It’s happening
again! They just can’t help themselves. The latest round of U.S. government censorship and propaganda —
for your own good! — started eleven months ago, with
a random, 14-second TikTok with some guy in Idaho marveling over his $16 McDonald’s quarter-pounder with cheese, large fry, and a Sprite.
Here’s his receipt, from the linked clip:
Last Friday, the Washington Post excreted its latest unappetizing piece of journalistic propaganda headlined, “The viral $16 McDonald’s meal that may explain voter anger at Biden.” The more ominous sub-headline warned: “As some Democrats fear social media is exaggerating economic problems, the White House faces a crucial choice on election strategy.”
Get it? Social media is exaggerating economic problems. In other words, it’s MISINFORMATION. Just. Like. Covid.
WaPo’s article was penned by pandemic keyboard warriors Jeff Stein and Taylor Lorenz. Lorenz’s name might sound familiar. She’s the single, late-40’s reporter who doxxed Libs of TikTok founder Chaya Raichik. Anyway, on Friday the two laptop-class WaPo reporters doxxed their latest victim, the guy who posted the McDonald’s receipt clip: an Idaho HVAC repairman named Topher Olive.
Apparently Topher Olive is a misinformer, if not an outright liar, since according to The Washington Post, in his 14-second clip he failed to explain he’d bought one of McDonald’s seasonal burgers — the “Smokey BLT” — and obviously the HVAC installer should’ve expected his otherwise plain fast-food burger to cost $16.
Looks delicious, doesn’t it?
The real problem is that, over the last couple weeks, Topher’s pricey burger clip sizzled onto social media like a cheap, Chinese frozen meat™ product hitting a rusty greased skillet. And not in a good way. Topher’s video clip has usually been re-packaged as an unhappy meal with a large side of scathing criticism of Joe Biden’s economic policies. And Joe doesn’t like it.
Fortunately your diligent federal government never sleeps, and it owns newspapers like the Washington Post, so it can promptly take the fight to liars like Topher Olive, who is probably working with the Russians. Still, it’s a vexing problem:
These stories soon reached the White House Office of Digital Strategy, which tracked the meme as one of many exaggerated examples of the nation’s economic woes, according to a White House official. In reality, inflation has been steadily subsiding.
And yet one anomalous price from one store in Idaho 11 months ago was ripping through people’s social media feeds as if it explained the entire economy. One Democratic official said: “What are we supposed to do, tell the president or Chuck Schumer to send a tweet saying, ‘Hey, most Big Macs aren’t that expensive?’ It would look ridiculous.”
Lest you forget, the White House Office of Digital Strategy is the federal government’s online misinformation police. It’s not political though! Because that would be wrong. But of course, anything that hurts the president also hurts the country.
So what should a good, massively-funded federal government do about a problem like
Topher Olive? It should combat misinformation, of course. But it turned out this problem is especially tricky, like a paper bag of extra ketchup packets with a leaky one. Democrat political operatives just aren’t sure what to do, exactly, about all the unhappy regular folks who’ve been deluded into posting all this economic misinformation, probably by Putin himself:
Some voters regard the suggestion that they simply do not appreciate their circumstances as elitist and condescending. (But) at the center of this debate is a dispute over what extent social media and perceptions — rather than real conditions in the economy — are fueling voters’ angst. TikTok abounds with misleading or inaccurate information about the economy. One video in September with 2.3 million views said there was a “SILENT DEPRESSION.”
Another video from this summer with 2.1 million views claimed, incorrectly, “We have the lowest purchasing power we have ever had in American history,” and asserted that inflation-adjusted wages are lower than they were then. A third video, with 1.8 million views, similarly falsely claimed, “We currently are making less than the height of the Great Depression.”
Can you believe all these misinformers are still running around, free as birds, polluting social media with their dangerous wrongthink about the economy? How serious is this problem for Joe Biden, sorry, I mean
for America?
Very serious:
Some economists think these kinds of comments are not just wrong but dangerous. Economists fear that these exaggerated stories will ultimately lead to a worse outcome — perhaps helping Trump win reelection — and that it is vital to make clear that this remains by many measures one of the best recoveries in modern U.S. history.
Dangerous! You know what happens to dangerous people, like folks who take unauthorized U.S. Capitol tours. And, the WaPo is fretting that this 14-second TikTok about pricey McDonald’s meals might result in
the worst outcome of all, at least, according to WaPo’s economists:
they might help Trump get re-elected. So stop it!
In the meantime, the White House is diligently using your tax dollars to bribe Facebook to clamp down on all this negativity. And it’s hiring social media influencers to hype the economy. Not to help
Biden. To help
America:
The White House official said the administration is working with TikTok creators to tell positive stories of Biden’s economic stewardship, while also working with social media platforms to counter misinformation.
It’s so handy that during the pandemic they created all these software tools to help social media companies “counter misinformation,” which is a very nifty euphemism for “shut you fools up.”
The truth is that Biden’s “economic stewardship” — if you can call it that — has not made the economy better. Only a sold-out laptop-class reporter who lives off doing the bidding of shady government intelligence operatives could say that. The federal government is just jimmying the data again, to make it look like there’s less inflation, a game it has been playing since the 1970’s.
Even Taylor Lorenz couldn’t let
that whopper languish under the warmer, admitting in her story that, to be honest, real wages
have plunged since Biden was elected. They’ve plunged
a lot:
If the article’s readers trudge through to the very bottom, they find the two quotes that should have started the article, instead of quotes from anonymous White House officials. As it turns out, Lorenz called two
actual TikTok influencers, to ask them about
their perspective on the
reality of Biden’s economy. In other words, the very people the article is about.
But you can see why Taylor buried these quotes at the very end — they both destroyed the story’s carefully-crafted ‘misinformation’ narrative:
“There’s this cadre of number-crunching paperwork obsessives who are convinced that if some report says inflation is slowing, that means everything is great and everybody who feels something different is either lying or brainwashed by TikTok,” said Jordan Uhl, a content creator and progressive activist. “The idea that people are just making this up or are misled about their own material conditions is absurd.”
Zaid Admani, a content creator with nearly 400,000 followers who posts about finance and economic topics, said that people are increasingly learning about financial concepts on TikTok — but that many have a very negative view of the country’s economic outlook. “People feel a sense of dread,” he said.
I imagine the “sense of dread” Zaid mentioned is like that feeling you get whenever you see Joe Biden about to give an important speech at the podium, and then he gets that vacant, confused look, like he’s running out of things to say, and starts swaying toward stage left. Imagine having that feeling all the time.
No wonder they are so mad about TikTok all the time.
A 14-second TikTok video about a McDonald's meal panics Joe Biden; Ken Paxton sues Pfizer over fake clinical trials; CDC's mysterious budget; Disney's SEC report admits ESG PO's customers; and more.
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