I'm Mad as Hell…
By John D Bertucci
Today is Election Day, and I am skipping a national election for the first time in thirty-eight years. I have voted in every major election since 1988. I have been thinking about this for a long time, and I have come to this conclusion. I no longer believe the people we elect are the people truly in charge.
I am disappointed in conservative politicians. They have presided over overspending, unnecessary wars, illegal immigration, over-taxation, and the release of criminals back onto our streets. The national debt climbs to 40 trillion and few politicians mention it. I wanted a strong conservative movement. What I have witnessed is the opposite. Both parties have done this, no matter which party holds the microphone.
The Grey Hat
I no longer wear a red hat, and I no longer wear a blue hat. I wear a grey hat. A grey hat means this: I am watching you. I see you. I know what you are doing. You are not fooling me.
That is not cynicism for its own sake. It is the position of a man who has spent a lifetime looking at how messages are made, how they are framed, and how they are sold. I believe there are powerful, unelected men making the real decisions that affect every American citizen, and I do not believe the system is designed to help us.
The Media Has an Agenda
For twelve years, I watched Fox News for hours each night. Then I quit cable, and Fox News went away. My mind, I found, could process events more clearly without that constant bias feed. People who watch CNN criticized me for watching Fox, and people who watch Fox criticize those who watch CNN. Here is what I discovered: there is no longer an unbiased newscast, an unbiased network, an unbiased newspaper, or an unbiased website. Everyone involved has an agenda. Journalism is dead.
MSNBC, CNN and the big 3-legacy networks sit on one side. Newsmax and Fox sit on the other. Each side is looking to destroy the other, to glorify the decisions made by those it supports, and to hide the real story. Fox does not attack President Trump or the Republican Party. CNN does not criticize the Democratic Party members. That pattern alone tells you a great deal. If the news were truly neutral, that pattern would not hold, day after day, year after year.
What Changed My Mind
I started looking into politics in earnest after Charlie Kirk was killed and the release and redactions of the Epstein files. I began to see cycles and I realized that the people in charge are not necessarily the ones we elect. Things did not make sense. President Trump was the last test. When I saw him break, and start a new war in the middle east, I knew something much darker was at work in our political system.
When Elon Musk stepped away from the White House after a rift with President Trump, I paid attention. Here was one of the smartest men in the world, and he had problem with Trump. Perhaps he discovered something that disturbed him.
When President Trump was nearly assassinated in Pennsylvania, it changed him. Soon after he moved politically towards war after promising no new wars. Why? Perhaps he was afraid and knew he had to get in line with the dictated agenda.
Consider this question: why did CNN decide to carry the Pennsylvania Trump rally live on a Saturday afternoon? That struck a nerve with me. They wanted America to watch a president being shot on live television. That was enormous coverage for a TV news network. They had stopped broadcasting Trump rallies long before that day, and avoided them since. The message was unmistakable: if you do not fall in line, you will wind up in a casket, like John F. Kennedy.
Covid, the Cover-Up, and the Weapon
People call an idea a conspiracy theory until, five or ten years later, it proves to be true. Covid is the clearest example in my own life. I caught it twice. It was not even as bad as the flu for me. The only difference I found was that it was more contagious. I stayed away from people. I wore a mask. It did not work, and I still caught it twice. That tells me this was, above all, contagious. It had nothing to do with being uniquely deadly, yet it was blown out of proportion.
Why? They wanted to ruin the economy, shut the country down, and to take the next election away from Trump. And it worked. The country voted for a man whose better days were long gone before he was vice president.
The question about Covid was never whether it was released by plan or by accident. The cover-up is what matters. The Democrats weaponized Covid, and both parties covered its origins.
President Trump was blindsided by a NIH doctor who was responsible for funding the Wuhan, China lab. That same doctor lied to Congress and to the American people. Then he was given a pardon by a presidential auto pen.
If the Covid virus was not weaponized, then why did Democratic mayors and governors shut down the economy in their cities and states, while Republican governors did not? Why were children kept out of school when there was no proof that children could catch Covid or die from it? Why was a vaccine designed in six months, without proper testing, or data? Why were the big pharmaceutical companies given immunity from lawsuits? What did that vaccine do to American citizens? I believe it did more harm than good, causing blood clots and, in some instances, death.
If it was not a cover-up, why did Joe Biden sit in the basement of his house and never go out on the campaign trail, yet still win the election? If it was not a cover-up, how do you explain 154 million votes in a country with only 130 million registered voters? Why was there so much scandal, so much uncertainty, and so many lies in a two-year cycle? Why did the weaponization of a virus and a vaccine turn out to be profitable for the Democratic Party and harmful to the Republican Party?
Yes it’s true
As you can see, I am a little bitter, but it is not without cause. I have studied politics and read the newspaper since I was ten years old. I did not know everything there was to know about politics, but I did understand how news was written. That is why I chose broadcasting and the written word. I was interested and I pursued it. I earned a degree in communications, with a focus on broadcast television and film production. I worked in the industry for twenty-five years.
When I saw the movie Wag the Dog, in the early 90’s, I realized the real power of television. Dustin Hoffman played a hired producer. Robert De Niro played a high ranking official from the State Department who meets Hoffman secretly in the back of a limousine. There the official tells the film producer what to do: create news to divert the truth away from the president. And it worked. Hoffman saw it as a challenge. He saw his film clips as a masterpiece. For years he had struggled to get people to watch his films, but with a created war on film, millions were watching. He filmed a child holding a doll in front of a green screen. The same child, with the same doll, in three different locations, three different countries. Seeing that movie is when my eyes began to open. That was Hollywood telling us, in story form, what is really happening in the world of broadcast news.
Art often imitates life. In the film Network, from 1976, a national news anchor tired of delivering slated news. He loses his mind on the air and yells. “I am mad as hell, and I am not going to take this anymore.” Live on camera he kills himself. Millions of Americans watched and began yelling out of apartment windows, bus windows, in their cars, in the streets, and subways. They too were fed up with fake news, as Trump calls it.
Let’s give President Trump credit for telling the American people how news is manipulated by those in power. If he does nothing else in his presidency, that alone would put him on a separate pedestal that no other president dared to stand. He has been fighting the media since his days as a young contractor. Trump knows how to deal with them. Fake news is manipulated news. Trump calls it fake like we called the National Enquirer.
So What?
So today is Election Day, and I say: so what? I won’t vote. Not today. Whoever is elected and sits in the congressional seat, whether in Louisiana or in Washington, D.C., it is not going to make a difference.
Sure, they will say some funny things in front of the cameras. They will pretend to really care by being in charge of special congressional committees. But in reality, it is all for show. A dog and pony show. Take the cameras away, and what do you have? Elected officials in expensive suits doing nothing but following orders.
We have 535 elected in Washington to represent our country, and they are all puppets, including the president. That is why I wear the grey hat. I’m a critical thinker. I am watching you. I know what you are doing and you are not fooling me. I’m mad as hell.
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