How do you know anything?

Lots of crowing and the eventual deletion of a comment calling for journalists to be "curb stomped" for their inadequacies. And if we set the gleeful neo-nazi motif from a presumptive "progressive" aside, there's still the general tone of celebration over the idea that the press is finally getting what it deserves by being shut out.

Pretty weird times, and I've given up trying to make sense of any broad political current's commitments based on a quick survey of what I can glimpse through a handful of online knotholes.

But also, a bunch of liberals celebrating the marginalization of the press because they just don't want their brat summer mellow harshed is less a disturbing harbinger of our failing social contract and more a day ending in "y" in the current moment:

Everyone's sort of sick of technocratic managerialism. They don't really like it at work, where it's all "return to office" mandates, layoffs, and penny-pinching geo-bands for the remote holdouts.  They don't really like it in their politics, where nothing ever seems to happen or get done yet nobody, everybody, or somebody else surely is to blame, and where the party machines have managed to snuff out all sense of possibility through what their leadership considers nothing more than sound management.

Everyone's sick, in other words, of the boss who tells you that three of your friends just got laid off, has enough EQ to briefly pull a long face and say "this is never easy," then pivots into why this is really best for the company. And pretty much anyone with any real power in this culture pretty much reminds you of that guy.

The American press as experienced through the national prestige outlets is the product of a social order that has been devoted to technocratic managerialism for several decades now. Its reporters come from the institutions that produce other technocrats, they're trained to think like technocrats, and they define what is possible and "realistic" through the lens of managerial pragmatism. So nobody likes their stupid faces, either. The  two kinds of people in the whole wide world who would be willing to say, "y'know, I think you're being a little hard on the HR team ... they have a tough job standing up for the company's interests" are that dumb boss who spent your last 1:1 telling you layoffs are healing and, well, New York Times reporters.

None of which really answers the question I titled this post with. How do you know anything? And I mean that both in the sense of "hey friends, how do you piece together a coherent world view when you believe all the corporate media are in the tank and that NPR is too soft on fascists?" and "how is it you people are all so sure of yourselves?"