Aliens Watching Reality TV

Luigi Mangione's Mainstream Media Villain Edit

• Erika Heidewald

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The news coverage of the Luigi Mangione story seems to exist in a different reality from the conversation happening among the public on social media because regardless of whatever part of the political spectrum they supposedly represent, the mainstream media is owned by billionaires and beholden to corporate interests. Let's analyze what happens when reality tv and the news become indistinguishable and our billionaire overlords create their own reality by giving regular people the villain edit in real life.
 
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Aliens Watching Reality TV is hosted by Erika Heidewald and Josh Shahryar, two reality show newbies who grew up feeling like aliens (turns out we're just autistic and ADHD) and love analyzing human behavior by watching reality TV dating shows on Netflix.

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Season 1: Perfect Match Season 1

Season 2: Love Is Blind Season 4

Season 3: Love on the Spectrum US Season 1 & 2

Season 4: The Ultimatum: Queer Love

Season 5: The Ultimatum France

Season 6: Too Hot to Handle Season 5 

Season 7: Love Is Blind Season 5

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Season 9: The Trust: A Game of Greed

Season 10: Love Is Blind Season 6

Season 11: The Circle Season 6

Season 12: Perfect Match Season 2

Season 13: Love Is Blind UK 



Welcome to the world Let me tell you what I've Learned about it It's such a world Everything I have We are the aliens who usually watch reality TV but yes we started watching the news Yeah we watched the news all the time Actually I used to watch the news all the time And then I was like wow TV news is awful And now I'm watching it because it's awful I find American news TV news like it's just not news it's really just some kind of entertainment Like the people who show up already know the anchors The anchors all know each other It's like some kind of family drama shh sort of thing you know like a like your late night comedy club thing Yeah it's just as like made into narratives with specific characters in tropes the same way reality TV It's like it's it's just a different genre of reality TV So we haven't posted in a little bit because Josh has been recovering from Covid which is still a thing Yeah yeah no I can I can covet early November and I haven't really like this is probably the first week Like wait this is the weekend right It's prior yes yeah yeah this is the first weekend where I feel slightly myself about It took a good solid six weeks to allow me to get back to be some of myself and this had never happened before I had I had been sick before I mean I just hate us all the time for fun But like I grew up around open sewers I had typhus twice by the time I was 10 I had malaria twice before I was an adult But I survived And I had in my mind I knew how long it took for me to recover from them And the worst was this one time when I had typhus and it was almost like a month it almost neared a month until I was myself Yeah it's like two weeks more and and get this I'm not still No no no I'm not done Like I'm not fully myself yet I'm probably at this rate it's probably gonna take another six weeks before I'm gonna be 100 at this rate I think that is I have time though I have time because school is off fir until late January I think that's a reasonable time for him But I think also just because so for anyone who doesn't know I had Covid last year first time so mad and my little sister coughed in my face Thanksgiving And it took four months It took four months for me to be able to do any of my normal life again And you might not get back to 100 or you might get back to 95 and then the last five Yeah yeah yeah absolutely absolutely some of it is like kind of adjusting to a new normal which is sucky It sucks Yeah No I mean I was thinking the other day I was just as I was walking around the house and at that point I think I was at 50 and I was like Josh what if this is your normal from now on Like what if you just don't improve from 50% Like is what life's still worth living And I was like fuck you yeah honestly I had to decide it's okay if I'm like this forever There were certain things that like I asked my family to like stop commenting on because them feeling bad for me was like actually the worst part It was worse it was worse because I could sometimes forget about things that was still like looks concerning to my family But I had to accept like wow maybe I'll be like this forever And what I have discovered though is you can heal from the long Cove It just takes a long time takes a long time Yeah yeah that's why we haven't podcasted recently And the second you start feeling a little tired Josh Well we're hanging up We're not gonna do any post exertionary belays for this podcast all right But luckily you know we have the benefit of such a strong helpful healthcare system here in the end Oh yeah right yeah so we're gonna talk about that Oh god I had to work through it all Like I didn't go to I did not go to class a couple of times but the rest at a time like I was just I was trying to survive it but I was also working I mean I'm still working I'm working on finals which take most of my energy every day Yeah not to be like buzzkill but a lot of people are just straight up dead because like they had to go to work and they never were able to recover their health enough eventually Like yeah no no I am actually I died And then their employers were like how come nobody wants to work anymore Like so they're dead Yeah yeah no no no I'm so grateful that I have the job that I have Like I'm an adjunct professor and you know much of professorial work is done at home You know you're grating papers you're