Here’s a pretty good summary of the last few years of political and intelligence and media developments, and the reaction of the right
I keep looking for a simple way to tell the story – which is hard, because there have been so many incidents leading to the current stance of the right towards these things. But this Twitter thread (hat tip: Ace) does a pretty good job, and I recommend reading it and even sending it to a few open-minded liberals, if you know some.
The author doesn’t seem to be on the right – at least, he describes Trump supporters as though looking at them from the outside, albeit with some compassion and understanding. I don’t agree with everything in the thread; in particular, I don’t think that “the same institutions would have taken opposite sides if it was a Tulsi Gabbard vs Jeb Bush election.” No; Gabbard may be an unusual Democrat with a few conservative values, but she’s a Democrat and the press would have supported her win if it was her vs. Jeb.
However, the thread contains a lot of succinct descriptions of the course of events and of the reactions of the populist right. Just to take one example:
The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, “no fair!” That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.
Or:
The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable. If that were true, they’d be all over the Epstein story. The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period…
This is profoundly disorienting. Many of them don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true…
They always claimed the media had liberal bias, fine, whatever. They still thought the press would admit truth if they were cornered. Now they don’t.
For me, the disillusionment described in that last paragraph above had already occurred some time early in the first decade of the 21st Century.
Another great Twitter thread that has apparently gone viral by Zuby on things he has learned in what he calls the pandemic but I call our response to the pandemic.
Lots of good points here.
https://twitter.com/ZubyMusic/status/1412012537986568193
Thanks, neo (and Ace).
Wow!!
For me the bias become undeniable during the Obama administration. The aptly described “slobbering love affair”.
Before that I knew the press was biased but I didn’t think it was deliberate. The hands up don’t shoot meme opened my eyes.
Now they not only don’t deny it they celebrate their bias.
For me, the absolute darkness surrounding information about available treatment for OOVID convinced me of pervading malevolence.
Meanwhile in Real Media Developments — i.e. Media which is actually trying to fight back:
Twitter just booted Nick Fuentes — he’s already on the No Fly List. Coincidentally the ethno-fascist ADL ran a hit on him the day before.
Another bank just booted Gab.
Both will survive one way or another and continue to gain followers.
And the Normies discussed in in the Twitter thread by a person who is still on Twitter and therefore Officially Tolerated will mostly continue to be Normies. Normie Gonna Norm. News at 10.
But there’s a Vanguard of the Kekkatariat coalescing…. Patience!
“Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.”
If we have no say in our governance, then that action is, effectively a declaration of war. And in taking that action, they have brought a not yet evident consequence upon themselves. For if we have no right of consent, then at base we have no right to life itself. But the reciprocal also applies, neither do those who are attempting to set themselves up as our masters have a right to life because you cannot logically claim a right you deny to others.
Yawrate,
For me the bias became undeniable during the Bush younger administration. Other than perhaps FOX, no media outlet declared “BusHitler” to be beyond the pale. Can there be any greater demonization of a political opponent than to declare them to be a new Hitler?
To me, the media playbook throughout the Trump Administration was a repeat of the GW Bush Administration with particular emphasis on the final year. You might recall the global recession that started in 2008 allegedly brought on by sub-prime lending. I think it was really brought on by the way the media reported on what should have been a fairly minor problem. Much like with COVID, the media created a panic by their relentlessly negative stories that caused the small problem to balloon into an economic disaster.
You might also recall that after Obama’s inauguration the economic news became exceedingly positive overnight. The media knew they created the economic meltdown so they thought they could create an economic miracle. That miracle never materialized during Obama’s 8 years because people are risk averse, they hear bad news about somebody else and they think “that could be me” and they prepare of the worst but they only believe the good news if it happens to them. People believe 2nd hand bad news but only believe 1st hand good news.
I do wonder, though, why some enterprising attorney hasn’t filed civil suits against the media for the riot damage they incited. Given that the majority of the damage in Minneapolis is in minority neighborhoods shouldn’t their reporting be considered a hate crime?
“I do wonder, though, why some enterprising attorney hasn’t filed civil suits against the media for the riot damage they incited. Given that the majority of the damage in Minneapolis is in minority neighborhoods shouldn’t their reporting be considered a hate crime?”
Because that wouldn’t be a very Enterprising step to take.
Read the “replies” that Twitter (allows? Puts first? I have no idea or trust as to how any of this works). Anyway the gist is “What do you mean Trump didn’t collude with Russia and the dossier was fake?” Basically proves his point about the corporate/tech oligarchy.
The guy does a nice job of stating pretty well how this tail-end boomer feels and thinks about all of this.
