Who Turned Off the Gaslight?
“Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine.” —Olivia Nuzzi, NY Magazine
There’s a reason that the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes is so potent: it describes a mentally ill society that retreats into abject unreality, to avoid contending with truth. Alas, this archetypal human quandary shoves such a society towards nemesis: downfall and punishment. And that is exactly the consequence of our news media’s craven, dishonorable, degenerate behavior the past decade.
They have disordered our nation’s consensus about reality with peremptory lying about everything, in service to a political party that lies to its citizens about everything. The big question is: who or what recruited them into serving the Party of Chaos, and why did they go along?
You can explain the media’s initial repugnance to Donald Trump going back to his 2015 debut in politics. Much about him had a low-class odor, despite all the gold-plating — his origins in tawdry Queens, his career as a builder in Manhattan where the trades are mob-controlled, the Atlantic City casino debacle, bankruptcy, ditching Ivana and his mid-life playboy reputation, the tacky TV show, the increasingly mystifying hair-doo, his rough, jumbly manner of speech. Everything about him repelled the Ivy Leaguers who increasingly filled the ranks of national-level journalism.
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Despite all that, Mr. Trump raised five kids successfully. The grown ones had careers and they all visibly loved him. With that and his overt masculinity, he assumed the lineaments of the archetypal Daddy, which enflamed the enormous cohort of feminists who had taken over the Democratic Party behind their avatar Hillary Clinton. And when he squeaked out an electoral victory over her in 2016, they were sure it was cheat. The menace of Daddy in da (White) house pushed them over the edge psychologically.
Daddy was all about setting boundaries, which was the antithesis to the “progressive” (and transgressive) agenda of the Dems, and was probably the reason that his talk of “building the wall” along the Mexican border drove them nuts. It signaled patriarchal control of a whole lot of other things, too. Boundaries galore!
Now, it happened that the Democratic Party was also the favored party of the DC permanent bureaucracy, which had been growing and growing for decades and had become overtly politicized during the eight years of Barack Obama. Mr. Trump threatened to downsize this leviathan government, meaning many patronage jobs might be lost. (Boundaries would be imposed!) The warrior branch of this Deep State was the Intel community. The FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the State Dept, and elements of the military were commissioned by the Democratic Party to destroy Mr. Trump.
They used the machinery of the law to lay one trip after another on the president and effectively hog-tied him — RussiaGate, the Ukraine phone call impeachment, the George Floyd anarchy — and when those operations failed to oust him, they ran the Covid-9 caper (with enormous collateral damage to the people and their economy), which enabled rigging the 2020 election with mail-in ballots. Once Mr. Trump was squeezed out-of-office, the FBI turned the J-6 protest at the Capitol into a riot, which Nancy Pelosi then converted into an “insurrection” using the House J-6 committee. The J-6 incident, they dearly hoped, would rid them of Mr. Trump once and for all.
The news media went along with every bit of that, year after year, converting each mendacious act of the party and the bureaucracy into consumable narrative, and lying either overtly about all the ops, or just omitting to report on the dark truth behind it all. Any reality-based thread that happened to leak into public view from independent alt-news reporters was branded by CNN, The New York Times, the WashPo, and many others as “misinformation” — a newish concept produced by a cadre of language Stasi skilled at inverting the meaning of anything to bamboozle the public. It appears that the news media became so invested psychologically in its own dishonest product that it began to believe its own bullshit.
Or, at least, they wanted to pretend to believe it. One of the big problems was that absolutely everything they labeled “misinformation” or “conspiracy theory” turned out to be truthful, and that was becoming an inescapable embarrassment. And then the biggest blunder they made was going along with the Deep State’s selection of “Joe Biden” in the very sketchy Super Tuesday primary of 2020. The old grifter had next-to-zero support in all the preceding preliminaries and somehow (abracadabra !) he swept the field.
By then, the Democratic Party, and its public relations arm in the mainstream media, had descended into florid mental illness. Everything they stood for post-World War Two flipped to its opposite. Suddenly, they were against free speech. They weren’t coy about it. They just made-up some new bullshit about free speech being “hate speech.” Similarly, they were against a free press. They went along with all the misinfo / disinfo bullshit the government cooked up and supported its role in suppressing the news. They were no longer anti-war, the party-of-peace. They were now pro-segregation and pro-discrimination (white people need not apply) according to Critical Race Theory (a childishly sketchy doctrine). Most of all, they were no longer skeptical of anything that the leviathan establishment wanted to do, including abridging the liberties of American citizens.
Then there was the campaign to use the most powerful human instinct, sexuality, as a weapon to disorder the minds of American children, leading even to the mutilation of their bodies — a program that unmistakably tipped toward genuine evil, suggesting that actual psychosis lay behind the Cluster-B crypto-Marxism used to justify it.
“Joe Biden” was fine with all of that, and the news media was fine with “Joe Biden” and whoever was using him as a front. Of course, it was evident during the 2020 campaign that “Joe Biden” was not up to a job as demanding as Chief Executive of the US government — and that was even apart from the dense criminal web of influence peddling discovered around him and his family, which the news media ignominiously ignored. But now the years have gone by and there’s no hiding “Joe Biden’s” rather gravely diminished mental abilities.
Last week’s debate gave away the game. It had the effect of finally turning off the gaslight that the news media has been shining over the republic lo these many years. They can no longer pretend that this president is anything close to okay in body and mind. They can’t annul the gaslighted public’s delayed realization that they’ve been subject to a concerted program of deliberate lying for a long long time.
So now, inveterate pretenders and liars, such as Jake Tapper of CNN and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times — and many others — have to pretend that they were innocently duped into supporting all the turpitudes of the Democratic Party / Deep State axis-of-evil. It is really hard to imagine that they can successfully rehabilitate their reputations. They have done immense harm to our country. It’s hard to see how the Democratic Party might survive, too, no matter who they finally put up for election this year. Of course, there’s still plenty of time left for them to destroy the country altogether. Just keep giving American missiles to Ukraine to fire into Russia and see what happens.