I often get very angry that Democrats aren’t better at political messaging, but then I remember that Democratic voters are nowhere near as monolithic, ideological, emotional, or aesthetically obstinate as Republican voters, so the liberal media bubble can never be as singularly focused and blatantly biased as the conservative media bubble. The liberal media is also much more nuanced and balanced, and goes out of its way to be tough on Democrats in anticipation of ceaseless conservative whining about bias.
Liberal legacy media such The New York Times and The Washington Post interview Trump voters in rural highway diners to find out just how “communist” they think Democrats are; and publish headlines of “Trump Claims _____” with no pushback amid agonizing editor meetings on why it’s not appropriate to call him a liar despite telling thousands of lies; and author endless opinion pieces on why liberals must walk on eggshells to not upset snowflake Trump voters (many of whom are currently stockpiling guns for a new civil war in case the increasingly absurd prophesies from a pillow salesman don’t come true) or make Trump voters feel stupid by pointing out how they’re now singlehandedly killing their neighbors, families, and themselves by refusing to vaccinate against COVID or even wear masks to such a stupid degree that the quarantines and shutdowns they existentially detest are inevitably going to have to return.
The overt media effort to avoid upsetting conservatives is a conspicuous asymmetry in our contemporary politics.
Never is the media more asymmetrical than following elections. When Democrats lose, even if just in the antediluvian Electoral College despite a substantial popular vote majority, the media makes them admit a “shellacking,” and spends years waxing poetic on the Democratic wilderness and asking Democratic politicians to soul-search on how to apologize to the voters they didn’t win and how to moderate all their policies and idealisms to extend a bipartisan olive branch on Congress.
That kind of reflection does not exist anywhere in MAGA media. When will Breitbart send reporters to a transgender poetry open mic night in San Francisco to see how Biden voters view the world? When will Sean Hannity ask the Congressional Republicans he interviews to grapple with why Trump was so unpopular and lost Arizona and Georgia? When will OAN host a focus-group with Trump-Biden voters? None of that will ever happen. Frankly, Republicans simply don’t care what anybody thinks except them, and the mainstream media does not do a good job asking them to put themselves in liberals’ shoes. Now, rather than persuade new voters in order to win the popular vote for just the second time in the last 30 years, the GOP is straight up trying to disenfranchise the voters who don’t vote for them all across the country.
The contrast between parties could not be any more stark than this last November. Despite losing the entire government, there has been no humbling, no existential epiphanies, and no political recalibration from the Right or its media. Nor was there any of that during the Obama years. Somewhere, Paul Ryan’s 2012 autopsy report’s unread pages are yellowing.
Instead MAGA fans committed Nazi degeneracy at the Capitol, and are now committing Confederate degeneracy in state legislatures across the country so that a Jim Crow 2.0 can strangle democracy.
This lack of political therapy has now radicalized the GOP, and led to conservatives suffering from a delusional persecution-complex in which, because basic facts about a host of political issues (such as tax cuts paying for themselves, shredded regulations protecting consumers and the environment, racism being long gone, the Civil War being about “states’ rights,” homosexuality being a choice, abstinence-only sex-ed limiting abortions, George W. Bush’s competency, Iraqi WMDs, forever war troop surges, climate change, evolution, Obama being the AntiChrist and a Muslim communist 100% committed to turning America into a Sharia Law dictatorship, Obamacare leading to death panels, Benghazi and EmailGate being crimes, Biden being brain-dead, etc., etc.) tend not to support their ideological declarations and assertions, Republicans have spent decades very conveniently accusing all inconvenient fact-checks and disagreeable critical analysis of being unquestionable proof of a grand conspiracy of liberal bias pervading every aspect of American society.
Yet after so much effort accusing reality of having a liberal bias in order for Republican politicians and culture zealots to save face while slowly and surely losing every culture battle du jour, the 2021 QAnon-winking Republican base has created an entire parallel universe they can go visit every time they close their eyes, cover their ears, and yell “Fake News,” “Baby blood drinkers,” and “JFK Jr. is still alive and will soon reveal himself and accept the VP position when Donald Trump is reinstated as POTUS next month!”
It’s no surprise that OAN and Newsmax are showing incredible growth as even Fox News, of all news organizations, is deemed too liberally biased because its lawyers refuse to go all in on the most dangerous conspiracy theories to stave off lawsuits and advertising boycotts.
Sadly, this paranoia is inevitable when conservative media refuses to tell its viewers and readers the truth about reality. Conspiracies are an attractive sentiment for MAGA world’s misinformed, persecution-complex addicts who suffer from Shit-Life Syndrome, a debilitating socio-economic disease whose only cure is Democrats being allowed to raise wages, offer universal healthcare, and reinvent the economy away from obsolete fossil fuels, soulless stock speculation, and perennial top marginal tax cuts for the already sociopathically rich who clawed their way to the top exploiting labor and the previous generation's infrastructure generosity and now want to kick out the ladder to make sure their caskets are filled with the wealth the next generation has given up dreaming of.
Like all persecution-complexed political coalitions in the modern era, Trump’s Republican Party is offering their voters a snake oil placebo pill of blaming illegal voters, immigrants, and diversity for all their problems, and Republican media is selling it for them.
Poems:
25 November 2016
the election made me a crooner.
I have nothing to say specifically
it would take much too long to explain
everything that has gone wrong and unidealistically
the necessary taxi ride would be prohibitively expensive
so crooning is all I got
and I sing from my throat the garbled karaoke tunes
one bar to the next deep into the night
for drunken audience attendees
who keep stopping me to tell me to keep singing
loudly in my ear too close with their drunken breath
and they say it makes them feel a little better.
Oracles
I sat under an olive tree
thinking about morbid disappointments in life
and a man in a fishing vest amidst the tourists
approached me and either asked me
where the acropolis was or if I had been up there
in a difficult italian accent
so I said yes and he accepted the answer
and asked me where I was from so I said st. louis
and he asked where and I said america
and he asked where in america and I said st. louis
and he lied and said he knew it
and I thought maybe here it was
a deus ex machina with some epiphany
to turn my dumpster inspirations around
so I listened closely
as he told me about the trips he used to take
to sacramento and san bernardino where his aunts lived
he was very close with his aunts he said
very close in their hearts
and he would fly into jack kennedy
and fly seven hours to the west coast
cause airplanes used to take longer then he said
and now he lived in dubai but missed his native Italy
and he asked if I lived here in greece
and I said no my in-laws do I get to visit every year
and he said I was lucky and I agreed
and he bid me ciao and left
and I thought to myself what a zen reminder
and then a little bird landed next to me
hopped a bit and flew right past my face so I flinched
and landed some feet away and hopped some more
to a dead mouse I hadn’t noticed in the grass
and flew away with it somewhere else.
There’s a new Brain Milk podcast episode! Click the link below, put it at 1.5x speed so we sound smarter and take less of your time, and get a liberal dose of current events!
Brain Milk: It's Time For COVIDIOTS To Quarantine
I also want to invite you to check out this classic Halfway Post article I wrote:
God Admits His Omniscience Means Humans Don’t Actually Have Free Will
Funny premise, but I’m really proud of the world I imagined at the end of the article featuring cannibal Jim Jordans eating each other. Enjoy!
Thanks for your digital eyeball attention!
—Dash MacIntyre