Revelations the press has been clearing questions with the DNC, coaching Hillary through interviews and in acting as her political agents motivated John Nolte to write: “national media now sees itself as part of the government”. It is part of the Narrative, along with everything else. It’s not news, it’s a paid political advertisement. “And here is the consequence of all this,” he adds: people have lost faith in everything. Museums, churches, universities, perhaps even the FBI. But the media’s betrayal, given its former role as America’s secular church was the unkindest cut of all.
Jeffrey Gedmin, formerly of Radio Free Europe, notes that Russian disinformation has never been so influential as it is today. Can you believe, he asks, that people actually believe the Kremlin? “Today, the cyber warfare of Wikileaks—linked by U.S. authorities to Russia—has been affecting the U.S. elections in incalculable ways.” But the success of Russia’s campaign of deception is directly related to the media’s political corruption. The decline in media credibility — the corruption of the Narrative — directly led to the plausibility of Kremlin agitprop.
It was when people stopped trusting Obama they they started believing Putin. It was when the Leader of the Free World stopped being seen as that the Red Chekist took the darkened center stage. Perhaps the biggest administration failure of the last 8 years has not been the creation of a power vacuum, but the generation of a black hole of lies that has sucked everything in and tainted all.
The hard power vacuum created the chaos in the Middle East, the Chinese challenge in Asia, the Russian advance in the Middle east. But the trust vacuum created something potentially even more dangerous, a crisis of legitimacy within the West.
This decade ends, not in Hope, but in cynicism. A high ranking Australian official observed in a private talk that the single most frightening thing about the 2016 American elections was the decline in trust in public institutions. The only institution trusted any more, he observed, was the military. It bodes ill when the only people we can trust to exercise power are the very ones who we have and for good reason forbidden to possess it.
If the answer to the question “who can you trust any more?” is “nobody” that’s the biggest achievement of the last 8 years. It’s so obvious you have to look at it to see it. The decade sold out everyone it could — including Bernie Sanders. It aborted babies; betrayed the white working class, impoverished the black inner cities, destroyed health insurance, started a campaign against every form of decency even in public bathrooms, presented blatant liars as the most qualified candidates and demanded that we greet it with hails and hossanas.
All hail. All hail. It’s not ‘why now?’ that is the question. The better question is: how much longer.
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Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with your friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document.
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