I came across the thread last night and immediately sent it to a few. A lot of the time, Twitter is an enormous time sink, but it does force one to be concise in writing, and thus thinking. I believe it crystallizes what many Americans viscerally know. I also believe the commenter would benefit from editing the latter parts of the thread and expanding on a few of these points that remain, like the responses to 1/6 and the border crisis.
But: Bravo, well-done. Waking and becoming aware of the problem is halfway to correcting it. I do believe we are in a correction phase now.
The compiled thread is here:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1413165168956088321.html
Geoffrey Britain says “For me the bias became undeniable during the Bush younger administration. Other than perhaps FOX, no media outlet declared “BusHitler” to be beyond the pale. Can there be any greater demonization of a political opponent than to declare them to be a new Hitler?”
In 2003, we had the Democrats most honored Senators like Rockefeller, Kennedy, and Durban excoriate Bush over the NYTimes obsession, Abu Grabe prison, and tar him as “worse than Stalin,” “worse than Hitler” and “worse than Saddam” — followed by the lying propaganda of Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11″…and no ounce of criticism or proportion from the Establishment “Media” — then I perceived a future America not worth living in.
It was the same one the Tech Oligarchs have now institutionalized today.
I think it was really brought on by the way the media reported on what should have been a fairly minor problem.
It wasn’t a minor problem. The problems generated by subprime and alt-A loans were overstated as most of the sum of loan balances on underwater properties were on prime loans. For some puzzling reason, Henry Paulson’s Treasury rejected instituting a debt-for-equity swap to recapitalize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and instead just pumped a couple hundred billion dollars to finance their deficits. Charles Calomiris was quite critical of Paulson et al, maintaining they ignored a wealth of experience and literature on how to manage financial crises and resorted to mad improvising.
We have decades of the divergent viewpoint, left and right. The folks on the left who know what they know are sure the ones on the right are stupid, un-informed, mean, racist, mostly white folk who were, “The Man” of the 1960’s who kept the less advantaged down. This is the same old same old battle against the “The Man”, as they perceive it, and there is so much damn virtue in their battle as they play this out they have no concept of where the end might be. That will be all.
OldTexan (8:17 pm):
Calls to mind the late, very lamented Charles Krauthammer, who declared:
“To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”
In some cases, though, I’d prefer “malinformed” to “stupid”. Some are intelligent. But when all your sources are establishment-certified and all that, whaddaya expect?
Andrew Sullivan, a Trump hater and Obamaphile, in this article –
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/what-happened-to-you-e5f
–
makes points similar to those made by MartyrMade.
Among Sullivan explains why he often criticizes today’s left:
MJR: It turns out conservatives have been wrong. Liberals are evil.
The compiled thread is here:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1413165168956088321.html
Aggie:
Thanks for the civilized experience of reading a twitter thread. I copied it to my Evernote log in case Twitter kills the thread for inciting insurrection or mopery with intent to gawk.
MJR: It turns out conservatives have been wrong. Liberals are evil.
Ira M. Siegel:
And thanks for the Sullivan link. Sully still worth a look now and then. He’s lagging the SJW parade and now finds himself called a white supremacist, etc. Amusing.
However, I don’t think today’s liberals are Krauthammer’s liberals. They’ve become radicalized and are now full-woke leftists.
The Sullivan piece contains some graphs of the Dem and Rep positions over the past decades, showing that the it is the Democrats have gone hard left, while Republicans have stayed pretty much the same. Kevin Drum, who has his moments of honesty too, ran those graphs the other day.
I would have thought this self-evident, but that’s not the story as our woke friends would tell it.
It wasn’t a minor problem, not only for reasons laid out by Deco, but because the leverage used in the related derivatives dwarfed prior levels.
Had that not been so, the case for the Bailout, such as it was, would’ve been far weaker.
Regardless of Fannie etc., firms like Bear and Lehmann should never have been near collapse, had they not been playing Enron-level games.
BoatBuilder: The guy does a nice job of stating pretty well how this tail-end boomer feels and thinks about all of this.
Me too. A good selection of issues. And a good tone
I don’t think these political / media developments can be fully understood without reference to the Managerialist Bugpeople Class having become self-aware and having developed their own class consciousness as a People Apart (heh).
“We seem to be experiencing something similar. Those medieval peasants must have thought the world was going mad at times. One day some men with weird haircuts show up and before long the lord is forcing them to be baptized in a new religion that makes no sense to them. Today the boss goes off to a conference and when he returns, he is babbling about white fragility and structural racism. The whole department is then marched off to be trained in how to hate their ancestors.”
