Looks Like a Duck, But Quacks Like a Pedophilic Demon

[This is a book review of Newsreal by Joseph MacKinnon & Carlo Schefter. Contains spoilers for Newsreal and The Unholy Consult.]

I.

How do you produce absurdity?

Here’s a shortcut: take some normal, reasonable belief, discern its fundamental principles, then extend those principles to their logical extremes. When this results in the ridiculous, as it generally does – what can be concluded about the original belief?

“Nothing,” a hypothetical friend might argue. “The belief was never supposed to be overextended like that. Under normal circumstances, the belief is perfectly fine and true.”

As Jordan Peterson would say (in his “muppet-like voice”, according to MacKinnon and Schefter): fair enough, man. But what about when you repeat this exercise, but begin with the absurd? (Say, by taking as a starting point a hyperbolic novel like Newsreal?) First discern the underlying principles in the ridiculous premise, then take it all to its logical conclusions – what does what is revealed say about the original scenario? And if, perchance, what is revealed is in fact perfectly reasonable – what does this say about the reality?

II.

The novel Newsreal, by Joseph MacKinnon and Carlo Schefter, at first sight appears to be a satire of the modern media. Our protagonist, Alecia Troust, is a young, idealistic journalist who has a computer accident instigated by her couch-surfer boyfriend, and loses the article she was working on for The Gruffington Buzz, the online newspaper at which she is employed. With her deadline looming, she panics and does something perhaps a bit ethically questionable, though for which we can’t blame her too much, since it’s surely what any of us would do in her situation:

She fakes a terrorist video.

This strategy initially gets off to a very positive start, ie. gets lots and lots of clicks. Yet soon, the story takes a shocking turn, one I’m sure you will never expect – Alecia certainly didn’t. Believing the video to be real, the rest of the media, rather than passing it over after its five minutes of fame are up like all the biggest-rabbit and celeb-wardrobe-accident stories of times past, instead lets its fickle attention linger. This forces Alecia, as the reporter who broke the story, into the spotlight. But the talk-show appearances and occupational opportunities soon turn as sour in her mouth as her boyfriend’s five-hundredth potato chip, when she learns from the TV that her video has caused rising tensions with Somalia (the home country of the terrorist organization SISI) that threaten imminent war. She feels bad – how could her innocent actions have caused such unintended consequences? And she’s a bit worried too, since with all this attention, what if someone realizes she faked it?

What follows is her heroinic journey of truth, reconciliation, and friendship – and perhaps the reader will find many of her new friends strangely familiar.

No one who has read my review of MacKinnon’s 2021 novel Lethe will be surprised to find that MacKinnon’s (and of course Schefter’s) naming sense here is on point, as always. On her journey, Alecia meets many famous media personalities, including Brucker Borson, host of TOX News, and Brad Spelter of CUC News. She reads magazines such as The New Public and The Juvenile Saracens. She deals with populist figures as well, such as Marvin Guinness, leader of the Boys of Valor, and Jada X, head of Antesta. And she even finds herself hanging out with members of a fraternity, Kappa Omega Kappa.

And then there’s Laurence Weinberg, head editor of The Washington Bulletin. Now, on second glance you might take this as a reference to Steven Ginsberg, editor of The Washington Post. But on first glance, and on glances three and onwards once words start coming out of the character’s mouth, the more obvious comparison is not to a newspaper editor at all, but rather to a very famous personality in a related but different field.

Now, certain differences between these two figures’ careers might make it seem at first glance that Mr. Weinberg has chosen the wrong industry for his specific pursuits. Namely, the differences between young female journalists versus young female actresses mean that actresses can be reliably expected to possess certain qualities desirable to Weinberg, that in journalists will be found only on a hit or miss basis… I am referring, of course, to their patience to act out a role while getting pawed up. With the collapse of the Hays Code, modern actresses already do this for a living. Journalists, on the other hand, have been out in the street dealing with pickpockets and muggers all day and are just as likely to reflexively kick the offender in the balls as punch him in the face – an evaluation in which we quickly find MacKinnon and Schefter agree with us entirely. Yet, Mr. Weinberg can surely be forgiven for mistaking the one for the other, since these occupations, though differing in some aesthetic and occupational details, retain certain parallels in essence… that is to say, the purpose of both is to communicate fictions to amuse an audience.

Part of the fun of Newsreal is that the humor cuts both ways across the partisan divide – no man or woman is safe from being satirized, no matter their political affiliations. Obscurity is the only protection.

Even so, while the story mocks all, it generally refrains from anything that might be construed as too offensive. With, I must note, the possible exception of Alecia’s explanation to Kevin of how she lost her camera to Antesta:

     “Gone?!” Kevin yelled. He checked himself, having surprised a passerby with his intensity. “Gone?”
     “Stolen by—what are those guys in the black masks called?”
     “Ninjas.”
     “No, no…That’s racist. C’mon, Kevin—what are they called?”

