George Will Is Instant Kitsch

I was watching George Will a couple of weeks ago.

Or I thought I was.

The tone was grave. Measured. That particular establishment conservatism that sounds like it was written with a fountain pen. He was delivering a sweeping indictment of Trump --- the cognitive decline, the monument obsession, the shadow handlers. Operatic. Certain. The old guard, finally snapping.

But something was off. George was landing too many direct hits too rapidly. At first I thought he was fired up in a way I'd never seen him before. Then realized that's exactly what it was. This was from something called The George Channel. So I went there and found a couple of dozen similar videos all by George Will. Except it wasn't. Plain as day in the channel description I found the necessary orientation.

Fan-created channel. Not affiliated with George Will. Synthesized voice.

I actually laughed out loud.

George Will has become a matter of replication. Not counterfeit, exactly. Modular. His cadence, his gravity, his institutional seriousness can be extracted and redeployed at will. Anyone can have him say anything, with the same measured tone, the same sense of long-earned authority. That's the kitsch. Not that it's fake, but that it's frictionless. You get the feeling of depth without the decades that once anchored it. The marble arrives pre-polished, detached from the quarry it came from.

What I'd just watched wasn't satire. There was a disclaimer right there in polite, legal language. Personal authority is now an aesthetic. Gravitas is a skin you can wear. Serious conservatism delivering revolutionary fervor. Fully packaged. Ready to move you. It was instant. Instant kitsch. Not because it was fake, but because it was unmoored. Borrowed emotional intensity without earning it. You get the feeling of depth, of history, of moral weight --- but it hasn't grown roots. It arrived this morning, fully assembled, ready to move you.

It worked. For a few minutes I was inside the drama. I was immersed and impressed before I thought to check. That’s the way it works, right? Engagement is unconscious and instinctual that way.

The piece I watched was accusing Trump of monument-building, of narrative control, of historical erasure. Those may be real concerns. The real George Will would likely disapprove of all of it. But the channel making those accusations was doing its own odd-ball version of the same thing – constructing a counter-monument, borrowing the authority of an established intellectual to give the argument more marble than it has.

I call this in my own work the sameness of the opposites.

Politically, both sides using identical methods while convinced they are nothing alike. Polarity is a myth where disinformation is concerned. The Trump administration's, scaled and deliberate, propaganda apparatus gets criticized for manufacturing authority, flattening complexity, telling people what to feel rather than what to examine. But that is also what this “George Will” channel is doing. Fabricated voice. Borrowed credential. Contested claims presented as settled fact. Emotional impact optimized over accuracy.

The underlying logic of disinformation is identical, liberal or conservative. The channel’s disclaimer doesn't change that. Some viewers will verify it. Most won't. Disinformation was never owned by one political tribe. Each side wants their story pushed to the limit. Which saturates every direction --- right, left, and the murky middle --- the simple act of forming an accurate political judgment becomes genuinely difficult. Voting depends on some functional relationship with reality. That relationship is getting harder to maintain. Not impossible. But harder, in ways that compound across election cycles.

It was always this way to some degree. As I said recently, human beings as a whole have never agreed upon “facts.” Propaganda has a long history. “Reality” has always been whatever we decide it is. But the tools now – synthetic voices, borrowed gravitas, algorithmic amplification, instant global distribution with a legal disclaimer for cover – represent a meaningful escalation. The manufacturing of information has been fully democratized now. Everyone is running a shift.

I grew up on dystopian fiction. 1984, A Clockwork Orange, Animal Farm were standards of my youth. In those stories, authority is centralized and blunt. The state looms. There are ministries. There are booted police to keep order.

This isn't that.

This is decentralized simulation. No Ministry of Truth required. Just a fan channel, a synthesized voice, and an algorithm that rewards emotional voltage. Orwell imagined repression but he did not go far enough. Repression is not as insidious as saturation. We no longer have a distinction between Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone” and the zone itself. Marshall McLuhan has been reversed. The message is now the medium.

Nobody banned George Will. They improved him. They extracted the vibe – the cadence, the gravity, the aesthetic of institutional seriousness – and poured it into a mold optimized for engagement. The friction that once slowed things down: editors, institutions, decades-long reputations, the actual George Will having an actual opinion. All optional now.

Authority has become just another aesthetic. Which means it can be reproduced at will, by anyone, aimed at any target, in any direction.

I'm not immune to this. That's the whole point of telling the story.