Good enough exposition here:
The New Religion
Intro Text + Comments + Podcast:
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=24344
Just the Podcast Audio:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlnkEHG_KuY
Tucker Carlson read almost this entire thing on his show tonight.
Excellent summary. I was awestruck by the concise, but true way he captured the whole grim episode of our political history. It also explained the essence of why we are so angry.
We’ve been lied to by our government agencies, by our media outlets, and by our elected representatives. My Congresswoman, Susan DelBene, has sent me answers to my inquiries about issues that have proven false. I get no apologies or corrections, only arrogance.
We know now to never trust an FBI agent. Never speak to one without a lawyer present with a video recorder. We believe in law and order, but we have seen, and continue to see, people being framed for crimes. Or being overcharged. We are now afraid of our federal government, that supposedly derives its power from our consent. It’s upside down and it’s got to change.
“For me, the disillusionment described in that last paragraph above had already occurred some time early in the first decade of the 21st Century.”
For me it occurred specifically in the fall of 2006: the Reuters Middle East photography fraud. Coming on top of the stunningly slanted coverage of the Iraq War, there was just no way to explain it other than active malice. The news services had to know the images and stories they were repeating were phony. They just didn’t care.
If our eyes and ears were as dishonest about our immediate reality as the mainstream media is about public information, we’d be dead in no time flat.
What the twitter thread is really saying, paraphrasing an old STNG famous line: “Their eyes open!”
Julie Kelly has pointed out that no FBI agent has yet complained in any forum about the tremendous waste of manpower invested in attempting to track down January 6 protesters. It’s now a reasonable inference that the agency is rotten from top-to-bottom and we’d be safer just dissolving it rather than attempting to repair it.
The point is not whether you or I believe it to be true. We actually follow politics. What is significant is that normal people who pay only passing attention to politics now believe it to be true.
A loss of trust in our institutions to that degree is significant and I don’t know if it is reversible.
Yeah, physicsguy, but that’s a scripted line. Remember, the producers of STNG thought that the appropriate response to a crew member engaging in espionage and treason was for Capt. Picard to tell her, “Hey, we all have our bad days, come on back and we’ll pretend it didn’t happen.”
“MJR: It turns out conservatives have been wrong. Liberals are evil.” Ira M. Siegel
Leftists are evil, liberals are fools.
Those of Dershowitz’s persuasion are not evil, merely too weak to publicly declare that the democrat party has embraced evil. If left unchecked, at some point the left will force that realization out of them. The meme that disagreement itself is proof of being evil is forcing them into a corner from which there is no flight. Many of the parents protesting CRT are liberals.
For the sake of completeness, MartyrMade has appended a subsequent short thread to the original one:
https://twitter.com/martyrmade/status/1413255525832163328
“Almost forgot: The security director at Dominion Voting Systems was for decades a member of anti-racist skinhead groups, and posted pro-riot/Antifa msgs on FB during the summer riots. Who knows if his approval of illegal means to achieve political ends affected his job, but…1/2
…ask yourselves how people would react if the security director at a major voting machine company in 2022 turned out to be lifelong Bircher posting pro-Capitol riot msgs on Facebook. The info was all in the public domain, but the media ignored it. Why?”
“It is a fact that he was a member of anti-racist skinhead groups for decades, and that he was posting pro-Antifa agitprop on his wall over the summer. The networks got sued because they made accusations they couldn’t prove regarding the ballots.”
There was a pretty good story about this, linked:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-extremist-at-dominion-voting-systems/
Related (on alternate treatments to Covid):
https://www.theepochtimes.com/nurse-blows-the-whistle-on-the-medical-industry-theyre-not-offering-informed-consent_3894572.html
– – – –
Regarding Andrew Sullivan’s recent “tour de force”, in spite of agreeing with the basic message, for which he deserves applause, I was somewhat less than impressed by some of the excerpts from Instapundit’s link to it, in fact I think that what he says here is just plain stupidity:
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/460860/
“…And, yes, some of the liberal critiques of a Fox News hyped campaign are well taken. Is this a wedge issue for the GOP? Of course it is. Are they using the term “critical race theory” as a cynical, marketing boogeyman? Of course they are…”
“hyped campaign”?
“cynical, marketing boogeyman”?
“wedge issue”?
For crying out loud!…
…but then I think that Sullivan has become for the most part, alas, a poseur. (Disclaimer: I—once upon a long time—read him religiously….)
Neo said, “For me, the disillusionment described in that last paragraph above had already occurred some time early in the first decade of the 21st Century.”
