Monkeypox is apparently the next best fear-mongering tactic by the media at large, with a whopping DOZEN cases announced on Monday, which progressed to an even more scary 45 cases on Friday. They say this like it’s spreading like wildfire – but only if that wildfire was located in your sock drawer.

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Note: This article contains the transcripts and recording notes from the original article.

And can I just say, here, that the name MonkeyPox just feels like the next thing that logically follows something like bird flu and mad cow disease and swine flu. I just wonder what’s next. I’m thinking like squirrel fever, or maybe horse hiccups. 

And all this isn’t to say that Monkeypox isn’t real. Of course I’m not denying that. But what makes it fake news is that it’s not newsworthy. It’s trumped up and bloated to make it seem important because there’s nothing else currently fear-wrenching enough to keep America’s sheep glued to the TV. So, they had to come up with something to keep the stress levels high enough to keep serotonin in the blood, which has proven to be the best motivator to pattern-forming viewing habits.

Just as we saw with the media frenzy that caused so much more harm than good amid the COVID-19 pandemic, mass media has wasted no time at all jumping right onto its next biohazard bandwagon. 

That’s right, if beating the war drum didn’t work to get us into a full blown nuclear war with Russia Monkeypox is a nice safe harbor to keep Americans scared, and of course glued to our TV screens for the latest updates in the world of media frenzying. 

So, here’s the timeline: Monday, America had 12 cases in 12 states. Tuesday that numer shot up to 13. That number ascended to 30 by Wednesday, which is more than double, before plateauing at 40 by Thursday, and then a huge spike of five new cases to bring the total to 45 cases in 15 states throughout the week. What a week for the onset of a brand new fear campaign. 

I can’t even believe their actually making this a part of their news coverage. There 

On Friday, that conversation shifted to made the jump to Monkeypox being associated, or even being confused with a sexually transmitted disease, as it can appear as a rash on the genitals. Like, because it’s a pox 

Just two paragraphs below the CNBC article was a 4-minute video stating that the “Next pandemic threat can come from everywhere.” I have such a hard time wrapping my head around a pandemic surrounding us from all sides that it literally comes from everywhere. 

It goes on to quote that health care providers should not rule out monkeypox just because a patient has another diagnosis or another sexually transmitted infection. They’re basically warning both doctors and patients that even if you go in for a routine check up, even though you’re at zero risk for catching Monkeypox, you COULD STILL HAVE MONKEYPOX!!! 

[Laughs]

Oh, geez. 

But this gives me a great opportunity to make a teachable moment. So, instead of joining onto the Monkey Pox bandwagon, I’m just going to use it as a moment of learning. I am, after all, a professor.

Teachable moment: 

