In the waning days of the 2024 Presidential election, The Atlantic, running an assortment of purely delusional articles engaged in wild factual distortions and rampant and incendiary name-calling and fearmongering, played host to one especially unhinged piece by David A. Graham titled, in an echo of comments made shortly beforehand by Michelle Obama, “How Is It This Close?” Well, we can now say that, in the end, it was not especially close, though I doubt this will be of much solace to Graham and his ilk.
For some time now, research has shown that, contrary to the common presupposition that education opens minds, our “educated” elites trapped in the corporate media bubble labor under a total inability to understand and empathize with “the other side.” From widely discussed books caricaturing and demonizing rural Americans to former President Barack Obama’s recent tone-deaf hectoring of “the brothers” for their purported misogyny in not sharing his enthusiasm for Vice President Kamala Harris to another recent Atlantic article in which Adam Serwer subdivided Trump supporters into three categories, all of which shared the characteristics of delusion and denial, the elites’ approach to this election has been a mix of misapprehension, disinformation, and condescension.
The media, academia, and the celebrity class, of course, had worked overtime on Vice President Harris’s behalf, doing its darndest to insulate the Vice President from criticism and scrutiny and trying to paint their transparently incompetent candidate as the second coming of President Obama even as she spent her limited time away from the teleprompter meandering in circles around predigested talking points.
The Media Research Center found that coverage of this election was the most lopsided in history, with broadcast evening news coverage of Vice President Harris being 78% positive and of former President Donald Trump being 85% negative. And, with the media seemingly marching in lockstep with her campaign all the way to the finish line, those of us not hypnotized by the elite monoculture’s hall of mirrors definitely felt the substantial slant as they went from telling us she was the “joy” candidate in contrast to those “weird” Republicans, to their unambiguously biased “moderation” of the last two debates.
They never bothered to hold her feet to the fire in probing her non-answers during the rare interviews she gave. There was 60 Minutes’ outright duplicitous editing to make her incoherent word jumbles seem slightly more coherent. There was then the implosion of the “joy” campaign in favor of a hatred-and-division-stoking fear campaign premised on calling now President-elect Trump a would-be authoritarian fascist who, if elected, would, among other things, crack down on free speech and weaponize law enforcement against his opponents (never mind the obvious ironies of such charges coming from the people whose administration had cracked down on free speech and weaponized law enforcement against the President-elect).
But here is the good news, and what I believe to be the most important lesson of the 2024 election: We—a very solid majority of Americans—did not fall for the ruse. Hard as they tried to suck us through the black hole leading to their alternative-facts universe, inundating us in a steady stream of misinformation even as they, again ironically, accused us of peddling misinformation, we resisted. The more their demented coverage flailed against the contours of reality, the more they lost our trust. We turned down the volume and went elsewhere, to alternative media, to podcasts and to X, a sanctuary for free speech thanks to the truly heroic role of Elon Musk.
Their failed, bad-faith Russian-collusion hoax that had distracted the nation and dogged President Trump’s first term while garnering Pulitzer Prizes for The New York Times and Washington Post certainly had not helped their cause, but the real groundwork for our defiance was surely laid during the Coronavirus era. That was the time when their authoritarian overreach and campaign of lockdowns, censorship, and vaccine mandates constituting thinly veiled corruption and shilling for Big Pharma ultimately got exposed to enough of us with an open mind that we realized we were no longer living in the Father-Knows-Best/Walter Cronkite era or even in the era when brave journalists could be expected to unveil and combat government malfeasance rather than play the part of toadies and heavies serving the powers-that-be.
The thumb-on-the-scale journalism we continued to witness as they painted the hateful and destructive Black Lives Matter riots as “largely peaceful protests,” while depicting January 6th as the mother of all insurrections (notwithstanding, for example, President Trump’s clear calling days before the Capitol protest, for the National Guard to be at the ready to keep the peace—a call ignored by his insubordinate advisors) further frayed our trust. Their effort to force down our throats the obvious lunacy that genders could be donned and doffed like Halloween costumes, that the whims of fantasy-addled tots and teens had to be indulged and even concealed from their backward parents, and that mediocre men could flash medals on awards podiums in women’s sports categories did their credibility no favors.
