Bari Weiss and the post-liberal media order

Many in the ruling class, emboldened by Trump’s brazen—and thus far successful—attacks on liberal institutions, correctly smell blood. But Trump’s radical fence-testing is not sufficient enough explanation. They likely see the rise of AI-assisted Palantir-like surveillance systems, in concert with big bets on AI-slop content as meaningfully reducing the need for the more sophisticated and softer version of liberalism via media and nonprofits. If the underclasses can be sufficiently neutralized with slop and mass surveillance, with incarceration and National Guard occupations, and we have a Democratic Party primarily paid to punch left and promote genocide while offering little in the way of real political oppostion, then what’s the point of all the high-minded nonprofits, fact checkers, and academics? What’s the point of shared reality? There isn’t one. Reality can be invented, increasingly with Sora-level verisimilitude, by virtue of simply owning the means––whether CBS or CNN or TikTok––in which reality is constructed.