Back in 2007, April Gavaza introduced a phrase from William Gibson into the Blogosphere: “The Cold Civil War.” In 2008, LilacRose described what was being fought over:
As far as I’m concerned, the differences are irreconcilable. One part of the country wants a socialist, European-style country. The other part wants a country based on free-enterprise and the Constitution. One side has disdain for orthodox Judeo-Christian faiths, whereas the other side embraces or at least tolerates those beliefs. One part believes that if we just let down our defenses, everything would be peace and lovebeads. The other part knows we live in a dangerous world and that defense is essential.
However this election turns out, there will be turmoil. If Obama wins, a large part of the country will feel angry and powerless against the will of the left leaning blue states, the news media, Hollywood and academia. (In fact, they already feel that way, I assure you.) They will believe that ACORN created enough false voter registrations to put Obama over the top. If McCain wins, the left will riot and claim, “The Diebold machines were hacked!” The blue states, the news media, Hollywood and academia will resent that the will of the “dumb hicks” in flyover country overruled that of their “betters”. And we will hear the cries of, “Racism! Racism!” ad nauseam.
I hate to sound all doom-and-gloom, but I see absolutely no solution to this. Or at least no solution in which America stays in the same form it is now. I hope I’m wrong about that. I guess we’ll see.
So what’s the battlefield for the Cold Civil War? Last week, Gerard Van der Leun concluded, “The Media is how America fights its civil wars”:
In this war at least half the country is both under-served and is painfully aware it is being under-served and lied to. In pop culture parlance, “We’re going to need bigger guns.”
Seen as the 4th branch of government, the unelected and self-selected Mainstream Media, in cultural and political collusion with the present government, knows this and – even as it dies – will do everything it can to prevent the arming of the people with more and better media.
To control the medium is to control the message.
And Andrew Klavan adds:
If the tax day tea party protests accomplished nothing else, they did this: they tore the mask off the mainstream news media and revealed the media’s naked hostility to the ideals of our founding fathers. For years, those of us who hold to those ideals have felt that the news media were biased against us. Now we see we were wrong. They’re not biased. They’re openly on the attack.
Saying the media are biased is like saying the British were biased against the colonial forces at Bunker Hill. It’s as if one minute man turned to another and said, “I think those redcoats are shooting at us because they lack objectivity.”
I think they’re shooting at us because they’re trying to kill us.
Never was this more clear to me than on Friday, the first of May, when I had the pleasure of participating in an extraordinary hour of television: Glenn’s live and free-wheeling discussion with a studio-full of regular folks who had turned out on tax day to protest the recent unprecedented expansion of government and the cost that they and their children are going to have to pay for it.
These were the very people columnist Paul Krugman called “crazy,” in the pages of the New York Times; the people Susan Rosegen of CNN labeled “offensive,” and that actress Janeane Garafolo called “racist,” on MSNBC. As for the rest of the mainstream media, well, they tried to ignore them at first and, when their sheer numbers made that impossible, they tried to mock them with the sort of low jokes you usually expect to hear in a middle school locker room or on The Daily Show.
And yet when Glenn gave them a fair chance to speak for themselves, what did these crazy offensive racists want to talk about? Their businesses. Their families. The constitution. The founders. And they wanted to try to answer Glenn’s question: what is the media missing about them?
Read the rest, here.
Update: Related thoughts from James Taranto, The Rhetorican, Shannon Love, and Kathy Shaidle.
Update: Welcome Michelle Malkin readers!
(Bumped to top.)
Join the conversation as a VIP Member