by Matthew Boose
Remember Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony? By now, it feels like ages ago. At the time, the media hyped what the president’s former attorney had to say into a really big deal.
In just a short time, Cohen’s highly dramatized hearing proved to be entirely inconsequential. Everyone forgot about Michael Cohen and his “bombshells.”
Congress recently heard from William Barr, the attorney general who has had the role of Trump’s henchman kindly foisted upon him by malicious scriptwriters at MSNBC and the Democratic National Committee (is there a difference, really?). If that isn’t enough political theater to satiate the gossips at the big networks and their delusional followers, they might hear soon from former special counsel Robert Mueller, too.
It’s an odd paradox that the media, while so widely distrusted, somehow manages to wield the power to signify what is actually happening. This power to invent and erase events is also a power of legitimation, to determine what is politically and morally acceptable.
This really is the media’s first role—not to report facts, but to narrate—to present moral tales, to make up villains, whether the enemy is “whiteness,” Christendom, a bunch of Catholic high school boys, or the attorney general of the United States.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the media shapes not only public opinion, but public consciousness and even moral sensibility. After all, they’re the ones with the cameras and the fancy equipment.
Everything that’s “happening,” everything that is allowed to be acknowledged to have happened, is presented by them with scripts that they have written. If the media isn’t talking about it, it’s not happening. If it is and people are talking about it, but they’re not supposed to be, then they’re conspiracy theorists.
The Mueller report was supposed to be a turning point. The media had been discredited at last! They had been proven to be the conspiracy theorists. Two years of patent nonsense, exposed for what it truly was all along: political, baseless, hot garbage.
But what has happened in reality? The Great Green Media Machine’s appetite for nonsense has not been diminished a jot, and neither has its power to churn it out without accountability.
The media’s disappearing act has been on lurid display these past several weeks, as they have fabricated one national crisis after another, quickly forgotten or shoehorned into the next, to wring whatever scandal possible out of a report that has been public for a month now.
It seems scarcely possible that the media ever talked so much about collusion. For weeks, they have been consumed instead with obstruction of justice, and the villainous attorney general who covered it up. Barr’s a toady who just does Trump’s bidding, see—he decided to throw away an illustrious reputation to play second-fiddle to the most hated president in American history!
And just like that—poof! The collusion story is now unresolved, indefinitely. With Barr in charge, can we ever really know what happened between Trump and Russia?
For weeks, countless media outlets have followed the same smear-William Barr-style guide, questioning his use of the term “spying” and slandering him as Trump’s “personal lawyer” and a traitor to his country.
The Barr “cover up” story has only grown more elaborate since his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 1. One has to wonder if a fired “Game of Thrones” writer is coming up with all these talking points.
It has now been established that Barr is some kind of corrupt henchman to the mad king Trump, who, in his refusal to comply with the Democrats’ “oversight,” has brought America to the brink of autocracy.
The latest narrative is that President Trump and the villainous Barr have precipitated a “constitutional crisis.” How? By refusing to release the unredacted version of a report that anyone with an Internet connection can access.
Of course, none of this hysteria about the imminent “Drumpf dictatorship” is new, nor does it matter, but that’s not the point. Fabricated outrage is the media’s lifeblood.
As the lie has grown more involved, the media has gone from mere slander to coercive threats. Barr must now be held in contempt of Congress and possibly arrested, and every one of Trump’s officials who refuses to comply with even one subpoena, however bad the intent, must be arrested, too. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
From where does all this hysteria originate? Might it have something to do with Barr’s statement that “spying did occur?” Or that he appointed a U.S. attorney to look into said spying?
Might it actually be possible that the fraudsters in the media will be forced to account for the lie they told yesterday, before they tell a new one today? They’re determined to ensure that doesn’t happen.
Like always, the media is bringing on their all-star cast of disgraced deep state “experts” to pontificate about values and integrity and whatnot. CNN gave former FBI Director James Comey a forum last week to assure the public that spying and investigating are two different things, which makes the FBI’s “investigation” of the Trump campaign perfectly normal.
The media is again playing their vanishing act on spying that actually occurred—you know, something that might constitute a bona fide constitutional and political crisis—while fabricating a complicated morality tale about the president and his attorney general to keep the biggest lie in the history of yellow journalism alive more than a month past its expiration date.
A recent survey of media duplicity shows the same double standard of suppression and amplification being applied on a wider cultural scale. The media didn’t let anyone forget who was really responsible for the mosque shooting in Christchurch: President Trump, Islamophobes, gun nuts—some even suggested all white Australians were to blame.
But when hundreds of Sri Lankan Christians were murdered on Easter Sunday by Islamists, we heard no similar calls for soul-searching in the Muslim community. It was instead decided by decree from the woke demiurge in a midnight email chain at the DNC that the victims were not, in fact, Christians at all, but “Easter worshippers.”
The media snapped to attention. “Christianity under attack? Sri Lanka church bombings stoke far-right anger in the West,” read a Washington Post headline.
The message here is insidious: not only are Christians not under attack but anyone who thinks so, or cares, is a conspiracy theorist—and probably racist, too.
To even acknowledge that Christians can be victims is to mark oneself as a political untouchable. Likewise, anyone who dabbles in that stuff about the border crisis or Trump being spied on is not only insane, but immoral.
In the media’s narrative, certain people, the erstwhile “oppressors,” are pre-determined as having lesser moral worth. Enforcing that narrative involves not only shaping perceptions of fact, but casting moral judgment.
The media is now carrying out the same moral role with the Barr-Trump “scandal” that they played during Russiagate, and Covington Catholic, and so many before.
The slander can be read in chyrons and headlines at elite news organizations all across America: Barr is a liar. He can’t be trusted. He’s a disgrace. He threw his reputation away to become Trump’s “personal lawyer.”
This is such obvious nonsense! But it’s all the media is talking about, and they’ve taken the rest of the country hostage in their fever dream.
The Barr cover up and “constitutional crisis” narrative is just their latest delusional fabrication, but it isn’t going to stop. For as long as there are villains for them to destroy, the media will be there to slander them. The Great Green Media Machine has many, many more lies to tell.
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Matthew Boose is a staff writer and weekly columnist at the Conservative Institute. His writing has also appeared in the Daily Caller.
Photo “Fake News” by Mike McKenzie. CC BY 2.0.
