The Media As Stenographers for the Ruling Class

'The establishment not only wants ordinary voters to be deprived of information that undermines the preferred narrative, but wants to keep itself in the dark.'

From The European Conservative 

By Rod Dreher

The establishment not only wants ordinary voters to be deprived of information that undermines the preferred narrative, but wants to keep itself in the dark.

To most observers, even on the political Right, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that Donald Trump lost the debate with Kamala Harris. Trump was unfocused, blustery, and unprepared, leaving many golden opportunities to go after the vice president unexploited. This was entirely Trump’s fault, and there’s no point in pretending otherwise. His debate loss is mostly his fault.

Mostly. It is also true, however, that Trump was put at a disadvantage by the ABC News moderators, who repeatedly intervened to “fact-check” Trump’s statements, but let Harris pass unharassed. Moreover, their questions were sometimes bad jokes. For example, race is a major issue in American politics and culture, and Kamala Harris, who is black, has joined just about every major far-left racialist cause. In 2020, she even promoted a fund to bail out leftists jailed in Minneapolis for race rioting. The Biden-Harris administration has gone all-in on the increasingly unpopular DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) campaigns.

Of the many substantive and important questions that could have been posed about race, what did David Muir of ABC News put to Trump? He asked Trump why he questioned whether or not Harris is black. This put Trump on the defensive for his dumb remark, and Trump failed to turn the trivial but hostile question around to discuss serious racial conflicts in American life. Nevertheless, this was but one example of how media bias distorts and deforms the campaign process.

This is hardly news to anybody on the Right, of course. Still, the closeness of this year’s presidential contest magnifies one side’s unearned advantages, however small. And the ideological biases of the media construct narratives that blind voters to real-world conditions. Sometimes, journalists themselves don’t know what they don’t know.

For example, in a piece explaining why Harris beat Trump in the debate, Time magazine faulted Trump for making up an outlandish story accusing his opponent of supporting “transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.” Crazy, right? That’s just the kind of absurd story Trump invents all the time, isn’t it?

Except it’s true. Time had to publish a correction admitting that “as a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris filled out a questionnaire saying she supported taxpayer-funded gender transition treatment for detained immigrants.” And you can see her in a video interview saying exactly this here.

In a heated rant about the chaos caused by mass migration, Trump cited claims that Haitian migrants living in Springfield, a small Ohio town, have been eating the pets of townspeople. The media assumed that this must be a lie. An ABC debate moderator said local authorities told the network that they had no reports of Haitians eating pets. This is correct: town officials have said that.

Maybe they are right. Trump’s claim really does seem insane when you first hear it. But there is video evidence that Haitians in that town have been catching ducks and geese from the town park to eat. A recording of an August 26 call to Springfield police emerged, in which a resident reported seeing four Haitians driving away with captured geese.  Plus, a number of local residents say, again on video, that pets have gone missing. Are they all lying? Maybe. But it is not the usual journalistic practice to accept the word of the authorities without investigating. 

Besides, in south Florida, home to a large number of Latin American migrants, finding body parts from animals sacrificed in Santeria ceremonies is so common that police had to develop a policy for how to deal with these situations. Is it really so unthinkable that migrants from poor Third World countries would bring bizarre culinary and religious habits to the United States with them? 

The point is not that Trump’s claims about pet-eating Haitians in Springfield are true. The point is that it is plausible. Here’s a clip from 2020 of an Italian woman yelling at a black migrant found on the street roasting a cat. If we had a responsible media, they would look into such claims. But if there is solid evidence for these practices, it would require the media to revise its preferred narrative. Therefore, they remain professionally incurious. 

Again, this media malpractice is so common that people on the Right have come to expect it. But what happens when Americans have no way of knowing when they are being gaslighted by the media? This happens constantly in U.S. and UK media reporting about European right-wing politics. If the only thing you know about the European populist Right comes from the media and from establishment Western politicians, you remain clueless about what’s really happening in Europe.

In the debate, Trump mentioned that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is an admirer of his. True. This prompted Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, to tweet the following:

The Vox.com article from 2018 paints Hungary as an example of “soft fascism.” It is certainly true that voters, especially on the Left, have reasons to object to government policy, just like in any country. But you would never know from the lengthy article why Orbán and his Fidesz party remain popular with voters; you can only assume that it’s entirely the fault of Orbán rigging the system, and “anti-migrant demagoguery.” For the Left, to object in any way to mass migration can only be a symptom of moral corruption.

