Poetic Injustice

Just as a reminder, the Conservative Treehouse is still going hard at it covering the greatest political scandal in American history. See here for a recent post on just how complicit the media has been in all this, which is why I label it the greatest political scandal. There are certainly other competing scandals for the title. A number of foreign wars based on lies & fake intel were highly scandalous, but at least weren't a direct assault on America's democratic process. The only thing that might be worse was the Kennedy assassination, which most Americans suspect was the result of some sort of conspiracy. But even if you believe the very worst, that Lyndon Johnson played a role, or - my preferred theory - that a CIA coup led by ousted directer Allan Dulles removed an existential threat, even then the scandal falls short of the current one, because of the role of the media in promoting a slew of obvious lies, not to mention a political party that has made the delusion it's primary platform, and a significant portion of the population adopting the narrative with religious fervor, despite all evidence to the contrary. The Kennedy conspiracy, if true, was at least relatively contained and didn't entail the broad-spectrum propaganda machinery we see in operation today.

There was recently a fake scandal from the White House because Sarah Sanders would not state, as demanded, that the media is "not the enemy." Good on her for refusing to adopt their frame-up job. The game where they make you denounce various things as evil, or you yourself are evil, is merely a tool of control. Either answer makes you their puppet, so the correct response is not to play their game at all. The public demand for spiritual purity is just what would be expected from the Neopuritans. "Do you denounce Satan and all his works?" has become "do you reject Putin and all his Russian bots?" Likewise, "do you believe in one Holy, Catholic and apostolic Church?" has become a demand for fealty to the various liberal institutions. When the reporter grills Sanders to say the media is not the enemy, he is merely trying to virtuously expose a heretic before his high-status Cult peers.

Well, the thing about it is that the press are the enemy. This was all in context of Trump, and the media have made themselves his enemy from day one. They are engaged in a program of lies to try to destroy him entirely. Their primary effort is political opposition to the elected president. That much is objectively true. The case is made very well by Sundance. The media have had a leaked copy of the FISA application for over a year, but have refused to report the truth about it because that would be politically beneficial to the president. That is one example of many, but is in itself sufficient to prove the point.

They are clearly the enemy of Trump. It is not even a value statement. They are trying to remove him from power, thus they are his enemy. It's too bad Sanders didn't flip the script on them, asking whether or not they are the president's enemy. It is, after all, their question to answer.

But even in the more general sense, they are the enemy. They are the enemy of conservatives, no doubt, but also of the whole experiment with liberal democracy. Crooked politicians are an enemy, but we kind of expect that, and so did the Founders. That's why they worked so diligently to ensure the various self-insterested entities would be balanced against each other. We also expect the voters to be somewhat irrational. Again, the Founders were very concerned to buttress against the tyranny of mob rule. But, that the press would be engaged in co-ordinated programs of absolute deceit....well, even if the Founders foresaw such a scenario, they did not architect a preventive solution. And how could they? In reality, if a political propaganda machine is successful, there is no good legal counter. The Soviet Union had an even better bill of rights in their constitution than we do, which only amounted to a "parchment guarantee." If the truth is blocked from the people, it hardly matters what the laws are. For that matter, it hardly matters what the government is. An absolute monarch reigning over an informed, reasonable population would be far less tyrannical than a liberal democracy with a majority obeying a cult of ignorance and hysteria.

The media are the enemy, because only they can enable or prevent tyranny. The difference between an honest media and a lying media is the difference between an investment agent who gets you a good return, and one who embezzles your retirement and disappears to a tropical island. Whose side the media on is quite important. Those pre-occupied with the acquisition of power will seek to limit the information that gets to the public, while those dedicated to freedom will battle to liberate information. The most insightful thing Alex Jones ever did was to grab the domain Infowars.com for his news/entertainment outfit. Because it is all an information war. Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery. How fitting that he has now been banned by the media. It is poetic injustice that shouldn't be lost on anyone paying attention.