After The Preliminaries Part 2: The Media

     Some in the Right believe that now that Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed to his Supreme Court appointment, the Left, seeing that its tactics have failed to stop the confirmation, will relent. I’m of a different opinion. My reasons include the observations in this article:

     It was always a problem for Kavanaugh that he was the one chosen to fill the crucial swing seat on the court (even more of a problem that he was a white man), but now that Democrats and their media friends have run out of ways to delay his confirmation, the obituaries have been written.

     The press, meanwhile, is turning Christine Blasey Ford into a hero for coming forward with her claim that couldn’t be corroborated, even by a good friend that Ford said was at the house where it happened.

     Kavanaugh, on the other hand, is the untouchable. (And don’t forget that he’s a white man — ew!)

     So the media are “taking point” in the second phase of the anti-Kavanaugh campaign, the aim of which is to make Kavanaugh, his family, and his supporters suffer. Many on the Left have already proclaimed that no Republican officeholder should ever again be permitted a moment of peace when in public. If even a small percentage of those enlisted in the Left should take that exhortation to heart, the consequences for Republicans in office will be horrible – possibly, in some cases lethal.

     And the legacy media are behind them all the way.

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     Early in his career, a reporter must develop the skill of finding those about whom he seeks to report. In this pursuit he will have several kinds of assistance. Legislators’ staffs routinely publicize their legislators’ itineraries. Government agencies do the same for their appointed ranks. The Internet is alive with talk about where this one or that one was seen, is currently observed, or will be in the near future. And of course one’s competitors in the news racket are often good sources of such data.

     It has become painfully obvious that the legacy media are enlisted, virtually to a man, in the Left’s causes. Many reporters, therefore, may be expected to help Leftist activists to find their targets for harassment. Though “JournoList” is no longer, I have little doubt that equivalents have emerged, and that only “reliable” reporters and activists are permitted access to them. Such webs will propagate the information activists require to carry on their campaigns of hatred.

     The idea isn’t somehow to undo Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation. It’s to exact a high price from everyone who supported it. Doing so would proclaim to anyone who might consider standing for office as a Republican that that price would be exacted from him and his loved ones. If this strategy is pursued with sufficient energy, it will deter – remember, that means to discourage through terror — conservatives and Republican allegiants from standing forth. The Left would capture the levers of power by virtue of being the only ones willing to reach for them.

     This is what Brownshirts do...or, if you prefer a more contemporary manifestation, the mutaween of Islamic hellholes. Fear used as means to power and as a cement for power.

     But without media support, the Left would probably not be able to make it work – and not only because the media would be invaluable in assisting Leftists at locating their targets.

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     It seems that, once again, I have no alternative but to cite a passage from C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, this one an article written for publication as an editorial in a highbrow English paper concerning a large-scale and very bloody riot:

     While it would be premature to make any final comment on last night's riot at Edgestow, two conclusions seem to emerge from the first accounts (which we publish elsewhere) with a clarity which is not likely to be shaken by subsequent developments. In the first place, the whole episode will administer a rude shock to any complacency which may still lurk among us as to the enlightenment of our own civilisation. It must, of course, be admitted that the transformation of a university town into a centre of national research cannot be carried out without some friction and some cases of hardship to the local inhabitants. But the Englishman has always had his own quiet and humorous way of dealing with frictions and has never showed himself unwilling, when the issue is properly put before him, to make sacrifices much greater than those small alterations of habit and sentiment which progress demands of the people of Edgestow. It is gratifying to note that there is no suggestion in any authoritative quarter that the N.I.C.E. has in any way exceeded its powers or failed in that consideration and courtesy which was expected of it; and there is little doubt that the actual starting-point of the disturbances was some quarrel, probably in a public-house, between one of the N.I.C.E. workmen and some local Sir Oracle. But as the Stagyrite said long ago, disorders which have trivial occasions have deeper causes, and there seems little doubt that this petty fracas must have been inflamed, if not exploited, by sectional interests or widespread prejudice.

     It is disquieting to be forced to suspect that the old distrust of planned efficiency and the old jealousy of what is ambiguously called “Bureaucracy” can be so easily (though, we hope, temporarily) revived; though at the same time, this very suspicion, by revealing the gaps and weaknesses in our national level of education, emphasizes one of the very diseases which the National Institute exists to cure. That it will cure it we need have no doubt. The will of the nation is behind this magnificent “peace-effort,” as Mr. Jules so happily described the Institute, and any ill-informed opposition which ventures to try conclusions with it will be, we hope, gently, but certainly firmly, resisted.

     The article is about twice as long as what appears here, but that’s enough to make the points I intend. Note the minimizations, the tendentious phrasings, the circumlocutions, and the praise of the N.I.C.E. and of “the Englishman” used to defuse anger over the events being described. But note above all the most important fact about this article: It was written before the riot took place, by a N.I.C.E. employee. The N.I.C.E. engineered the riot specifically to force the civil authorities to surrender control of Edgestow, so that the remaining residents could be displaced by fear or force.

     The papers had surrendered to the N.I.C.E.’s control. Therefore it could use them to put about versions of events, and opinion-editorials about them, that would conduce to the advance of its agenda. That agenda, to say the least, was not favorable to any Englishman’s life, liberty, or property. Indeed, it was diabolic in the exact sense of the word.

     Our legacy media are not (so far as I know) under the control of an Institute itself controlled by devils. But they are wholly enlisted in the support of a left-liberal / “progressive” agenda, regardless of the effects that agenda has had when regnant. Some media figures are “true believers,” while others are aspirants to power themselves, and others are “going along to get along” in a trade that treats him who diverges from the editors’ wishes very harshly. They are reliable Squealers for the Left’s regime, whether it’s in or out of power.

     Should a Reign of Terror befall Republicans in public positions, I have no doubt that it will be greatly assisted by the media. Consider all they’ve done to this point to make the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh next to impossible. Consider also how careful the media have been about not giving true coloration to the harassment the Left’s street activists have already perpetrated. Finally, consider how willing Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and several other voluble Democrats have been to encourage the harassers and concur with their media defenders, all the while keeping just enough distance between them.

     This demands to be watched.