Even so, the Vox piece, though extremely critical of the Hungarian government, does not justify Hillary Clinton’s conclusion that Orbán is a “democracy-killing Hungarian dictator.” This is another case of the globalist ruling class judging that “democracy” is when voters choose the way the ruling class wants them to. When they don’t? Well, “democracy” is under attack!

How are ordinary Americans to know otherwise if their media won’t tell them that the real story is far more complicated? 

Consider the recent shock German regional elections in the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia, which concluded with a thumping win for the populist-right Alternative For Germany (AfD) party. The AfD, whose main issue is opposing the flood of migration into Germany, is anathema to the country’s mainstream politicians, media, and ‘respectable’ opinion. 

Before the recent vote, a conservative German voter told me that the AfD, with its forceful anti-migrant stance and its opposition to the mainstream parties’ green-driven deconstruction of the once-mighty German economy, is the only party worth voting for. But, he said, it is very risky to openly support the AfD, given that the country’s domestic intelligence service has labeled the party as extremist. AfD has trouble attracting top political talent because to affiliate with it, he said, is to put your personal and professional reputation at extreme risk.

No wonder. When AfD won in the east, frightening headlines appeared in newspapers and magazines across the English-speaking world, warning of birth pangs of National Socialism’s rebirth in Germany. This line becomes conventional wisdom in the US and UK because there is little to contradict it in the media. 

Arare counterexample has just been published in the New Yorker, the prominent liberal magazine that, in Alec MacGillis, has a reporter who actually seems to want to understand what’s happening in Germany. 

MacGillis reveals what so many other journalists either ignore or suppress: that AfD’s rise is happening in tandem with the rise of a populist Left party built around the ex-Communist politician Sahra Wagenknecht, who combines traditional leftist economics with cultural conservatism. In both cases, this has everything to do with the expanding gap between the German establishment and the kind of people Hillary Clinton once disparaged as “deplorables.” 

MacGillis writes:

The dynamic was reminiscent of what I had observed while reporting on the rise of Donald Trump in the American Midwest in 2016—above all, the disconnect between voters in left-behind places and the highly educated winners of the metropolis. What sets the situation in Germany apart, in addition to the dark historical context, is the multiplicity and transparency of the rupture. In the U.S., the growing regional disconnect has been flattened under the weight of Trump’s cult of personality, obscuring the realignment under way in both major parties. But, in a multiparty parliamentary system like Germany’s, the rifts and tensions are easier to discern. They are out in the open, striations of a Western democracy under strain.

Is German democracy “under strain”—or is it simply doing what democracy is supposed to do, and represent the changing wishes of voters? It seems that even journalists who largely succeed in moving beyond their natural biases still can’t let go of the idea that democratic choices that oppose the establishment consensus must, in some sense, be counter-democratic.

American conservatives are by now accustomed to this sort of thing in reporting on Trump. What is interesting, though, is how little American journalists have learned from their mistakes. After Trump’s election in 2016, a prominent East Coast journalist and friend emailed me in Louisiana, where I was then living, to say that he should have listened to me when I told him over the previous few years about the social changes I was seeing—the kind of changes that led to Trump’s surprise victory. 

He promised to do better. He didn’t. The “deplorables” are simply too deplorable for ‘right-thinking’ people to contemplate with anything but contempt. 

The ugly truth here is that this is class warfare expressed as culture war. The New Yorker’s MacGillis picks this up when quoting a Wagenknecht campaign speech:

One by one, she ticked through the now unpopular figures of the national government, painting them as out-of-touch cosmopolitans who had no idea what the German people really needed or how they really lived. She reserved special scorn for Robert Habeck, an ambitious leader in the Greens party, whose proposal to almost completely ban the installation of new gas and oil heating systems provoked one of the government’s biggest setbacks after mounting opposition to the cost scuttled the plan. “Herr Habeck is of the opinion that most people live like his friends in their hip big-city bubble in Berlin, where life perhaps really consists of choosing between oat-milk macchiatos, cargo bikes, and organic shops,” she said. “A politician should know that the vast majority of people in the country don’t get up in the morning and think, Am I going to be a virtuous person today and go to the organic grocery, or am I going to Aldi?”

