ABC/Disney gave us all a startling vision of their contempt for truth.
Or perhaps not so startling. Certainly, it shouldn’t barie. They provided only the latest, though most egregious, example of the legacy media’s pimping of truth, the coin of payment being power. Their goal is establishing themselves as a new ruling aristocracy. Truth stands in their way, so it must be ravished, demoralized and shamed to clear their way.
Aristocrats are afraid of the power of the people.
What better public place for the shaming than the presidential debate?
When I thought of researching this article, I went first to refresh my memory of the crossing-the-Rubicon moment when Candy Crowley changed the momentum of the 2012 race. Obama had disappointed as president, deliberately enacting policies that he knew had never received a mandate from the American people, increasingly showing himself as a divider rather than a unifier, as racial tensions began their recent rise under him.
Obama Gets Media Help
Obama had disappointed in his first debate with Republican nominee Mitt Romney as well, and the polls showed it. Unless Obama could regain the Big Mo, odds were he would lose.
In that second debate, Romney had Obama dead to rights. He had focused on the avoidable and disastrous loss of America’s ambassador, left inadequately secure in Benghazi, Libya. Despite the brave members of the military who defended them to the death, the well-organized terrorists of Ansar al-Sharia celebrated another humiliation of America on the anniversary of 9/11.
In reporting the incident to the country, Obama deliberately obscured the intelligence that he already had — that the attack was planned and executed by terrorists. His team would soon try to pass the lie that the terror was really a spontaneous and understandable popular reaction to an American insult to Islam (as would be maintained, a reaction to an utterly unknown film by an utterly unknown filmmaker whom the feds then hustled off to prison, First Amendment and the intelligence reports be damned). The truth would hurt the administration, so it had to be suppressed.
Obama had in mind, as we know now and has been admitted by his chief confederate in the process, the complete upending of our long-held Middle East policy. He aimed to distance Israel and other American allies in the region and in their stead, rehabilitate and empower the savage mullahs of Iran. Step by careful step, he minimized the role of Islamist terror and magnified everything and anything that could be portrayed as American (and Israeli) hubristic imperialism.
Now, his community-organizer narrative was being threatened by objective reality. But he had a tight grip on his administration and he effectively controlled what information got out — at least at first. In his characteristic manner, he used words that were meant to communicate one thing but, when needed, provided a sort of plausible deniability of his actual intent.
In his speech, he condemned the attack — America would expect that. But he made no statement clearly calling the attack an act of terrorism, and so set the ground for what became the administration’s line in the coming days: it was a spontaneous attack, an understandable reaction to American insensitivity towards Muslim sensibilities.
Obama used the word “terror” just once in his remarks. Here’s how it reads in the official transcript: “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for.”
This is a perfect example of Obama’s brilliant duplicity. He does not call the act terror nor its instigators terrorists. Here, he speaks only about our principled stand as Americans, not of the specific act, which was and should have been labeled as exactly that, for planned terror is exactly what it was.
So, when at the second debate, Obama spoke of how he had called Benghazi an act of terror, Romney knew he had the chance to put this debate away and probably the whole election. He asked Obama to deny that he had not identified the attack as terror, believing that he had him dead to rights.
But Obama seemed entirely unconcerned. There was no deer-in-the-headlight look on his face, but rather that of a skilled poker player about to show someone who has put all his money on the table that he was holding four aces. He wasn’t going to have to lie. Candy did it for him, intervening decisively to uphold the lie that Obama had in fact called Benghazi an act of terror. She knew how to deploy the trust most Americans still put in legacy media for being honest brokers that would never put its thumb on the scales of a presidential election.
Romney never regained momentum. He lost that debate, and the next one, and the election.
This is what I recalled as I set out to review that ancient history before writing about the latest lying intervention by legacy media abusing the trust still invested in them by a major segment of the American people. The facts, I thought, had been settled out by the evidence, and since the election for which Crowley lied was won in some part due to her intervention, there was no necessity to spend all the energy it takes to keep a lie alive.
Still Gaslighting the People
Was I ever wrong. My Google search was filled almost to exclusion by the links given pride of place by Big Tech, and those links are still pumping air into Crowley’s lie and pretending that what a fair reading and internal emails show conclusively as true — is not.
It takes little reflection to understand why. The legacy media still wish to perform the same role in empowering those who do not trust the people, the self-appointed aristocracy that believe it knows all things better than we the people. ABC showed that to perfection, lying not once, but many times.
Just as important, they supported Kamala’s serial deceits by silence and other means. The legacy media cannot admit that they have ever done what they did and what they are doing again, whether it was the feeding of debate questions to Hillary in 2016 or Chris Wallace’s utterly erroneous “correction” of Trump’s accurate assertions about Hunter’s laptop. They admit no wrong and intend no change.
It’s an old attitude. The fault towards which aristocracies tend, as known even by Aristotle and in our own history by Madison, Hamilton, and the other framers, is ever-increasing contempt for those under their rule which inevitably leads to ever greater resentment. Aristocrats are afraid of the power of the people.
This is true over time. Piers Brendon wrote of the British aristocracy of the 1930s:
The people were only allowed a glimpse of the proceedings. Live television coverage, which could not be censored, was prohibited…. The masses were consumers, powerful but manipulable.
We, the People, can see better. Legacy media no longer have the only voice. We need to seek out the voices of those who are unafraid of the truth and unafraid of the people. Our trust must be earned, by the media and by the candidates alike.
That is the core of our power and the power of our constitutional republic. It is in our hands.
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