Love or hate Donald Trump, one of the reasons he managed to win the election was that he spoke a truth we’ve all known for quite some time now, but which few others were willing to say openly: the press is the enemy of the American people. It’s a sad state of affairs, and indicative of the descent into technocratic government.
Some time ago, one of my readers linked a post of mine on Free Republic. He suggested my blog was worth following, for which I can only express my gratitude. But another individual immediately lambasted the original poster with “oh, you follow blogs? I feel sorry for you.” It was the sort of self-absorbed, arrogant snark you usually see in places like the Democratic Underground. When it was pointed out to him that the press is blatantly corrupt, and cannot be trusted, he fired back with an insinuation that at least the press is better than amateur bloggers.
To be fair, I am not a trained journalist, nor am I even a trained author. My readers have probably noticed errors here and there, and in all likelihood I will continue to make those boneheaded mistakes from time-to-time (I count on my readers to let me know when this happens, of course). But regardless of my own errors, at least it can be said that I am not an enemy of America, her culture, and her way of life.
The intrepid anti-blog freeper missed that point. No matter how much training the technocrats in government and media receive, we cannot trust them. They are no longer reporters of facts, they are agents of propaganda as dishonest and skewed as the editors of Pravda.
Blogging is relatively popular in the right-wing world, not necessarily because we are the best, or the most highly trained professionals, but because most of the highly trained professionals have stopped doing journalism at all. They are pure propagandists, at this point. The market had a demand for news that was either unslanted, or slanted the other direction in a sort of compensation for the blatant left-wing agitprop spewed 24/7 from the major news outlets (Fox possibly excepted).
In other words, the proliferation of bloggers like myself is due almost entirely to the media not performing its own stated function. Some time ago, Tom Nichols and I got into it over whether or not the public ought to be informed about unclassified material. Tom took the position that it was better to keep as much as possible out of the public eye, because the public is too stupid, and decisions are best left to the experts.
Tom isn’t even a Leftist, but he is a technocrat. And his default position is trust the experts. He used the example of airline pilots. Certainly we trust them, right? The comparison was all wrong. Airline pilots are observably good at their jobs. We can see their record, and determine that for the most part, they do a wonderful job. The media, on the other hand, is observably bad, and in many cases intentionally so. We can see it in our own lives, when they misreport everything with a political spin. But some people still believe it is better to trust them because they are the experts? It doesn’t make any sense.
Francis, at Liberty’s Torch, explains that you shouldn’t accord this respect to one who is observably your enemy:
Your enemy is, by definition, someone who wishes you ill. He intends your subjugation or destruction. If you’re sane and possess appropriate self-regard, your objective is to prevent him from attaining his objective. By implication, his opinion of you should be utterly unimportant to you.
Politicians and commentators in the Right have utterly missed that implication.
Contrast the behavior and statements of figures on the Left and the Right these past few decades. I posit that the Left has made its intentions plain at every step. Leftist politicians and spokesmen have never feared to wound persons on the Right, whether by word or by deed. Yet the Right has behaved, spoken, and written as if the most important of all its desiderata is not to offend the Left or its allegiants.
Francis doesn’t explicitly connect this behavior to the media in his post, but given their obvious left-wing bias, the implication is there. The media doesn’t like you. They wish you ill. If they could dispose of right-wing America with a wave of their hand, they would do it without hesitation. Their contempt for you is open and obvious.
Take a look at this piece of drivel from the chief foreign correspondent at ABC News.
Trump in the Oval Office today. Noticing there are no pictures of his wife or children in this shot. pic.twitter.com/q2Hj8hKck4
— Terry Moran (@TerryMoran) January 28, 2017
He’s taking a petty and completely idiotic jab at Trump for the way he has chosen to decorate his office. Presumably Trump is busy, you know, doing the job for which he was elected. These sort of nitpicking jabs are one of the media’s chief weapons, finding some small thing which they can use to deliver a passive-aggressive barb at their chosen target.
In case you think I’m cherry picking (I’m not, I see these things almost every time I go to a mainstream media site), here’s a great series of headlines:
Here’s another great example:
On the off chance that you thought this didn’t apply to sports and hobbyist reporting. Gamergate should have disabused you of this notion with how video gamer journalists treated their own demographic, but still…
And another one:
Gee. I wonder why he doesn’t like you?
And the amusing contradictions are legion:
Sure, two different authors. But this *is* pretty funny nonetheless.
