The First Salvos of the ‘Political War’

The making and un-making of American propaganda.

There’s a political war going on in America at the moment. To see it all you have to do is turn on CNN or NPR at any point in the day. This war is being waged mainly by the institutional left (what conservatives used to call the “liberal elite”). They are waging a war on political truth in America. The weapons they use are the crafting of narratives and counter-narratives, defensiveness and deflection, “fact-checking” and gaslighting.

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.