preparing material all of that But had I had a different kind of job I would have lost the job most surely And yeah falling into debt because I cannot could not pay rent Someone else with a 9 to 5 job had this bro it would be like yeah you would definitely lose your job Yeah I was doing door dash back when I got sick in 22 I remember and like you can't keep doing door dash Yeah well it's really a big part of like the moment that we are in is life is not possible We have actually reached conditions that cannot sustain human life Like we aren't making enough money to afford to live The people at the top have like pushed the machine too far Now it will explode We've been squeezed and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed to the point where any kind of basic living requires like almost all of your work hours Like you if you want a basic living as in like have a roof over your head and food that is the most required needs more hours than you have Yeah yeah it's gotten to the point where you just can't And if you're disabled and you can't and you do not have disability that immediately means being unhoused You're just gonna lose your shelter and then the cops come put you in jail for the crime of yeah yeah you're gonna be fine$10,000 for sleeping on the street and not having a house because the Supreme Court said that's fair actually Yeah you deserve Yeah yeah it's really really gotten to the point where yeah just there's no I mean it's gotten to the point where like people are going to start taking justice into their wrong hands Oh my yeah that has happened Yeah I mean the system the problem is that the system is completely broken because of white collar crime that goes unpunished And not just white collar crime but white collar criminals have gotten so much money they've accumulated so much money that they can basically stop stop the march of justice Can imagine justice is walking towards them They can build a steel wall of the diameter of like 20 meters and like five minutes right in front of them And it will take them years and years to climb through that and then another steel wall of lawyers and you know bought off lawmakers and bought off judges They have bought our minds And people are really resistant to the idea that they can be influenced or if you know but we are all extremely fucking brainwashed And the more in denial you are of that like the more solidly that brainwash is staying right where it is We are Trent to seek the crimes that are the most visual and that fit a very stereotyped biased racist framework But the biggest criminals who are killing the most people and stealing the most money are white collar criminals We will prosecute like a teenager who was doing a robbery with somebody else and then their friend killed somebody but because they were there doing that robbery day get tried as an adult for murder Like that is a leap we can make But then all these CEOs make decisions that like a whole bunch of people should die at because it will save them some money And people cannot see that that is also murder that feels like way more I mean we have to see it And it's not just that this is simmering in the minds of people like our entertainment industry is also fully aware of this and has used this plot point again and again and again like in the movie the Incredibles Like you what happens in the beginning Mr Incredible is working as an insurance agent and his insurance manager is mad at him because he's helping people He's actually helping people He's like our job yeah our job isn't the help people our job is to make money for the shareholders Like that's our job but even more like an even more recent movie a movie series they franchise saw Saw is about that like the person who begins this whole thing is denied insurance That's what saw is it about Saw is literally a guy who's dying Yeah yeah yeah his question I saw too I I I saw a girl fall into a pit of hypodermic needles and I was like what the fuck is wrong with me for watching this Yeah no no no What's really wild about this entire story is that contrary to our perception that we have this bifurcated news media that's polarized There is only one acceptable point of view among all all American mainstream news on many issues and this is one of them Like CNN is not Liberal It is not left It is also owned by billionaires Every single news outlet is owned by billionaires and that's who they have to please Every single major outlet is pushing one narrative that this guy is a terrorist and anybody who disagrees is a fucking sicko It's woven into even what is supposed to be objective reporting from the least bias of sources wanted to read a little bit of an AP article AP supposed to just be like here's the news We see if the AP of being like pretty much objective and sticking to facts but like this is a propaganda piece Subject's line is Luigi Mangione is hard turn from wealth and success to murder suspect Investigators in New York and Pennsylvania are working to piece together why Mangione may have diverged from his path to make the violent and radical decision to gun down United Health Care CEO Brand Thompson in a brazen attack on a Manhattan street side Note Do you hear How many descriptive words are it very deliberately put in there beraison Radical violent The killing sparked widespread discussions about corporate greed unfairness unfairness unfairness in the medical insurance industry and even inspired folk here of sentiment toward his killer So fair and balanced objective centrist American journalism is using descriptive emotive words to really play up the the horror of Luigi's crime And the way they describe the other perspective the one that in many places a majority of America told which is seeing that Luigi was responding to an epidemic of these companies killing innocent people