I have been thinking over the past couple of days just how much media driven cognitive whiplash there is. A week ago it was Covid-19 all the time everywhere. Now it is BLM protests and riots all the time and everywhere. Before Covid-19 it was baseless impeachment (the fact that the released House testimonies reveals that all witnesses, when under oath, declared that there was no basis, is astonishing), before then it was, what? I guess the Mueller report for a couple of years.
It is almost as if there is no longer a portfolio of news on many subjects and issues everyday. Instead of assembling a cognitive dinner of many dishes, we get all rice, or all bread, or all salad, or all fruit, or all hamburger for as long as the gnat-like attention span of the MSM lasts. Or until the next issue to advance their ideological/political agenda.
But how to convert impressions into empirical evidence. One way is to look at Google Trends. What are people searching for over the past thirty days?
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Until May 27th, Riots, Protests, Antifa, and BLM were not part of the conversation. After that Riots, Protests, and Antifa rose to prominence and BLM rose more slowly.
Looking at ninety days of trends, Covid peaked in the last week of March and the first week of April. Since then, the Covid conversation has declined by some sixty percent.
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We are currently talking about riots 25% more than Covid. Interestingly, despite the MSM Baghdad Bob impersonations and its insistence that these are peaceful demonstrations with occasional outbreaks of unruliness, the public knows a riot when it sees one. Riot terminology exceeds protests by 40%.
Despite a few superannuated charlatans trying to push that the riots are the result of Russian interference or white supremacists, again, the public is much more clear-eyed than the press.
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The public apparently overwhelmingly understands the linkage between riots and Antifa.
This seems to indicate that the public is not buying the MSM drivel about peaceful protests versus riots. By a ratio of 73:1.
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Another whiplash has been the 180 degree reversal from a month ago when citizens peacefully protesting for reopening was roundly condemned in the MSM as a threat to quarantine and an invitation to mass outbreaks of Covid-19 to the position today that rioting and protesting is a civic duty with nary a mention of the possible consequence to defeating Covid-19. It is a dizzying feat of unclear thinking.
There are no good search terms that quite capture it but Reopen, Antifa, and riots captures it a bit.
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Reopen chatter began around April 12th and peaked two weeks later on April 27th and has been trending down since then. But people have not ever been near as focused on Reopen protests as they are about Antifa and Riots by a factor of six or seven.
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