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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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This feels a lot like wordcel lying where what is said is truthful but it is deliberately structured to give an impression to the audience that is incorrect.

I mean, this is certainly what's going on. This is standard operating procedure for all non-fictional media on all sides of the aisle all the time. As such, people in media who practice this have no plausible deniability; either they're following this playbook knowingly, or they're so oblivious to the reality of such a playbook (intentionally or not) that everyone listening to them is dumber for having listened to them, they should be awarded no points, and may God have mercy on their souls.

Now, wordcel lying is infinitely adaptable to circumstance, but that doesn't mean the adaptation always happens. The part where I see the biggest weakness, by wordcel lying standards, is the inclusion of "desperately" in describing the MAGA gang's actions. The "desperation" implies a sort of losing battle that they're grasping at straws to prove something that's factually wrong, rather than simply stating truths that are obvious, evident and obviously evident. "Desperate" is a subjective judgment call, of course, so Kimmel absolutely deserves zero government censorship for this, by my lights; all it does is show that his judgment is so bad that it reflects poorly on the judgment of people who hired him as a host for a show like that. That MAGA was trying to characterize the murderer as anything other than MAGA is arguably a bland, neutral fact about reality, but that MAGA was desperately trying to do so is a judgment call that shows extremely poor ability to observe reality or to discern reality. Which many many people find perfectly fine in their late night talk show host, as long as that poor ability pays out in making fun of people they disagree with. It's just that, if even more people (or possibly the people with the actual power, like the owners) seem to believe in some higher values than just beating up people they disagree with.