The TV Tarts’ Reign of Terror

TV’s empaneled witches and their housebroken, domesticated boys are guided more by the spirit of Madame Defarge than by Lady Justice.—ILANA MERCER

The particular CNN segment I was watching concerned Fox News personality Tucker Carlson. It was meant to help terminate the controversial anchor’s career. I recognized the sourpuss, dressed in marigold yellow, who was presiding over the seek-and-destroy mission, targeting the ultra-conservative Mr. Carlson. She was no other than Poppy Harlow.

It transpires that years back, Carlson had routinely called into a Howard-Stern-like shock-jock radio show and made naughty comments, some about women. Women were “extremely primitive,” he had quipped. Yet to watch the countless, indistinguishable, ruthless, atavistic women empaneled on CNN, MSNBC, even Fox News—one cannot but agree as to the nature and caliber of the women privileged and elevated in our democracy, and by mass society, in general.

They are certainly not women with the intellect and wit of Margot Asquith—countess of Oxford, author and socialite (1864-1945). Would that women like Mrs. Asquith were permitted to put lesser “ladies” like CNN’s Ms. Harlow in their proper place!

When asked by American actress Jean Harlow how she pronounces her first name, Margot Asquith shot back, “The ‘t’ is silent, as in Harlow.” Naturally, you’d have to have a facility with the English language to know what a “harlot” is. You’d certainly need an education, as opposed to a degree, to recognize the next character referenced.

TV’s empaneled witches and their housebroken, domesticated boys are guided more by the spirit of Madame Defarge than by Lady Justice. If parents saw to it that children got an education, not merely a degree, the brats would know who Madam Defarge was. But our uneducated ignoramuses no longer seek out the greatest literature ever. This is because most of the best books were penned by the pale, patriarchal penile people. Given this self-inflicted ignorance, few younger readers will know this most loathsome of literary icons, from “A Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens.

Madame Defarge is the bloodthirsty commoner who sat knitting as she watched the en masse public beheadings of aristocrats (17,000 of them) in Paris, during the Reign of Terror, aka the French Revolution, whose symbol ought to be the guillotine. (Another 10,000 perished in prison sans due process.)

America’s modern-day Madam Defarges are the harridans who shrieked in vengeance on TV when a sentencing Judge, T. S. Ellis III, dared to cite Paul Manafort’s “otherwise blameless life.” Manafort, formerly a Trump campaign adviser, will be jailed for seven-and-a-half years for non-violent “crimes” excavated by Grand Inquisitor Robert Mueller, and committed against that most wicked of government departments, the Internal Revenue Service. That a broken, frail, wheelchair-bound man might not die in jail enraged the wicked, pitiless witches of the networks.

Cheered on by our contemporary Madame Defarges, Manafort’s next sentencing Judge, an angry female, failed to limit her ambit to the application of the law, namely to sentencing. Instead, she lectured the defendant for a demeanor that displeased her, and for an inadequate display of contrition. Judge Amy Berman Jackson subjected a visibly broken Mr. Manafort to a vicious tongue-lashing.

For that the TV harpies rejoiced as one.

Not one bit did they care that Manafort had also been subjected to double jeopardy. In contravention of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prosecutors simply tweak or reword an indictment just enough to twice or thrice put a defendant “in jeopardy of life or limb” “for the same offense.”

The cable coven was having none of this compassion stuff (that’s for immigrants who murder Americans, not for elderly white men who had worked for Mr. Trump). Mercy? What’s that! Manafort had stolen from the government, shrieked one NBC harridan (the IRS itself being a thieving, corrupt and oppressive entity).

Undeniably, this reign of terror on TV is dominated by women. And they are as flippant about a new arms race with Russia as they are about jailing individuals for crimes created in the process of conducting a Mueller-like inquisition, with its “storm-trooper tactic” and overweening, extra-constitutional powers. (Is Maria Butina still in solitary, by the way?)

Likewise, the attitude of TV’s females to alleged sex crimes is to drop the word “alleged” and dispatch the accused: guilty! In the lexicon of these feral creatures, whom we watch day-in and day-out gesticulate and fulminate, to be accused of a sex offense is to be guilty of it (unless you are a ruthless illegal alien who’s raped a helpless cow**. Due process? That’s too much of a high-minded abstraction for the average tele-tart.

Then there are the phrases these women deploy and the direction their impoverished discourse invariably leads on the ubiquitous panels:

It’s not normal!

Look at what President Trump just said. Look, he shows more affection toward dictators than democrats.

Look at the “untraditional nations” he is befriending, look at the war he is not prosecuting. It’s not normal. Help. Restrain him. Make him “normal.”

The “not normal” refrain issues from the uterine bowels of the tele-tart. It is a visceral cry for conformity, uniformity of thought at all costs.

Never mind that the path to some kind of unity in this fractured, broken country of ours is through peaceful disunity. That, these radical females consider dystopic. They are unprepared to accept respectful disunity, or accord an opponent respect. It is a fight to the death—though not theirs.

It takes a foreign correspondent planted amid our White House Press Corps to highlight the latter’s dysfunction. During a presser with “Trump of the Tropics”—Brazil’s visiting president, Jair Bolsonaro—a Brazilian lass distinguished herself by focusing exclusively on … hefty matters. When this foreign correspondent asked President Trump about the “OECD,” the furrows on the sloping brows who make up the American press scrum deepened.

To these presstitutes, it mattered not whether America was going to put in a good word for Brazil at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, when there was one overriding, life-or-death matter to tackle: Trump’s irredeemable, unrelenting, absolute awfulness, which not even an exoneration by the sainted Mr. Mueller has ameliorated. Yes, Grand Inquisitor Robert Mueller found no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia in the 2016 election. No, this has not altered a bit the hyperventilating done by the harridans on the ubiquitous television panels.

