ABC News – Brought to You by Walt Disney

I was researching the issue of the Multiple Bidens this morning and using all of the image searches. I haven’t really used Google’s much in a while, because Google is just so censored that it simply isn’t fit for purpose, even outside of politics. (I believe they’ve just completely broken the algorithm. AI and machine learning can’t understand political correctness, so punishing it for violating it is like beating a dog every day because it doesn’t understand French – the dog doesn’t understand what it did wrong, and eventually it is just going to give up on trying to please you.)

But there I was on Google Images, scrolling through various pictures of the various Bidens, and I came to a piece about Glasses Biden. The image was interesting as I had not run across that particular Biden before.

But what was more interesting was the link to the source.

Freeze it.

Magnify.

Zoom in.

That is ABC News being labeled as a subsidiary of Walt Disney. Based on where the link is, I wondered for a minute if it was generated by Google’s machines. But labeling the ownership of the news would imply serious anti-Semitism, which I can’t imagine these abused Google AIs are capable of at this point.

No, I think the placement of the link is being pulled from ABC’s site. (For the record, yes, I did right-click and “inspect element” and I couldn’t figure it out definitively.)

However, I checked the bottom of the ABC website, and did not find “Disney” where you might expect it if it is included in the site’s current corporate branding.

I then checked if CNN was linked to AT&T, if NBC to Comcast, or if CBS was categorized as “Viacom.” They are not.

Nor is the Washington Post categorized as “Amazon” or “Jeff Bezos.”

Perhaps more interestingly, National Geographic, which is also owned by Walt Disney (or rather, the company that bears his name), is also not identified this way.

So that implies it is not some legal program they are running to put an invisible branding on all their subsidiaries for some technical reason.

I have literally no conclusions to draw here. I just thought it was a weird thing.

But I will say – it reminded me of the fact that these companies do try to more or less keep themselves distanced from their subsidiaries. There is not a single thing these companies don’t focus-group test, and knowing that these companies are all owned by the same mega-companies clearly does not test well.

The only time I am aware of a major media merger being featured in pop news was when Disney was buying Fox properties, which meant that the X-Men could join the MCU. This led to “imagine if Hugh Jackman returned to his role as Wolverine – to join the Avengers.”

Just so you’re aware – this is the most recent media consolidation graph I could find:

It’s pretty easy to understand why people would take the media less seriously if they were consistently reminded of this.

“But everyone on the media agrees” stops being a very good argument for anything as soon as you realize that the entire media is run by a few companies.

Of course, every other industry is consolidated under this oligopoly structure, in a kind of feudal order. But it is most relevant in the media. It is also very relevant that it is the media that works to destroy people like Andrew Anglin and Alex Jones.

Speaking of both media and corporate dominance, I was reminded of this graph:

All corporate megaplexes, globally, are ultimately controlled by the central banking system.

If people are complaining about banks, they are really getting to the heart of the issue.

No one in the power structure wants people complaining about banks.

Left and right can easily unite around that issue.

You’d think left and right would be able to unite around the fact that it is just absurd and dangerous to allow all commerce to be controlled by a tiny number of mega-companies.

But of course, the right stopped caring about small businesses when Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity started incorporating these really hardline libertarian talking points, saying that taxing corporations, or not allowing them to merge into mega-corporations, would be just like communism.

If anyone would be able to cut to the core of American philosophical and political identity, it would be a working class Irish Catholic who was born and raised in Long Island, and is also an average middle American evangelical Israel fanatic for some reason.

Of course, if I were willing to question the purity of the ultimate wisdom of Sean Hannity, I would offer that a better argument would be: “letting a tiny number of elites own and control everything in society would be just like communism.”

But there was no one making that argument on any major platform… because of media consolidation.

The left is still theoretically against mega-corporations. But in a lot of ways, the left doesn’t really even exist anymore. It’s just a bunch of people who worship a power structure being dictated to them by the media, and literally just repeat contradictory and nonsensical gibberish.

Ultimately, this is all partisan politics are: a series of emotional wedge issues, designed to divide a nation in half so it is arguing with itself, endlessly, while all power exists right out in the open, controlling both political parties, but the wedge issues are so sensationalized that even though any person can understand that it is all staged, they can’t pull themselves away from these purpose-built distractions.

(Editor’s note: I’m impressed that I was able to put this together after the China thing. I was planning on nothing but filler slop for the rest of the day.)