Reading · The Pariah Messiah

I won’t to begin this by saying this article may people feel uncomfortable. Enlightenment can and is often times painful. The job of our brain and central nervous system is first and foremost to keep us safe—the second job…is to make a copy of itself. Where the tradeoff between these two is hard to know—for everyone it is different and what we inherit in our genome, our culture(s) and our families and local tribes certainly impact this.

I won’t get into all the different parts of the brain and what they do and don’t do, but there is a reason why our formative years are shaped by our early experiences. The brain is literally wiring neuralpathways at that time. Think of a circuit board being burned. Certain experience can radically alter these which I have written about before here, but we don’t need to get into that now.

So, okay, on to brass tacks. Racism, sexism, and all these things we constantly hear about on the news. I first heard about this idea back when I lived in Puerto Rico. The basic idea is that when organisms are dying they will do almost anything to survive. So, let’s look. What is DYING?

Legacy Media. The internet, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. all of these are tools where people can promote ideas and communicate. Now, this is not a 1:1 map hence why it is an anlogy but the Catholic Church used to basically run the world—or at least parts of it. What changed? Well, the printing press came along and esssentially dethroned part of the rule. Of course the Catholic Church is still powerful, but this changed civilization in a radical way. I am not a historian and this is just meant to be a conceptual study of it, so don’t get bogged down in the details…but the same thing is happening on a conceptual level with Legacy Media. CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC, etc. are dying. Here is some data from a LLM to help summarize this:

The revenue collapse was brutal. Print advertising revenue for newspapers fell from $46.2 billion in 2003 to $14.3 billion in 2018, and between 2008 and 2019, the number of newsroom employees dropped by 51%. CWU Observer Newspaper advertising revenue dropped 62% between 2008 and 2018. Iircj From 2005 to 2021, about 2,200 American local print newspapers closed entirely.

This is not a blip on the radar. These are massive businesses whose existence is threatened. What does a dying organism do? It generally has 3 choices. Fight, fleeze, freeze…there is a 4th one up for debate but that is for another time.

So…these massive businesss are dead or dying…gobs of money is going away. Influence, prestige, power—the power to shape the minds and feelings of people. So…what does the dying organism do? It fights. Here is where it gets interesting.

Once again I will turn to a LLM for brevity:

The key study here is Rozado, Al-Gharbi & Halberstadt (2023), published in Social Science Computer Review. They analyzed 27 million news and opinion articles from 47 of the most popular U.S. news outlets, published between 1970 and 2019, and found that the frequency of prejudice-denoting words related to ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and religion markedly increased within the 2010–2019 decade, starting before but accelerating after 2015. Sage Journals

The numbers are staggering. From 2010 to 2020, the frequency of words like “racist,” “racists,” and “racism” increased 712% in The New York Times, 756% in the Los Angeles Times, 361% in The Washington Post, and 468% in The Wall Street Journal. PolitiFact

Critically, this increase was seen across all 47 outlets analyzed, regardless of their ideological leanings. PolitiFact That’s important — it’s not just a left-wing media phenomenon. It’s ubiquitous.

And factor analysis showed a single latent factor accounted for over 78% of all the variance across these different prejudice-denoting terms Substack, meaning they all moved together in lockstep. This isn’t 16 independent editorial decisions — it’s one underlying phenomenon driving all of them simultaneously.

So..to summarize. Hot button words increased by insane amounts. The question we must ask ourselves is this: WHY? Once again to the LLM magic machine:

Here’s where your hypothesis gets really interesting. The General Social Survey, running since 1972, shows that support for public and political forms of discrimination shrank significantly — while 31% of white Southerners favored segregated schools in 1972, by 1985 so few held that view the question was removed from the survey. FiveThirtyEight Polls from the late 1950s and early 1960s found nearly universal disapproval of interracial couples among white Americans; by the 1990s, only a small fraction of whites held that view and a majority actively supported interracial marriages. The American Prospect

So you have a massive divergence: the word racism exploding in media while measured racist attitudes continued their multi-decade decline. The Canadian study replicating Rozado’s work explicitly noted this paradox — the increases in prejudice-themed language in news media “conflict with the well-documented decline in self-reported explicit prejudicial attitudes among the American public over the past six decades.” Macdonald-Laurier Institute

Summary: The media does not reflect the beliefs and/or attitudes of people. Now, this isn’t these issues don’t exist…certainly they do. They always have and likely always will to some extent.

I think the data shows we are being gaslit. Once again a LLM to the rescue

Here’s where it gets really interesting. The General Social Survey, running since 1972, shows that support for public and political forms of discrimination shrank significantly — while 31% of white Southerners favored segregated schools in 1972, by 1985 so few held that view the question was removed from the survey. FiveThirtyEight Polls from the late 1950s and early 1960s found nearly universal disapproval of interracial couples among white Americans; by the 1990s, only a small fraction of whites held that view and a majority actively supported interracial marriages. The American Prospect

So you have a massive divergence: the word racism exploding in media while measured racist attitudes continued their multi-decade decline. The Canadian study replicating Rozado’s work explicitly noted this paradox — the increases in prejudice-themed language in news media “conflict with the well-documented decline in self-reported explicit prejudicial attitudes among the American public over the past six decades.” Macdonald-Laurier Institute

Reduce it to biology: an organism (legacy media) in a collapsing ecological niche (monopoly on information) adopted an extreme survival strategy (emotional/divisive content) that exploited an already-existing neurological vulnerability (the amygdala’s threat-detection bias, which makes racism/sexism allegations inherently high-salience stimuli). The strategy “worked” in that it sustained engagement among a narrowing audience segment, but it also created a classic evolutionary trap — like a peacock’s tail becoming so large it can barely fly. The media became hyper-adapted to an increasingly niche audience while accelerating the alienation of the broader public that was already leaving.

Here are the key sources:

The Core Study on Media Word Frequency: Rozado, Al-Gharbi & Halberstadt (2023) — “Prevalence of Prejudice-Denoting Words in News Media Discourse: A Chronological Analysis” — analyzed 27 million articles across 47 outlets from 1970-2019.