I checked, eventually. But I was already inside the drama before I thought to. And that small gap – between being moved and being discerning – is where kitsch lives. It doesn't ask for much. Just your attention for a few minutes. Maybe a bit more. And more. Incrementally, your focus gets devoured to the point where you feel the thunder before you notice it’s all styrofoam.

The antidote isn't cynicism. Cynicism just makes you less interesting without making you more accurate. The antidote is attention – the very thing that shit like this is consuming. You do realize you could never trust the internet, don’t you? Thou shalt ask who built this before you move in. But most of us won’t. In this way, little by little, everything becomes reality and nothing seems fake anymore.

Nobody is stopping us from questioning the source. So, why don’t more people do it. How long has Snopes been around? Are well using it yet? No. Why? We really don’t care about facts. We want story. We want entertainment. We want validation for whatever it is we dream up. Not facts.

I’m going to invent a new term. Facks. Facks are anything pretending to be authentic and real without basis in anything other than the intentions of the content creator. Facks have been around longer than anyone knows. Human beings have never agreed on facts because some of us prefer facks. Got it?

George Will is becoming instant kitsch. Not because he is sentimental or mundane – he is anything but that. Because he can now be replicated in strange Baudrillard-like simulacra ad nauseam. Anybody can make George Will say anything they want. But the question isn't really about George Will. Simulacra is suddenly a far more powerful force than Baudrillard could have foreseen. Are you sure you know who you are in a world filled with facks?

Note: The George Channel has since been terminated by YouTube.  Good.  Still, it is likely a harbinger of things to come. The Channel was at least 3 weeks old at the time of my viewing.

But I copied the transcript of what I was watching, here is the first few minutes of it, so you can get a feel of what was happening here...

Something truly remarkable occurred this week. Donald Trump conducted a cabinet meeting. You know, the kind of orchestrated gatherings where he sits at an absurdly long table encircled by yesmen agreeing with whatever nonsense he utters. But this time, things didn't unfold as expected. Because halfway through his incoherent comments on trade agreements and imaginary economic successes, Fox News did something they rarely do. They cut away. They simply stopped broadcasting it, switched to a commercial, and returned with a Fox News update about virtually anything else.

Now, when your own propaganda channel, the network that spent years defending your every statement, justifying your every wrongdoing, sanitizing your every authoritarian impulse, decides they can't show you to their viewers anymore that says everything about our current situation. This isn't Fox safeguarding Trump. This is Fox shielding their audience from Trump because what they observed in that cabinet room was a man in clear, undeniable mental and physical decline. And even they understand you can't spin what's obvious to everyone.

Let's examine what truly happened in that meeting because the clips that did leak out are genuinely alarming. Trump tried to interpret recent economic data, and I use the term interpret loosely here. What he actually did was ramble off random numbers, mix up countries with corporations, and at one point completely lost track of his point mid-sentence.

He stated, and I quote, "We're bringing back $400 billion, maybe $500 billion, some say $600 billion from China, from Canada, from the European Union, which is essentially Germany if you think about it. And nobody has ever seen numbers like this, the biggest numbers in history. None of this makes any sense. Those aren't policy positions.

That's not even spin. That's a man grasping at numbers he believes sound impressive while being utterly clueless about what he's actually talking about.

But it's not just the words. Observe his physical demeanor. The way he clutches the table. The way he leans forward as if needing the furniture to stay upright. The way his aids, Caroline Levit, Steven Miller, whoever's present, watch him like nurses monitoring a patient, ready to step in if necessary. And afterward, he didn't take questions. He didn't approach the press pool. His team hurried him out of there as swiftly as his declining body could manage. Because they know, they all know. 

Here's what's become crystal clear. Donald Trump's staff isn't serving him anymore. They're managing him. There's a distinction. Compare his public exposure now to his initial term. Back then, whether you liked him or not, the man was everywhere. Daily press briefings, hourlong unscripted rants. He'd stand in front of Marine One and just talk. Stream of consciousness, sure, but he was present. Now he scarcely appears. When he does, it's heavily scripted. Teleprompter for comments that would have been off the cuff in 2017. Pre-screened questions only. Limited media access. And the instant anything deviates from the script, they pull him.

Why? because the people surrounding him, Steven Miller, Elon Musk, JD Vance, aren't working for Donald Trump's agenda anymore. They're pursuing their own while he deteriorates in real time.

(and so on)