And as always, the story reflects MacKinnon’s spot-on sense of irony:

“This isn’t Soviet Russia,” Jada continued. “This is America. We need to purge the rogue actors from these agencies. We’ve got to restore American liberty.”

And so we conclude: a fun satire of the modern media, bam, check it off your reading list.

But wait – not so fast, friends! Recall, truth shines – but all that glitters is not gold. To take mere surface appearances as the sole intent of the novel is to underestimate the authors.

Where did we make our first oversight? Go back to the beginning, because we need look no further than the opening quote:

“Would that I could discover truth as easily as I can uncover falsehood.” –Cicero

Ah! A timely reminder of that ancient wisdom of the need to strive for truth! What tragedy, that our modern media so sadly lacks similar integrity! Would that we could regain the incorruptibility and trustworthiness of such esteemed authors as classic Cicero! If only we could follow in the footsteps of our intellectual ancestors, to abhor lies and love fidelity, all would surely be well again in the world! Alas, that we moderns have forgotten this pursuit, and instead content ourselves with comfortable falsehoods!

But things are never so simple – not with MacKinnon, and certainly not with Cicero. Maybe reconsider this appeal back to those good old honest days, when people like Cicero wrote good old honest fifty-page ad-hominem attacks against their enemies in the Senate before chasing them out of the city under threat of murder.

Friends, Cicero was not a philosopher. He was an orator – in other words, a politician. He wrote and spoke to convince – politically. He didn’t much care about uncovering truth, only about appearing persuasive enough to convince his audience to agree with him and side against his enemies. And he said whatever it took to achieve that, truth and logic be damned.

I’m no Cicero expert, but here is a summary (from memory) of one of his more memorable speeches I read in translation: If Cicero’s enemy remains in the city, it’s because he’s a shameless, lying bastard willfully ignoring the condemnation of the populace. If his enemy flees, it’s because he’s a cowardly criminal whose very flight proves his guilt. Everything his enemy has ever done was motivated by pure malice alone and resulted in terrible losses to the city, even the things which everyone else agreed were beneficial at the time. Everyone who is friends with him, related to him, or has agreed with or associated with him in any way be it ever so slight is complicit in his crimes and is part of his cowardly evil plot – a plot which is doomed to fail and yet still poses the profoundest threat to the very fabric of society. And anyone who even remotely agrees with even the most passing thing he ever said deserves to have the same scorn and hatred heaped upon them as society owes the man himself.

Wait, doesn’t this sound somehow…familiar? While we can never know for sure, I personally believe that Cicero would have taken to Twitter like a cat to Calhoun’s rat utopia.

Anyways, since MacKinnon knows what he is about, it can hardly be a coincidence that of all the classical authors they might have quoted from, he and Schefter went with Cicero. But what is this choice of quote implying about how we should view, not just the media, but the frame of the novel itself?

But wait, back up again – the misdirection starts even before the quote, on the very copyright page, where it claims:

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the authors’ imaginations or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Any friend who believes a single “coincidence” in this book was coincidental would be well advised to stay off Twitter.

III.

But if the plot of Newsreal plays out as an absurdist, satirical farce – does this necessarily mean that the world of Newsreal is itself just satire and farce? After all, the real-world media often enough portrays its own subject in tones of satire and farce, without, presumably, draining the flesh-and-blood character from reality itself. So what was MacKinnon and Schefter’s intent in creating such a plot?

The characters in the story are certainly more than happy to keep acting out their farce, finding it indistinguishable from reality. But, as psychologically realistic characters, how can they suspend their disbelief? Because they define their existence by the media, and the news media by its very nature is incapable of communicating fundamental truth. As Lippman explains, reality is too complex to be communicated to a reader or viewer in any meaningful way, so to keep their content coherent and interesting the media finesse whatever facts they can lay their hands on into narrative form. Or put more bluntly, when the truth is boring or confusing, they make stuff up that’s more interesting and cohesive and say that instead. And then, since the audience has no direct access to the underlying reality – it’s too far away, happening behind closed doors, in another language, etc. – they mistake the narrative they’re being shown for the fundamental truth. This does not mean that there is no truth – there’s still a cold-reality layer at the bottom, the media doesn’t change what is true. They only change what people believe is true by creating a hot-narrative layer that rises to the top. And this top layer is not transparent – thus, it conceals what lies underneath. The result is that you can no longer see the floor.

This is very much what it feels like reading Newsreal – being unable to see the floor that is reality.

The reason that the story feels absurd and surreal is because the characters are playing their roles in an absurdist and satirical way – that is to say, they’re “playing out roles”, i.e. acting, as in performing for cameras like actors and actresses. “But of course they’re acting, they’re just characters!” Wrong, because inside the story they’re just as real as the reality within the story – they’re not actors there, they’re their real selves. And yet – they’re still acting.

To see this, take Alecia, and ask one simple question: why would she fake a terrorist video?