Let me be clear: When I allude to the women of TV, I include those with the Y chromosome. However, other than a few “men”—Don Lemon and his CNN sidekick, Chris Cuomo, come to mind—the housebroken boys on the typical TV panel are tamer than the tarts. Some of the “men” might even be pretending to be temperamentally unhinged in order to hook-up with good-looking girls in the Green Room.

Brooke Baldwin of CNN and Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC continue to spit out Trump news in CAPS, just so you know HOW EACH ONE FEELS DEEP DOWN INSIDE, AND WHO ARE THE ANGELS AND THE DEMONS IN THE STORY. (Donald and his Deplorables are never angels, if you get the drift.)

Not coincidentally, the asphyxiating hysteria matches the vapid vocabulary. TV’s liberal women rob the English language blind, deploying breathy figures of speech to fit a simpleton’s febrile, emotionally overwrought state-of-mind: “Unbelievable, incredibly embarrassing, amazing, OMG!”

This piss-poor, teenybopper English comes with sound effects. TV’s tarts all speak in insufferable, grating, staccato, tart tones. At least, that is how I have always described the gravelly voice of the tele-ditz. And yet, believe it or not, such a depiction is no longer politically proper. The voices from hell have been dignified. Explains The Economist:

Two vocal features are associated with young women: vocal fry and uptalk. Uptalk, as the name suggests, is the rising intonation that makes statements sound like questions? And vocal fry – often said to be typical of Kim Kardashian, an American celebrity – happens at the ends of words and phrases when a speaker’s vocal chords relax, giving the voice a kind of creaky quality.

Mandatory elocution lessons might ease the viewer’s pain.

Bad English and bad thinking are intertwined. By logical extension, the “ladies” resort reflexively to ad hominen attack. If Trump expresses an opinion, it is not because he sincerely thinks it or believes it, but because he is narcissistic, is not nice, makes them sad.

As befits the pedestrian minds described, our pig-ignorant panelists are incapable of grasping the role of government. You see, the tele-tarts focus not on the role of government, but on the tone of government. Thus is disagreement cast as diabolical. Donald Trump dares to dispute the notion that white nationalism is an urgent problem. He has the audacity to dislike John McCain (who is likewise despised by many a Vietnam War veteran), and he is unconvinced a few Russian bots threw the 2016 elections. Trump doesn’t conform. He rejects received opinion. He is not like all those sinecured, empaneled “normies.” The reality of difference among TV’s distaff sets off the kind of uncontrollable twitching and writhing conjuring medieval mass hysteria. St. John’s dance frenzy, 600-odd years ago, for example.

All this is the stuff of tabloids. For the disciplined mind craves data. It craves facts, not folklore. By contrast, devoid of discipline and a sense of propriety, and seeking the warm smell of the Fake-News herd, cable’s cretins escape into gossip, feelings and fantasy.

The girlie nature of news reportage means a lurch from one scandal to the next. And it is rarely about real news. The “Five W’s” journalists are obligated to impart in their coverage no longer count. These were: Who, What, When, Where and Why. Nowadays, the women in control keep it sensational, as opposed to informative and substantive. They pick the most perverse aspect of a story—often entirely imaginary and symbolic—zero in on it and work it, until the next fix presents itself.

Nor are these dames nameless phantoms. Here are some of American TV’s more memorable mediocrities: Yamiche Alcinder (PBS); Ruth Marcus (The Washington Post); Marie Barf, Jessica Tarlov and Rochelle Ritchie of Fox News; Alexis McGill Johnson (pseudo-scholar and “activist”); Jackie Speier (politician); Ana Maria Archila (co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy); Nomiki Konst and Symone D. Sanders (high-flying Bernie babes both); Asha Rangappa (former FBI, ever Democrat); Michelle Goldberg (atrocious writer at The New York Times); Hallie Jackson (MSNBC); Sarah Westwood (snide at CNN); Emma Brown (The Washington Post); Shannon Pettypiece (Bloomberg); Catherine Rampell (The Washington Post); Eliza Collins (USA Today); Maya Wiley (MSNBC); Jessica Valenti (author of Sex Object); Liz Plank (cringe factor infinity at Vox Media); Liz Mair (lite libertarian); Cynthia Alskne (dumps on the Donald for MSNBC); Natasha Bertram (The Atlantic); Anne Rumsey Gearan (The Washington Post’s White House Reporter); Jennifer Horn (AP News); Neera Tanden (former adviser to Barack Obama and Democratic operative); Adrian de Vogue (CNN Court reporter); Laura Coates (CNN); Xochitl Hinojosa (big wig in the Democratic Party); Jay-Newton Small (Time Magazine); Adrienne Elrod. And on and on. Like so many telemarketers, these propaganda-peddling females are interchangeable in opinion and in demeanor.

And here is my modest Swiftian proposal: It so happens that a hero of the left, mass murderer Mao Zedong, once proposed exporting 10 million Chinese women to the United States. In a long conversation with Henry Kissinger at the Chinese leader’s residence, in February of 1973, Mao moaned about “the dismal trade between the two countries.” China was a “very poor country,” said Mao, with “an excess of women.” “Let them go to your place. They will create disasters. That way, you can lessen our burdens,” Mao pleaded in earnest (for he had no sense of humor).

That is the one and only page America might consider taking out of the Little Red Book—in reverse. Ship the TV Tarts to China. Bomb China with American bimbos. Alas, as soon as one prototypical panelist falls away, like sharks’ teeth, another moves in to fill her slot.

©2019 ILANA MERCER
The Agonist
April 15