I find the "corporatized" charge so blatantly false that I can't understand why it's there, except as a hollow rhetorical gesture to signal that the author wants you to perceive his discourse as coming from the left.
Whatever anyone's motivation, the most important thing in this regard--and I would like to know DiMaggio's and the Shortstops' position(s) about it--is that any thoughtful leftist should avoid endorsing the program of eliminating independent journalism that Jonathan Cook describes above, and that is amplified in a particularly nasty way by this noted warrior of the anti-Trumpian-fascism Resistance:
But let's consider the charges that DiMaggio makes about things Left-Fielders have actually said or done.
DiMaggio seems to think it's a damning charge against the Left-Fielders that some of them call ("posture about") the Democratic Party "authoritarian."
Well, it is, and I don't see how any thoughtful person can deny it.
It's a party with an anti-democratic structure that gives extra votes to party officials and super-delegates, and cheats and manipulates elections. It's a party whose previous president inaugurated the unprecedented use of the Espionage Act against journalists, and whose current president has just imprisoned Daniel Hale and is seeking to put Julian Assange in prison for 175 years--a deadly dangerous attack on freedom of speech and the press.
It's a party that spent the last five years endorsing the most authoritarian elements of the U.S. capitalist state--the national security and intelligence agencies and the military, and whose current president is now siccing those agencies on "domestic violent extremists"--defined as those who "oppose capitalism, corporate globalization" or "perceived exploitation or destruction of natural resources and the environment" and might try to "influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion"--like, you know, strikes and mass demonstrations.
And it is a party, both out of and in government, that colludes with, threatens, and directs the Silicon Valley oligarchs about what and whom they should exclude from the social media--in fact, the public fora--they control.
Yes, it's "authoritarian." Referring to other authoritarian actors, or trying to pooh-pooh the importance of that, will not make the obvious go away. Not-so-thoughtful leftists may approve of this authoritarianism, because they think it is being used against white supremacists and Trumpian neo-fascists, but it is disingenuous, to say the least, to deny it's there. I don't see why any leftist, whose purpose is not to whitewash the Democratic Party of what they know is a taint, would argue about it.
Nor do I understand why DiMaggio, or any political analyst, would think leftists should be all aghast at Left-Fielders talking about a "deep state." Under one name or another--"permanent government," "bureaucracy," etc.--the concept of a deep state has been a standard part of political theory since--well, forever. It's positively banal, and straw-manning locutions like "conspiratorial rhetoric" and "threatening and ominous" just make the speaker sound desperate. The recent use of the specific term "deep state" traces back, I believe, to a rather thoughtful essay promoted and discussed by Bill Moyers, who must have been normalizing Trumpian neo-fascism and white supremacy in 2014.
Again, why would any leftist, who was not trying to deny or hide the concept in order to protect the permanent imperialist regime from scrutiny, or who wasn't utterly bewitched by the sound of it coming from one fool's head, denounce anyone for using it?
But let's go to the big one, which leads to the big thing: Left-Fielders go on Fox! Shocked, shocked! Guilty as charged. Hang 'em high! Who can deny that talking to Tucker Carlson is the "normalization of white supremacist television"?
Well, gee, who can deny that talking to Wolf Blitzer is the "normalization of Zionist--i.e., Jewish supremacist--television"? And who can deny that talking to Nicolle Wallace is the "normalization of imperialist television"? Indeed, who can deny that talking to anyone on CNN or MSNBC is "normalization of CIA television"?
Really, Wolf Blitzer was the spokesman for what white nationalist, "white Zionist" Richard Spencer, calls "the most important and perhaps most revolutionary ethno-state, and... one that I turn to for guidance." Nicolle Wallace was the Communications Director for the war criminal George W. Bush. CNN and MSNBC proudly pay the likes of James Clapper--manager of the mass-surveillance program he protected by lying to Congress--and John Brennan--high priest of the drone-assassination program who shepherded actual fascists into power in Ukraine. Which of them, from a thoughtful leftist point of view, has done less harm than Tucker Carlson?
Unless racism and colonialism targeting Palestinians don't count, unless imperialism and the mass killing of Afghanis, Iraqis, Libyans, and Syrians don't count, unless enabling Hitler-loving fascists in Europe doesn't count, the answer to that question is: None.
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