See, Donald Trump is right about one thing. The media is the enemy. I’m not quite sure how this happened, except to reference back to my previous post on Ideological Subversion. It is clear most of them have been subverted in the manner Yuri Bezmenov explained.
And so, they are now opposed to the idea of America, to its culture, its way of life, and, indeed, Western civilization entirely. You can count on them to be strongly dismissive of Christianity, and embracing of Islam, because Christianity is a feature of the West, and Islam is generally opposed to it. They will harp on white people for the most minor of quibbles, and excuse the actions of individuals of other races (provided, of course, the members of those races don’t become “contaminated” with right-wing ideas), because the West was European in origin. They celebrate other cultures, while denying us the right to do likewise (they call this cultural appropriation), or to even embrace our own.
Liking your own culture is bigotry, white supremacism, cisnormative heteropatriarchy, or a host of other ills and buzzwords. The specific allegations don’t matter. The fact that they are peddled by the ‘experts’ in the media does matter.
Basket of Deplorables… and now schmucks. These people don’t like you.
I’ve had my issues with Donald Trump, and no doubt I will continue to have them. But on this matter, he is 100% correct, and conservatives ought to take note. The media is your enemy. They don’t merely disagree with you, they hate you. You are a basket of deplorables. You are bigots. You are the whitelash (even if, paradoxically, you are not white). You are stupid hicks, fundie Christian loons, or whatever else they might come up with.
They see you as the enemy. You ought to see them as the same. And, having done so, the advice of Francis Porretto is important to digest and understand fully.
No, I am no expert. But the experts are liars, and once a man has demonstrated his dishonesty, there is no reason to trust him on anything. This is something Tom Nichols and other technocrats, like the guy on Free Republic, criticizing the whole notion of blogs, don’t really understand.
And so, like it or not, us bloggers must do what we can. We won’t always get it right, but it can at least be said most of us don’t deliberately try to mislead you. We don’t lie to you, or hate you, or regard you as our enemy. And when we get it wrong, we’ll fess up to the mistake and try to learn from it.
And that’s better than the alternative, is it not?
And “reporters” think they should be treated as “somebody” special because of “Freedom Of The Press”.
All “Freedom Of The Press” means is that the Government can’t “shut you down”.
It doesn’t mean that the President can’t call reporters liars and it doesn’t mean that the President “has to call on reporters” and it doesn’t mean that the President must not “ban” your “news” company from Press Conferences.
Quite true. And Trump is the first President in a while to remember this. Though, IIRC, Reagan had a habit of calling them out too.
But this all goes back to the Left’s conflation of two words: tolerance and approval. Trump is required by law to tolerate the media, as you say. He is NOT required to approve of them, or grant them any favors or boons, or even refrain from calling them assholes, if he so desires.
This conflation of tolerance and approval is at the root of so much Leftist thinking.
Freedom of the press began with pamphleteers, not huge corporations.
Like many of the guaranteed rights freedom of the press meant the freedom of individuals, not privilege of certain corporations to have access that other citizens do not, and CERTAINLY not to the extent that if the groupthink of these corporations has no room for the truth if it doesn’t fit the story they already want to tell, then most people never hear about it at all.
They have lost their privilege as gatekeepers, and this enrages them.
Did you ever meet a journalism major back in college? Not the sharpest knives in the drawer – and a major that requires no math, no real hard science (social sciences are not science), no economics, no real knowledge of history, nothing that isn’t essentially B.S. A job that has minimal exposure to reality – did anyone know the real side of a story and not see the journalist get it completely wrong? And we’re supposed to consider these people experts because …?
Never had the displeasure of meeting a J-school student, but I’ve known since I was a kid that the press couldn’t be trusted to get the details right when they reported on the military or the Catholic Church. Knowing that many of them don’t care to get the big points (much less the details) right makes my blood boil. No truce with the liars of the Lamestream Media.
“Journalist” comes from a Sanskrit phrase meaning “person who knows nothing about everything.”
Lulz.
Accurate description of the students and faculty of one j’ism (sic) school I am alas intimately familiar with. Except that they are also as arrogant and self-righteous as they are ignorant.
imho, J-schools and Ed-schools should not exist. We used to do both journalism and K-12 education rather well, but as soon as we moved to professionalize them via academia, the rot set in.
In the good old days, young reporter-wannabees would basically apprentice at City News Bureau in Chicago, or similar organizations in other cities, where they would learn the trade under a competent editor, covering the night shift at police stations and crime scenes and hospitals. They would learn how to report facts, on deadline, with tight, well-crafted prose. And aspiring teachers would go to a normal school and then, in essence, apprentice under an experienced teacher.
