All the above examples illustrate the fundamental difference in the way leftists and conservatives view the role of government.
Because of its contempt for the average person leading to an inflated overestimation of themselves, leftists view government as the solution to all our problems, able to eliminate (or at least greatly reduce) poverty, inequality, racism and other ills, ushering in a golden age of “social justice.” At least that’s what they tell us.
The contempt and groupthink they are mired in also require the silencing of those who disagree, and the complete conformity and allegiance to the Marxist agenda. If only government were bigger, taxes were higher so the rich and corporations paid their “fair share” (a vague term with no commonly accepted definition), and government regulations were more far-reaching, most people would be better off in this view.
All of this is the excuse with which to manipulate societies into accepting the view that the individual is incompetent to run their own lives, and only political bureaucrats know what’s best and can save society from itself. This has been the animating force driving the massive growth of government since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt began creating an alphabet soup of new federal agencies and giving them broad new powers to do things America’s founders never imagined should be federal responsibilities.
Marx popularized the phrase “From each according to ability; to each according his needs,” summing up his view of a world in which talent and merit are irrelevant and bring no reward.67 In reality, no society on Earth has ever achieved this false end stage of communism because it is really meant to punish human nature, destroy the talented, and condemn the desire to succeed. Marxism is the cancer of envy, normalized and rewarded.
The leftist obsession with “equity” (meaning equal outcomes, as opposed to the far better path of equal opportunities) was espoused by Karl Marx. He said this would lead to a supposed communist paradise where private property and money would ultimately be abolished. However, such a “paradise” would also abolish incentives to work hard, innovate, and advance the cause of human progress. Why would pioneers of science and industry like Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler, John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and many others accomplish all they did and risk everything on untested ideas if they had no prospect of financial success, and if extreme government regulations punished them for their creativity and productivity?
Conservatives understand it’s no accident that the free enterprise system limits government power, incentivizes individual initiative, and is the key to economic success and innovation. They also know this system enables the flourishing of human rights and the preservation of liberty specifically because the people gain and maintain their own power, keeping government in line.
Conservatives also understand that Big Government is usually not a benevolent parental figure taking care of the citizenry, but rather an iron-fisted oppressor forcing the population to bow down to the almighty bureaucratic state.
If Aristotle, Huxley, and Orwell could magically come back to life and view the suffering brought about by Big Government tyranny around the world since their deaths, we can imagine them saying in unison: “We told you so. Now do something about it.” Doing something means deliberately cutting government down to a manageable size (many of the agencies that exist now serve only to maintain the behemoth of government while subjecting the citizens to federal diktats and edicts), and strengthening the freedom of individuals, and the businesses and organizations they create, to build a better future for us all.
It’s a simple cure, but like all change threatening the establishment status quo, it requires courage to implement.
Chapter 7 Propaganda and Witch Trials
The mob I now faced carried no ropes or guns. Its weapons were smooth-tongued lies spoken into microphones and printed on the front pages of America’s newspapers. It no longer sought to break the bodies of its victims. Instead it devastated their reputations and drained away their hope.
—SUPREME COURT JUSTICE CLARENCE THOMAS1
Mass media are the indispensable weapon the worldwide left relies on to spread its lies, misery, and fear. This is why the malevolent left has always coveted controlling the tools of communication in society to frighten, harm, and control the populace. The modern age has provided the world mass electronic media. It can be a wonderful, life-enhancing medium, but for the left it has been a terrible weapon with which to frighten, harm, and control. It was inevitable it would become an irresistible method with which the corrupt would spread their misery and fear without limit.
Understanding the power of the media, the American left has been remarkably successful at dominating communication platforms in the US and around the world. This explains why the Marxist agenda of fear is so easily dispersed through most of mainstream news media and becomes the prevalent “frame” or “spin” as chaos drives the left’s ideological war against the free-market system and individual rights and freedom.