For contrast, put yourself in Alecia’s situation – looming deadline, dead laptop, no article – and ask: what would you have done in her place?

Anyone else go for the “no change, she did everything perfectly” option? Bueller?

So then, why not (besides the hindsight from having read the ending)? Because you have perspective on her situation – you’re not her. You look at her problem and say what she did is not helping solve her problem. You have other answers: three red bulls and a fluff piece, sleeping with her boss, finding a better job, we could continue…

But in fact, Alecia can do none of these, because none of them would solve the actual problem. “What, of course they would!” The actual problem is not what you are thinking – you’re thinking she needs an article in order to make her deadline in order to keep her job. But that’s only the object level problem, which Alecia, as a level-three, couldn’t care less about and can’t truly grasp. The actual problem Alecia considers relevant is that she wants to be a strong, independent journalist – and she can tell whether she is succeeding by whether she feels like she is such a journalist. Now you see the issue – not having a great article to submit is making her feel like a not-so-good journalist, or maybe not a journalist at all but just a random woman working for a media company. And that feels very bad. To preserve her identity as talented reporter, she has to submit an article she has made herself, and it has to be serious, and it has to be “good” (by some interpolation of her own/her boss’s/the wider media’s standards). Unfortunately, for reasons we’ll come to later, she doesn’t have enough reconciliation of values at only level three to consider that she might want to make sure it is true as well. Hence her later issues.

But for now, we see why none of the other solutions to her initial problem will work – they wouldn’t be serious, or her own work, or prove her independence, and thus wouldn’t let her keep her identity as journalist. They would all undermine her identity in some way, and thus would not solve what from her perspective is her actual problem.

For her to preserve her identity as a journalist, she must continue to act like a journalist. “Act,” mind you, not “do”, but act as in actress. This is why she thinks she can fool the incorporeal spirit of identity-justice by publishing lies that fit all the other criteria.

The fact she is acting out her own life is underscored by the way she treats everyone else in her life as mere props to her story – from her boyfriend, to the very government agencies she believes herself persecuted by. We see clearly that it doesn’t matter to her what agency specifically is her problem, only that she is “persecuted,” by the simple fact she can’t even keep straight which one is supposed to be after her:

“It’s them!” Alecia announced. “The FBI…the CIA!”

But she’s not alone in playing a part – everyone else does it too. Just look at her boss:

Wingham threw the flaps on his jacket back, revealing a smart sweater vest, red suspenders, and a silver pocket watch stowed away with the chain threaded through a buttonhole. He checked the time.

Wait, what century is this again? He’s the head editor of an online news outlet. Why is he dressing like this? He’s basically running a tech company – doesn’t he know the modern uniform for his position is a turtleneck and jeans? But he doesn’t want to be a tech-worker, he wants to be a “newspaper editor”. And since for him appearances are all that matters, he can make himself the one rather than the other simply by going for the knockoff 19^th-century gentleman look rather than Zuckerberg-modern. All he’s missing is a monocle. It looks like a costume because it is a costume – as long as he acts his part, as far as he’s concerned there is no difference between his webpage and the old, great newspapers he imagines the past to have contained. And if the content, the words appearing in pixels on his site, are different in source or seriousness than those of the newspapers of old? That hardly matters, since only style counts, which he clearly has in spades. No one looks that close at what’s actually being written, anyways. If it looks like a newspaper, and is formatted like a newspaper…and if it looks like an editor, and is dressed like an editor…

IV.

So, if all these characters are acting out a story, we must then ask: what is in truth going on, in this absurdist world? What are the real identities of the actors behind the roles, the real materials the props are made out of, the real depth of the painted background scenery? And who are the real authors writing the script, the real directors giving orders from outside of the frame – and their real purpose in producing the film? Or – is the whole story just MacKinnon and Schefter’s joke? Is all the Newsreal-world truly a stage?

Well, was Cicero a joke? No – he was a politician and a liar, but a joke he certainly was not. Just ask Cataline – wait, you can’t find him since he fled the city? Hmm, I wonder why he would flee, if it was all just a joke?

Because, of course, it’s not a joke. In the Newsreal-world, as in the real world, there is a narrative interpretation of events – but the narrative is not at all the only layer that exists. Beneath, there is a layer of cold-hard-reality, obfuscated by the narrative but not replacing it, its peaks rising up between the story-hot clouds, waiting for unsuspecting planes to fly into them and crash. To see where the story-level ends, and the reality-level begins, though, we must return again to that initial bit of fakery: Alecia’s “terrorist video”.

Here’s the scene: Alecia, her boyfriend Chris, and the random middle-eastern food-vendor Faroud, get together and fake a SISI execution video. The video goes viral and gets them hits (yay!), but also precipitates an international crisis threatening war with Somalia when the government is fooled into believing it’s real (aww!).

Here’s how they build the set for their video:

“All of the living room furniture had been cleared to make room for a photography light, which illuminated a fake jihadist banner. Chris had made the banner in under twenty minutes for just over ten dollars with plywood, a black sheet, and some white paint.”

