Afghanistan — of all places — may have saved America.
An important part of our democracy has been stolen from us — far more devastating than the right to vote. Democracy cannot work, despite the ostensible presence of other freedoms, when the mediacracy are tyrannical. The media are called the “Fourth Estate,” and they are a critical lynchpin in democracy. We rely on them to investigate fraud when no one on either side within “The System” will do so. When corruption so permeates the very System itself, when players on both sides come to realize that their best personal game is to allow corruption to fester — “you rub my back, and I’ll rub your back” — all we have left are the media. With their own theoretically independent funding and their own theoretical motivation to lead the way uncovering Truth, they have comprised democracy’s safety net since John Peter Zenger. How sad it is that we now are rearing generations of Ignoranti at colleges that are so focused on 1619 Projects and Systemic Yada-Yada that every college student knows about trash like Cardi B but not one in a hundred knows who Zenger was . . . or Nathan Hale.
Patrick Henry got it wrong: Give me education, or give me death. Oh yeah. They never heard of Patrick Henry either.
The media uncovered not only Watergate but also the abasements of Monica Lewinsky and Paula Corbin Jones and Gennifer Flowers and Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey. They exposed Iran-Contra but also the Bay of Pigs. Until the past quarter-century, they certainly tilted so far left that, if they were a pinball machine, the game would have been canceled. But they also exposed the other side.
They now are a different media. Many of us did not realize way-back-when that Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, and Edward R. Murrow actually were partisans of the Left. But they also were good journalists. And, fair is fair: The Left should be entitled to their partisans as long as we’ve got ours. And we had ours.
What has changed is very complex — and yet profoundly simple. First, we expanded to cable news. Life in America is about profit-making. Early CNN — the James Earl Jones voice, Bernard Shaw at the anchor — aimed to make money by offering news 24-7. However, as time unfolded and more players entered — MSNBC, Fox News — the profit race found greater riches by appealing to niche markets. If the Bluth Family of “Arrested Development” ultimately learned that there is money in the banana stand, so it is that cable discerned there is money in raising the temperature and anger in the room. Get conservatives angry enough, and they will watch Tucker, Sean, or Laura rant their rant. Get the liberals and backward progressives angry, and they will croon to Cuomo, Lemon, and Tapper. By contrast, if we all are calm, then we don’t bother watching any of them, and they all get fewer viewers, so earn less money.
And the same is true with online magazines and print media. The New York Times never was a fair player. They covered up Hitler’s Holocaust. They covered up Stalin’s Holodomor. But they postured as though fair. Now they don’t even bother to posture. They are outright left, as is the Washington Post, because their business model correctly assumes conservatives will not subscribe, but Rachel Maddow will. So they talk to her, while the New York Post and Wall Street Journal opinion pages talk to the other side. They raise the heat in the room. Everyone makes money. And never the twain shall meet.
The only problem is that, under this new “information” regime that replaces the aura of fact with the heat of often-crazed opinion, where even “fact checkers” are corrupt, the big money is not to be found in exposing Watergate and Iran-Contra. Rather, the money is in advancing the angst and jealousy embedded in the Big Lie of “Systemic Racism” and the lie that police specifically target Blacks for death and the lie that the southern border is under control and the lie that Ocasio is a brilliant young mind reflecting a new generation. Consider the last of that litany. She does indeed reflect a new generation, while her mind is as brilliant as is any other piece of reflecting glass: if you get your hair done and professionally washed and your nails professionally polished and your complexion professionally cosmeticized, it indeed is more alluring in the mirror — but it still has the IQ of a piece of glass.
In this environment of suppressed information autocracy and tyrannical media, we encounter the further wall of social media blocking out the light. Only one side has unfettered access. It is beyond contemplation how evilly Facebook, Twitter, and the others now have allied to close out legitimate coherent, fact-based conservative thought that challenges their premises.
So we are stuck in a polity that is constructed on democratic principles of free association, free thought, free speech, free assembly — but not really. In Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971), the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, we learned that the Bill of Rights permits wearing a garment that says “F*** the Draft” (with the first word fully spelled out), and in United States v. Eichman, 496 U.S. 310 (1990), we learned it is OK to burn the American flag. And yet, free speech, free thought, and free association are not the facts on the ground. Visit this web page as a reminder that American academia now decapitates many of its finest minds with the same gusto that al-Qaida chops. Professors are fired, lose their careers and incomes, and lose the chance to feed their spouses and kids when they express conservative views. Who would blame any of them for borrowing Paul Robert Cohen’s jacket and replacing the words “the Draft” with “Cancel Culture”? So free speech, association, and thought has been lost. Professors may attend “Black Lives Matter” and Antifa riots aimed at killing policemen, but they are professionally doomed if they march or otherwise associate for causes that demonstrate infidelity to the Left.