Those were considered trades, not professions. And when we all fell for treating them as professions it cost us a lot of money and the quality sank into the gutter.
We would all be far better off if all those programs closed down tomorrow.
Yes, I knew several who lived in my dorm at UT Austin back in the 1976-1977. After getting to know them, and several education majors, I realized both sets were tremendously ignorant. They were the biggest party animals who did not have to work very hard to make their grades. Simkins Hall was mostly Engineering majors and we were pretty contemptuous of the journo majors.
The “experts” have also removed all comments sections from their articles on every major media site.
Think about that. I can write whatever I want about what a giant dumbass you are here, about how wrong you are, how your opinions are stupid, and I can nit-pick any errors I find in your post.
The media used to let people do this. Then it started making them look bad, so now you can’t find a comments section on virtually any major media site. It doesn’t make any sense financially. Comments sections mean more page views as people refresh to reply to each other, which means more ad revenue.
How great can you be at your job if you’re afraid of people criticizing the way you’re doing it? Unless your job is spreading propaganda and keeping people from disagreeing with you.
I noticed that as well – no, it was too embarrassing for the news “providers” when commenters either rejected the editorial spin, or provided additional facts. Ordinary citizens fact-checking their *sses just got too darned embarrassing.
Quite so. Pravda doesn’t want competition.
These people are on someone’s payroll. Maybe George Soros, whatever it may be. They are paid to turn our thought processes to believe the opposite of reality is in fact reality. They are angered when we resist. So yes, they hate us, and yes they are the enemy. Everybody wants our freedom and our money. If we can’t be shamed out of it, we will be frightened out of it, and if that fails, they would very much like to weaken us sufficiently to force it from us. Enemies is a good defining label. Soros must go to trial, and the media must be consistently hit with libel and slander suits. Any other ideas?
I deeply despise the word “technocrat.” English already has a word for those who believe that the vast bulk of people are incapable of governing themselves: Royalist.
Actually, there is a difference, since royalists believe in a hereditary monarchy, while technocrats for the most part believe in an oligarchy by an anointed minority of experts that is not (necessarily) hereditary. The French use the pun (which I’ll anglicize) “ENArchy”, which literally means “insider rule” but contains the acronym of the ENA (Ecole Nationale d’Administration, or National Government College) that many French career politicians (and the vast majority of senior civil servants) are graduates of.
Early feudal societies had a degree of meritocracy, and even late in it’s history elevating commoners to the nobility wasn’t unheard of. The realities of social capital mean that such a level of power concentration will become hereditary in a very few generations. The US has been practicing such a system only since FDR’s day and you can already see hereditary trends in the political class. I think eschewing the neologism is useful for pointing out that Progressives are in fact advocating for an old and discredited political philosophy.
Both of you are correct. But technocrat is useful to describe the current stage, which is only partly hereditary. Brahmandarin is, perhaps, better than both.
See: https://spinstrangenesscharm.wordpress.com/2016/12/17/trump-and-the-rage-of-the-brahmandarins/
The answer is to defund Prog Ed in K-12, university, grad and journalism schools; replacing the anti-brain pedagogy with Western Enlightenment. This is the fix that fixes all.
Funny how when minorities, women and gays vote as a bloc it’s a good thing showing they are voting their best interests. When whites vote as a bloc it’s a harbinger of dark times.
An “expert” is someone who has some technical or other skill born of specialized education like a pilot, a doctor, a toxicologist. Journalists aren’t “experts”. They don’t know more about writing than anyone who can write. They don’t know anything about any subject matter that anyone with time on their hands can’t know. They surely know nothing about “investigating” because the first rule of an actual investigation is that you don’t have a result in mind lest you support that result by rejecting facts or truths that can’t get you to the result you want. These MSM types only have the influence we give allow them which they have squandered because they can’t be trusted to report the truth. To hell with them.
Edited [sorry still on my first cup of coffee]: An “expert” is someone who has some technical or other skill born of specialized education like a pilot, a doctor, a toxicologist. Journalists aren’t “experts”. They don’t know more about writing than anyone who can write. They don’t know anything about any subject matter that anyone with time on their hands can’t know. They surely know nothing about “investigating” because the first rule of an actual investigation is that you don’t have a result in mind lest you support that result by rejecting facts or truths that can’t get you to the result you want. These MSM types only have the influence we allow them which they have squandered because they can’t be trusted to report the truth. To hell with them.
