Let's Take Some Time to Bash the Media, Shall We?

And I'm only on my first cup of coffee

It’s dawn - predawn actually; what happens when moonlight on the snow makes you think it’s close to six and, not wanting to turn on a light and wake the sleeper next to you, you start the coffee before noting it’s 4:45am. That’s fine. There’s a lot of reading to be done and notes to input after this past week’s last-minute trip to the west coast, a trip that had me walking on Venice Beach at sunset, just before the drones moved in from the south.

Or maybe they were drones. It’s the story buzzing around, drone drone drone, so that when the person you are walking with points not very high in the sky, really too low for planes and bobbing over the Pacific like electrified spiders, and says, “What is that? And that, and that…” you think, “drones.” That’s what the brain does, or maybe what desire does, not a craving to see something unique and wondrous, but to confirm the information floating around you. I think some people are more prone to this than others, and if you can answer me why, I will send you some cookies, and if you give me an answer that is startling and puts a useful spin on people rushing off this or that cliff because they perceive it to be the right thing right now, then I will maybe use the fancy butter someone gifted me, and which I ate nearly every bit of, as I spent five nights in a sweet little aqua cottage by the ocean bequeathed me so that I could walk into a new story. The cookies I send you will look better than the ones below, rendered by someone I do not know, you may not get the title allusion (but you can).

I’ve wandered a little far from what I meant to post, the lemming-like escapades of our media class and others who, believing they hear some noble truth they are specially attuned for, take off, zoom! There they go.

How many articles have their been in the past few weeks, “Ding dong! Cancel culture is dead!”? Many. And if I am bored by most of the obituaries, there are nevertheless some good reports. Note that I am not trying to bash Obama, but this long clip, from David Samuels’ “Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment,” is nicely illustrative of the wave so many allowed themselves to be carried away by:

The Obama Democratic Party (ODP) was a kind of balancing mechanism between the power and money of the Silicon Valley oligarchs and their New York bankers; the interests of bureaucratic and professional elites who shuttled between the banks and tech companies and the work of bureaucratic oversight; the ODP’s own sectarian constituencies, which were divided into racial and ethnic categories like “POC,” “MENA,” and “Latinx,” whose bizarre bureaucratic nomenclature signaled their inherent existence as top-down containers for the party’s new-age spoils system; and the world of billionaire-funded NGOs that provided foot-soldiers and enforcers for the party’s efforts at social transformation.

It was the entirety of this apparatus, not just the ability to fashion clever or impactful tweets, that constituted the party’s new form of power. But control over digital platforms, and what appeared on those platforms, was a key element in signaling and exercising that power. The Hunter Biden laptop story, in which party operatives shanghaied 51 former high U.S. government intelligence and security officials to sign a letter that all but declared the laptop to be a fake, and part of a Russian disinformation plot—when most of those officials had very strong reasons to know or believe that the laptop and its contents were real—showed how the system worked. That letter was then used as the basis for restricting and banning factual reports about the laptop and its contents from digital platforms, with the implication that allowing readers to access those reports might be the basis for a future accusation of a crime. None of this censorship was official, of course: Trump was in the White House, not Obama or Biden. What that demonstrated was that the real power, including the power to control functions of the state, lay elsewhere.

Even more unusual, and alarming, was what followed Trump’s defeat in 2020. With the Democrats back in power, the new messaging apparatus could now formally include not just social and institutional pressure but the enforcement arms of the federal bureaucracy, from the Justice Department to the FBI to the SEC. As the machine ramped up, censoring dissenting opinions on everything from COVID, to DEI programs, to police conduct, to the prevalence and the effects of hormone therapies and surgeries on youth, large numbers of people began feeling pressured by an external force that they couldn’t always name; even greater numbers of people fell silent. In effect, large-scale changes in American mores and behavior were being legislated outside the familiar institutions and processes of representative democracy, through top-down social pressure machinery backed in many cases by the threat of law enforcement or federal action, in what soon became known as a “whole of society” effort.

At every turn over the next four years, it was like a fever was spreading, and no one was immune. Spouses, children, colleagues, and supervisors at work began reciting, with the force of true believers, slogans they had only learned last week, and that they were very often powerless to provide the slightest real-world evidence for. These sudden, sometimes overnight, appearances of beliefs, phrases, tics, looked a lot like the mass social contagions of the 1950s—one episode after another of rapid-onset political enlightenment replacing the appearance of dance crazes or Hula-Hoops.

So it’s nearly 2025, and people do get tired of the same sweep the leg, but I doubt they will tire of the ease with which they can take others down if they believe it will concurrently help them to rise. And while I have no particular reason to bash Chris Cillizza, his “confession” here - that he should have not have, you know, deep-throated for years what the White House was telling him about Biden’s suitability to stay in office - cannot be anything but parody, right? Whom does he think is swallowing this disingenuity?

Look, I know the dude is probably trying to keep his job; they all are...