Okay, friends, throw the gearshift in reverse and back up for a second. Are we really supposed to believe that Chris, who half-an-hour before this was sitting on the couch playing video games, in twenty minutes creates a jihadist banner so realistic it fools the entire US intelligence community? “Well, you know, handwriting analysis can be wrong.” I don’t mean that. Do you really believe this daytime video-gamer knows Arabic? That he draws this:

In 20 minutes?

Okay, maybe lone-wolf terrorists tend to draw the ISIS – excuse me, SISI – flag a little simpler. But wouldn’t someone fluent in Arabic – and let’s agree the US intelligence community has at least a few of these stashed away somewhere – would be able to tell the difference between writing by a fluent Arab versus by an all-American couch-surfer who couldn’t tell where one letter ended and the next began, much less what any of it meant? And that’s not even to mention the realism of Alecia’s party-store fake-blood-spurting knife…

“We just need to suspend our disbelief and let MacKinnon and Schefter tell the story.”

No, by suspending disbelief you only get the story. Disbelieve the story – and you get the reality.

The US intelligence agencies would never be fooled by this video in the real world – nor were they ever in Newsreal-world.

“But in the novel, the news said the President believed the video and was considering attacking Somalia!”

That’s just it – “the news said.” And the news in Newsreal-world, as in our world, only tells the story, not the reality. Is it really such an inferential jump to suppose the news in Newsreal-world bears no more resemblance to the reality in Newsreal-world than the news of the real world does to the real reality? You think after all the irony in the book, the title wasn’t intended to be ironic?

“But then, why does everyone pretend to believe the video is real, if it risks starting a war?”

Despite everything I’m about to say about the character Angela Weitz, I’m not saying she’s necessarily wrong. (In fact, MacKinnon and Schefter are perhaps a bit prescient about current events in Ukraine here, or else maybe historical circumstance is really just that repetitive… ) The simple answer is that the media publishes it as truth because it makes a good story. Whether it is real or not carries absolutely no weight in their decision-making process.

And yet, despite the fact the publication of the video is an act taken on the narrative level, there are still real-world consequences. People die – for a start, Farouk is killed, and framed as a terrorist in the news. But does it matter how real they are, when they’re simply treated as one more part of the narrative? When the world is treated as backdrop, any response becomes acting – as we can see by what Alecia does next.

To begin with, she freaks out – which I suppose is a fair enough response. Assuming that the CIA is coming for her next (after letting Faroud’s death reach the press to, what, give her a heads up? Hmm…), she runs to her kitchen and grabs a knife.

First off – a kitchen knife? Really, that’s the best she can do? What is she, in high school? So not only does she have no actual weapons to use – she doesn’t even know what would make for a good weapon. At least something long and heavy would give her range. No bats? No shovels? But of course those wouldn’t work for her, because she’s not actually expecting to have to fight a “real” threat. She’s still just acting. In her story, the CIA has framed Farouk, so the lead actress’s next action as a strong, independent woman is to grab a “weapon” for protection – the knife doesn’t have to work, it just has to serve as her prop weapon.

But take a moment to ponder Alecia’s logic here. Why does she assume immediately that the CIA is coming after her? What does her model of the situation look like, and is it actually warranted by the facts – or at least what she perceives are the facts? She assumes the CIA “made an example” of Faroud, so she must be thinking they figured out Faroud’s involvement in faking the video, and murdered him for it. But why? For informal vigilante-esque justice? For revenge? It makes somewhat more sense if you imagine her thinking they killed one participant to scare the rest into silence about the video, so their impending war with Somalia wouldn’t get derailed. But then, why wouldn’t they have just killed everyone involved in the first place, Alecia included? In this scenario, wouldn’t the fact she was still alive imply that just keeping quiet would be enough for them to leave her alone? But in that case, why the pointless knives?

But of course, Newsreal being a story where action follows not cause but re-action, the CIA, true to expectations, does indeed come after her. (By kidnapping her off the street in broad daylight – though interestingly enough, if you look at historical KGB and Mossad operations, this strategy is the most realistic part of the whole thing.) “So since her fears come to pass, her speculations must be correct, right?” And yet, her speculations are what you would expect of the story, the top hot-narrative layer, not the cold-reality beneath. And the Newsreal-world, as we’ve already established, does in fact have a cold-reality layer lurking down there. So then, we’ve got to ask – what’s up with the CIA agents?

But really, what is up with the CIA agents? Agent Green? Agent Orange? Is their mission to defend America from being invaded by aggressive foliage? And why do the lackeys get colors, but the spokeswoman gets to be “Angela Weitz”? Is that her real name? And why does she communicate solely in naval metaphors?

From the same conversation, dialog all Weitz’s:

     “You are lost at sea, and the storm that’ll wreck you is of your own making.”
     “You cast off without fixing your sails, Ms. Troust…”
     “Farouk Ali knows that, just as Chris Gallagher will, unless you’re willing to batten down the hatches for Lady Liberty. You will batten down the hatches, won’t you, Ms. Troust?”

