For years the Left has been able to construct a reality for people. They almost completely controlled what you could see, hear, and by extension think. They owned almost all the cultural means of production, which is an extremely effective tool. Their control was not comprehensive, and some people are natural skeptics, but the Left did a pretty good job of controlling The Narrative™.

Like a movie or a magic show, if you control what is being presented you can manipulate people’s sense of reality.

Of course some magicians are better and quite successful, just as some movies are better at getting you to suspend your disbelief. A great musician or storyteller can transport you to a different reality, at least for a while. A lazy one is exposed as a charlatan or a dramatic hack.

Over the years the Left has gotten lazy about the quality of their fake drama, and has completely lost the ability to make any actual logical arguments based upon facts. They never had to make arguments–they owned the cultural means of production and only needed to produce dramas and comedies–and as with Star Wars or the Matrix movies, the quality of the stories suffered because they didn’t have to make them good in order to sell the product. So what if the story sucked? There was spectacle and people paid to see it.

So they got lazy both with the fiction and the fact, and it shows. Almost every movie sucks and almost nothing said by the MSM or the Left convinces any more. It’s lame and obviously fake.

A great example of this popped up in the real/political world this morning in my Twitter feed. As you know the Left has gone absolutely insane about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and are doing everything they can to both destroy Musk and to incite governments and advertisers to crack down on the platform.

Twitter’s loss to them presents a dual problem: it is where the Left went to sharpen their Narrative game (I wrote about why Twitter matters in my VIP Column); and losing Twitter leaves a big hole in their control over the Narrative. An even bigger hole than having Fox News out there, as Fox still strives to fit mostly within the mainstream. Twitter tweeters not so much. It is a free for all.

How far will the Left go to slander Musk? As far as they can. How good are they at doing so? Not so much any more.

This 👇 is how that 👆 works. https://t.co/uSWPhiwrzh

— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) December 13, 2022

Explicitly encouraging his followers to go all Defcon Q-Anon? Huh? Don’t see it, and nobody else does.

As you know, Q-Anon has become the go-to craziness that can be applied to anything the Left wants to discredit. When the Balenciaga scandal broke the New York Times actually claimed that linking clearly pedophilic images in the Balenciaga photoshoot to pedophilia was a Q-Anon conspiracy.

Nobody bought that because…well, we could actually see the images and see how tightly connected the company was to pedophilia. Their creatives all rolled that way, and publicly so. But the Times tried. They just failed because they have controlled your perception of reality so long that they lost the skills to tell a convincing story. This is just a bad sequel, Matrix 4 or The Rise of Skywalker. Yawn.

Same thing here. Our top 1% Tweeter is trying to convince us that a reference to the “white rabbit” is a secret call to become Q-Anon conspiracy theorists. It’s a pretty bizarre claim, given that literally nobody knows what the hell she is talking about, including me. If this is supposed to be a dog whistle, none of the dogs could hear it.

The white rabbit reference is more obviously to the Matrix scene which leads the main character Neo into the story where he gets “red pilled,” learning the nature of reality. His old life was an illusion created for him and others, hiding the gritty truth under a Narrative constructed to control humanity. Millions of Americans are getting Red Pilled by getting to see the manipulation of reality for themselves.

It was a cool film, a perfect metaphor, and like all such great stories it was ruined in the sequels. The storytellers got lazy quickly and by the fourth movie it was a hollow shell. Straight to streaming and all that, as popular as She Hulk.

Which is precisely what has happened here. The Left has had it so easy–milked the franchise for money so lazily–that when they are forced to tell a plausible story they can’t. They are replacing storytelling with increased volume and spectacle, but it makes less and less sense and we are less inclined to suspend our disbelief. Their control of the Narrative is slipping and they are panicked.

Literally nobody who sees Musk’s tweet thinks “I am going to join Q Anon.” Without Caroline Orr Bueno nobody would even think Q Anon. I don’t even know if Q Anon and white rabbits have any connection. Neither do any of Musk’s followers, I would wager.

The Left has gotten so intellectually and creatively lazy that they just recycle ad hominem attacks rather than even try to engage in arguments. They point to “experts” as if that is convincing (we can find an “expert” to say anything); they accuse others of evil as if that invalidates an argument; what they almost never ever do is engage in logical conversations.

It turns out that controlling the cultural means of production is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it is the most powerful tool in the world; on the other, the sword becomes dull if you wield it too much. It fails to slice as it used to.

The Left has gotten dull, literally and figuratively. Their movies suck, their “news” is unconvincing and repetitive; and they are unable to argue anything other than with appeals to authority–authorities we are less and less inclined to believe. They are left with spewing hatred and innuendo.

“Fauci said it” doesn’t move the needle any more. We have seen that movie and it sucked.