I saw this bubble when I lived in Dallas two decades ago. Texas, which shares a border with Mexico, was at the time being swamped by illegal migrants. All the respectable opinion-makers—business leaders, journalists, and politicians—held fast to the “diversity is our strength” dogma. Meanwhile, in working-class neighborhoods and middle-class areas that were declining, the migrant tide was making daily life much worse. 

In some public schools, American children could barely be educated because classes suddenly had a large number of children who spoke no English. Impoverished Americans found it hard to get prompt care at public hospitals, whose emergency rooms had been overtaken by illegal migrants. Absentee landlords rented houses to groups of fifteen to twenty migrant workers at a time, men who did not understand or observe the laws or unwritten social rules of the neighborhoods. 

One man who lived in the Dallas suburb of Irving told me that when he returned from work one day to find police with submachine guns blocking his street as they investigated one of these illegal worker houses, that was the day he and his wife decided they had to sell their house, take their family, and leave. 

None of the bien-pensants of the Dallas establishment ever had to deal with things like this. Their only interaction with illegal migrants was in hiring them to do yard work, or as cooks and dishwashers in popular restaurants. In other words, middle and upper-class Dallasites got the benefit of cheap migrant labor, but lower-class Americans had to pay for it with a lower standard of living.

Unsurprisingly, some of these lower-class people expressed their anger in crude, even racist, terms. This, in turn, gave their social betters an excuse to dismiss their plight as nothing but bigotry. We see this dynamic at work in this recent exchange in London between a woman reporting that a migrant had attacked her, and the police chastising the English woman for calling the migrant “filthy.”

Is there any wonder that people are angry? A voter in eastern Germany told the New Yorker: “Something has to happen. It can’t go on like this.” Another told MacGillis something I have heard in my own reporting: that former residents of communist East Germany expect the media to lie to them, and are therefore more immune to the kind of manipulation that is routine in the Western press.

This is increasingly true in the United States, but only when the American media report on domestic stories. The world outside their borders remains opaque to most Americans, who have no choice but to depend on the eyes and ears of liberal correspondents based there.

Or do they? Twitter, now known as X, is a terrific tool for challenging the manufactured narrative. Like any social medium, X can be a source of lies and disinformation. But it can also be one of the only places an ordinary person can learn what is really happening in the world, as opposed to what the media want him to believe.

Take this powerful speech in the Bundestag by Alice Weidel, the leader of AfD. She delivered it in German, but whoever runs Weidel’s X account put English subtitles on it. If you are under the media-generated impression that AfD are Nazis with a smiling face, watch the speech. It instantly calls into question the hysterical, self-serving accusations that the establishment media in Germany and abroad make against the party. 

This is a big reason why Brussels Eurocrats want to rein in X owner Elon Musk. In Germany, Anton Hofreiter, a prominent Bundestag member of the Greens party, has called for the muzzling, and even the ban, of X and other forms of social media, to stop online radicalization. In her Bundestag speech, Dr. Weidel called this “the ugly face of the totalitarian spirit that dominates you.”

She’s right. It is class war, it is culture war, and it is also information war. The puzzling thing is that the establishment—left-liberals and right-liberals both—seems not only to want ordinary voters to be deprived of information that undermines the preferred narrative, but they also appear to want to keep themselves in the dark. Consequently, when upheavals like the 2016 Trump election happen, they do not see it coming. 

While they focus maniacally on the unruly January 6 mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol as the greatest threat to what they call “our democracy,” others with clearer vision understand that mobs like the Stanford Law School claque that shut down a federal judge’s speech last year are, in fact, the far greater threat to self-rule, precisely because of the combination of their professional elite status and anti-democratic contempt for opinions not their own. Donald Trump understands this intuitively, but lacks the rhetorical and intellectual skills to attack it effectively. His running mate J.D. Vance, a Yale Law school graduate who has become a traitor to his classmates, is a different story. Whatever happens to Trump in November, Vance is the future of the Republican Party. 

The ruling class does not grasp how their arrogance undermines real democracy. If opposing mass migration, an economically ruinous war, and job-killing environmental policies makes one anti-democratic, then these comfortable, well-credentialed fools should not be surprised when ordinary people decide that maybe democracy is not what it’s cracked up to be. 

Make no mistake: if democracy is ever killed in the West, oligarchs like Alex Soros, apparatchiks like Hillary Clinton, and ruling-class propaganda newsletters like the Washington Post will have more of its blood on their hands than democratically-elected deplorables like Viktor Orban.