  1.  I really enjoy taking jabs at the establishment. But that’s basically got the value of potty humor unless the point of those jabs actually comes across. 
  2. As a professor, I always task my students with considering three things about every story they come across. Well, there are a lot of them. The first three should be kept in mind at all times, the two I’ll detail after that should come to mind when the first three don’t quite pass the sniff test. 
    1. First, consider the agenda. This seems obvious, of course, but you need to ask yourself: Why is this story being written? What other stories happening right now are talking about the same facts, and what are those stories saying? A wonderful way to find out is to search! And how do you do that? You take a handful of the biggest buzz words in a given article or broadcast, and plug those into an internet search. And I recommend that you do NOT use Google, because they’ll obviously send you results that benefit them, their social media platforms, their advertisers and constituencies first. In fact, they may not even return anything that’s NOT going to benefit these entities. I recommend using Yahoo! or Bing, or even downloading the TOR browser or using a VPN and searching that way. This will give you the least filters and help balance out what you’ll get back from all perspectives. At least that’s the hope.
    2. Second, consider the source. Who is writing the article or releasing the podcast? What has their position been in the past? Does taking a certain side of the debate help push another angle that they’ve pressed in the past? A very simple way to do this is to simply get off your normal apps and websites and look at a different news provider. For instance, instead of using YouTube, search for your stories of interest on Minds.com, Bitchute.com, Odysee.com or another platform that I like to call the Aftermarket Media. If you’re interested in a list of the ones I use for my sources, send an email to MasculistPodcast@gmail.com.
    3. And third, consider the timing. Are their bills sitting before Congress right now that a certain story might influence in some way? If a story is really huge, but doesn’t really warrant that much media coverage, what else is happening in the world? Is this story being used to flank another issue, to draw attention away from a foreign bombing campaign, or to hijack a conversation that would otherwise draw a critical perspective of a position, or a publication or a certain politician? A great place to find out what’s happening in the world is on that list I mentioned above. Shoot me an email and I’ll get that out to you. 
    4. There are several other considerations that we must take, of course. But those first three will be your first line of tack at getting you a a wealth of rational answers to just about any nonsensical mass media frenzy question you’ll ever ask. 
    5. Two final pieces of advice that I’ve found to be consistently valuable in answering many seemingly unanswered questions are the following:
      1. When you can’t answer the question of why – as in “Why did the US invade Iraq when we found no weapons of mass destruction, and then follow that up with an equally questionable invasion of Afghanistan” – is to insert the word “Money” into the equation, which will give you a heaps of options to choose from. In this example, it’s no coincidence that George W. Bush led the invasion of both of these countries while Dick Cheney, the former chairman and CEO of Halliburton, was Vice President. The reason it’s no coincidence is that Halliburton went on to win billions of dollars in securities and construction contracts in the wake of these invasions. Of all the contract bids entered from all the companies across all the countries in the world, the notion that the government looked away while mass media wouldn’t  report on the fact that Halliburton beat out all these other bids in what came to be known as a no-bid contract process, is equally not incidental. About the closest they came to paying it any attention was in a September 27, 2004 article from the New York Times that quotes “the Bush campaign maintains that Mr. Cheney has cut ties with Halliburton and that the administration has given the company no special treatment.” In case you’re missing my meaning here: THIS IS A LIE that the government sponsored and Mass Media propogated. There is no other way to say it. And the sheeple of America swallowed that lie hook, line and sinker. This report didn’t come out until three years after the invasion of Iraq, which happened to be less than one year after Cheney left Halliburton after chairing the global company for 15 years. Cheney also happened to have continued receiving taxable compensation from his former company all throughout the war. And yet there was no more scrutiny given to this issue than a weekend read in the NYT, and the world moved on like nothing ever happened. I didn’t though. I spent three weeks on a report for one of my journalism classes at IU slamming everything that the Bush cabinet and Mass Media stood for in that obvious collusion of outright lies to the American people. In the end, as always, nothing changes when not enough people demand that change. And that’s what happend there.
      2. Which leads me to the second thing one should always ask himself when hearing what appear to be echoes of news stories around the world without any governmental pundits or White House correspondents dashing the claims. When the government and the Mass Media at large – and I’m including Social Media in this statement – do NOT disagree, or worse, actually DO agree on a certain subject, the hairs at the nape of your neck should be standing at attention. This usually only means one of a few things. 
        1. Firstly, it could mean that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. In other words, when there’s no blowback from Mass Media over what’s happening in Washington, that’s usually because the media is benfitting from the affair (either in terms of scandal to cast out click-bait, or gossip value, or even passage of legislation that makes fake news even easier to spread). 
        2. Secondly, the opposite may be true as well, meaning that a given spike in coverage potentiates momentum in a certain element of political benefit to a party currently in power – for good or bad, which, regardless how it plays out, bad is always good for someone in Washington. A perfect example of this is the former president Trump’s seemingly endless cringe moments that, if not for him being president, would not be news at all. At times it seems that the announcements on his Twitter feed were in the news more than the policies he implemented. 
        3. And thirdly, it could be an active, calculated, partisan agreement between the government and Mass Media themselves to engage in a campaign of censorship – or whatever redirecting, misinformational, narrative-shifting ideology they can hatch under the guise of fomenting “truth” by protecting the poor, uninformed American people of the mysterious, powerful disinformation machine churning day and night in an effort to send us all into chaos. News flash: we’re already in chaos! And it’s not because a handful of wachos have an internet connection. In one of the most dispicable displays of being caught having both of their hands in the same cookie jar, major Social Media platforms including Facebook and Twitter, complied with government requests to flag, shadow ban and even remove posts, comments and accounts of those making claims that went against stated claims of the Biden administration. This, of course, surrounded the often daily changes to the COVID-19 information horizon which has ultimately seen itself dashed altogether with the latest data from vaccine and viral infection research.  
  3. How to spot fake news: 
    1. When any disease, disorder or virus or anything else is anything less than tens of thousands of cases nationwide, it’s not a real threat. Not that we shouldn’t be preparing for it. But anything less than that is not newsworthy. 
    2. When the numbers are so abysmal that it’s not newsworthy, you have to ask yourself why they’re reporting it. 
    3. The major networks were actually reporting that MonkeyPox was actually NOT a threat. And my first question was, ‘So why are you talking about it?’ What’s so important about a non-threatening bug that it comes on in Prime Time Television? 
    4. Think about how much effort goes into telling the news? Researching the news? Producing and airing the news? Think of the expense of paying all those people and advertising expenses and station promotions. And yet they go through all that to report that something is NO BIG DEAL. THAT’S NOT WHAT NEWS IS ABOUT!!
    5. News is supposed to be impactful, important, so rare and extraordinary that IT MAKES THE NEWS!!! The news is supposed to be reserved for useful, information like record breaking Olympic accomplishments and noteworthy inventions; outstanding accomplishments like moon landings and military victories. MORE…
    6. Think about it, folks. Think critically about what the mass media is telling you, because I can assure you, if the majors like Fox and CNBC and CNN and all the others are circling around a non-issue like sharks circling a wounded diver, there’s a reason. 
    7. My assumption – dare I say even a prediction – is that they’re preparing to turn MonkeyPox into the next big scare. And as the numbers of infections don’t support the news broadcasts covering it, we’ll still see it come in well ahead of real threats going on in the world like when the US bombs a small village in Sudan and that never makes the news. 

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