"The point here is not to draw a moral equivalence, or to say that all these actors have lost their grip to the same degree, but rather to suggest a troubling family resemblance. The underlying structure of the reality-gamesmanship we find in, say, Infowars has its counterpart in, say, Trump-era CNN: incentives and rewards, heroes and villains, plotlines, reveals, satisfying narrative arcs."

Structurally CNN could never claim to have video of "literal vampire pot-belly goblins" coming to steal their children like Jones has. When it comes to this topic, the two just are not counterparts in any sense worth considering morally or otherwise.

The underlying stucture the author describes simply notes that both CNN and Infowars use narrative. True, but this observation could be applied to virtually any public facing commercial enterprise (not just news) both present and past.

In the context of this piece (even after the author's self-aware qualification) its a glaring mistake to describe Infowars and CNN as each others "counterpart" regarding making Reality into a game. Infowars does so with far greater intensity and impact to the point where comparison much less equivalence feels like a disengenous attempt to "both sides" their way out of coming across as partisan. Up to now, a left-wing counterpart with remotely the reach and intensity of things like Infowars, OAN, or even Fox news has simply not immerged. To treat this topic seriously acknowledgement of the partisan imbalance is necesary and shouldn't be ignored/side-stepped.

There does not exist left-wing counterpart to Jan 6 and the subsequent acceptance of it on the right. There does not exist a left-wing counterpart to the belief that Obama was a succesfully installed manchurian candidate from Kenya (of all countries). There does not exist a left wing counterpart to Fox News' political comic section on a daily basis promoting for over a year (still ongoing) a conspiracy that Joe Biden finds nourishment drinking literal children's blood from a sippy cup. There does not exist a left-wing counterpart to contesting deeply understood physical phenomena like climate change fueled by human produced CO2. But we don't blink at these things, because it's "normal" for rightwing outlets to do this in a way it simply is not for left wing outlets.

The steele dossier finds its counterpart not in Jan 6 as the piece seems to suggest with it's a or b "pick one" offering, but the far lesser scandal of Hunter Biden's laptop. Both are tainted wells of genuine and partisan injected scandal. And its worth acknowledging, the left abuses objectivity occasionally like with their floating of the Steele Dossier. Still, the left has never so much whispered something so politcally scandolous as abandonment of parliamentary democracy. The Republican party, after failing to do so on Jan 6, continues pursuing just that within state legislatures as its main political project at the moment. Chalking up Jan 6 and Steele Dossier as essentially the same thing at heart just dialed to different degrees really misunderstands the techniques, technologies, and structures at play.

This imbalance has to be reckoned with for a serious attempt to better understand the "gamefication of reality" occuring foremost within both mainstream and fringe Republican realms and to an almost incomprably diminished degree on the left.