Our news media exists in a strange nether world where the Republican corruption from one story – their acceptance of the Big Lie – never laps over into a story about the very same corrupt Republicans running for office or “governing”. The press has a remarkable ability to turn from a story about Republicans visibly supporting the insurrection to one about Democrats refusing to be “bi-partisan”. Wait, what? Are the Democrats supposed to suddenly forget the insurrection ever happened just so they can reach across the aisle and make nice with Republicans? For the sake of “making nice”? Why is our news media incapable of holding two opposing thoughts in its head at the same time – or even just two thoughts?
This is what comes from thinking “both sides do it” and then pretending to be journalists. As one side in the American political equation is entirely cynical – that’d be the Republicans – when the news media also becomes cynical (when what they’re supposed to be is skeptical, a very different thing), it means the news media is automatically reporting one side’s point of view as the norm. How else could rich, white men get away with so much corruption for so long? “Both sides do it” is about the most conservative way one can view humanity. We’re all alike. Screw us all!
If our news media would only just read and aggregate its own reporting, it would have an entirely different view of Trump and the GOP – a deep, balanced and nuanced view of a party that’s chosen to represent a narrow and narrowing interest: permanent white hegemony in America. If our news media would just ask follow up questions to answers they already have! For instance – what did current GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy mean when he entered a meeting of GOP leaders on June 25, 2016 and said forthrightly “There’s two people I think Putin pays – Rohrbacher and Trump – swear to God!”?
Why did then Speaker of the House Paul Ryan end the conversation – insisting that no one outside the room repeat it what had been discussed? If Putin “pays Trump”, that makes Trump a grave national security threat. Why isn’t everyone whipping out their cell phones and calling the FBI – as good, patriotic Americans would have done? Why did everyone there – the GOP leadership – go along with Ryan? Did they agree with him that this terrible secret needed to be kept in the “family”?
Does that in any way explain every last bit of subsequent Trumpian and Republican fealty to Vladimir Putin?
And, hey – doesn’t that sound an awful lot like treason?
Gosh, what if the Republican resistance to any oversight whatsoever to anything Trump did has less to do with its overall corruption and more to do with the fact that, at its root, Trumpian corruption is treasonous? The moment the Republican Party chose to keep Trump’s corruption a secret, they became Trump’s co-conspirators: in committing TREASON. Quick side note? One doesn’t have to knowingly commit treason in order to be charged, prosecuted and punished as a traitor. Ask Ethel Rosenberg.
Paul Manafort served time in prison – before Trump pardoned him – for handing proprietary polling data to Russian military intelligence (aka Oleg Deripaska and Konstantin Kilimnik). If the weaponized Facebook ads that emerged from the GRU’s cyber unit and landed on the individual Facebook pages of Black, Democratic voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or Michigan caused one Black Democratic voter to stay home? The line has been crossed and a crime was absolutely committed.
Take this to the bank: many Black Democratic voters chose to stay home because they’d been propagandized by Russia in order to help Donald Trump get elected. Meanwhile (as the investigation into the insurrection is demonstrating) the Republicans were assaulting our democracy on multiple fronts. The owners of voting machine company ES&S – they make the overwhelming majority of voting machines in America – have steadfastly refused to remove the back doors to their voting machine systems. They have refused to provide permanent paper records of what their machines do. They have refused to be transparent. They have Republican politicians on their board of directors. They donate a lot of money to Republicans running for office.
The reason Republicans have turned on voting by mail and via drop off? It’s cutting the voting machines out of the process. Hmmmmm… now why would THAT bother Republicans? The lack of transparency on ES&S’s part screams volumes. Look, the name of the game – if one was a voting machine company and one wanted to cheat an election – isn’t in flipping votes. That’s too obvious. Too easy to figure out the existence of a discrepancy. Padding one candidate’s totals is far easier to pull off – harder to discern – and therefore less likely to raise the kind of red flags that would invite scrutiny. All a code writer would have to drop into a voting machine’s instruction is something like “for every ten Republican voters, add one”. That would instantly add ten percent to the Republican’s tally (which is why they’d choose a less aggressive percentage). Think of a race that’s close – within the margin of error. Now add three percent to the Republican’s tally and voila! The Republican wins and everyone agrees the Democrats just didn’t “show up” the way the Republicans supposedly did.
Want to know how far gone we already are? Our news media is convinced that “cheating to win” is just another way “to win”. They’ve already normalized the mechanism when, instead, they should be the ones squawking loudest about every cheat that Trump and the Republican Party employ. Our press shouldn’t be normalizing Republican corruption (as just the Republicans’ point of view), they should be digging into it!
The Big Lie isn’t “just their opinion”. It’s utter bullshit. Deliberate utter bullshit meant to destroy our collective acceptance of Truth. There is no such thing as an “alternative reality”. There is only one reality – the one the majority of us live in. What Republicans are living in is “an alternative TO reality”. Not the same thing.
Every time a “journalist” reports on Trump running for the presidency, they’re pretending every last bit of history that preceded that moment never happened. They’re pretending their own reporting never happened. Makes one wonder… is American journalism already dead?
If Trump “wins” the White House, that will mean we’re much further down the road than we realized – much further past the point of no return. Trump’s never won anything – not fairly. If he “wins”, it’s because the rest of the guard rails meant to contain him failed. Republican attorneys general will be the ones deciding election outcomes instead of voters. White hegemony will be in full bloom.
But, that flower won’t be around long. A diverse America will never go along with what the Republican Party wants to do. Yeah, the American Republic will be dead – strangled by the GOP. But a new American Republic will begin to rise in its place – one that believes ardently in E Pluribus Unum and that All People Are Equal Before The Law (because “All men are created equal” was code for “White, Christian, land-owning men ONLY”).
One way or another, conservatives will lose this fight because they are outnumbered – and by a diverse population who is over being abused by them. Donald Trump ironically may turn out to be the spark that reinvented America.