MICHAEL WALSH: What Is to be Done? Preparing the Information Battlespace.

The truth is, the Democrats were caught with their pants down in 2016, immediately vowed to never let it happen again, and then set about their four-year task of battlespace preparation. You can read all about how they did it in this by now-notorious piece in Time Magazine, which includes the following victory lap:

“There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes… They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.”

All the supererogatory Trump rallies in the world couldn’t compete with that. Because while the president was jibing at the media and Joe Biden’s pathetic and infrequent public appearances, the real action was taking place at the state level, right under the Republican Party’s noses, and the principal battlefield was the media environment.

The corporate media has been drifting left for decades, self-selecting in its hires for progressive radicalism: overly credentialed, poorly educated, and rabidly partisan young reporters who weren’t smart enough to get into law school, but wanted to change the world anyway. Traditional notions of objectivity and even-handedness had been vanishing for years but in 2016, the New York Times abandoned all pretense to fairness and issued a call to arms:

“If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that,” wrote Jim Rutenberg in August 2016. “You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional… Do normal standards apply? And if they don’t, what should take their place?”

Once absolved by the Mother Church of Progressivism (and now Wokism), “journalists” everywhere went to work on Trump with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch. Although they failed to swing the election that year, their opposition only intensified during the “resistance” as they unabashedly allied themselves with the Democrat Party and gleefully functioned as anti-Trump propaganda outlets 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

And that’s where the battle was lost. Enough suburban white wine moms were trained to recoil at Trump’s “mean tweets” and to gravitate toward a clearly senescent Biden in the name of civility.

Which civility never appeared.