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A snip of what’s up at Reels.

I wouldn’t normally use this site to promote a single joke at Facebook’s Reels investment in ACHD social network communications. This is a special case in a couple ways. The graphic basis comes from a post at Breitbart by John Nolte, whom we admire for his courage and his encyclopedic knowledge of (yeah, I’ll use the highfalutin’ word…) Cinema. It’s long been a conviction of mine that the most indispensable credential for opinionating is knowing at least one subject extremely well. Nolte’s love and expertise about all things connected to Hollywood and its extraordinary cultural contribution for over a hundred and fifty years now qualifies as just such a credential. He was with Breitbart from the beginning and has survived all the ups and downs there because he never stops doing what he does best, which is write about all the phenomena that have affected and changed the world since this breakthrough project was produced in 1872:

Edward Muybridge. Ever heard of him? Someone else who knew, 

understood, One Thing extremely well. And changed history.

Nolte has an intuitive understanding of the fact that performing in front of cameras has become the secret obsession of a lot of people who don’t know much of anything extremely well, although dollars comes in a close second with most behind personal sexual gratification. Two things about which the Hollywood Legacy has understood very extremely well. Nolte has been monitoring the impact of these obsessions on Hollywood, just as he always has, and more recently on all the institutions and disciplines led by wannabes auditioning for the role of Esther Blodgett in A Star is Born. He knows the difference between talented creative people and greedy scene stealers who mostly ruin what they tinker with. It pains him that the movies are dying, that entertainment television is dying, and that those who are responsible for reporting on these and other matters critical to the mental health of the nation are laughable puppets in a 21st Century Punch and Judy Show.

Got the idea. Had to do it in one minute or less because Blogger pretends that a 

video longer than one minute exceeds its 100MB limit on vid file size. Poppycock.

All the news we get from Alphabet networks is just performance art. Murrow and Cronkite may have entered the television studio in part because of their newspaper experience, but they both had long experience in packaging their output for broadcast media and selling the results with their vocal delivery skills. Everything after them has been show business, men with gravelly voices slowly giving way to good bone structure, teeth, and on-air attitude. Women? Same as it ever was. Faces and figures and flirtatious manners. Who led successive generations of men in the same direction, except for the neckline and legs categories.

Now Scott Pelley acts like a cheerleader who had to give back the prom queen crown. Why I loved the John Nolte piece that startedlike this at Breitbart.

I’ll get back to why I showed you this. Right after this…

Here’s the full text of what Nolte gave us:

FTA: <<If Scott Pelley weren’t real, those of us committed to destroying the corporate media by exposing how awful these people are would have to invent him.

 

In short: what a gift this pompous ass is.

 

Never stop talking, Scott Pelley. Please, never stop.

 

After 37 years at CBS News and some 20 of those years at 60 Minutes, change was coming, and this self-absorbed, entitled leftist just couldn’t deal with it. Bari Weiss took over at the helm of CBS News, her new hire was about to take over running 60 Minutes, and Pelley decided to go out using an electronic version of suicide-by-cop. In an all-hands staff meeting, he raged against Weiss, he attacked his new boss as unqualified, and got what he wanted — fired. Now he can play martyr. Now he can sue. All very transparent.

 

But he’s also a gift to those of us who want to remind every Normal Person in America that you can never hate the legacy media enough.

 

What’s the first thing Thurston Howell Pelley III does after his firing? He released a photo of himself at the wheel of a fancy sailboat. Oh, yeah, he’s in touch with Real America. This must be a video of Pelley heading home after his sailboat photo op:

 

 

But the real gift was yet to come, and that was with his weekend New York Times interview. Naturally, he’s only lobbed softballs — few things are as useless as leftists interviewing leftists — but his cold arrogance, his sniffing elitism, his breathtaking sense of entitlement… Everyone needs to read this to understand that the legacy media are irredeemable. This guy never should’ve been allowed in the front door, much less celebrated today. And the fact that a so-called journalist who makes everything about himself in the most childish and unprofessional way is being celebrated tells you just how broken this institution is.

 

Here are a few excerpts…

 

Pelley claims there’s no evidence 60 Minutes is biased, or even that people perceive it as biased.

Bari Weiss “didn’t offer any kind of a metric” to back up her claim that people see the show as biased, he sniffs, adding: “Do you have a poll? Is there market research? What are you talking about? We felt that she was making statements that she couldn’t back up and was coming into the news division with hardened preconceived notions that didn’t seem to be thought through.”

 

He then admits he chose to ignore a request from Weiss, and when I say “ignore,” he just went ahead and broadcast the story without even acknowledging her request or bothering to ask why she saw it that way….

 

Weiss directed Pelley to describe ICE protester Renee Good’s car “as driving toward the officer” just prior to the ICE officer shooting her dead in self-defense.

 

“This is not what you see on the video,” Pelley falsely explains to the Times. “On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer.”

“So,” Pelley brags, “I decided that I wouldn’t do those things. I wasn’t going to get in a debate about it. I wasn’t going to call Bari Weiss about it. I was just going to refuse to make those changes.”

