Requiem for the Legacy Media

The mainstream media's failure to cover both the "Censorship Industrial Complex," the Hunter Biden scandal and more confirm their death. Satire alert.

Satire warning. Sort of.

The church is somber and packed with friends and past benefactors of the deceased, their coffins lined up neatly, sequentially, in front of the assembled. The room is dimmed.

A sobbing organist plays music from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, tilting her head up, eyes closed, as a tear trickles down her left cheek.

An occasional sob is heard as the officiant walks slowly up the center aisle, dressed in a black suit. He walks through the center of the coffins lined up, draped in their corporate logos.

Tucker Carlson stops to rest his left hand on the Fox News coffin, paying respect to his former employer.

He gazes quickly at the other coffins assembled - NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, PBS, CNN, The Washington Post, The New Times, even Associated Press, Reuters, and USA Today - then softly ascends the stairs and turns to face the audience, somber-faced, as he slowly opens his notebook to deliver prepared remarks.

Tucker stops to take inventory of who is in the audience, the survivors. Newsmax. One America Network. News Nation. National Review Magazine, The Daily Wire, The Washington Examiner, The Washington Free Beacon, PJ Media. American Spectator. Townhall.com. The Post-Millenial. RealClearPolitics.com. The First TV. Someone from Substack is here. Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media networks are nowhere to be found. Former Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA), now President of Truth Social, arrives late to sit in the back row. Kash Patel, his former House Intelligence Committee counsel and now an author and podcaster, joins him, followed by Ben Domenech and Chris Stigall.

He spots Elon Musk, who has slipped into the rear of the building, their eyes meeting briefly. Even Twitter is here, Carlson pondered, then spotting Bari Weiss, the founder of The Free Press on Substack. His eyebrows arch up. This is quite an assembly.

Maybe the media isn’t as dead as some make it out to be.

He ditches his prepared remarks, closing the notebook with a thud and placing it below the rostrum. He grips the side of the podium and leans forward.

Carlson spots independent journalists Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Berenson, who have reserved a spot for Weiss, arriving late. Substack is well represented, Carlson notes.

He recognizes someone from the new Rumble streaming service. Oh wait, he thinks, that’s Stephen Crowder, who winks at him. Carlson fights back an urge to chuckle, covering it with a cough. He looks for and can’t find Dan Bongino but spots JustTheNews.com’s John Solomon.

Carlson takes a deep breath as he begins to speak.

“Friends, beloved colleagues employed in the craft of journalism. You honor the deceased with your presence today. This is a solemn occasion, never envisioned by America’s framers and founders nor by the legendary pioneers and giants of the Fourth Estate, on whose shoulders we stand today.

“Those lying before us this day did not die suddenly. It was a slow, agonizing, painful, even tragic, and unavoidable death, invited by the viruses of wokeness and ideologies birthed by the military-industrial complex, then festooned on college campuses where future journalists were indoctrinated with grievances, victimhood, and new bigotry.

*It was a pandemic for which they refused the antidote, the cure. Their audiences and advertising shrunk, and their newsrooms hollowed out, chasing and collaborating with malevolent government agents. Like an alcoholic in the throes of cirrhosis, they demanded more bourbon.

“Remember what Thomas Jefferson said? He said he would rather live with newspapers, without a government, than with a government without newspapers.

“If Thomas Jefferson were alive today, his worst nightmare would be realized, except it would be worse. A government that manipulates newspapers and the media and censors and cancels those who dare to disagree.

“Just like Cuba. China. The Soviet Union.

“But the ‘censorship industrial complex’ forgot one thing.

“This is America. Full of. . . Americans. People - patriots - who picked up muskets in 1776 and took on the world’s most powerful army, and - with a little help - won our freedom. A rag-tag army that crossed the Delaware on Christmas day and slaughtered invading Hessians at Trenton. Those patriots wrote a constitution that included a bill of rights that started with those magic words, ‘Congress shall make no law. . .’ I would love to stop here.”

(Audience chuckles nervously)

“Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of the press. It’s the third of five rights mentioned in the First Amendment, following freedom of religion and the exercise thereof and freedom of speech. Third in line but equally important, equally essential to the building blocks of American society.

“So why are we assembled to honor the dead before us? What happened? Were they killed in a war? Was there a revolution of some sort? Maybe a pandemic did them in?

“The answer is all three.

“President Dwight David Eisenhower perhaps saw it first and mentioned it in his farewell address in early 1961, three days before he gave the White House keys to John F. Kennedy. He warned us of a ‘military-industrial complex.’

“‘In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,’ the 34th president warned. ‘The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.’

“Not only did the government fail to guard against this ‘acquisition of unwarranted influence,’ it signed up. You see, Eisenhower constantly fought growing Pentagon budgets and feared the excessive influence of the axis of giant defense contractors working with Members of Congress, creating a monster.

“That monster quickly began to grow, its tentacles deepening and widening. Some say we saw its influence during the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Why are so many of Warren Commission records still sealed, by the way? It continued during the mismanagement of the Vietnam War and then Watergate.