To understand what is up with these sea-minded CIA agents, we might first look at their logic. Why do they come after Alecia? And why then in particular, after she already knows they killed Farouk? And why only threaten her, but not actually kill her?

No need to guess, because they tell her flat up: they’re there to blackmail her into parroting pro-war/right-wing talking points on her upcoming talk show appearance. An attentive reader might then be prompted to ask: “What? Why?”

Set aside the fact that their motive has everything to do with the media narrative and nothing to do with reality, why would they need to blackmail talk-show guests in the first place? Are we to imagine the US intel community really can’t manage to cut a deal with the shows themselves to only invite guests that will say what they want in the first place? Or alternately, if the CIA is really in charge of the media deep-state style, why would the media need to wield the CIA to blackmail their own self-chosen talk-show guests? It’s like the scorpion clawing at its own tail to stop it from stinging itself. It makes no sense.

And yet, this is still more rational than what Weitz & the Color Company try next, after failing to stop Alecia and her grass-roots-leader allies from collaborating to pass proof that the video was faked to WhistleLeaks. When the Boys of Valor and Antesta leaders meet up to exchange clever repartees and incriminating videotape in an abandoned parking lot, the rainbow patrol roll up in a van on the Twitter-frenemies meetup, and promptly open fire.

Whether because this is a story and the CIA are the Bad Guys, or because the Newsreal-world at heart still runs on real-world physics, the CIA barely gets in a couple kills before everyone else there pulls out their own guns and starts shooting back. (Except Alecia, who as we’ve already established, only has a kitchen knife – which she hasn’t brought, because she knows enough not to bring a knife to a gunfight, but not quite enough to realize that’s because you’re supposed to bring a gun instead.) Now, are we supposed to believe a government agency sent their agents into a situation where they were outnumbered three to one, in which they could assume the targets would be armed, with no backup, no plans for cleanup, nothing? This makes no sense.

Now, you might be tempted here to assume that this is just MacKinnon and Schefter playing ridiculous: “Suspend disbelief!”

But don’t be fooled, we don’t need to suspend anything, because there’s a much simpler explanation. Namely: Weitz, Orange, and Green aren’t acting on the orders of the CIA. They may or may not be employed by the CIA bureaucracy, but their orders are coming from one and only one place, and that is the voice in Weitz’s head telling her to blackmail talk show guests, shoot up Twitter meetups, and speak only in naval metaphors. These people aren’t the deep-state, they’re just in a state of deep psychosis. It should come as no surprise that they’re attracted to media stunts like Alecia’s like flies to rotten meat.

“But if the supposed CIA agents are just rogue actors and Alecia’s self-narrative of persecution is all in her head, then how do you explain the ending? She gets murdered by terrorists! What could be more real that? There has to be something to her theories.”

Yes, but not what Alecia thinks – nor what the media claims. Alecia’s logic is never correct, and in fact she is precluded from reasoning out the truth, because she assumes that in any explanation of events she must necessarily be the main character. Even if she admits that sometimes she isn’t entirely in control of the plot, it still at least has to revolve around her to make an acceptable story. What her narrative can never allow for is the possibility that she is only a blind piece in a higher game.

Apply the realism filter one more time to Alecia’s execution: Are we really meant to believe that terrorists operating on hostile foreign US soil somehow manage to find a native US journalist in her own country, who has changed her name and gone off the grid? If the terrorist networks in Newsreal-world were really this skillful, I trust the authors would have mentioned the extra seventeen 9/11s that had occurred in their timeline.

The only explanation is that the terrorists’ information is not actually this good. But it doesn’t need to be to explain events – not if the terrorists have help. Congratulations, Alecia, you have just attracted the attention of the real CIA. This one doesn’t go so much for the outnumbered drive-up shooting strategy, I’m afraid.

And now we see that MacKinnon and Schefter know perfectly well the actual way to fake a terrorist execution video: just make a real one. These “terrorists” may actually be CIA themselves, or they may be or believe they are a real cell and the CIA just tipped them off. It doesn’t matter – in either case, the CIA’s will is done.

“But why would the CIA bother? The media doesn’t even believe that video is real!”

Yes, but why do you assume the point of reality is to change what the media believes? The CIA has this video made to send a message to someone – but that someone is not necessarily anyone among the media, Alecia, or even anyone we meet directly in the story at all. The sort of person worth sending a message like that is operating primarily in the reality-layer, and thus has no place in the spot-lit media stage-world which the plot of Newsreal follows. You can be certain, though, that the true recipient of the message is never fooled by Alecia’s original video, nor by the media’s judgment of the second video – if indeed they care enough to look at any kind of media evaluation at all. The masses get their knowledge from the media. When those with actual power need to know something, they have medical-degreed, Arabic-fluent analysts to inform them.

