Flooding the zone with oil and shit.

Sorry about the vulgarity, but it neatly captures the lies, the manipulative distraction and the mass deception of the past week.

The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit. - Trumpist dezinformatziya czar Steve Bannon, 2018.

Going back over the years of my working life in the journalism racket, I can’t recall a time when “the news” was quite so cluttered and strewn with so many outright lies, so much hysteria, and such loudly-amplified and widely-broadcast raw propaganda as it was last week.

The week before was about as bad.

It has been in turns amusing and alarming to notice how so many people, smart people, even, can be so easily led around by the nose. I spent most of the weekend developing a catalogue of just some examples of the more brazen instances of the “fake news” in circulation at the moment. Most of it has come from the same dark American corners where the term “fake news” was invented.

My catalogue was turning the Real Story newsletter into a Real Story encyclopedia, so I’ve put it aside for a stand-alone edition. I keep adding to it. It’ll be out soon enough. There’s just one fake-news frenzy I’ll get into today, because it involves a friend of this newsletter. I’m saving the rest for the Bullshit Catalogue.

Anyhow, in the main content today. . . there’s a lot of ground to cover.

Hope lies in the proles. Taking my own cue from the verdict I’ve reached and explained last Thursday in the National Post, There’s no turning back for Canada now, there’ll be some state-of-play reporting that’s pretty disturbing. But there’s an encouraging signal coming from the noise of public-opinion data. Downside: It won’t make either Justin Trudeau or Danielle Smith particularly happy. Cheers me right up, though.

Stop wishing for a Chinese lifeboat: There are quite a few pseuds out there who seems to think that hey, if Trump doesn’t want our stuff, Xi Jinping will be happy to buy it. This would be trading a frying pan for a fire. And while we’re on the subject, we need to stop ignoring the pipeline-mania backstory: Are we already just playing into China’s hands?

And importantly, can we still count on the Trump White House in the effort to seize kleptocrats’ boltholed wealth and shut down foreign-interference ops? No, we can’t. The Americans don’t care anymore, as we shall see.

Let go of your damned “narratives.” Like ‘it’s really all about fentanyl and the border.’ It isn’t. Just stop it.

The main attraction: There’s no such thing as the mainstream media anymore. This is what you need to get your head around to understand what the hell is happening right now. In the new media ecosystem, Elon Musk is the apex predator. He’s also the main guy behind the hurricane of bullshit that’s rumbled across the terrain over the past couple of weeks.

Also: Turning Gaza into the 53rd state. Or whatever that was. I’ll be leaving it to our friend Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib to have his say.

So let’s get into it. But before we do, remember: I didn’t launch this newsletter just to tell people what they wanted to hear. If that’s the sort of thing you’d prefer, there’s always Rebel News, say, or the insufferable wokester Rachel Gilmore, depending on your sensibilities.