Quite so. For instance, Byzantine history is something of an obsession of mine, and though it rarely merits media attention these days, I’ve long noted just how inaccurate journalists are on the subject. They think they know it, but they clearly don’t.
A good test for one who is skeptical of this is to pick a subject he knows better than most, a subject for which he might be called upon as an expert. Then, go look that subject up on any mainstream media site. Catalog the inaccuracies. Extrapolate across all other subjects…
It’s not pretty.
My primary focus on history was Greco-Roman pre 476. I used to watch History Channel before it became reality tv. Many programs on Rome had absurd imaginings instead of anything that might approach reality. eg: Roman troops were marched to the Coliseum to watch the games to inure them to violence and death. Of course their religious programming was just as bad. They frequently had doctors of theology spouting nonsense that was easily disprovable if they had ever actually read the Bible.
I agree wholeheartedly. The attack on Milo is another underhanded establishment scheme. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6cHYy0M3G4
I’m watching this one very closely. It appears to be an all out media blitz of epic proportions.
Well-stated arguments, w/ visual proofs, . Nice piece – for a blogger 😉 Also, that’s a fine definition of those like Mr Nichols. Thanks.
Roger Scruton has a word for this hatred of one’s own heritage: OIKOPHOBIA — The aversion to home:
“Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which intellectuals tend to become arrested . . . and this has often made them willing agents of foreign powers”
I blogged about it awhile back here: “A new and more terrible servitude”: http://sisu.typepad.com/sisu/2006/06/a_political_cul.html
Related: “Gramsci’s long march through the institutions ends at the water’s edge” http://sisu.typepad.com/sisu/2010/11/gramscis-long-march-through-the-institutions-ends-at-the-waters-edge.html
Your quote would explain a great deal. If the Left is functionally adolescent, the dumbing down of society, the emotional infantilization, starts to make more sense. One might even think it is deliberate.
Well written post. And I’m glad to see some young people who have seen (and understood) Yuri Bezmenov’s videos.
I wish they taught this in schools. But I presume there’s a reason they don’t…
@Dystopic and author of this post: You have the integrity and search for the truth in your corner! I can not speak for others but I estimate millions of citizens not only agree with you but also support you knowing for a fact that you do not lie!
Having said that this election has indeed unmasked the agents of the Deep State. Who is the Deep State? The Deep State is the shadow government in this country who have been in control of everything: Government, intelligence, dissemination of truth via the US Pravda, false flag wars, coups of various political leadership and government such as Egypt, Tunisia, Ukraine, Honduras, Iraq, Libya and the last attempted but failed coup against Bashar Assad in Syria. These are the coups undertaken by this shadow government these past 8 years alone. If Vladimir Putin would not have entered in Syria to stop this coup and protect its client state there would be a hot war zone as we speak.
Who are members in this Deep State and shadow government? It includes the CFR, CIA, NSA, NSC, DIA, Homeland security and many more making up the 16 members that is the Deep State and shadow government. This entity continues expanding their imperialism exercising their power in false flag wars using our men and women in uniform to fight their dirty wars. It also included 9/11 where they murdered over 3,000+ of our citizens. This false flag served as cause to enter the middle east and stage coups throughout with the end goal building and controlling energy into the European continent while destroying the economy and energy sector of Russia who currently provides energy via Gazprom running its pipeline using Syria into Europe. The ultimate pipeline beginning in Qatar via Syria into Europe is the end goal.
The media corporations and newspapers are all members and agents of this shadow government and Deep State who run interference and propaganda for this shadow government ergo lying, distorting, selective reporting and more but hide their agenda ergo US Pravda. This election has completely unmasked the media and their anti-American agenda. They also lost control of the information flow as citizens – like you – took it upon themselves to use blogs and any available means to write, expose and tell the truth about various subjects. You, I and millions have become enemies ergo the label deplorable.
Everything changed with the least election: Hillary Clinton – the Deep State candidate lost and with it – the Deep State also lost removing their power ergo the lashing out, anger attempt to destroy, protest, riot and the US Pravda does that part as agent of the Deep state.
Lastly – it is now okay for the agents in the democratic party, the US Pravda, Hollywood and collective left to openly call for the assassination of Donald Trump. Understanding the power and agenda of the Deep State to finally have their one-world-order the constitutional powers must be destroyed and all borders removed. It stands in the way of their global agenda. The shock troops we see in the streets throughout this country are paid by this Deep State via George Soros.
This really is nothing new. During Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign, the media ran negative stories to the tune of 92%. The American public saw this ridiculous bias for what it was and re-elected Reagan in one of the largest landslides in American history.