They describe it as corporate greed unfairness in the industry and folk hero sentiment they couldn't be more patronizing and minimizing So then the AP makes a turn and explains to us why we do not need to even learn about any other perspective on this crime Pennsylvania Governor Joshupiro sharply refuted that perception after Mangione's arrest on Monday When a customer at McDonald's restaurant in Pennsylvania spotted Mangione eating and noticed he resembled the shooting suspect and security camera photos released by New York police In some dark corners this killer is being hailed as a hero Hear me on this He is no hero Shapiro said The real hero in this story is the person who called 9 1 1 in McDonald's this morning That's not an argument Some dark corners like pretty much everybody Yeah they're trying to shame anybody who might be feeling any sympathy towards Margioni to feeling that if they reveal it they will be reviled And it's not working Now when it doesn't work comes off so fucking weird And I mean the real hero is the person who called Man 1 1 at McDonald's Yeah that's the hero for Josh Shapiro An entire end of this AP article which I can't stress enough of major media outlets get their stories like from the AP Like if something is in the AP that's a source for other newspapers this is how they finish their article to describe Mangione's dark turn The entire thing is sourced from a law enforcement bulletin obtained by AP Mangione likely was motivated by his anger at what he called quote quote parasitic health insurance companies and a disdain for corporate greed According to a law enforcement Bolton obtained by AP they won't admit that he is angry about things that are really happening Try and phrase it in a way that sounds crazy And as if they don't have as if there isn't factual information to know whether or not this is true But of course there is There's not an objective answer to should you kill somebody because they're killing other people But like there is data There's plenty of objective data that shows these insurance companies are letting people die and making record profits That's just true And our news will not acknowledge it and that is terrifying Like we are so far into this authoritarian propaganda Arab much further than we think we are Yeah I think the way that the media wants to play does um it's just to take us back to 9 1 1 and just be like hey he's a terrorist just like a song I've been lauded and hate him Well and it worked at the Boston Bonnings because honestly I feel like they're like okay those guys were also white and they managed to flap the terrorism label on them real easy And people were immediately like yes Boston police I don't need any privacy rights There were insane like illegal searches people at homes and stuff Because the the general like feeling was uh yeah nothing matters but catching these evil people and then hopefully killing them Uh but man the star and I have brothers Like they killed a 9 year old He they did something horrific It's just not the same They actually killed innocent people Yeah and that's the thing is the CEO he had he killed innocent people He had he choices that he could make and he chose to kill innocent people And Luigi has much fewer choices and he was very careful not to kill innocent people I see morality and only one of those people yeah he could have killed anybody if he wanted he had a gun he had the opportunity He went after the CEO of an help insurance company that has the largest number of denial rate of claims into country and we are the worst developed country in terms of healthcare So he's like the worst of the worst of culprits for the state that our ELD insurance is in Yeah I mean though or we could see from the way like the billionaire class has reacted They have never thought about having consequences of their actions They have never thought that the people on the bottom could fight back They have never considered it And it scared them out of their minds And I think that's fucking good cause I don't want to be killing people But like clearly they need to know that there are limits to what they can get away with before they are punished There is no limit to what they will do because they don't have any internal morality Billionaires inherently do not have any internal morality or you can't become a billionaire And I think we underestimate just how like diabolically cruel these people are because we don't know anybody like that Because most people aren't like that But the people who are like that succeed I wanna wrap up with a little clip from a podcast I just I wanted to know what to the mainstream centre or center left like approved narrative about this situation in American news And I went to the top podcast episodes and then just found the first one that was about Luigi and Gianna Cause and and yeah let me just play this for you This is NPR this is NPR NPR is supposedly leftist like Republicans tried to defund NPR because they are so leftist Here is NPR's perspective narrative really on Luigi Maggia All right when does a murder also qualify as an act of terrorism Prosecutors in New York city used that word as they rode out the charges against Luigi mangione He was indicted yesterday for murder after the killing of United healthcare CEO Brian Thompson NPR Sara Ventri is covering the aftermath of the story in New York Good morning Good morning Okay why call it terrorism Well understandably there have been a lot of questions related to that Here's Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg had to say to press conference yesterday you know in its most basic terms this was a killing that is intended to evoke terror and we've seen that reaction New York Police Commissioner Jessica Tish also spoke at the press conference and she was very concerned about the reaction to Thompson's