It was the Jayson Blair plagiarism/fabrication scandal at the NYT in April 2003 that destroyed what was left of my trust in the MSM. That trust had already been damaged by a similar scandal at the New Republic in 1998, when the magazine was forced to admit that most of the articles that Stephen Glass had written for it between 1995 and 1998 were creative fiction, to put it mildly. Unlike Neo, I’ve never been a liberal; I used to read left-of-center periodicals back in the day just to keep up with their party line, so to speak– but I did assume that those publications had some kind of basic connection to the real world. No more.
Looking back, I’m reminded of Søren Kierkegaard’s months-long quarrel with the editors of The Corsair, a short-lived Danish satirical periodical that was published between 1840 and 1846. Kierkegaard saw the European press of his day as dishonest and decadent in its focus on influencing the whims of “the crowd,” i.e., the faceless general public. At one point during the Corsair affair, Kierkegaard noted in his private journals that if he had had a daughter who had become a prostitute, he would never cease to pray for her redemption– but that if he had had a son who had become a journalist, he would give up all hope.
PA+Cat:
“At one point during the Corsair affair, Kierkegaard noted in his private journals that if he had had a daughter who had become a prostitute, he would never cease to pray for her redemption– but that if he had had a son who had become a journalist, he would give up all hope.”
If Kierkegaard had had the good sense to be born in 1975, he could have gotten two for the price of one.
I realized that the American media and the liberal establishment were consciously and strategically adopting a double standard in order to “fundamentally change” the country when the Journolist scandal emerged. The ideological attitude was unmistakable, the extension and the relevance of the membership more than alarming.
Yep, and just as a reminder, it’s time once again to roll out this always (unfortunately) relevant cartoon (from 2010)….
https://tinyurl.com/ptp59x33
It’s also clear that some new not-for-profit orgs should probably be established (i.e., if they haven’t been already):
– Liberals for Utter Dishonesty in Media (and everywhere else)?
– Liberals for Stolen Elections?
– Liberals for Instituting Racism in Education?
– Liberals for Violence, Chaos and Mayhem in our Cities?
– Liberals for Shredding the Constitution
– Liberals for the Destruction of America?
For starters….
That the Left is evil is a discussion I’ve tried to have with Neo several times over the years. I agree with David Horowitz that you can’t give liberals a pass. They are headed in the same direction and are motivated by the same instincts. They just want to get there a little slower. Those instincts are the source of the evil. It’s the hubris. It’s their belief that they are better, more deserving, smarter, entitled, anointed. Thomas Sowell has banged this drum for decades.
The twitter thread is bare bones. The rampant and relentless dishonesty of liberals goes way back. He could have added the lies underpinning Obamacare. Or the all-encompassing lies of Covid that shocked and appalled us leading up to the November election. Add Climategate — global warming is a scam, the elites know it, but the opportunity for graft is too great to be honest. And another biggie — the astonishing slanders and ugly stereotyping of BLM and riots. The elites/deep state/liberal machine lies about EVERYTHING!
The one thing about the stolen election which puzzles me is how little reference we see to the Democrats’ long sordid history of election fraud. They stole the presidency in 1960. They tried mightily again in Florida in 2000. For a good look at rampant, over-the-top fraud read the third volume of Caro’s bio of LBJ about his 1948 theft of the senate seat.
We know that in 2020 federal indictments cited election fraud by four different election judges in Philly. And yet, we are supposed to believe that the fraudsters running that cess pool didn’t cheat Trump. Yeah, sure. Democrats gave us four years of an obsessive campaign of insanity, corruption, slander, and criminality regarding DJT, but we are supposed to believe that they suddenly got scrupulously honest (for the first time in their history) in the election that gave them a chance to get rid of the hated Trump. Sorry, but my understanding of human nature won’t bend into a pretzel that tight.
stan:
As I’ve noted before – some on the left are evil, some are misguided and naive idealists, and many (the great majority of the non-activist non-leftists who enable and vote for the left in the guise of the Democratic Party) are “useful idiots” or simply kneejerk Democrat voters.
Neo, I hope we can agree that people who support evil bear some responsibility for what they support. The more awareness they have, the more accountable they must be.
Now the question is how much should any reasonably intelligent liberal be expected to know?
There are dozens of subjects that they should realize are part of the big LIE because any cursory look at the reality demonstrates it (women don’t lie about rape, 1 in 4 women are sexually assaulted on campus, boys are girls whenever they say so, Heinz 57 varieties of sexual identity, cops who save lives by shooting attempted murderers are racist, global warming, the gender pay gap, systemic racism, $15 min wage, etc.).