V.

So given that there is a story-layer and a reality-layer, and that Alecia gets herself murdered by getting them mixed up – what should she have done differently? Where does she go wrong?

From the start, of course. That’s no way to go about making a fake execution video. But on a more fundamental level it bears asking – why does she need to film a terrorist video in the first place? “So she can write an article about it to meet her deadline.” Sure – but why is that so important to her?

Alecia, living in limbo between these two opposed world-views, and holds two contradictory sets of values. She values identity – in this case, her identity as a journalist. And as part of that identity, she believes she needs to value what a journalist would value – and what journalists value, according to her, is Truth.

The characters throughout the story span the political spectrum in object-level values – some want social justice, some want nationalism, some want to uncover the deep-state, and so forth. But despite such surface-level differences, all of them seem to take for granted a value more fundamental than all these – namely, that seeking and revealing the Truth is the deepest value of all. They assume that Truth is desirable at any cost, that it is the terminal value at the altar of which all else must be sacrificed.

Thus it is inevitable that as Alecia’s secrets begin to unravel the scenery of her life and identity around her, she decides that there is only one thing to do, one thing which can stitch everything back together – she must reveal The Truth to The World. In Alecia’s story-time absurdist narrative, this of course results in a complex chain quest involving getting Marvin Guinness (no relation to Milo Yiannopoulos, see the authors’ disclaimer) to ask the good people of Antesta to give back Alecia’s making-of footage proving her terrorist execution video is a fake – all this only in order to turn around and hand it over to WhistleLeaks. Because of course, the only way to reveal The Truth to The World is through some intermediary famed for doing just this. It’s symbology all the way down.

“But why do all these people in the chain-quest decide to help Alecia? Is she paying them or what?” Of course not, she writes for an online magazine, she’s hardly rolling in the dough. “Well…maybe she pays with her body, then?” Also no, see Weinberg discussion above.

When these bipartisan, international collaborators come together to help Alecia, what is their motive? What factor can be enough to unite such disparate (and often disparaging – at least of each other) forces?

What else, but their shared worship of Telling the Truth, which Alecia has sworn to do by revealing her video as a fake?

But why would they all be united by this goal, and not some other? They lack the insight necessary to create higher-level goals for themselves. Truth is the fallback goal of those who cannot think clearly enough to formulate a real goal and determine what action it would take to achieve it. Truth is the goal of level-threes (and a few misguided level fours). In the hands of real level fours and higher, truth is only a tool.

The trap Alecia and friends fall into is the same as that of Bakker’s Achamian – furious at Kellhus for stealing Esmenet, but unsure what precisely he wants to or can do about it, Achamian settles on “revealing the truth” about Kellhus. But why this goal and not another? What was the point? Was he trying to ruin Kellhus’s reputation as a simple act of revenge? Or maybe rather than revenge, Achamian was attempting to hold Kellhus accountable to bring about some form of cosmic justice? Or else, perhaps Achamian’s feeling of altruism towards his fellow men compelled him to get the men of Eärwa to rise up overthrow their emperor, bringing an end to Kellhus’s predatory rule? It’s hard to say, since Achamian’s motivations, beyond a vague hatred of Kellhus, are totally unclear – even to Achamian himself.

And just as Achamian hasn’t thought through the actual probable consequences of succeeding – that is, getting tortured and murdered by the Dûnyain upon actually finding Ishuäl – so too Alecia hasn’t thought through the actual consequences of “revealing The Truth to The World.” She hasn’t considered that this can only be professional and social suicide.

Why does she do it then? Because she is no longer trying to solve any object-level problem. Some examples of Alecia’s object level problems at this point are: not being killed by the CIA, removing herself from the media spotlight, keeping her job, etc. Her actions at the end, as at the start, are not intended to solve any of these. Instead, she works to solve the emotional problems stemming from the collision of reality and her worldview, i.e. fixing her next identity crisis: she has lied, and now she feels bad about lying. While she may have lied once, it was just once, that doesn’t define who she is, she’s not a liar! But how to prove it? Telling the Truth, she thinks, will make her feel better, and remove the scarlet “L” from her identity. This is why she is so surprised on the bus when the Twitter trolls note that her reputation will be ruined whether or not she succeeds:

     Guinness thought for a moment then laughed morosely… “And besides, you’re going down for at least sedition. I mean, we’re going to help you fix the country, but you’re broken, baby; you’re done for.”
     Whatever good humor Alecia had enjoyed at the party was long gone. She looked at her feet, certain someone was getting ready to knock them out from under her.

Intellectually, she already knew all this, but she had never thought through the chain of real-world consequences that far because those were not what she was aiming for by taking the action – she was only considering the personal emotional consequences.

