When I moved out on my own I never bothered getting a cable subscription. It’s been several years now. On my PC or my phone, I use ad blockers. On the TV we pass around account credentials for streaming services. I almost never even see advertisements any more (in media, anyway), aside from when Mike Duncan is hawking razor blades or mattresses at me for the first minute of his podcast.

On rare occasions my wife turns on a stream of CNN, John Oliver, the Super Bowl, the Olympics or whatever, or when I go to see family or somewhere in public where cable news is playing, I begin to feel physically ill. It is all just so fucking slimy and duplicitous. They literally cannot go a minute without reinforcing some sort of big lie about American exceptionalism, empire, or the innate benevolence of American institutions, the global free market, or their new favorite term, the American led “rules based international order.”

It is, as Zizek would say, pure ideology. It is nothing but ideology. Doesn’t matter if it is MSNBC, CNN, Fox, NPR, local broadcast TV. It is always like fucking astrology. It is always working backwards from the assumption that the United States is legitimate and justified in all circumstances to explaining how domestic and world events uphold that assumption. It is never an investigation into how or why crises take place, what the root causes are, or how they might be avoided or mitigated. It is never about holding powerful people accountable.

Then after 6 minutes of that slop, it is time to cut to the advertisements so you can learn about how the new Tide Pods are environmentally friendly™ because you can run the machine on cold (as if you were going to waste money washing your socks in a separate machine at the laundromat), some new TV series about being Black in America which frames all problems of living in the inner cities on a bunch of yokels in the hills and prescribes national unity as the solution, how the newest Ford pickup is bigger and stronger than all previous iterations but we’re working on becoming environmentally friendly™, or some patriotic spiel from Bruce Springsteen about how great America is, followed by a sales pitch for the new Jeep Wrangler. Then three or four ads about the newest prescription psychiatric drugs with animations of sad bumblebees turning into happy bumblebees while someone reads an entire page of disclaimer copy.

It is fucking bleak. It is worse than any picture they try to paint about the conditions of propaganda in our Official Enemies™ like China or DPRK. It is like a very bad methamphetamine-enhanced acid trip.