Years ago, I knew a guy who desperately wanted to make a mark as a conservative activist. He was seriously naïve and ill-informed about most things (he’d been raised in a kind of self-segregated immigrant community). He used to call me up at five in the morning – don’t ask me what he was doing running around at that hour – and say things like, “I just saw the New York Times. They were saying bad things about President Reagan.”
So here I am, half asleep and scarcely able to think (not an uncommon problem with me). I tell him, “The Times, huh. The leading leftist paper in the U.S. What do you expect them to say?”
A long pause. “But…” A real sense of desperation here. “They’re saying bad things about President Reagan!”
It would go around a couple more times before I could get him off the phone, well aware that I hadn’t convinced him because he was beyond convincing. He fancied himself a movement conservative, and all the movement conservatives at the time believed in institutions. Ancient establishments that no matter what the field — media, finance, government, what have you — could be trusted implicitly and must not be questioned. So when a media institution — the NYT above all — said bad things about Reagan, they had to be true. (That “bad things,” with its kindergarten aura of “if you don’t actually say it, it won’t come true” is a tell. And no, he never did make any contribution.)
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past few weeks. Because recent behavior among MAGA conservatives — the new populist conservatism that has pushed the movement types into well-earned obscurity — has made it clear that this attitude, toward the legacy media in particular, this attitude that “it was in the noospaper, so it must be twoo,” still exists. And that, playmates, is a problem.
Some people are just not cynical enough. It’s clear that naivete and misplaced trust has a firm grip on MAGA populists. Think for a moment about the hundreds just freed from lengthy, unwarranted sentences because they believed it when the nice policeman invited them into the Capitol and even held the door open for them.
The two most recent examples deserve a close look: The drone invasion and the H-1B uproar.
Both came out of nowhere, apropos of nothing, and both were media-driven. Legacy media – tube and newspapers – not social media, at least not at the start.
Let’s take a look at those drones – if we can find one. The last week of November, they were suddenly all over the place. Thousands of them. Big as SUVs. Or even bigger. Iran had sent them, from a “mother ship.” Or maybe ISIS. They’d already taken over New Jersey, and were ready to spread all over the country (in the end, they didn’t).
Anybody who has ever looked into the UFO crazes of the late 40s and 50s will recognize this narrative immediately. Most people spend their lives without much in the way of looking up. When they do, when they are persuaded to actually pay attention to what is going on over their heads, they tend to see things Great Fear that gripped revolutionary France just before the Terror or the same panic that spread across the South in the weeks after Lincoln was elected.
I can’t tell you how many drone submissions I’ve fielded over the past few weeks. The frustrating thing is that all of them, with one exception, repeated the panicky, fearful tone of the legacy media coverage: “The drones. They’re coming! They’re from Iran! Or the hollow earth! They’re as big as houses, as aircraft carriers… God help us, can nothing be done…” (The one exception was this sensible piece from Ed Sherdlu, a licensed pilot.)
As we reached the holidays, the drones faded out, as was to be expected. But then they were replaced by something else: the H-1B visa conflagration.
The controversy suddenly sparked out of nowhere when it became apparent that neither Elon nor Vivek Ramaswamy had any intention of targeting the H-1B skilled visas program, on the grounds that it worked and was necessary for the U.S. economy. This was immediately met with an explosion of outrage, much of it from MAGA circles and much of it overwrought and ill-informed. Why, you’d think that Elon had been sending drones over New Jersey.
Elon handled it badly, but he’s a billionaire unused to backtalk. He was also right, being well aware that the U.S. university system turns out streams of feminist interpretive dancers and lit theorists specializing in early Bazooka gum comics but no so many highly-trained techs.
The media, and the Democrat/DEI structure, want desperately to drive a wedge into the MAGA movement, and that’s exactly what they did here. It’s appalling how many MAGA kids went along with the joke, immediately concluding that the H-1B visa was a dagger pointed at the heart of a helpless America. That anybody who supported them was in league with the Chinese and the Cartels. That Musk and Ramaswamy were the very worst of RINO carpetbaggers. I’m quite sure that the legacy media, the Dems, and the elites couldn’t be more pleased.
Fortunately, the damage hasn’t been permanent. But we need not congratulate ourselves. Once again, paranoia is uncalled for. But it wouldn’t hurt to consider whether these convenient episodes were something along the lines of proof-of-concept, a demonstration that MAGA can be manipulated as easily as the old movement conservatives, or, for that matter, pink-haired lefties.
We have to do better. Become suspicious, cynical, more enquiring and intuitive. We must not, in the words of Patton, “take counsel of our fears.” We must extend no trust to the legacy media at all, on any topic, at any time. Above all, we must upgrade and retune our BS detectors.
The next time such a panic ignites, ask yourself: Does this make sense? Why now? What happened last week that somebody would like to see disappear? Where does this come from? Who does it serve? Who does it hurt? For a long time, conservatives have insisted that they can’t be fooled, that they know too much, that they’re way smarter than all the pink pussyhat wearers. Well, playmates, the drones tell me that is not the case.
We’re going to be hearing a lot of wild tales in the months to come. A lot of demented claims, a lot of accusations, a lot of signs and wonderments. It’s safe to say that not a single one will have any weight. It will be best to discount them all.
We can take it for granted that anything coming out of legacy media is suspect. Legitimate journalists are bailing out. Newspaper owners have had enough. Jeff Bezos, WaPo owner and the most humane and fundamentally decent of the Third Millennial moguls, and Patrick Soon-Shiong of the LA Times have both embarked on reforming their newspapers. There’s also Bari Weiss, a smart lady who quit the NY Times out of disgust and has been extraordinarily critical of the media in the Free Press and her own podcast since.
Don’t fall into the legacy media trap. Don’t let yourself be led around by the nose by your enemies. Don’t give in to panic. And above all, don’t go calling people up at five in the morning.
Image: AT via Magic Studio
Jesus Christ is King