 

You’ll note that according to Pelley himself, Weiss did not ask that he report a claim Good “aimed” her car at the ICE officer, but only and factually that she was “driving toward the officer” – which is indisputable.

 

Let me tell you right now, if I ever published a piece here at Breitbart without making the changes requested by my boss, I’d catch hell. If I refused to even acknowledge the request and arrogantly published as though I were the final word and owned the joint, I’d probably be fired, and rightly so.

Then there’s this beauty from Pelley…

 

“I’ve never worn the uniform. But I’ve been in combat for this country, in Afghanistan and Iraq, Kuwait. I’ve been shot at, spent nights in foxholes filling up with water in the desert. I’m not aware that the president of the United States has ever done any of those things for his country. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

 

“I’ve been in combat for this country.”

 

Man alive.

 

And let’s not forget that President Trump gave up a dream life and was shot for his country.

 

Pelley closes with this…

 

CBS management doesn’t “know what they’re doing,” he says. “And there’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at 60 Minutes before, or at CBS News before. So that is my hope: a return to sanity. We can save this. It’s possible to land this plane. But right now, CBS News is on fire.”

 

He’s the classic narcissist who’s written himself in as the indispensable hero of his own story, who’s certain 60 Minutes will not survive without him.

 

If you wanted to expose the corporate media in the worst way imaginable, you couldn’t invent a better fiction. Let’s hope Pelley never stops talking, although I fear Pelley will go the way of Chuck Todd, Terry Moran, and Jim Acosta — disappear into the Substack as their former employers somehow stumble along without them.>>

I inserted the pic Nolte linked. The only one that appeared on the Breitbart page was this, shown in the screencaps above.

A pop-up captioned as an advertisement

This is the whole reason I made the feel I posted at Facebook. To my eye the similarities between Pelley’s Mussolini pose and Robin Williams’s undercover Resistance garb, (the cap, the cap, thinking of Alistair McLean’s Navarone movies…) were about more than bone structure. In fact, I can prove it:

THE GUNS OF NAVARONE original 1961 posed b/w lobby still photo 

James Darren as the Greek Resistance fighter Spyros Pappadimos.

Kind of perfect for how Pelley views himself in the twisted post-Watergate “Save the World” fantasy that elite journalism has taken on in jettisoning reporting for sabotage of political undesirables. The Mussolini pose comes as a result of being outed and having to assert his native authority in place of the official authority he’s just been deprived of. Inside, though, he has still has the image of himself working behind enemy lines against great odds to bring down the MagaReich he was battling long before Trump came down that escalator. Pelley sees himself as a genuine hero of the oppressed masses he’s never met. No doubt that’s the explanation for his inapt references to combat experience. He’s not referring to Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s referring to 60 Minutes, where he fights the good fight by spinning the propaganda that hurts or slows down the evil enemy.

Why I had to put the two pics officially together, and then why I felt obligated to explain why I’d done it.

Which is my final nearly seditious point in writing this. (And even in putting myself through the totally unnecessary slog of building a one-minute video that took more than 60 graphic files and half a dozen graphics apps to make. I wanted me to remember I had made this point about pop-up-land…)

Pop-up-land? It has no flag, no membership card, no union. It’s just there, an incidental weapon in the asymmetric war being fought across the Internet. All these websites who are also trying to save us from the Great Satan, however constituted, have set aside their own pristine journalistic ethics in the quest for advertising dollars. I know it keeps the doors open in hostile economic territory. But with those dollars comes pop-up creep, the seemingly random insertion of distracting photo/video ads in between paragraphs of earnest reportage. Gateway Pundit, whose fundamental values I don’t criticize, nevertheless is also now a full-fledged accomplice in the legal cannabis trade and quack remedies for everything from impotence to tinnitus to baldness to Alzheimers Disease. Breitbart too. Plus a lot of reasonably priced Chinese crotchless lingerie every household needs. (Um, where’s the button that lets my 13 yo son read Breitbart and Gateway without seeing a seductive stream of nearly naked women in the process?)

I notice it at the old sage pundit sites too, on RAV and News Nation, etc. Old guys who are definitely trying to help Trump save the nation by working at under-compensated jobs they’ve taken after getting thrown out of Fox/Murdox or wherever. “But first, ten minutes on my inexpensive pamphlets on how to make a fortune from gold in a collapsing economy, and then in our last segment, an interview with the physician who’s responsible for the new wonder drug that will make you 30 again by joining my Health Prescription Club for Old White People @betooyoung.com…”)

They’re all at us, all the time, from all sides. No telling who specifically is behind a lot of it. The one I’ve called out today strikes me as illustrative of how subtly it can be done but this is an instance I believe to be genuine individual ‘resistance’ activity inside Breitbart. Somebody’s private joke, hoping someone else would notice.

I noticed. That’s kind of what I do. Notice things.

Let me conclude with something unexpected that may be as half true as it is half false from the much maligned Bruce Springsteen.

The only Springsteen title my wife ever mentions. That’s something. Far be it 

from me to point out he’s probably undermining the Common Man persona 

he’s performing onstage these days. How the knuckles crack, you know?