| Time | Text |
|---|---|
|
Piers Morgan's Phony Game
00:09:18
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|
| Let's be honest, okay? | |
| Piers Morgan is the Brit twit who's full of shit. | |
| Sorry. | |
| Okay. | |
| And while we're setting the record straight, Piers Morgan is not a journalist. | |
| He's not a thinker. | |
| He's not even a credible commentator or communicator. | |
| He's a glorified referee for human cockfights. | |
| Dressed in a suit. | |
| And trying to pull up the. | |
| Americans fall for a British accent. | |
| Not the, you know... | |
| Not the Johnny Rotten, you know, accent, but... | |
| He's such a phony. | |
| You buy this property. | |
| Look at the Mid-Atlantic accent. | |
| Look at George Plimpton. | |
| Look at William F. Buckley. | |
| And how they contrive this. | |
| It's nonsense. | |
| It's a shill. | |
| He's a dupe, a shill, a phony, fugazi. | |
| He's a work. | |
| And for reasons still unexplained, he keeps tricking American audiences into thinking he possesses some kind of wisdom. | |
| Spoiler, he doesn't. | |
| I don't know what this is. | |
| He's made a career out of asking leading questions. | |
| Pitting people against each other because he doesn't have to do anything. | |
| Then he steps back like a smug bartender who started the brawl, started the bar fight, and then watches from behind the counter. | |
| He lets other people do the work because he doesn't have anything to do. | |
| That's more and more of the deal, especially on YouTube, where you just pit people together. | |
| You know, interviews are great, except that they do all the work. | |
| You don't have to do anything. | |
| You don't have to think anything. | |
| Put people together. | |
| I mean, just go down the list. | |
| He'll get shmooly and junk yogurt and he sits back and he, hey, good friend, he gets a million hits, doesn't have to do anything. | |
| Let them do the work. | |
| But he doesn't have anything. | |
| He's not controversial because he speaks the truth. | |
| He's controversial because he thrives on chaos that he creates. | |
| He lets other people do it. | |
| He doesn't offer analysis. | |
| He offers provocation. | |
| And there's the difference. | |
| Remember Geraldo Rivera? | |
| Bless his heart. | |
| Bless his heart. | |
| Let me tell you something. | |
| There's a Pruder film. | |
| Geraldo during his day. | |
| But he was the best. | |
| Geraldo Rivera. | |
| He was more... | |
| He pretended to be more illegitimate. | |
| But like Horrendo Revolver, I think that was... | |
| Anyway, like Geraldo. | |
| Without the stache or the porn star flair, Piers is a character. | |
| He's a cartoon character made for TV relic who serves one purpose, to stir the pot and stir the shirt so others can make the meal and do the work for him. | |
| He plays devil's advocate not out of intellectual curiosity but because he doesn't have a solid position of his own. | |
| He's not courageous. | |
| He's not insightful and certainly not original. | |
| He takes cheap shots, low blows, throws gasoline on ideological fires, and then feigns confusion. | |
| Listen to him talk about science. | |
| Oh, my God! | |
| Did you hear the... | |
| When he puts on that other Charlotte and Eric Weinstein? | |
| I mean, it's... | |
| And when it all explodes, he's happy. | |
| He gets his numbers. | |
| This isn't journalism. | |
| It's ratings garbage. | |
| It's grabbing showmanship wrapped in a faux intelligence package. | |
| And Americans, I keep saying, are too stupid to realize he doesn't know what he's talking about. | |
| When he interviews someone, if that's what you want to call it, it's never about truth or accountability. | |
| It's about drama. | |
| He cuts off his guests, cherry-picks quotes, and creates the illusion of tension because he knows that outrage is currency. | |
| It's like he's taking two roosters and putting them together and letting them go. | |
| And he loves to stir the shit. | |
| If you think he has values or a worldview, you haven't been paying attention. | |
| Piers Morgan is a bankrupt guy. | |
| Blank slate with a microphone. | |
| He doesn't stand for anything because standing for something would... | |
| You know, having an opinion, going out on a ledge, standing there, putting your convictions up. | |
| But if he does have a conviction, it's kind of like this no-shite obviousness. | |
| And risk is not in his nature. | |
| Performances. | |
| Better yet, views, metrics. | |
| That smug demeanor, the finger-wagging style, his habitual interrupting, these aren't traits of a tough interviewer. | |