Radical leftists, having embedded themselves within the American academic, political, and media establishments, know that their victimhood agenda would naturally be rejected by the vast majority of people everywhere. So leftist radicals have embraced a propaganda campaign to romanticize, incentivize, and normalize their Marxist claims of victimhood to justify overturning the old order. For this existential lie to work, the left has infiltrated and seized control over much of the media to weaponize mass communications to successfully brainwash and manipulate as many people as quickly as possible. And, as we’ve learned, they will use government to coerce media to censor and crush unapproved voices and ideas.
Make no mistake—the radicals of the 1960s didn’t just disappear into Haight-Ashbury’s drug-ridden side streets, stake out tents in Berkeley’s parks, or set up candle and incense shops following the Woodstock countercultural music festival. The red-diaper babies* that came after them went to college, where they were churned out as journalists, politicians, lawyers, community organizers, and activists working for nonprofits pushing the far-left agenda. A short three generations later we’re seeing the tragic result of the left’s focused effort to control our cultural and social infrastructure, including media, government, education, and law.
In the twentieth century, radical journalists have become evangelists for wokeism—the new religion of the left that preaches an apocalyptic fear of gathering oppression, rejection of free speech, equality of outcomes, and the necessity of discrimination against some groups for justice. They want us to fear being labeled as bigots if we embrace traditional American values, American exceptionalism, and a positive view of American history and our nation’s place in the world. They praise millionaire sports stars who disrespectfully kneel when our national anthem is played as heroic “social justice warriors.”
These journalists deride police seeking to quell rioting and looting in cities across the nation as racist oppressors. They denounce parents and government officials as backward and prejudiced for wanting to shield children in early elementary school grades from lessons about sex. They elevate “progressive” Democrats and socialists as the true patriots who will usher in better futures for the downtrodden, soak the rich and corporations with sky-high taxation, impose an enormous regulatory burden on businesses, and transform life as we know it in a fanatical crusade against climate change. Their goal is not just to use fear to attract the biggest audiences, but to use fear as a powerful weapon to push a leftist Big Government agenda.
Control of media is the linchpin for the success of the entirety of the Marxist agenda. America’s liberal news media—made up of the vast majority of US news organizations and most of the journalists they employ—are now unabashedly in the Marxist business of fomenting fear and anxiety as a means of controlling what we think and what we do. It is fear itself they covet; fear itself without resolution but the chronic, unsolvable perpetual kind of fear meant to drive people into a compliant state of mass anxiety.
It’s not one act, one story, or one event. The impact on us results from a combination of efforts. The media want us to think what’s happening in this country is a natural and organic meltdown. The Democrats love phrases like “new normal” and “painful transitions,” which is Joe Biden’s favorite trope. Barack Obama loved telling us about his plans to “fundamentally transform” the country.
How has that been working out for all of us?
Leftist journalists don’t sit under looming portraits of Karl Marx, plotting the next Bolshevik revolution. Their efforts are much more insidious. For activist liberal journalists, propagandizing for Democrats is the natural and appropriate thing to do. After all, these journalists believe they are so much more enlightened and public-spirited than the millions of hardworking and patriotic Americans they smear as semi-fascists clinging to politically incorrect religious and traditional values. After all, what makes us “deplorable” is our unwillingness to confront the apocalypses coming from pandemics, climate change, Trump’s foreign string pullers, systemic racism, and whatever number of other frights-of-the-day may be useful.
These smears are designed to reinforce and spread contempt for the average American. When I was on the left, I recall everyone being inspired and encouraged by rhetoric casting conservatives as evil and hopeless enemies. When I worked with journalists to create stories and get coverage of the liberal policies I was supporting, it was genuine teamwork. There was no pretense about it. I reflect on those times and the fact that every aspect of my work, including with media, reinforced my leftist ideology and sense of rightness. Everyone felt the same way; everyone understood. In order for that to work, we were to not watch or listen to “the enemy.” It was crazy to even consider having friends who were not activists or “in the fold.”
Now I know why. Because the moment a different idea appears, or an action is challenged, or someone you may grow to respect questions the false reality that has been built around you, the walls begin to crack. Listening to “evil” conservative media was especially forbidden. Speaking with conservatives was existentially dangerous because then you would find out just how much your feminist “mentors” had lied to you. And I speak from experience.
