The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

UNLEASH ‘THE TONE’!

Posted on | February 24, 2019 | Comments Off on UNLEASH ‘THE TONE’!

 

In 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center raised $132 million, David Montgomery of the Washington Post noted last November:

That’s a 164 percent increase over the $50 million it took in a year before. The SPLC’s endowment is up to $433 million. SPLC leaders explain the jump as a reaction to the tone unleashed by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and continued by the Trump administration.

So the unleashing of the tone explains why so many idiots gave so much money to the smear-merchants at the SPLC. As I remarked this week (“Fear and Loathing: Journalism in the Age of Trump Derangement Syndrome”), the problem is that the “Trump-is-Hitler-and-Republicans-are-latter-day-Nazis analogy just doesn’t function as a meaningful mechanism to understand the daily news,” but the media won’t let it go.

The depiction of Republicans as Nazis — a deliberate smear aimed at all 62.9 million Americans who voted for Trump — goes hand-in-hand with the “Russian collusion” narrative that Michael Tracey and Scott Adams discuss in the context of fired FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe’s book tour (hat-tip: Instapundit). There’s a sort of feedback loop in operation, an echo chamber of fear, where the voice of sanity is drowned out by shrieking paranoia. Pardon me for once again citing my own work (“McCabe’s Weird Anti-Russia Paranoia Reveals ‘Deep State’ Cult Mentality,” Feb. 14), but the obsession with Russia runs hand-in-hand with the belief that “the tone unleashed” has driven a surge of hate in America which, in turn, generates incidents like the Jussie Smollett hoax.

What’s going here? Why have so many people gone batshit crazy?

My theory: The shock of the unexpected — Trump’s surprising 18-month campaign to the White House, defying all the “expert” logic — not only traumatized the liberal media, but also inspired fear within the national-security bureaucracy among those people like Andrew McCabe who had bet heavily on Hillary Clinton winning in 2016. Remember, the same people who whitewashed Hillary’s private email server scandal were the ones who launched the “Russian collusion” investigation, based mainly on the Steele dossier. So all the shabby goings-on within the Justice Department during the Obama years, which would have continued to be covered up if Hillary had been elected, were at risk of exposure by the incoming Trump administration. Therefore, when Trump fired Comey (a signal that the status quo at the FBI/DOJ was about to change) McCabe and others pushed for the appointment of Bob Mueller to investigate “Russian collusion” with Trump. The “Deep State” needed to discredit Trump in order to protect its own secrets, especially the extent to which Hillary had gotten special treatment in the email server scandal.

The fears of McCabe and others inside the FBI/DOJ bureaucracy were paralleled by the liberal media’s fears of Trump’s power to undermine their ability to shape the political narrative. No presidential candidate has ever campaigned with an anti-media message like Trump’s. He took them on directly, called them out by name, turned the tables on them and made resentment of media bias a central issue of his campaign. This is why we have seen tech companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter joining forces with the Left to silence dissent, specifically using the SPLC’s “Hate Group” listings to justify their purges. What is this really about? It’s about protecting the power of the legacy media — CNN, the New York Times, etc. — to influence politics. Liberals understand that the proliferation of right-leaning media channels, everything from Fox News to Breitbart to 4chan to Alex Jones, played a crucial role in defeating Hillary in 2016, and they feared the consequences if such dissenting voices were allowed to continue pushing back against the narrative of the Democrat-Media Complex.

All of these forces on the Left, now including Big Tech as well as the legacy media, have refused to accept the verdict of 2016 — a populist revolt against the political, economic and cultural elite — and this has fed into the intensifying climate of fear. Read this list of “hate” hoaxes since Trump’s election and you get an idea of how this constant fear-mongering impacts the feeble-minded. Of course, liberals blame Trump and his “tone” for this, but in reality the media have become increasingly irresponsible, damaging their own credibility, and what we need now is for the grown-ups in journalism to tell everybody to calm down.




 

 

Category: Donald Trump, Fear. Loathing., Media Bias

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