| They're the tics of a man who knows he has no substance and how he overcompensates with volume and condensation and lets the people fight themselves. | |
| He puts people on who have moral conviction in one way or another. | |
| He wants fighting! | |
| Three, four people cut him off. | |
| He just sits there. | |
| He's thinking, how much money is this generating? | |
| And it's the usual suspects. | |
| You don't walk away from a Piers Morgan segment enlightened. | |
| You walk away irritated, disgusted, like you've... | |
| You're thinking, what was that? | |
| What was that? | |
| That's him. | |
| And maybe that's the point. | |
| Maybe I'm missing the point. | |
| Maybe he's the embodiment of everything wrong with the modern media by design. | |
| Noise without meaning, an opinion without foundation, theater without conviction, without a plot, without a denouement. | |
| Even when he occasionally says something you agree with, it feels unearned because it is. | |
| He parrots consensus when it benefits him and then swings at easy targets when the mob already has its pitchforks up. | |
| It's a... | |
| There's no... | |
| He never leads. | |
| He follows the outrage. | |
| Adds some British accent-flavored sarcasm and waits for the applause. | |
| He's a carnival barker, not a commentator, a parasite on the news cycle, not a contributor to it. | |
| Oh, no. | |
| In America, where people still think, I keep saying this, a British accent is somehow systematically, automatically means intelligence. | |
| Piers Morgan has found his niche. | |
| Faux, artificial, synthetic gravitas. | |
| He's the thinking man's fraud. | |
| The pseudo-intellect posture boy. | |
| You listen to him not because he has insight, but because you mistake his tone for depth. | |
| He could be reading a laundry list because people would... | |
| what He does it. | |
| You know, there was a time when Morgan pretended to be a moralist. | |
| Remember his anti-gun crusade? | |
| Remember when Alex Jones broke it off at him? | |
| By the way, that was by the design. | |
| He is smart enough to know when he's doing well. | |
| He tried to, remember, he came to CNN and he said, get the hell out of here. | |
| He tried to take the moral high ground, remember that? | |
| Only to crumble. | |
| Under the actual debate. | |
| Then came the celebrity interviews, oh my God, where he offered softballs wrapped in fake outrage. | |
| Then came the Twitter wars where he swings wildly. | |
| And he fancies himself as being this courageous, I don't know, arbiter of bullseye. | |
| And he cuts people off and blocks people. | |
| He can't handle it. | |
| He's a wimp. | |
| He's spineless. | |
| He's implicit. | |
| Atesticular. | |
| He's a gelding. | |
| He swings wildly at every trending topic to stay relevant. | |
| He's not a man of principles. | |
| He's a man of trending hashtags. | |
| He couldn't hack it in serious journalism if his life depended on it. | |
| He couldn't hold his own in real editorial environments. | |
| So he settled into the only role he was ever really good at. | |
| Agent provocateur for hire. | |
| And the tragedy is that this works. | |
| It works. | |
| And I've got to hand it to him. | |
| And I will concede it works. | |
| In a media landscape that's obsessed with friction, his brand of, you know, feigned and deliberate adversarial ignorance is in demand, I guess. | |
| Piers Morgan is not brave. | |
| He's not smart. | |
| He's not interesting. | |
| He's a clown with a microphone, with a smug face attached, reciting, feigned and choreographed outrage, performative BS. | |
| This is this theater for the benefit of producers and YouTube clip editors. | |
|
Starve the Market
00:00:50
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|
| Look, he's the intellectual equivalent of a drive-thru burger. | |
| Loud, over-processed, empty, greasy, stale, and intellectually not nutritious. | |
| And yet he endures. | |
| Bless his heart. | |
| Not because he deserves to. | |
| But because there's a market for bombastic fools, idiots with accents, and no shame. | |
| That market needs to be starved. | |
| Turn them off! | |
| Tune them out! | |
| Stop pretending this man offers anything of value. | |
| Because he doesn't. | |
| And you know this and I know this. | |
| And you don't need me to establish it. | |
| But you need me sometimes to say, you know what, you're right. | |
| So, remember, there's so much greatness out there. | |
| True. | |
| True genius. | |
| Folks with intellectual heft. | |