1: Fiery but Mostly Peaceful
There is a political war under way in America, and you don’t need a subscription to a niche newsletter to find the front lines. You need only turn on CNN or NPR at almost any hour of the day. The combatants rarely describe it as a war, because to name it would be to concede that a fight is happening at all. But it is a war nonetheless — a war over political truth itself, and over who gets to decide what counts as true.
The offensive is being waged largely by what an earlier generation of conservatives called the “liberal elite,” and what might now be better labeled the institutional left: the elite newsrooms, the credentialed commentariat, the very-online progressives, and the dense social ecosystem of Media Twitter that sets the day’s acceptable opinions before most Americans have finished their coffee. Their weapons are not tanks or televised debates. They are subtler and, in their way, more powerful: the construction of narratives and counter-narratives, reflexive defensiveness and deflection, and the strategic deployment of “fact-checking” and gaslighting as instruments of control.
The institutional elite — as denoted by Media Twitter, ‘very online’ progressives and the elite media, — have a monopoly on acceptable narratives and “the truth”. Elite media crafts certain narratives favourable to Democrats or parroting left-wing talking points and ideology (“mostly peaceful” protests instead of riots, Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian “disinformation”, etc) while doing two things at the same time: disingenuously claiming that they’re not crafting left-wing narratives, merely reporting (or fact-checking) “the truth” and secondly deflecting any criticism that they’re just parroting a left-wing narrative by formulating such criticism as a Republican, right-wing, manufactured (as opposed to grass-roots) “assault” on said “truth.”
Take for instance the riots of Summer 2020. There is ample evidence that those riots caused billions of dollars in damage and resulted in dozens of deaths around the country. What’s notable is the response to those riots by progressives, the media, and Democratic politicians.
Firstly the media focused almost exclusively on crafting a narrative of these protests as a broad-based reaction by regular Americans to ongoing racial injustice, when that wasn’t the case at all. Protests were led and populated almost entirely by young white people under 30 who comprised the vast majority of protestors, only made possible because of COVID lockdowns that left them with a lot of time on their hands.
Secondly, the media maintained this narrative even as uneventful protests during the day led to burning, looting and rioting at night. They maintained this narrative even as people were murdered by rioters, businesses looted, and government buildings attacked. Of note, though, is the hypocrisy by the media and Democratic politicians with regards to the protestors: after months of media hyperventilating about people not adhering to social distancing including vile criticism of those protesting lockdowns in front of state legislatures a month prior, those concerns went out the window when literally thousands of people were crowding together yelling BLM slogans in the major cities in Summer of 2020.
Remarkable was any lack of concern about masses of people congregating in such numbers during a raging pandemic, especially after the same politicians and media activists had just spent the last few months prior castigating and chastising anyone congregating in public or flouting public health measures. In fact the media took great glee in labeling right-wing protestors as “idiots” in May 2020 for essentially doing the same thing left-wing protestors were doing in June.
Remarkable too was that any attempt to highlight the disparity between reporting and the ongoing riots was met by deflection and hand-waving by left-wing politicians and the media. They would never concede that rioting was taking place, claiming any criticism was just a “conspiracy theory” by malevolent right-wing reactionary forces who were attempting to slander the “broad-based” protests of “racial reckoning”.
It’s hard to imagine that if similar protests and rioting had taken place in Russia, or China, that coverage of those protests in Western media wouldn’t have included such words as “uprising” or “insurrection”.
Furthermore, these politicians and media-activists claimed, any rioting which was theoretically taking place was entirely justified since rioting was the “language of the oppressed”, and only “property” was damaged, which wasn’t true to begin with: people lost their lives in the riots.
That same deflection and hand-waving by the institutional left can be seen in the debate against Critical Race Theory. The controversy is being presented by the elite media and liberal blogs as a drummed-up culture-war issue by paranoid conservatives who “misunderstand” it, in effect gaslighting them.
During the pandemic, public schools, teachers unions and local schoolboards somehow thought that instead of ensuring children are reading and doing math at grade level, and that they have all the tools to succeed academically while learning from home, they would instead inculcate left-wing racialist and gender dogma in children.
The elite media (NPR, the NY Times, Washington Post, et al.) then try to obfuscate this reality by trying to craft a reality-control narrative, first of all denying that anti-racism is being promulgated at all in public schools: Critical Race Theory, they say, is only taught in certain law-school classes, not in elementary school, furthermore they deflect the indoctrination of children into left-wing political ideology as merely “teaching history”, and thirdly by characterizing grass-roots opposition to this indoctrination as some sort of right-wing astroturf campaign. An episode of NPR’s Fresh Air describes the opposition as being led by “conservative think tanks, media outlets and law firms.” In other words, the elite media is describing this issue as any opposition is fake and artificial, and in any case they merely oppose teaching American history.