But her would-be allies are no better – they too are helping her not for the sake of any real-world goal, but for the emotional high they can get from acting for the sake of The Truth, as well as the amusement they get from playing these sorts of media-narrative-games. Or at least that’s the most flattering explanation. Perhaps, like why the slave of the Scarlet Spires agrees to spy for Achamian, they help Alecia because she is just so confused and pathetic they can’t help themselves, like a person stopping to pick up a drenched, lost kitten.

“Okay, maybe they’re not doing it for the right reasons, but so what? In the end, isn’t Alecia’s action – revealing the truth – helping the world as a whole?”

But think about it again: telling what, and to who? How can Alecia tell the Truth, when she can’t even see the world clearly enough to know the truth? And why does she believe the Truth she has will be helpful to the world in the first place? She has placed her faith in Truth unconditionally, but just consider the Dûnyain; Truth is hardly an unmixed good. In this case, Alecia’s Truth is not helping anyone, only feeding the gluttonous narrative.

Truth is the perfect terminal value of the media, because it leads to – nothing. Simply Knowing more True things does not get anything done, changes nothing, leads to nothing. Only action leads to something. Truth does not matter in and of itself, only in how it is used.

The media-world is a story-world, where the only reality is narrative. But since everything in a fictional narrative is make-believe, none of it can really matter. Thus, in the all-fiction media-world nothing can be truly valued, and in fact true values, moral or otherwise, cannot exist. This value void is no problem for the media itself, of course – it simply continues on its merry way without them. Thus, the media exists beyond values – beyond good and evil. To the extent human nature forces them to frame their arguments as appealing to some underlying principle, they take Truth as their substitute value. The Truth is the Holy Grail all their actors can claim to be seeking, while all they really want is just to get drunk/get famous/murder twitter-trolls/etc.

And by taking Truth, which should rightfully be only an instrumental value, as a terminal value, the media permanently blocks itself from any real terminal values, consigning itself to a perpetual state of actionless limbo – full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Just the way they like it.

Alecia’s first and principle mistake, we now see, was not having any actual values to begin with.

What should Alecia have done when she her laptop broke? We cannot answer, because the answer has to depend on her values, of which she has none.

If she valued money, she should have quit and gotten a better-paying job, and probably dumped her couch-potato apparently-unemployed boyfriend while she was at it. If she valued being liked by her boss, she should have just slept with him (hey, whoever said there were no shortcuts in life). If she valued being liked by anonymous internet clickers, she should have drunk a couple of red bulls and written a click-bait fluff piece. If she valued excitement and action, she should have still made the terrorist video, but rather than faking it found a victim to murder outright (and also covered her tracks better).

But she doesn’t know what she values. As a consequence, she goes through the entire story acting out a life, instead of living one. This is why everything she does is story-like and surreal, despite the fact Newsreal-world is perfectly capable of supporting cold-hard-reality, and in fact runs on cold-hard-reality at its heart while allowing the layers and layers of story and narrative piled on top to obscure it.

This is also why her conflict with the CIA is so ridiculous – involving crawling through air-vents, using payphones (during a time-period in which online newspapers and social media are the ubiquitous default), and wielding kitchen-knives against her sailing-obsessed foe.

The story-central nature of her life also plays out in her relationship with Chris. I see no love in any of their interactions; the only reason I can think of why she is with him in the first place is to prove to herself that she, as a journalist, is doing better than someone else. We might ponder what MacKinnon and Schefter are signaling to us about her, that for her to get sufficient contrast here to maintain her self-esteem, she needs that “someone else” to spend his entire day sitting on the couch watching television and playing video games. (The closest he ever comes to doing any work is one instance of “thinking about working on that script for Jeff’s thing.” And while the MacKinnon and Schefter leave his personal appearance diplomatically undescribed, the fact his every appearance in the story involves him sitting on the couch snacking, we can probably make a few guesses.)

And yet, when she leaves Chris a message on the phone, she tearfully tells him that she loves him with a passion she has never shown in the relationship up to this point. A passion she can only summon here because it is part of the narrative – the part where the action starts to take off, so to introduce a human element, the lead calls their loved one and shows their vulnerable emotional side (this part comes right before the hardball stuff, to invest the viewer in rooting for the protagonist, and to make everything they do from then on be “for their family/spouse/friends” thus relieving them of moral responsibility). The CIA offing Chris right after this just embeds him deeper in the narrative, making him an even better motivation for her actions, since now he can’t derail the plot by returning her call to tell her he’s actually back at home playing Call of Duty so she can climb down out of the air vents now. Yet really, Alecia isn’t so different from Chris as she perhaps believes – they’ve both dedicated their lives to role-playing games, only his use pixels while her chosen fantasy uses more fleshy avatars.

But while Alecia does spend most of her time lying to herself, she can at times step back and see the big picture – say, when she needs to lie to others. Such as when her boss asks her why she’s suddenly repeating Republican talking points on air, and since it’s too much trouble to explain how she’s being blackmailed by the CIA, she tells him instead: “It’s what I believe.”