But beyond the Russia collusion and stolen election realities that are discussed in this thread, there are some that are so blatant anyone with a working brain understands them:
— They know that the BLM narrative about cops was a nasty, slanderous stereotype. They know that the protests were violent. And they know that the insistence that they were peaceful is blatant BS.
— They know Antifa is not simply an idea.
— They know that censorship is wrong. And cancel culture even worse. If they aren’t appalled at Big Tech and the news media by now, they are brain dead.
— They know that everyone who disagrees with them is not a racist, fascist, Nazi, white supremacist. And that white supremacy is not the nation’s biggest threat. That the leaders of their party insist it is should scare the hell out of them. Normal people would be upset by this. If GOP leaders were this nasty, vicious and blatantly wrong, every conservative on this thread would be screaming bloody murder. Why aren’t liberals? There is simply way too much of this garbage for any honest person to dismiss. There is enough to presume they are on notice. Time for accountability. They know. What do they support given that knowledge?
Why are Greenwald and a very small handful of others the only liberals yelling? This is the KEY! This tells us that something seriously wrong is involved. It’s psychological and moral. The moral is what I am focused on.
stan:
Most of the people I know who are liberals bear responsiblity for gullibility and lack of interest. They do not seem to me to be morally deficient at all. They are uncurious, they are somewhat trusting of the media, they are involved in other things, and many are not very interested in politics (or reading about it) although some are.
For me, when I was a liberal, it was all about reading just a few sources and not being all that interested in politics, which repelled and bored me in equal measure. I don’t see those things as moral failures. And that’s what I see with most of my friends and family.
OK, Neo, “many are not very interested in politics… although some are”.
The key ones are the some who are.
I wasn’t paying much attn. between, say, 2012 and 2016, but once I saw the Dems push this Russia BS, I was horrified.
It behooves folks interested in preserving peace, to look up the 1867 Luxembourg Crisis, and the Franco-Prussian War 3 years later.
War was averted in the first case, since Bismarck didn’t let the German media bulldoze him, before the Russians could urge an
int’l Conference to sort it out.
War was not averted in the second case, since Napoleon’s bad health sapped his will, to stop the French media from bulldozing him about the Ems Dispatch uproar, before anyone could urge another such Conf.
In 2017, Putin was able to stop the Russian media from bulldozing him about the DNC hack BS, but such a result was not guaranteed.
aNanyMouse:
I agree that “it behooves them.” But it’s not evil to not pay much attention, or (if paying attention) to think that the varied MSM sources one uses for information are mostly telling the truth. It’s naive and/or lazy or any number of things, but not evil.
Of course, it’s not evil, but it’s not deserving of “adult” respect.
Those who don’t do basic homework are *not entitled* to being heard.
This might just get buried and never read, but I thought this was a good followup to all the (well-deserved) attention this thread by MartyrMade has generated.
Darrel Cooper (MartyrMade) has written an essay on Substack under Glenn Greenwald’s header to explain a bit more and expand his thinking on the same themes. It’s worth a read.
https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/author-of-the-mega-viral-thread-on
Cooper does not define himself as a Conservative, Republican or Libertarian, but says he’s ‘conservative by temperament’ with all of his political friends on the Left. He wrote the thread to communicate to the Left that he thinks this is an opportunity for them to reach out to Conservatives (‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, he says), as they are….adrift at present with their sense of political alignment. (I snorted at this, but maybe he knows a better class of Leftists).
Some of the comments are worth reading as well, along the lines of what @Stan is referencing, above.
Aggie:
Thanks for this link too. It’s a keeper.
Neo, I’m sure most of your “liberal” friends and family have an implicit, if not explicit, desire to be among the Morally Superior.
In the easiest possible way.
Which, in itself, is not evil.
But accepting evil is not good, even if it’s not evil, or let’s say “immoral”, or even “against the usual principles”.
Tell the Truth.
Live NOT by Lies
Cooper calls them The Regime. Black John McWhorter calls them The Elect. Thomas Sowell calls the The Anointed. Glen Loury, who I echo, calls them the Elite.
Republicans should now be pushing for Term Limitations on govt officials. They need to leave govt “semi-socialism”, and get back in the real world of competition and freedom.
This thread about why Reps are angry is so good. But also so … “whatcha gonna do about it” –missing.
America loving Americans are being lied to and having their elections stolen by American haters – what are we going to do about it.
Multi-pronged effort, especially at first.
Brainstorming about possibilities, then looking at good and bad points. But in social media practice, we get brainstorming plus evaluations at the same time, inevitably.
Trump might be the best leader of the anti-Elite we have, but he’s not a great leader, despite being a great talker.
He does NOT have, nor will ever have, “moral superiority”.