“Perhaps you remember my episode, where I discussed the odd involvement of CIA personnel in a bungled break-in of Democratic National Committee headquarters that June night in 1972 and the infamous ‘Deep Throat.’ He turned out to be Deputy FBI Director Mark Felt, leaking and manipulating a pair of young Washington Post reporters. They literally forced a President to resign. His crime? Trying to cover up the connection of his reelection campaign to the break-in and then trying to get the CIA to intervene in the FBI’s subsequent investigation.

“We saw how that turned out. So did a of others. And boy did the intelligence-federal law enforcement complex take note. Mark Felt was their guiding star, their guru, on how federal officials control and manipulate our elected officials, even the occupant of the White House.

“News reporters - journalists - were taught to become the fourth estate, challenge the status quo, take on those in power, and become a check-and-balance. And now, we’ve seen this insidious complex manipulate the media in two consecutive presidential elections to swing it in favor of this permanent administrative state.

“First, the Russia Collusion hoax, where a presidential campaign used the FBI and intelligence community, forced a $30 million dollar special counsel investigation and spied on innocent Americans. Meanwhile, they let the Democratic presidential nominee and former Secretary of State wipe a server where she keeps classified documents, a crime, with no prosecution. Their gamble didn’t work. But they weren’t done.

“In 2020, we saw a bunch of spooks team up with the media to squash a New York Post story on what we were told was the ‘Hunter Biden laptop.’ But as we are learning now, it is about so much more, including nine Biden family members, possibly involving a prostitution ring, and massive foreign government contracts involving both China and of course, Ukraine.

“How did the media cover this? They did what their censorship industrial complex overlords told them in government. They fell for a Jedi mind trick and looked away. They created a ‘scandal’ over a bogus dossier that was never believable but was convenient for political purposes. They then dutifully bought the Biden campaign and spook spin that Hunter’s laptop was classic ‘Russian disinformation.’

“Talk about ‘privilege.’ Who else in America can get paid $83,000 dollars a month by foreign gas monopoly in a country where he doesn’t speak the language and get his ‘dad’ to fire the country’s prosecutor for looking under rocks for corruption?

“Who else in America gets to join ‘daddy’ on Air Force Two and comes home with multi-million dollar business deals from Chinese communists?

“And who else forgets about a porn-infested laptop left behind at a repair shop, teeming with evidence of official corruption? And what did the US Attorney do with it? Nothing, as far as we can tell. Meanwhile, Hunter gets to vacation with daddy to Ireland and reportedly hides from lawyers trying to deliver him a subpoena over the failure to provide child support.

“Oh, that repair shop? He’s forced to close down over threats."

“Meanwhile, a whistleblower has stepped up to report how the Attorney General of the United States lied to Congress about the laptop investigation and reports political interference in an official investigation.

“Sound familiar? Remember how “Woodstein” wrote front-page story after front-page story as Hollywood fawned over the reporters who brought down a President?

“Yet here we have stories of corruption that make that look like a picnic in the park. Where is the media?”

Carlson extends his right hand, palm up, sweeping it before a room of coffins. “‘Democracy dies in darkness,’ one of them says, on their masthead. “I didn’t realize that ending democracy was a mission statement and their newspaper an instruction manual,” Carlson added, referring to the Washington Post.

“I came here to deliver an offertory for the dead. But actually, I’ve changed my mind. Instead, I deliver a message of hope to announce a new birth of freedom.”

Gasps are heard in the audience.

“Look around you. Media outlets are still too young to obtain a driver’s license, buy a drink, or fight a war. Some of you are still in diapers.”

Carlson hears Ben Shapiro’s unmistakable laugh as others chuckle softly.

“Your audiences - our audiences - are growing. The American people have woken to the stench of corrupt collusion between out-of-control law enforcement and intelligence bureaucrats, in collusion with the media and politicians.

“Nikita Khrushchev once said that the Soviet Union would sell the rope by which Americans would hang themselves. While our media happily advertised and promoted that rope as a carnival barker inviting you inside a dark, foreboding tent, America has said no, thank you.

“Almost every media outlet represented in this room is growing. The Daily Wire. Substack, Rumble, and many others. Americans are giving birth to new media with their eyes and their dollars.

“They spurn the elitist finger waggers who try to persuade that they are either oppressed or the oppressors, that they are responsible for violence, inequality, and other maladies. Americans have been tolerant of many things that violate their values and consciences, believing their own values and beliefs would be respected, and that the media, our government, our legal system” - Carlson chuckles - “would be there to protect us.

“They have found out otherwise. Hunter Biden gets to skate while Justice Clarence Thomas is hunted down for having a rich friend—the horror. And what happened to Audrey Hale’s manifesto? You know, the trans activists who mowed down three children and three adults at a Christian school in Nashville.

“Americans see through this—no small thanks to those of you sitting in the pews before me and behind the dearly departed.

“You are the new media. You are the new Fourth Estate. Their legacy is now your inheritance. You may either stand on the shoulders of giants or the ashes of those before you. The choice is yours. And the American people are waiting.

“I am now called upon to deliver a eulogy. Instead, I will offer a blessing.

“God bless the United States of America.

“If you’ll pardon me, I have another funeral.” Carlson exits stage right.