killing She says that social media quote erupted with praise and she really wanted to emphasize that there was nothing to celebrate here In the nearly two weeks since Mr Thompson's killing we have seen a shocking and appalling Celebration of cold blooded murder And any attempt to rationalize this is a vile reckless and offensive to our deeply held principles of justice But it keeps going on Is this right There's been crowd funding for Luigi Mangione's defense Yeah there has been there's been a lot of reporting about how the site Go Fun Me has taken down fundraisers for Mangione but other sites have raised quite a bit of money One site says it has raised almost$150,000 as of this morning And on that site people posted comments about how they feel that the health care industry has let the American public down Okay so that is the way that some people see this prosecutor See this is terrorism What else do the charges say While they were filed in the New York State Supreme Court and they include one count of murder in the first degree and two counts of murder in the second degree If he's found guilty he could face life without the possibility of Parole Now the other eight charges are related to criminal possession of a weapon and criminal possession of a forged instrument That was a New Jersey driver's license that was allegedly used to check into a hostel in New York I reached out to Mangione's attorney in New York but she declined to comment And Pierre also reached out to United Health Group for comment And the company said quote this is an important step forward for seeking justice in the murder of our colleague Brian Thompson We will work with law enforcement authorities to help bring closure for Brian's family friends and colleagues Okay so the suspect is not yet in New York He's being held in Pennsylvania How does he end up getting brought across state lines Okay So tomorrow there's going to be a preliminary hearing that is scheduled for him in Pennsylvania That's for his Pennsylvania charges Those include forgery carrying a firearm without a license and giving false identification to law enforcement First of all a prosecutor clutching their pearls about somebody justifying murder like you are trying to get the death penalty Like now like you justify murder all the time it's your job But yeah this idea that like it's against American values to embrace violence when it's just like no it's what are we doing there goes like that Yeah it's that there are certain people whose lives we are supposed to value and certain people whose lives you are not supposed to value And for a long time there were certain topics where there was basically no pluralist discussion on that topic being pro Israel or at the very most a two state solution was the only acceptable opinion It still is the only acceptable opinion for mainstream American media And people are gandalized and horrified Thus young people are starting to say actually we think Palestinian lives are equally valuable We are supposed to believe that billionaire's lives are more important than ours They're shipped You know what I thought when she was like when he was like and it has worked about the terror part and I'm like of course it has worked All your donors are calling you like nobody in the public is calling you but all of your high dollar insurance industry donors are calling you Like yeah that's who's who you care about to tell us that it was designed to terrify when it actually he'd clearly designed this to terrify the public as little as possible It was quick and not in front of a whole bunch of people Like there's all these things that could have affected more innocent people that he clearly did not want to do This was a targeted killing Yes but that is very different from terrorism Yes like just because you're scared doesn't make this terrorism Yeah and that's kind of what it has been in America for so long as soon as like rich white people are scared as terrorism absolutely And everything else is communism And communism in terrorism are two things that have no rights in America We think that there are exceptions to human rights Yeah we just set somebody back home from Guantanamo after almost two decades yeah of them being in Guantanamo This idea that we are the good guy it like we can see that that's not true And one thing I found shocking is that I says that Gofund me is taking down yeah and yeah the pains were him So like immediately the entire upper class is coalescing and deciding what is acceptable and what is not And they literally will not let us have an opinion that they don't like Yeah yeah they're trying to shame us out of it And then what is wrong raising running for him to pay for his defense fund Like he's a suspect he's not convicted It is one of our most basic rights that everybody has the right to affair trial You're supposed to believe in that They don't believe it if it's if it's not someone they like This is why they're banning Tiftok It's because yeah to talk as the place where ideas spread that they don't like and they're not in control of what we see on that app That's why Twitter was bought by Elon Musk Yeah there is nowhere else for this to go And they can make it for it to be impossible to share opinions that are unpopular anywhere on the internet Cause if they just have certain words that are flagged like well that frequently happens with Palestine If you even type the word Palestine your count might get taken down I don't know what we're gonna do honestly you two land podcasts sir Probably the places that are still most are still set up to be able to share unusual and in depth opinions because like come on we're not going to be able to organize on Instagram the way we do it Tic Tac Yeah yeah it marks up Robert doesn't want us to yeah I wonder I wonder where we're gonna hit you our own