Let’s get back on the track unwinding before us in 2021 to 2024. The dominant Muddy Stream Media will continue to discredit itself by zealous partisanship on behalf of their brothers and sisters. It begins to look as if they have lost the ability to even make a pretense of objective non-partisan journalism.
The Washington Post provided a prime example when it announced on Jan. 23 that the Post’s fact checkers had identified 30,573 false or misleading claims Trump had made as president. It offered a database for anyone who wanted to check. Think about that a bit. It’s an imposing, scary figure but useless as news.
It’s possible that some laborious political science professor somewhere might work his or her way through his list, but that number, 30,573, does not qualify as news. It’s not going to be examined by any voter in full possession of his mental faculties. The Trumpofphobes will think “See we always knew he was a mendacious swindler. The Trumpophiliacs will dismiss the evil leftist press for making stuff up. “And so what? All politician lie anyway and we like our liar.”
Let’s not waste time defending Trump’s accuracy. An impression shared by many is that he was not so much a deliberate, calculating liar as an intellectual featherweight who considered any news he liked as fact and never gave it a second thought. He simply moved on to the next factoid that caught his attention. His incessant, compulsive twitterbabble made it impossible to even keep up with his own statements. How would he have found time? His habits of excited overstatement made it still harder to take his babble seriously.
Biden’s sparse and feeble election rallies revealed that there was no solid mass of Biden fans. It will fall to the usual journalists, editorialists, communication directors, and pundits to manufacture enthusiasm for the addled old bore. The NYT’s star columnist Nicholas Kristov assures us that although Joe Biden is not a great orator he is appealing for unity and promises to be a president even for those who voted against him.
Here’s his brightest rhetorical gem: “Let’s start afresh,” he urges us, “Let’s see one another. Show respect for one another.” This qualifies as “boilerplate” because of its hackneyed and formulaic content. Although these sound like the commonplace insincerities of generic politicians of both mainstream political parties, we can’t be sure that Good Ol’ Joe doesn’t actually believe them. His well-known appetite for banalities make this probable.
His unifying message seemed madly inconsistent to many. Our new president told his listeners that we are a “great nation” and a “good people” which oppresses minorities, inflicts growing inequities, stings of systemic racism, and displays an inexhaustible urge for inflicting “white supremacy” on the POC population. Now we are hearing “a cry for racial justice, some four hundred years in the making.”
That brings us to another reliable prediction. The range of opinions and analyses which can be freely discussed will continue to contract, The cancel posses will perfect their arsenal of suppression. and volunteer censors will multiply via the social media. And, of course, there will always be mobs of undergraduate harangue-outang eager to show up and shout.
President Joe has dodged difficult and dangerous positions for a whole generation, but has always been flexible about accepting fashionable opinions. Delaware was a model moderate state when he was first elected and he made no waves in the prevailing political culture, but he knows that the Democratic Party will have serious long-range problems if the African-American and “Hispanic” vote split 50-50 so he will exploit the ill-defined plague of “systemic racism.” The academic left, which coined that phrase uses it to derogate every American institution as illegitimate and in need of reconstruction. So far Biden’s cabinet nominees have declared that eradicating systemic racism is a top priority, whether in health, finance, environmental policy and education.
The Ultra-Left is already making it clear that they don’t believe President Biden is sincere. Riots and vandalism in Oregano and Washington have made their doubts vividly clear. They suspect that he is a tool of the “corporate Democrats.” They may be right.
We’ll have four years to find out, if he survives that long.
John Frary of Farmington, the GOP candidate for U.S. Congress in 2008, is a retired history professor, an emeritus Board Member of Maine Taxpayers United, a Maine Citizen’s Coalition Board member, and publisher of FraryHomeCompanion.com. He can be reached at jfrary8070@aol.com.
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