The argument by progressives and the media is presented as one where conservatives in state legislatures are imposing bans on the necessary, in their view, teaching of systemic racism, moreover the fact that conservatives are bringing up CRT at all is as a culture-war smokescreen to distract from the usual claims of all the -isms that ail America.
One New Yorker article says that conservatives “have noticed that concepts used in critical race theory — ‘structural racism,’ ‘internalized white supremacy’ — have entered the mainstream, and in some cases have become part of corporate training or public-school education.”
The assumption being that CRT terms, such as “whiteness” are remotely mainstream.
It can never be a reaction to the introduction of “anti-racist” indoctrination by social-justice activists in the various schoolboards and universities. In other words, parents have no legitimate cause to rail against CRT, and any reaction to it is illegitimate if not outright devious.
As proof of this just take the recent letter from the National School Boards Association, where they plead with the Biden admin to have the FBI investigate outraged parents who dare question their school board positions on anti-racism and gender identity.
In it, the NSBA likens parents to “domestic terrorists.”
Now imagine if the same thing had happened under the Trump administration: let’s say the NRA had sent a letter imploring William Barr to pursue activists targeting NRA meetings, and then that the Department of Justice had actually began one? Can you imagine the outrage amongst liberals and in the media!
And yet that’s where we are in the U.S. in 2023: the left claims enemies of the Republic and wrongthingkers are everywhere on the right, whilst simultaneously engaging in the very acts they claim to be against: it’s OK for anarchist rioters try to burn down a courthouse in Portland during the riots of 2020, but when right-wing plebes try to vandalise the U.S. Capitol building, it’s nothing short of an insurrection, according to them.
2. The Double Move: Deny and Deflect
The institutional elite holds something close to a monopoly on acceptable narratives — on “the truth” as officially sanctioned. That monopoly is not maintained by argument, and it does not need to be. It is maintained by controlling the terms on which any argument is permitted to take place: which framings count as neutral and which as “misinformation,” which sources are authoritative and which have been “debunked,” which questions are asked in good faith and which are asked only to sow doubt. The mechanism is worth naming precisely, because it repeats across issue after issue with almost mechanical regularity.
The elite media crafts narratives that flatter Democrats or echo progressive talking points — “mostly peaceful” protests rather than riots, the Hunter Biden laptop story waved away as Russian “disinformation” — while performing two maneuvers at once.
The first is a claim of pure neutrality. The outlet insists it is not crafting a narrative at all; it is merely reporting, or, increasingly, “fact-checking” the plain truth. This is the more sophisticated of the two moves, because it launders editorial judgment through the vocabulary of objectivity. A word choice is presented as a finding. “Mostly peaceful” arrives not as a characterization open to dispute but as an established fact; “disinformation” arrives not as a contested political label but as a verdict, delivered with the full apparatus — the fact-check rating, the credentialed expert, the platform warning label — that lends an opinion the authority of a settled conclusion. The reader is invited to believe not that the outlet has taken a side, but that the other side has taken leave of reality.
The second maneuver activates the instant the first is challenged. Any criticism of the narrative is recast not as legitimate disagreement but as something more sinister: a coordinated, right-wing, manufactured “assault” on the truth itself. The critic is not met on the merits. The critic is diagnosed — as a partisan, a conspiracy theorist, the mouthpiece of some astroturfed campaign traceable to think tanks and dark money rather than to genuine, grassroots concern. This is the elegance of the move: it never has to engage the substance of the objection, because it has redefined the objection as proof of bad faith. To notice the narrative is to reveal yourself as an enemy of the truth.
Taken together, the two moves form a closed loop. Deny that a narrative exists; then, when someone points to it, delegitimize the act of pointing. The first move renders the framing invisible. The second renders any challenge to it disreputable. Between them, they insulate the narrative from the single thing that might dislodge it — scrutiny. Once you see this pattern, you cannot unsee it, and the episodes that follow — the riots of 2020, the fight over Critical Race Theory, the campaign against dissenting parents — are the same machine running on different fuel.
3. Summer 2020: A Narrative That Outlasted the Facts
Consider the riots of the summer of 2020. There is ample evidence that the unrest that year caused billions of dollars in damage and resulted in dozens of deaths across the country. What is most revealing, however, is not the destruction itself but the response to it from progressives, from Democratic politicians, and above all from the media.
From the outset, the coverage was devoted almost entirely to a single storyline: that these were broad-based demonstrations by ordinary Americans reacting to ongoing racial injustice. That framing did not match the reality on the ground. The protests skewed heavily toward the young and the white, with participants under thirty forming a conspicuous share of the crowds — a mobilization made possible in no small part by COVID lockdowns that had left an entire cohort of young people with time on their hands and nowhere to spend it.
