Monday, October 20, 2025

A vanishing act: repressive desublimation and the NYT

 

We are in the depths of the era of “repressive desublimation” – Angela Carter’s genius tossoff of a phrase – and Trump’s shit video is a marker of an unusually explicit kind.

This is why the establishment media, desperate to make Trump seem presidential – which is of course the mission that their owners have set for them – are so oddly off track.

In particular: I’m looking at you, NYT. In a gesture as comic and as bewildering as the NYT’s glorious reportage about 18 year old Mamdani’s form to enter Columbia University (he wrote he was Ugandan since he was from Uganda and thus was an African (horrors!), a scoop they received from a neo-Nazi hacker who broke into the Columbian university computer system and boosted confidential docs - the NYT, now, chose to pretend that No Kings was just some quantity thing, like college students swallowing goldfish in a fifties frat – unworthy of their sovereign regard.

This has the effect of making them seem unworthy of their subscribers regard.

A bluesky-er, Thomas Ley, has done the service of putting together two NYT pages. Here’s the Charlie Kirk racist festival front page:

A newspaper with a crowd of people

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

And here is yesterday’s page, as 7 million to 8 million people were protesting all over America.

A newspaper with a collage of photos

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Freudians among us will notice the headline in yesterday’s paper: The Vanishing Act. Indeed, now, would you like to tell us a little bit about your feelings for your mother after the unfortunate open curtains incident, NYT? Here, stretch out on this sofa..

Ah, the years of Mamdani are gonna be superfun!

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A vanishing act: repressive desublimation and the NYT

  We are in the depths of the era of “repressive desublimation” – Angela Carter’s genius tossoff of a phrase – and Trump’s shit video is a m...