I was too young to remember, but it would not surprise me.
There is even more to the whole trust thing. Anyone who has ever read a journalists report on sme topic the readers knows, finds a huge amount of error and misinformation in the report. If you doubt this is untrue outside of technical issues, go reread Ben Rhodes and his comments about how easy it was to lead and mislead journalists on the Iran treaty. He specifically noted these paragons of trust were basically 20 somethings with virtually no experience in anything. In the end it is quite disgusting to see how misinformed we are by callow youths of no experience.
No one wants to believe that the media are in league against us. It’s too upsetting to settled worldviews and habits of thought. Yet there it is, indisputable. And the refusal to accept it, just like the refusal to accept the inherent hostility of Islam, can lead nowhere but to this:
[Atlas Shrugged]
That quote is right on target. They expect us to speak of Islam in the same manner.
I has an avid poster on Free Republic in the early 2000’s. The posters seem to have ossified, many of the interesting ones left, and the rest don’t understand the tactics that elevated Trump to the White House. Many seem to still live in the 90’s mindset, probably why many don’t understand blogs.
I’ve known the media is my enemy since the 80s and Reagan. They have been since the 60s and the Vietnam War.
Leander Alphabet is right on target. though it should read If you USE half your brain you are a liberal. What he left out was If you use all your brain you are (small l) libertarian.
The battle is already over. And I say it is 90% probable that WE’VE WON.
Some of you may be shocked by that statement. Let me explain:
I lived in California for two decades. I noticed that amongst the regular guys – working stiffs who were appliance repairmen, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc… – that there was a deep, abiding distrust of the media and that, especially during the Obama years, all the ‘good news’ about the economy was, in fact, a con.
The last election proved the point. Half or more of America simply does not trust what the MSM tells them. AT ALL.
When a people lose faith in their institutions – in our day and age, personified mostly by Washington DC and the MSM – then those institutions are finished. In highly authoritarian societies, it can take a while for them to finally collapse, but once the genie gets out of the bottle, there’s simply no way yet devised to get him back in.
I’ve been seeing the MSM ringing its hands for the last 3-4 days now about how Freedom of the Press is sacred to them and that Trump not treating them (NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, the NYT and WaPo) with deference and reverence by either not answering their questions or choosing OTHER, less powerful media organizations during press conferences for Q&A is an attack on the Constitution, America, baseball, apple pie and Mom. They then soliloquize how They, the poor, persecuted, abused and unfairly maligned Leaders of the Press, will fight on bravely, like the French Resistance against the Nazi occupation, because they love their country so very, very much…..
As I have seen these displays of cognitive dissonance, vanity and sanctimonious narcissism, I have giggled like a retard. The President isn’t ‘trying’ to discredit the MSM; they’ve already done it themselves over the last 2 decades (arguably more, of course, though it’s been especially obvious for the last 15 years.) The MSM is simply too juvenile to deal with the reality of things the way rational, functioning adults do. They are truly just a bunch of pathetic, spoiled brats having a screeching tantrum when every day isn’t their birthday and there’s no party with cake and presents.
They’re going to keep doing this for at least the next four years. If the Progressives are frustated both in their hopes for the 2018 midterms and the 2020 general, that will break the back of the MSM – after all, they are owned and operated by mega-corporate entities, and those who do not adjust to the Real World will simply go out of business.
I love to liken the rendition of news to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Everything tends to descend into chaos unless acted on by some outside force. I think SPIN should be defined as the intentional misdirection of facts to misguide the unwary into believing something that is not implicit in those facts. We all do it. And it’s so EASY! Who wants to engage their gray matter every time a news report comes on and attempt to discern the logic, or lack there of, in what is being reported. All people want is to know what happened not some news reporter’s take on it. We virtually always get some version of the truth(my recent favorite oxymoron) rather than just a rendition of the facts.
I have my issues with Trump but he’s still human and he’s still a billionaire. Was that just luck? Glance across the internet or the news and TRY to find something good about the man. It’s there, but you damn sure have to hunt to find it. Why? He’s been extraordinarily generous in the past. He has had female and Hispanic long term employees laud his virtues. He’s been extraordinarily successful. But it doesn’t get mentioned. Hmmmm….
He has taken on and reviled the press openly and they are adamant about hoisting him on his own petard for it.
At the VERY least it’s going to be an interesting four years.
And to any who still believe the news is merely a rendition of events around the world, beware. This is certainly not the world our parents grew up in…..