aNewDomain — Here is the narrative that’s been going around since Electon Day:
Left-leaning Democrats unduly and cruelly demonized half the electorate, using dirty personality politics that ended up driving away too many of America’s working and middle class white people.
If only the left had listened to the concerns of the rural poor and middle classes, so the narrative goes, things would have turned out so differently.
But there is a problem with this narrative.
Only a tiny margin of people separated Clinton from victory in the 2016 election. She won the popular vote by 2.8 million votes, according to estimates that came in just today.
That means the more the late vote comes in, the more Trump is the loser in the popular vote.
And it turns out Trump won only by just a few hundred thousand people in just a few key states — that’s a tiny minority of voters.
And it’s an exceedingly tiny minority of the population generally.
This is why suggesting that liberals made Trump win by being mean to his supporters doesn’t hold up. Saying we all should’ve paid more attention to white male concerns probably just does not do justice to the real issues they care about. And those issues are just a tiny, minority set of concerns, anyway.
We’ll see this come to light more and more as Trump assembles his cabinet and enters his first 100 days in office.
Trump’s voters, a coalition of wildly different white peope, have needs that will soon be revealed to be mutually incompatible anyway. The only thing many of them have in common, really, is a certain kind of genetic mutation that causes the depigmentation you see in pale, white skin.
That’s not much to have in common.
Working poor whites from the Rust Belt do not have many interests in common with either white supremacists or rich, white libertarians.
This edifice must crumble. That is why we are beginning to see already in policy reversals – so many campaign promises are falling by the wayside.
No border wall, no Clinton prosecution, no repeal of Obamacare on day one, either.
Where does it end?
So back up a second and ask yourself this: If there is not a broad coalition of white, working-class voters whose needs are being ignored, are there other explanations for the Trump phenomenon, deplorables and all?
And who is responsible for this?
The media has called mea culpa on this one. Deservedly so.
So would it really be that surprising to find they had planted the idea that Democrats ignoring innocent white people was the proximal cause of their failure?
How much are their talking heads being paid to repeat the message over and over?
You don’t even want to know.
Yet CNN more or less gave the game away. Fake news became a real and pernicious national problem in this election cycle.
Following the results of the election, remember, CNN president Jeff Zucker admitted that perhaps showing so many Trump speeches in their entirety with no fact-checking might not have been a great idea.
And boy, did Trump ever deliver on the ratings. CNN made a fortune off the Trump campaign, you know.
Letting Trump have the run of the airwaves could only have been a mistake in the light of events — securing the Republican nomination for president, for example.
But the real important thing in America and to American media, too, is clicks, cash and whatever cash you can score from the companies who can afford to pay the big bucks to pimp their products.
The President-elect is right about this much: The mainstream media really are biased and corrupt, and are out to get him.
We get to look forward to four to eight years of Trevor Noah and Samantha Bee and Saturday Night Live poking fun at the old man. They will use any crude tactics to deflate him. Problem is, only liberals will keep watching.
These production are the left’s version of fake news news: It’s just current events packaged in navel-gazing, self-congratulatory jokes and sly put-downs.
And there’s the problem. Right there. The problem is the media. All the media. All the news, real and fake.
It’s hard for anyone to tell the difference any more.
Even NBC fills its headlines with click-bait sounding adjectives and adverbs. The days of factual reporting, well, they’re behind us now.
Trolling is the order of the day now. And who let them in? Cable news did. It opened the door. And the Internet keeps it ajar.
There is enough blame to go around. CNN is a ratings whore of the first order. Its reporting seems designed to keep us watching rather than to inform us. It was designed that way.
But do you ever wonder how many news stories you missed over the last 600 days because it was all Trump, all the time?
Fox News led the way, certainly, pioneering in some ways the delivery of our daily news in sneering tones, all counter-factual statements wrapped up in condescension.
Academics and comedians tried to point out the logical fallacies and the persistent bias but, as usual, only got the message out to liberals. Conservatives were happy hearing what they wanted to hear, and they tuned in in droves. Hospitals, banks, airports and police stations frequently defaulted to this mad bad source of information.
And when Fox proved impossible to take down, when Bill O’Reilly was permitted to flood the airwaves with misinformation for 20 years, when they withstood all attempts to fact-check them, well, then, someone had to come along and do it better. And they did.
Breitbart is just one of many media outlets not at all interested in what is true. Infowars is another. The list goes on and on. Thousands of fake journalists produce metric shit-tons of misinformation on every possible subject every single day. Global warming, for example: cherry-picked data or outright lies, always packaged with sarcasm and condescension, let us know global warming is a hoax perpetrated by eco-terrorists.
The blame for all this is not on liberal shoulders. Liberals and academics tried to tell everyone they were getting trolled.
We sometimes used trolls to do it (I miss you, Jon Stewart) but the message has been out for a long time. Your news is fake, even the real news is slanted.
People chose to believe what they wanted rather than what was supportable with facts and data.
And I don’t mean just red voters, but enough red voters in battleground states to make a difference. Listening to their concerns would be nihilism because their concerns are built so much on fake news.
On Clinton’s fictional child sex ring in a fictional Washington DC basement, aka #Pizzagate, on Planned Parenthood’s fictional abortion rates, on trickle-down economics.
But how can you tell the difference between truth and lies when even The History Channel dumbs us down with stuff like MonsterQuest, Ancient Aliens, Doomsday Preppers and all the other crap? How can you tell when a channel called The Learning Channel runs shows about petulant young gypsy brides, or when Discovery’s hit investigative series delves deep into fake Amish mafia?
The educational channels spew out bullshit and we buy it.
Are there really mermaids?
They make fakeumentaries, entertainment meant to fool us into believing the subjects are real, to make us doubt.
So, no. No, it isn’t liberals neglecting white people or wanting a female president that is the issue.
The issue is our willingness – everyone’s, not just a minority of white Trump supporters who can’t seem to understand global warming – to believe misinformation that supports our prejudices.
Forget about authoritarianism. It’s innocent, this time.
For aNewDomain, I’m Jason Dias – so far as you can prove, anyway.
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