More striking still was the media’s refusal to revise the storyline as the facts changed beneath it. The narrative of peaceful protest held firm even as demonstrations that were calm by day gave way to burning, looting, and rioting by night. It held as people were killed, as businesses were destroyed, and as government buildings came under attack. To understand how far the machinery of narrative management would go, it is worth examining three episodes in particular — the sudden disappearance of the pandemic as a concern, the armed occupation of an American city’s downtown, and a single television graphic that captured the whole enterprise in eight words.
The Vanishing Pandemic
For months in the spring of 2020, the public-health establishment and its allies in politics and the press had treated public gatherings as an act of near-homicidal recklessness. When Americans assembled outside state capitols to protest lockdowns and mask mandates, the condemnation was swift and unsparing. Epidemiologists warned that such gatherings would kill. Governors and mayors denounced the protesters. The media reserved a special contempt for them, branding them selfish and stupid — “idiots,” in the framing that circulated widely in May of 2020 — for daring to congregate while a virus raged.
Then the season changed, and so did the science — or so it appeared. When the protests of late spring and summer erupted, drawing enormous crowds into dense proximity in cities across the country, the warnings did not merely soften. They inverted. In June 2020, more than a thousand public-health professionals signed an open letter declaring that the anti-racism protests should not be curtailed on pandemic grounds, and explicitly cautioning against equating them with the earlier anti-lockdown demonstrations, which the letter’s signatories condemned. The same act — a mass of human beings gathered shoulder to shoulder in a plague year — was lethal when performed by the wrong people for the wrong cause, and permissible, even laudable, when performed by the right people for the right one. The virus, apparently, could read a protest sign.
This was not a subtle inconsistency to be teased out by careful analysis. It was a public reversal, executed in the open, by the very authorities whose entire claim to deference rested on the premise that they followed the evidence wherever it led. What the summer of 2020 revealed was that, for a significant portion of the public-health and media establishment, the evidence was downstream of the politics.
A “Summer of Love”: The Occupation of Capitol Hill
Nowhere was the indulgence of the moment more vivid than in Seattle. After police evacuated the department’s East Precinct in June 2020, activists seized several blocks of the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood and declared them a police-free zone — first christened the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), then rebranded the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP). An American city had, in effect, ceded territory to a self-governing occupation, and the response from its leadership was not alarm but something close to delight.
Seattle’s Democratic mayor, Jenny Durkan, appeared on CNN in June and, pressed by host Chris Cuomo on how long the occupation would last, offered a now-infamous assessment. She described the zone as having a “block party atmosphere” and, asked how long it might persist, replied that the city could see a “summer of love.” She dismissed the notion that this was an armed takeover, likening it instead to the ordinary neighborhood gatherings Seattle held all the time.
The reality diverged sharply from the mayor’s sunny billing. Within roughly ten days of the interview, the zone had been the site of several serious crimes, including an attempted arson, multiple assaults captured on video, and the fatal shooting of a nineteen-year-old. After further bloodshed, Durkan reversed course and ordered the area cleared, later conceding that her “summer of love” remark had been a poor choice of words that she had made “in jest.” The episode is instructive precisely because of its trajectory: an elected official’s first instinct, echoed sympathetically in a national broadcast, was to romanticize the seizure of American streets — and the correction came only after people had died. One is left again to imagine the coverage had a comparable occupation been staged by the right.
“Fiery but Mostly Peaceful”: The Chyron That Said the Quiet Part
If a single image distilled the media’s posture that summer, it aired on CNN in the early hours of August 25, 2020, during the unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that followed the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Correspondent Omar Jimenez reported live from the scene, standing before buildings and vehicles engulfed in flames. Beneath him, the network’s on-screen graphic read: “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.”
The dissonance was total and self-evident. Jimenez himself noted that the fire behind him was one of multiple locations that had been burning across the city over the course of the night. The chyron and the footage told opposite stories in the same frame, and the caption became an instant object of ridicule — a shorthand, ever since, for the media’s willingness to file arson under “mostly peaceful” so long as the fire burned in the service of an approved narrative.
In fairness, the chyron was the work of CNN’s copy desk rather than the correspondent, and Jimenez’s own reporting acknowledged that the daytime demonstrations had given way to violence after dark. But that distinction, while accurate, does not rescue the network; it indicts it. The graphic was not a slip of the tongue from a reporter under pressure. It was a written editorial choice, composed at a desk, by an institution deciding in real time how to characterize what its own cameras were showing the country. The words did not describe the picture. They were meant to instruct the viewer on how to feel about it.