We now live under suppression.
As one consequence of that media suppression, Joe Biden was elected president of the United States. The Washington Post’s slogan actually is right: Democracy Dies in Darkness. It simply is unusual, outside of movies, for the criminal so publicly to tout his own crime. They and their ilk have snuffed out significant aspects of democracy by suppressing the light. Biden is a lifelong, 50-year failure in public service, a demonstrable liar and cheat, a plagiarist, and a grifter who has manipulated the honor of serving the public. Through 50 years, he has been remarkably wrong, consistently so. Whether it was Einstein or someone else who first coined that definition of insanity, Biden proves its truth for all who quote it. His spoken words have been extraordinarily racist, truly Ku Klux Klan Kwality, whether commenting on his sense that Blacks are by nature an unkempt dirty people who deserve unique approbation when one of them has taken a bath or shower, commenting on Indo-Asians and donut stores, so much else. On foreign policy — always wrong.
One hesitates to use the words “Biden” and “ideas” on the same page, much less same sentence. A Biden idea? He does not even have an idea that he does not have an idea. In that glorious 2020 Democrat “debate,” he was talking about encouraging our young people to play 33 rpm records. And yet, maybe he was onto something: what else to suggest as snowflakes retire to their safe spaces, shielding from microaggressions and awaiting trigger warnings to mull alongside their play-doh, cups of cocoa, and emotional support animals? Just lost.
And yet, this was and is the puppet, the John Gill of Planet Ekos, whom the media set up for this presidency. They blacked out Trump from Twitter and Facebook, blacked out the Hunter Biden scandals, failed to comment on the unprecedented canceling of a presidential debate to assist Biden while he played defense, failed to investigate the various improprieties that pocked the November 2020 election, and have promoted the Biden presidency ever since. They have perpetuated the myth that he is in charge, has a grip, has a plan, is a peacemaker who brings people together, is beyond partisan. And we just cannot break the Truth through into the mainstream left cabal of ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. For six months the lies held, so Biden’ popularity held though it never soared.
But then came Afghanistan. We needed the turbans to reach the suburbans.
There simply are certain stories that cannot be suppressed. Gary Powers. The Bay of Pigs. Watergate. Jimmy Carter’s Iran Hostage Nightmare. The first Bush lying and raising taxes after promising “read my lips: no new taxes.” The Clinton harem. The Twin Towers. Obama’s and Hillary’s — and our — ambassador to Libya. Malaysia Flight 370.
Afghanistan is of that dimension. Notwithstanding the Left Mediacracy’s monopoly on “Our Truth,” the cartel-like protection of Biden from outside inquiry, they just could not suppress the mess in Afghanistan: the fall of an entire country, its government, its military almost as rapidly as an infant toppling a house of “Lincoln Logs” . . . after we foolishly had invested so much blood, treasure, and more in that jungle we had no business trying to change. The unforgiveable deaths of 13 of our boys and girls who gave all — but who really did not sign up to lose their lives that way. It is a story that could not be suppressed.
For half a year, Biden was polling as the most popular guy in D.C. What’s not to like? Uncle Joe? Everyone likes bumbling, stumbling, fumbling, crumbling, mumbling Uncle Joe.
Finally, the Truth got out, Stan, because of Afghanistan. The left-wing Politico had him polling at +26 favorability at election and in mid-February. At +24 in mid-March. At +22 in mid-April. At +14 in mid-May. We could not shake the mindless approbation that locked Biden in as beloved and sacred because the left mediacracy ran interference for him and suppressed the truth about the fellow. But Afghanistan could not be suppressed. By late August, even the left-wing Politico had Biden’s favorability crashing down to a tie. And now he is below water. Meanwhile, other polls at other sources with fewer dogs in the hunt now — finally — have Uncle Joe movin’ kinda slow at the junction. The Economist/YouGov has had him at -5 and -6 throughout September. The RCP daily averages have followed his bee-line into minus territory since Kabul.
The ice simply had to be broken, as it was when Obama slid to the 2010 and 2014 shellackings. The façade simply was going to be shattered sooner or later. Americans simply needed to get a glimpse that the emperor not only is naked but also does not know where the clothes are drawered or that he is the emperor or over what entity he reigns.
For this, a small thanks to Kabul. With the aura of Biden invincibility collapsed beyond the circle of those who had his number from Day One, we now embark on taking back the America stolen from us.