“And her boss really just accepts this explanation?” But of course, MacKinnon and Schefter are right. Inside the narrative, nothing is more real than subjective experience, and thus no better answer than Alecia’s can exist. In a world that takes fiction as reality, only subjective experience can never be questioned.

Yet, if we’re being truly careful in our psychological modeling, someone invested that deeply in the narrative wouldn’t lie like that – not when she could simply change her beliefs and thereby keep on telling the Truth. A more realistic Alecia would have simply rationalized her actions away: “If tensions are rising between the US and Somalia, then SISI and Somalia must really be threats and by making the video I just helped people realize the truth – I did nothing wrong.”

For her actions at the end to make sense, the amount of identity-affirmation she obtains by Revealing the Truth must be greater than the amount of identity-debasement in admitting she lied. I suppose this is at least plausible – after all, was not the prodigal son upon his return more valued than the ever-obedient? By emphasizing the contrast between her earlier lies and present honesty, she perhaps even comes to embody Truth. Thus, in the presence of those who worship Truth her identity is most affirmed, since by extension they end up worshipping her.

VI.

But if all we’re seeing from Alecia’s perspective is a surface-narrative – what then is the underlying reality being concealed? If mysterious, behind-the-scenes figures control events from the shadows, leaving the unsuspecting media-addicted population to twist whatever sense they can out of apparently causeless and chaotic events – who are these mysterious figures? “How can you even guess, when they never show up in the text?” But just because they never show up directly, doesn’t mean they’re never discussed.

Ask, and MacKinnon and Schefter shall provide: who, out of all the characters, has such a theory of unseen controlling powers that doesn’t fit the primary left-vs-right media-narrative?

“And you know who is behind all of it?” Alecia fell back onto her rear as if she’d lost a boxing match. “That’s right, ladies and gentleman: SHAPE-SHIFTING, INTERDIMENSIONAL PEDOPHILIC DEMONS!”

Yes, that’s who has a theory: Alec Jane, all similarities to Alex Jones totally-coincidental, host of the podcast entirely-coincidentally named Infoclash. Alecia though, like every other reasonable media-addicted consumer, instantly dismisses this theory out of hand. After all, it sounds like no more than the most ridiculous idea a person could come up with, combining the most fantastical, unlikely, unreasonable elements out of the imagination of our evil hearts.

And yet, friends, please stop and consider for just a moment: what if it were true? What would a world in which this evil cabal existed actually look like?

Don’t worry if you’re drawing a blank. Because it turns out the work has already been done for us – though not by MacKinnon and Schefter. In fact, this bit of world-modeling comes from none other than the illustrious R. Scott Bakker himself.

That is to say, what “Alec Jane” is describing is simply – the Consult.

Go down the list: Shape shifting – that’s the whole point of the skin spies. Interdimensional – well, they tend to avoid Hell, but the fact their leadership contains interstellar aliens must count for something. Pedophilic – see the end of The Warrior-Prophet. Demons – enough said. Comparing the Consult and its“Alec Jane”-theorized version: each is a hidden conspiracy, recognized and fought against by a small group of people who shout its existence to the world, but are only mocked and ridiculed for taking it seriously in the first place. Alec Jane, friends, is Newsreal-world’s version of Achamian.

One has to admire Bakker for this bit of inspiration – he took the most bizarre, unlikely, ridiculous hodgepodge of evil-conspiracy characteristics that a person could come up with, and turned it into the sort of visceral horror that appalls imagination.

And like the Mandate, the Infoclashwarsers’ strategy is mainly what a modern might term “awareness”. I.e., tell everyone you can about the Consult, even if they think you’re crazy. Because, as Alecia says: “We need to get the truth out there.”

Oh, the truth is out there, friends – it’s out there roaming, like a roaring lion, seeking whom it may devour.

Trying to spread the Truth to as many people as possible is a dead-end strategy, because most of them will do nothing, and the few who are actually able to do anything are also the ones who will find the truth first and foremost, whether you try to raise their “awareness” of it or not – people who the truth is drawn to, or even serves, like metal filings to a magnet.

The Mandate goes around preaching about the Consult for millennia, but when Aurang et al. truly rise again, who is it who actually raises armies to stop them? It’s Kellhus. And while Kellhus took whatever assistance he could squeeze from the Mandate (as he did with everything and everyone else he encountered), he certainly didn’t need their assistance – he was perfectly capable of detecting, capturing, and interrogating skin spies all on his own. Kellhus is the one person in the story who would have discovered the Consult no matter what – and also, and not coincidentally, the one person with the ability to actually do anything about it.

This is the topography of the situation, if we only dare believe it. But why believe in a Truth so absurd-sounding as a hidden conspiracy of evil?

Because the alternative is that there are no alien demons, no organized evil, nothing there at all in that bottom layer of cold-hard-reality that’s coming for you and everything you love. But if none of this exists – then from whence all this evil and suffering?

Better to believe that your adversary is out there somewhere walking about, seeking you to devour – because the alternative is that it has already found and devoured.