So I tripped over this as I was surfing around last week, and flagged it for comment.
It's unexceptional hard-left cant:
There are no constraints left to halt America's slide into a totalitarian capitalism. Electoral politics are a sham. The media have been debased and defanged by corporate owners. The working class has been impoverished and is now being plunged into profound despair. The legal system has been corrupted to serve corporate interests. Popular institutions, from labor unions to political parties, have been destroyed or emasculated by corporate power. And any form of protest, no matter how tepid, is blocked by an internal security apparatus that is starting to rival that of the East German secret police. The mounting anger and hatred, coursing through the bloodstream of the body politic, make violence and counter-violence inevitable. Brace yourself. The American empire is over. And the descent is going to be horrifying.I was going to just page away from it and shrug when I caught the author's byline:
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.I'm sure there are NYT and WaPo reporters who post on VDare and Stormfront and places like that. I don't go to those sites often, so can't say I have any kind of data. And I can't find examples in my bookmarks for other crazed left-wing ex-legacy media journalists.
So - serious question - what other examples can people think of offhand, on either side of the political spectrum?
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Gotta say, crawling through Stormfront to look for author correlations with other publications sounds like a very difficult way to spend an afternoon. But it's probably a good idea.
A corresponding exercise for Truthdig and Counterpunch would be equally unpleasant, though probably far more fruitful.