This is at the heart of the leftist obsession with censorship and controlling what people read, hear, see, and are “allowed” to say. Leftists understand that their arguments and narratives, when challenged and exposed, fall apart. They operate through lies and manipulation that cannot be maintained when even glanced at in the light. They also understand the power of even one voice when it presents the truth.
From Cancel Culture to “Depersoning”
What is now called “cancel culture”—destroying the lives of dissenters, nonconformists, and others deemed troublemakers for the establishment—is an old weapon of the left. The dead Soviet Union and current Russian regime, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and the cancerous Chinese Communist Party have long histories of using murder, imprisonment, and “disappearances” to cancel journalists, political opponents, activists, and noncompliant influencers. For us, another term might be “depersoning,” because the goal is to shut people out of every part of life. Both cancel culture and depersoning seek not just accountability for a perceived wrongdoer, but destruction of their public life and ability to participate in society. The mob wants them to be unemployable, undatable, unfriendable, unwanted in restaurants or on planes, shouted down in every venue, and excluded from everything, including family.
The individuals featured in the following case studies have been written about extensively for years by those who recognize the injustice done to them at the hands of a burgeoning totalitarian government and its media handmaidens. The following commentary about Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and President Donald Trump provide important and specific examples of the vile collusion of the Democrat-Media Axis and how consistent, focused, and vicious their war against the foundation and values of this nation has been.
These three cases also share a particularly important element: sensationalized stories threatening the reputations, careers, and even lives of the targets involved in leaking the core accusation by a member of the government to the media.
In our first case study, what Thomas called his “high-tech lynching” began when President George H. W. Bush sent his Supreme Court nomination to the Senate in July 1991. The attempt to derail-by-smear Thomas’s confirmation began when a former coworker, Anita Hill, provided a confidential statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee alleging sexual harassment by Thomas. And voila, NPR’s Nina Totenberg and Tim Phelps of Newsday each suddenly obtained a copy and reported on Hill’s unsubstantiated allegations.2
In our second case, the Kavanaugh virtual assassination circus went public when Christine Blasey Ford gave an interview to the Washington Post in July 2018, alleging that a drunken Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in high school in 1982. After approaching media, Blasey Ford then made the same unsubstantiated allegation to Representative Anna Eshoo (D-CA). Eshoo then gave a letter from Blasey Ford to Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who was the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.3
Our third case, in what some argue amounted to a coup attempt against Trump,4 became public when FBI director James Comey gave confidential notes of a meeting with Trump to a college professor friend with the request that the individual provide it to the media, which the friend dutifully did.5 This unethical subterfuge was designed to allow Comey to say he didn’t leak the notes to the media, even though he used his friend as the middleman to do exactly that.
None of these premeditated character assassinations were organic or natural. They were all plots that required cooperation and amplification by the media.
This is one of the goals of normalizing the abnormal—making us accept something completely destructive and wrong as the “new normal.” Many of you are familiar with the following events, but now think of them within our context of the spreading of fear beyond the target and the necessary involvement of the media in the “fake news” attack. We previously saw how the goal of spreading huge, amorphous fears is having the mind-killed turn over power to a technocratic elite. They want you to believe the only path to safety is obeying the authoritative and high-status. And who does the left believe is more authoritative and high-status than journalists?
Justice Clarence Thomas
In 1991, Clarence Thomas withstood one of the most obscene and egregious assaults by liberal media in memory. Thomas’s comment that opened this chapter comes from his wide-ranging 2007 memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, in which he recounted his October 1991 Senate confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court. It became what was for most Americans, as he described it, a “high-tech lynching” concocted by Democrats and their allies in the media. Thomas is a black man who grew up in poverty and achieved professional success in government with humility and keen skepticism. Liberal groups protested his appointment to an appellate court on ideological grounds, but they really came out in force when a seat opened on the high court.
Democrats were still riding high from shooting down Robert Bork, whom Reagan had nominated for the court. This time, they knew they would need more.
Thomas testified for hours on his own behalf, and after that concluded, he found himself suddenly accused of sexual harassment in the press after someone leaked FBI documents. A public feeding frenzy began as Democrats began calling for his withdrawal.
Sound familiar?
