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Notes -
A (potentially former?) staffer for allegedly Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Maryland) is making news for filming gay sex in the Senate hearing room. He also, allegedly, yelled "Free Palestine" at Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio).
I include the last sentence only to clarify the full context for a statement the staffer posted on his LinkedIn about the matter:
I'm struggling with his statement because it seems like the "filmed sex tape at work in the Senate hearing room on Amy Koobuchar's desk" is more of the issue here than the staffer's sexuality itself, but the language used insinuates that he is using his sexuality as a defense for an act that straight people also probably could not have "gotten away" with.
The utter lack of understanding of consequences is also throwing me a little bit. Culture war discussions about sexuality dip into accusations of degeneracy and pleasure-seeking not associated with, necessarily, love that this video emulates. This video will of course be used to further those accusations onto "all gays" instead of the particularly privileged ones who work in the Senate.
There are of course a million angles on this, but the one that just got me was the "Republicans pounce" headline from NBC:
Senate staffer alleged by conservative outlets to have had sex in a hearing room is no longer employed
Forget the sense of defilement (in the old "despoil their temples" sense of defilement), the sense of entitlement on display (both in the video's creation and in the staffer's "I dindu nuffin" and "I play the gay card" and "I'm gonna sue" responses), how this impacts stereotypes of gay men as oversexed wantons, comparisons to the consequences of the January 6 2021 "riots," jokes about whose chair that was and what she's going to do about it...
Forget all that. Somehow, the headline is Republicans pounce. I don't know how something can be so simultaneously brazen and banal, but there it is. Totally unapologetic partisan propaganda from a major news network, just the most painfully obvious and insanely unprofessional bullshit approach to burying the lede, and I know they do this all the time but come on. We've got full-on video of gay sex in a Senate hearing room and these so-called "journalists" can't see it as anything but an opportunity to run interference for the Democrats?
I'm a big fan of the Free Press, in the old "fourth estate" sense. But I'm not sure there are any legacy media outlets left that aren't simply Democratic political action committees that murdered the First Amendment and now prance about wearing its desiccated skin, cultural wolves in political sheep's clothing.
It is pretty crazy how much the democrats were able to capture legacy media. It would be interesting to understand why.
They always had it. They just stopped being subtle about it.
"Always" is an overstatement. In the 50s, the counterculture definitely didn't control legacy media, since it didn't exist yet.
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