Years ago, I knew a guy who desperately wanted to make a mark as a conservative activist. He was seriously naïve and ill-informed about most things (he’d been raised in a kind of self-segregated immigrant community). He used to call me up at five in the morning – don’t ask me what he was doing running around at that hour – and say things like, “I just saw the New York Times. They were saying bad things about President Reagan.”
So here I am, half asleep and scarcely able to think (not an uncommon problem with me). I tell him, “The Times, huh. The leading leftist paper in the U.S. What do you expect them to say?”
A long pause. “But…” A real sense of desperation here. “They’re saying bad things about President Reagan!”
It would go around a couple more times before I could get him off the phone, well aware that I hadn’t convinced him because he was beyond convincing. He fancied himself a movement conservative, and all the movement conservatives at the time believed in institutions. Ancient establishments that no matter what the field — media, finance, government, what have you — could be trusted implicitly and must not be questioned. So when a media institution — the NYT above all — said bad things about Reagan, they had to be true. (That “bad things,” with its kindergarten aura of “if you don’t actually say it, it won’t come true” is a tell. And no, he never did make any contribution.)
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past few weeks. Because recent behavior among MAGA conservatives — the new populist conservatism that has pushed the movement types into well-earned obscurity — has made it clear that this attitude, toward the legacy media in particular, this attitude that “it was in the noospaper, so it must be twoo,” still exists. And that, playmates, is a problem.
Some people are just not cynical enough. It’s clear that naivete and misplaced trust has a firm grip on MAGA populists. Think for a moment about the hundreds just freed from lengthy, unwarranted sentences because they believed it when the nice policeman invited them into the Capitol and even held the door open for them.
The two most recent examples deserve a close look: The drone invasion and the H-1B uproar.
Both came out of nowhere, apropos of nothing, and both were media-driven. Legacy media – tube and newspapers – not social media, at least not at the start.
Let’s take a look at those drones – if we can find one. The last week of November, they were suddenly all over the place. Thousands of them. Big as SUVs. Or even bigger. Iran had sent them, from a “mother ship.” Or maybe ISIS. They’d already taken over New Jersey, and were ready to spread all over the country (in the end, they didn’t).
Anybody who has ever looked into the UFO crazes of the late 40s and 50s will recognize this narrative immediately. Most people spend their lives without much in the way of looking up. When they do, when they are persuaded to actually pay attention to what is going on over their heads, they tend to see things that were always there but are unfamiliar to them. Someone on the news starts going on about “flying saucers” or “mystery drones,” and this is exactly what happens. I was child during the last — and largest — of the UFO “flaps,” as they were called, in 1965, when, triggered by an extremely goofy and ambiguous UFO report from Michigan, thousands of people across the country raced out of their homes, saw Venus or Jupiter, and screamed that the aliens were here. It made quite an impression on me at the time.
That’s exactly what happened these past six weeks regarding the drone attack. I’ve looked at some of the videos. They come in two varieties: 1) small lights too distant to see what they are, and 2) airliners. (I kid you not. The majority of the videos – well over half – were airliners showing the standard lighting arrangement of all such.)
Not to put too paranoid a point on it, but how is it that all this started only a couple weeks after one of the biggest political upsets in modern history? It’s not unusual for political upheavals to have this kind of effect. Look into the Great Fear that gripped revolutionary France just before the Terror or the same panic that spread across the South in the weeks after Lincoln was elected.
I can’t tell you how many drone submissions I’ve fielded over the past few weeks. The frustrating thing is that all of them, with one exception, repeated the panicky, fearful tone of the legacy media coverage: “The drones. They’re coming! They’re from Iran! Or the hollow earth! They’re as big as houses, as aircraft carriers… God help us, can nothing be done…” (The one exception was this sensible piece from Ed Sherdlu, a licensed pilot.)
As we reached the holidays, the drones faded out, as was to be expected. But then they were replaced by something else: the H-1B visa conflagration.
The post MAGA and the Legacy Media Trap appeared first on LewRockwell.