by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
One of the most frustrating things going on these days is how Right Wing “thought leaders” love to conflate the (annoying) soft power of the smug liberal elite media with the power of the Federal government.
This conflation is serves the purposes of the Right because it reduces everything down to an Us vs. Them situation.
I bring this up because I’m listening to the “All-In” podcast and David Sacks loves to do this very thing. He — and a lot of other Right wing thought leaders bitch and moan about the “bias” of the mainstream media and use that anger as a cudge to demand hard power.
Say what you will about the media and their power, Mr. Sacks, but they can’t put you in jail. Even the people that get “canceled” by the “woke cancel culture mob” are free to do the same damn thing they’ve always done — sometimes to great success.
The issue is that this conflation is parter a broader problem of the United States cleaving into two nations, Red and Blue. Right wing people are alarmed at the hyper societal change going on in the United States and the “bias” of the mainstream media is a shiny object that they point to when they want hard power.
As an aside, I really fucking hate people who are hyper partisan. And people like David Sacks have a huge and I mean HUGE chip on their shoulders and so they lash out. The whole whining about the power of the media is more a symptom of how popular fascism is in the United States than anything else. Sacks makes a point of saying that the evil libtards of the media have such absolute influence that they control the government via their reporting.
This is serious bullshit. Ron DeSantis — but for Trump — is probably going to be the next president of the United States, no matter how much he, and the Republican Party, are hated by the smug Twitter liberals. You can’t have it both ways — you can’t say the only reason why Trump became president was all the free publicity from the press and yet also refuse to acknowledge that the press doesn’t really have much power given that DeSantis now the frontrunner to become president in 2024.
The key issue is — if people like David Sacks get their way, will there be an equal and opposite reaction on the part of Blues? During the transition to a legalistic autocracy, will Blues refuse to “bend a knee” to fascism and demand a National Divorce?
That’s an open question for the moment, at least.
