there's a fair amount of "crazy" over here in the blue silo too!

Is there any way that could be accurate? We'd have to say that the answer is yes—and that we're sometimes drawn to that conclusion by watching reports on Fox & Friends. 

We know of no reason to go any further with this. In our view, the die has been cast.

The tribes have agreed that there must be a war. Under current arrangements, our political wars are now conducted within two dueling silos.

We don't know who will win next year's election, but it's harder and harder for us to believe that President Biden can win. Abnormal psychology being quite normal, there's no point in attempting to argue any particular part of this case. The hounds of hell within our blue silo will rise up to shout and yell.

In this morning's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof takes us all the way back to 1965, to the time when these tribal divisions began to take form. As he starts, he offers "a shower of caveats" concerning an issue he thinks we should discuss. 

"Yet this is still so wrenching to discuss," he correctly says. "[E]ven today there is a deep discomfort in liberal circles about acknowledging these realities"—about acknowledging the alleged realities he says we need to discuss.

In our view, our own blue tribe is deeply involved in such flights from reality. Beyond that, we have little idea how we look to other people when we let our Storylines be created by the people who now commandeer our "liberal circles."

We've moved from the trenches and the camps over to the silos. Organs like the New York Times largely ignore this change in the rules of the game. 

Red silo denizens have their treasured friends. Are our own blue tribe's friends actually that much better?

Tomorrow: Norman O. Brown meets Mitt Romney