“Give me liberty, or give me death!”
Patrick Henry
March 23, 1775, Virginia
“It’s genuinely alarming that all of the legacy media outlets (apart from Fox) now state explicitly—on election night broadcasts!—that decent people are required to vote for a particular political party. (Even non-voting and third-party voting are not morally defensible options; you must vote specifically for the party endorsed by the corporate, academic, oligarchic and mass-media consensus.)
I surfed around a bit last night—my first time watching network news in years—and I was surprised by what I heard. The open contempt for viewers/voters... the condescension toward minorities especially (simple folk who are “easily confused/misled” and hence accidentally make the wrong decisions sometimes)... the unstated assumption underlying every comment that the Democrats are the party of good and the Republicans are the party of racism, perversion, deception and evil... it had a “Romanian TV in the 80s” vibe.
For many years, reporters, academics, and campaign hacks have been unwilling to consider that some voters are partially, occasionally driven by real policy concerns—and unwilling to entertain the thought that a non-college-educated voter who disagrees with a Williams or Swarthmore grad could ever be correct. But what I saw last night was a new phase of elite contempt for the masses.
Calling Virginia’s electorate “infected” with “the delta variant” of a mental and moral disease is so stupid and ugly that it actually got my attention for a moment.
On the one hand, I’m glad that this didn’t work for them in Virginia the way it has worked for them for the last five years. On the other hand: these are dark times.”
Comment by Antoine Doinel, following this excellent essay by Newsweek’s Ungar-Sargon.
From another essay by Unger-Sargon, How Journalism Abandoned The Working Class:
”Once a blue-collar trade, journalism has become something akin to an impenetrable caste. And what journalists have done with that power, perhaps inadvertently, is to wage a cultural battle that enhances their own economic interests against a less-educated and struggling American working class.
Once working-class warriors, the little guys taking on America’s powerful elites, journalists today are an American elite, a caste that has abandoned its working class roots as part of its meritocratic climb. And a moral panic around race has allowed them to mask this abandonment under the guise of “social justice.”
Take Kirsten Powers, one of Lemon’s guests on that panel in 2018. Powers had been the resident liberal at Fox News until CNN poached her in 2016, for a rumored $950,000 yearly salary.”
Batya Ungar-Sargon, How Journalism Abandoned The Working Class
Thanks for this, Celia. It gave me a good chuckle for the day!
There are two possible end results from the uptick in Republicans winning in Virginia. Either the “new” Republicans (RINO’s???) who carried the Republicans to victory will trend back to their natural place, the Democrat Party; or the Republican Party will continue their gradual slide left.
My money is on both …..