I think a lot of I think there will be a chilling effect and I think a lot of people just will lose touch with them yeah their communities And it's just like there is nothing else to go to that satisfies the same like need It's insane to ban this app and a lot of people weren't gonna suffer her And I'm never gonna vote for anyone who voted for that band And never should we wrap today out Yeah honestly we had other news we Learned to talk about we didn't get to it I just the only thing I wanted to talk about There were two things I wanted to talk about one that hawk to a girl like I just I wanted to say absolutely nothing but it seems like she's the one who got scanned like in the new and the meme coin But like my God hawktua the kind of I think her kind of shit that's happening right now I think she's the other people She's what she scammed other I mean I think she knows one of the stammers She actually is saying now ever for everyone to join the lawsuit She's saying no she was scammed she was scanned in that she had no part in the yes Anna now Yeah but like the second thing yes are you going Oh just before when people were criticizing it she was shouting them down And I mean she was 100 hardcore promoting that And so it's just now that things have turned on her She's trying to stay She's going wherever the wind blows for whatever the hawk to us So the second person I want to talk about is Hana Cobayashi I really do not want to hear about her ever again just for okay but I don't know who she is so you'll have to tell her for weeks and weeks We're told that this woman disappeared This this woman from Hawaii came to California and just disappeared And her family was looking for her And like it was like oh she wasn't watch I think she was half Asian halfway but yeah it was like a strong hint Yeah yeah yeah and it was like it was like a it was treated totally like a white missing white woman thing Like it was everywhere And and then at one point her dad killed himself Yikes And then this all happened like in the last month And then a week ago we find out like I think 10 days ago we find out that she had actually crossed the customs line at San Diego Like she walked into Mexico And so there were stories that she had she and her like she had married someone for a green card So to get that guy green card and gotten paid for it and basically like their shady stuff going on Yeah and she's alive she's alive She turns up and yeah she was like I had no idea you all were looking for me which I mean is do you think there's any chance that that's true or did she orchestrate this on purpose I honestly I don't know I feel like cause either one is I mean you can yeah I mean you could go to Mexico and kind of disappear for a little bit But I heart I can't believe that like I can't believe that somebody would not know that everyone's looking for them I know that some people who leave home and their families on purpose Their families pretend that they are missing in order to find where they are Yeah no no no it doesn't seem like this didn't seem like someone I mean she's claiming that she did not know that people were looking for her I mean I didn't know that people were looking for her so I find it believable Yeah yeah man I'm down and never talk about her again cause I don't know anything Thank you so much Well yeah well I hope I hope you all have a great wonderful time We are back after an absence Please subscribe to our Patreon where you will get access not just to our regular podcasts about reality TV but also you can access the special episodes where we discuss other things like news or movies We're sort of branching out more at this point and we'd love to hear a feedback from you like what you enjoy and what you're interested in And we're happy to do more of that Yeah yeah unless it's watching the circle I'm not happy to watch the circle ever at this point And our Patreon is just Patreon Com at reality aliens watching reality TV Oh my gosh it's been so long I forgot our name Uh luckily it's catchy so you remembered it Hey hey I do think it's funny every time I tell someone about the podcast I have to explain like what the name means And to me if the name just feels so self explanatory but obviously it's not Yeah yeah it's just I don't know I'm always like how do I and make it more clear than that we feel like aliens and we're watching reality TV the way aliens would Yeah that's the whole thing and going through going through pop culture and meme stories and just yeah yeah and honestly the way that like there is no difference anymore between pop culture and memes Yeah yeah and news I think we need to be we need to be watching CNN like love is blind like we're looking for the edits and the narratives and the villains Yeah yeah that's what's happening And we have to like we have to learn to be the fucking savviest of media consumers at this point in time because right now it's like you can't believe anything But we also can't live not believing anything So yeah yeah believe us that's what our patrons for my buxy months I'll tell you what you believe It's a joke all right Thanks everyone Have a lovely day Bye Aliens watching Reality TV is hosted by Erica Hydewald and Josh Shahrir to produce an edited by Erica Hydewald That's me And our theme song is Just World by Erica Hydewald which is also me Available for streaming on iTunes and Spotify for$5 a month you can subscribe to our Patreon and get an extra full length episode of the podcast every week Right now we're covering Love Is Blind Season 1 We'd love to hear from you Our social media links are in the episode notes or you can write to us at aliens watching reality TV at Gmail Com Thank you for listening And as always I thought that there was part amen Welcome to the world Let me tell you what I've Learned about it It's such a swirl