Democrats seem to believe Americans are so gullible and stupefied that friendly reporters can openly quote the left gloating about how they lie, steal, and cheat to get power.
We saw it in February with a bombshell Time magazine article crowing about Democrats’ successful “conspiracy” to rig the 2020 election through aggressive lawsuits, a compliant corporate media, and the ability to deploy rioters. Big tech still chokes people on the right who make similar claims, including former President Trump, but not Time magazine. It’s like they want their political opponents to know they’re liars who abuse power and that we can’t do a thing about it.
Now on May 8, New York Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi is out with an article quoting Democrats celebrating their success at lying to Americans about the true goals of the president their “conspiracy” elected. Nuzzi claims a “person close to the White House” told her, “At his hundred-day mark, Biden is the most liberal president we’ve had — and the public thinks he’s a moderate. That’s a winning strategy to me. They’re willing to accept that you’re gonna write this piece as long as they know that swing voters in Colorado aren’t gonna read it.”
The full article discusses the steps the Biden White House takes to lie to Americans about what Democrats are doing with unified control of the federal government. Item number one is the border crisis, which the White House has instructed obedient corporate reporters not to call “a crisis.” The Associated Press, which controls the language use of most media through its AP Stylebook, quickly complied, issuing admonitions that outlets “avoid” the term.
When President Biden accidentally called the historic surge in foreigners illegally entering the United States a “crisis,” his press team displayed “the unusual degree to which his staff seeks to control the narrative (and often succeeds) by controlling the press and the president himself,” Nuzzi writes. She further explains the gyrations Biden’s press team went through to control corporate media’s use of language on this issue:
[White House Press Secretary Jen] Psaki attempted to clarify: It was not the position of the White House that the border was in crisis; Biden had meant to refer to the circumstances everywhere prior to migrants’ arrival at the border. Psaki and other White House officials carefully explained to me the distinction: The conditions that compel migrants to the border are crises, and the conditions of the journey are a crisis, but the border itself is not a crisis because the Biden administration has not sown chaos as Trump did, and the policy response to the challenge has not been chaotic. It’s a crisis until it reaches American soil, in other words, then it’s a challenge.
As Rachel Campos-Duffy pointed out Friday, except for Fox News, corporate media has fully complied with the White House’s demands to obscure and retcon Biden’s border crisis, which is only worsening amid the media blackout.
When Trump appeared to contradict himself or attempt to get reporters to see things from his perspective, it generated slogans and jeers that follow him and his comms people to this day. Nuzzi would know that, as she covered the Trump White House for the Daily Beast.
For Biden’s press team, however, Nuzzi presents lying about what the president said and demanding to control what media outlets report as this quirky little thing all White Houses do that is “mostly innocent.” Nuzzi admiringly reports that this pressure on media outlets is controlled by higherups within the White House. Imagine the nuclear rhetorical explosion that would ensue if the Trump White House was caught or framed into appearing to do either of these things. We’d be treated to another round of accusations he’s a “fascist.”
More important than the continued and obvious double standards these propaganda outlets apply against Republicans is the effects of their information warfare against the United States’s promised system of representative self-government. Americans can’t govern themselves if essential information is withheld from them and manipulated. In such conditions, they are only being duped into believing their votes really affect governance.
If corporate media can control what people believe is true about a politician, they can control who people elect. If millions of additional people illegally enter the United States this year, most of them for good, but the majority of Americans who don’t live near the border have no idea this is happening, does it affect voting in 2022 and 2024? Obviously, and perhaps decisively. That’s the point.
What about if the president requires all institutions affected by federal control to teach Americans to hate each other because of their skin color? And what about if Democrats execute a federal takeover of state elections that mandates insecure voting methods susceptible to fraud and manipulation, and all of big corporate tells Americans that to question such a bill means you’re a Jim Crow-supporting bigot? Again, what if Americans either learn nothing of such things or believe about it what they are told by “news” outlets that publish exactly what Democrats tell them to?
Democrats’ control of the institutions that mediate public discourse equals control of the American people. Democracy indeed dies in darkness. And the people who say that are the ones who turned out the lights.
