The media’s 10-month panic attack triggered by Donald Trump’s inauguration shows no signs of abating. Every news cycle is filled with breathless reports of yet another “scandal” that could lead to Trump’s removal from office.
News of a federal grand jury’s indictments of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his associate, Richard W. Gates, is yet another hook upon which the media have hung their hopes for impeachment. But it is to no avail.
The 12 counts against Manafort and Gates have nothing to do with Trump’s campaign. Instead, they involve a money-laundering scheme and a conspiracy to conceal $75 million that Manafort and Gates received when they worked as unregistered foreign agents of Ukraine from 2006-2014. This is just one more nothing burger. Yet the media’s crusade continues.
Then came the story the wait staff of the Democratic Party thought they had been waiting for. News broke that George Papadopoulos, a 30-year-old Trump campaign volunteer, was arrested by the FBI in July and has been cooperating with Robert Mueller’s investigative team ever since. But Papadopoulos was a low-level, unpaid foreign policy advisor to the campaign, and though he met in London with an intermediary who promised information from the Russian government, nothing ever came of it.
The FBI’s Statement of Offense notes that Papadopoulos emailed Trump campaign officials about having a higher up or even Trump himself meet with his contact overseas. A campaign official wrote in an email conversation that “DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.” The trip, however, “did not take place.” And as Paul Mirengoff of Power Line writes, Papadopoulos “pleaded guilty to making false statements, not to trying to arrange a meeting with Russian government officials. The latter is not, to my knowledge, a crime.”
Quite simply, getting dirt on Hillary Clinton—even from foreign sources—is not a violation of federal law, whatever the DNC and its epigones in the press contend. Instead, it’s the Clinton campaign and the DNC that look to have broken the law with their machinations with Fusion GPS. The available evidence, or lack thereof, so far suggests that the entire Trump-Russia collusion “scandal” is a complete fabrication by individuals who seem to have projected on Trump and his team their own inclinations to countenance unethical actions.
In an infinite regress, it’s nothing but lies all the way down.
Even with stories that don’t rise to that level of mendacity, every effort is still made by the anti-Trump media to portray Trump, his administration, and even those who simply criticize Trump critics as completely beyond the pale.
The latest example of this stratagem is the overheated reactions generated by an interview White House Chief of Staff John Kelly gave Monday night. To the shock and alarm of the professors at Oberlin College, Kelly called Confederate General Robert E. Lee “an honorable man” even though he noted that Lee incorrectly judged where his ultimate loyalty should have been—with the nation rather than in his home state of Virginia.
Kelly also noted that a “lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,” an opinion so mild that it beggars belief that every major news organization decided to plaster those words on their front pages (see here, here, here, here, here, here). MSN even ran a video on the story with the defamatory headline, “Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly Defends Confederacy.” This is written as if Kelly himself defended the Confederate cause, instead of merely offering an innocuous opinion about the events leading up to the Civil War.
Under the spell of seeing the specter of white nationalism everywhere, the press has completely lost its ability to discern between truth and deception, facts and opinions. They inhabit a world that is defined by a conception of pure good versus pure evil—and they are the ones who help to define those terms for the rest of us. Sin has been transformed from man’s violation of God’s commands to man’s violation of the Left’s commands. And all are now of the unforgivable variety. God may have mercy on our souls. The Left never will.
While Trump lives to provoke the press, he cannot take credit as the source of their perpetual maniacal state. He has merely revealed it. The corruption in the media and the ruling class has been spreading for decades. This is a consequence of an already debauched character that their increased power has only magnified. To amend Lord Acton’s famous dictum, power can only corrupt absolutely when a person’s character is already corrupted.
The perpetual outrage machine will cease only if the American people refuse to assent to the media’s ongoing gaslighting campaign. Though the media may hold up four fingers and tell us there are five, we must push back and see reality as it is—not how those who wish to rule us want us to see it.
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