Deflection as Doctrine
Through all of this, any attempt to point out the gap between the reporting and the reality was met not with argument but with the now-familiar deflection. The rioting was denied outright; those who noticed it were accused of peddling a “conspiracy theory” advanced by malevolent reactionaries bent on slandering a “broad-based” movement of “racial reckoning.” It is hard to imagine that comparable scenes in Russia or China would have escaped words like “uprising” or “insurrection” in the Western press. Yet at home, the same events were smoothed into something gentler. When destruction could no longer be denied, it was justified: rioting, we were told, is “the language of the oppressed,” and in any case only “property” had been damaged — a claim false on its own terms, because people had lost their lives.
The pattern, in other words, was seamless. Deny that the violence is happening; when the flames are too obvious to deny, recast them as “mostly peaceful”; when a life is lost, retreat to the language of property and oppression; and at every stage, treat the person pointing at the fire as the real threat to public understanding. This is not journalism failing to describe events. It is a system succeeding at managing them.
4. Critical Race Theory: Denial, Redefinition, and the Astroturf Charge
The same deny-and-deflect pattern structures the fight over Critical Race Theory. The elite media and the liberal commentariat present the controversy as a culture-war panic drummed up by paranoid conservatives who simply “misunderstand” the subject — which is to say, they gaslight the people raising the objection.
The underlying grievance is not mysterious. During the pandemic, at the very moment when public schools, teachers’ unions, and local school boards might have concentrated on getting children reading and doing math at grade level while stranded in remote learning, many chose instead to fold racial and gender ideology into the curriculum. Parents noticed.
The elite institutions — NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and their peers — then set about obscuring that reality through a three-part defense. First, denial: anti-racist ideology, they insisted, is not being taught in public schools at all; Critical Race Theory is a narrow academic framework confined to certain law school seminars, not something a fourth-grader would ever encounter. Second, redefinition: whatever is being taught is not indoctrination but simply “teaching history.” Third, delegitimization: grassroots parental opposition is reframed as an artificial, right-wing astroturf campaign. An episode of NPR’s Fresh Air, for instance, characterized the opposition as the work of “conservative think tanks, media outlets and law firms” — the implication being that the anger is manufactured, and that in any event the objectors merely want to stop the teaching of American history.
From there, the progressive framing writes itself. Conservatives in state legislatures are cast as would-be censors banning the necessary teaching of systemic racism, and the very fact that they raise CRT at all is treated as a smokescreen — a distraction from the litany of -isms said to afflict the country. A New Yorker piece captured the posture neatly, noting that conservatives “have noticed that concepts used in critical race theory — ‘structural racism,’ ‘internalized white supremacy’ — have entered the mainstream, and in some cases have become part of corporate training or public-school education.” The unspoken assumption is that terms like “whiteness” are now simply part of ordinary discourse, and that no reasonable person could object to their arrival in a classroom.
What this framing can never allow is the obvious possibility: that parental anger is a reaction — a response to the introduction of “anti-racist” material by activists inside school boards and universities. Concede that, and the objection becomes legitimate. So the objection is ruled out of bounds in advance. Parents, in this telling, have no valid cause for complaint; any reaction they have is either illegitimate or outright devious.
From “Domestic Terrorists” to the Asymmetry Standard
If proof of that posture were needed, it arrived in the letter from the National School Boards Association urging the Biden administration to bring the FBI to bear on parents who had the temerity to challenge their local boards over anti-racism and gender identity. In that letter, the NSBA reached for the language of “domestic terrorism” to describe the threat such parents supposedly posed.
Now perform the thought experiment. Imagine the same sequence under the Trump administration. Imagine the NRA writing to William Barr to demand action against activists targeting its meetings — and imagine the Department of Justice actually opening such an effort. The outrage from liberals and from the press would have been deafening, and it would not have subsided for weeks.
This is the asymmetry that defines the current moment. The institutional left warns ceaselessly that enemies of the Republic and dangerous “wrongthinkers” lurk everywhere on the right, even as it engages in the very conduct it claims to abhor. When anarchist rioters tried to burn down a federal courthouse in Portland in 2020, it was framed as protest. When a mob of the right stormed the U.S. Capitol, it was, in the same voices, nothing short of an insurrection. The label follows the politics, not the act.
5. The Stakes
None of this is an argument that the right is without sin, or that every conservative complaint is made in good faith. It is an argument about a particular power — the power to decide, before any debate begins, which facts are permitted into the conversation and which are quietly escorted out.
That is the real prize in the war over political truth. Whoever controls the frame controls the range of acceptable conclusions, and controls it invisibly, under the flag of neutral reporting. The elite media’s genius has been to fuse advocacy and adjudication into a single voice — to be both a participant in the argument and the referee who declares it over. A democratic public cannot reason its way to good decisions when one faction owns both the microphone and the fact-check. The first step toward reclaiming that reasoning is simply to name the maneuver for what it is: not the neutral pursuit of truth, but the management of it.