But when they began, in truly Orwellian fashion, in the name of “defending democracy,” using everything from coordinated lawfare to the 14th Amendment to try to force out their democratically nominated political opponent while, at the same time, concealing President Joe Biden’s dementia and then, when compelled to do so, unceremoniously deploying their wealthy donors and political bosses to dump him in favor of a handpicked candidate no one at all had voted for, many of us were pretty much done. By the time their all-hands-on-deck campaign to install Vice President Harris as President by hook or by crook got rolled out to us, the die had already been cast: We were no longer listening.
To be sure, if we looked in the right places, we could still find real live humans without a press pass obediently chanting the mantra that President Trump was a danger to democracy. But such people were largely the ones imprisoned in the monoculture, the teachers and academics, the smugly superior white-shoe professionals prone to mistaking their net worth, positions, degrees, and credentials for education, the wealthy society ladies, those baby-boomers who still feasted on network news, considering every utterance of their hosts infallible. Insulated from the incursions of reality and dictates of common sense by the propaganda-padded walls of their elite echo chambers, these and similar categories of Americans bought into the disinformation campaign.
But they were a distinct minority. The rest of us—a resoundingly clear majority of Americans—had woken up. We had realized that we could no longer rely on their versions of “the Facts” and “the Science” handed down to us from on high by the corporate media and its ever-at-the-ready panels of industry- and military-industrial-complex-approved experts dictating some alleged consensus of Big Media/Big Food/Big Pharma/Big Tech insiders. Hard as it would be, we had to push past our comfort zone. We had to venture out alone. We had to think for ourselves. And we did exactly that, defying the commands of the authorities trying to keep us in check. Despite the unprecedented extent to which they had skewed their coverage to ensure a predetermined outcome, we voted and made our choice, not theirs—and in so doing, we broke their spell.
Their sadly predictable response thus far has been to lash out at us. “America Just Elected a Fascist to the White House,” blared an absurd headline from The New Republic. “Donald Trump has won—and American democracy is now in grave danger,” a Vox headline warned us. “America Did This to Itself” charged a nasty headline from The Atlantic. “America Makes a Perilous Choice,” concluded The New York Times Editorial Board. Celebrities naturally went nuts. Despite the inconvenient facts that President-elect Trump had made substantial inroads among black and especially Hispanic Americans, winning approximately half of Hispanic men, and though more women had voted for that old white guy, President Biden, than for Vice President Harris, a host of other sources sounded pathetically familiar notes of racism and sexism, with white women being particular targets of scorn.
The fact that the dominant reaction of the elite monoculture has been to cast blame rather than to look inwards means that we must be prepared for a still more dug-in battle next time around. When all is said and done, I predict that the principal lesson the powers-that-be will extract from this election will be that the propaganda mill was, as yet, inadequately constructed, with the mechanisms of control as yet imperfect. The deeply troubling arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France for alleged failure to moderate that platform to the French authorities’ liking and the anti-free-speech threats and sentiments of Democratic Party bosses like Vice President Harris, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State John Kerry, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mean we should expect an all-out war on the communication networks and sources currently out of their reach.
Already, The Atlantic is laying the groundwork, labeling X “a white-supremacist site” (for the record, I have never seen a single white supremacist post promoted to me on the site since Elon Musk’s takeover). “Musk and X are epicenter of US election misinformation, experts say” blares one headline carried by Reuters. Ominously, we have seen calls made for Musk’s investigation or arrest. Although the pro-free-speech Trump Administration holding down the Presidency for the next four years offers at least some protection from what is likely on their agenda, we can expect the disinformation-and-censorship machine to be working actively behind the scenes and through whatever organs of federal and state government they control to extend their tentacles further out and tighten their grip.
Our continuing duty, therefore, is not to allow our victory to make us complacent. We must remain vigilant and do what we must to keep our technology, our bodies, and our minds out of their reach. We should be heartened by the fact that, this electoral season, despite their most concerted efforts to date to keep us zombified, their grip on the false metanarratives on issues ranging from free speech to democracy to immigration to climate to health and nutrition is failing. Now is not the time to rest on our laurels. It is the time, to quote our defiant President-Elect, to “fight, fight, fight.”.
Source: merionwest.com
