Following the Republican National Convention last month, former President Donald Trump was riding high, even by the standards of a real-estate-mogul-turned president. He had just survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, by turning his head at the last possible moment. His federal classified documents case, which legal observers considered the most damning among his numerous indictments, was tossed out of court. The RNC, the third straight to nominate Trump, received high marks from friends and foes alike for its displays of enthusiasm and party unity. His vice presidential selection, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), was received as a bold, if high-risk pick.
But the glow was short-lived. In a span of days, the secular liberal establishment, composed of various cultural institutions including the legacy news media, Big Tech, and Hollywood, worked in lockstep with the Democratic Party to turn the tide of the race and bolster the nascent candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris. The extraordinary operation has left many observers in awe of the secular-liberal establishment’s ability to manipulate the cultural narrative.
Each institution played a key part in upending the campaign. The legacy news media hypnotically repeated the claim that “Kamala was never the border czar,” despite describing her in precisely those terms three years earlier. Meanwhile, they produced a torrent of glowing headlines for her campaign.
Google appeared to suppress search results about Trump, particularly regarding the assassination attempt on his life.
Scores of A-list celebrities hurled themselves into the breach on Harris’s behalf, including actor George Clooney, whose op-ed in the New York Times calling for President Joe Biden to step down weeks earlier opened the floodgates for other prominent liberals to follow suit. And let’s not forget rap star Megan Thee Stallion, who gave a profanity-laced performance at a Harris campaign rally in Atlanta. (A Taylor Swift rally is whispered to be in the works.)
These efforts have been brutal for the Trump campaign. His lead in the polls has evaporated, recent swing state polling shows he is now behind or tied in many of the states he has comfortably led for months, and his vaunted campaign war chest has been eclipsed by a massive fundraising month for Harris, whose July haul more than doubled his.
“It’s more than just a coordinated effort,” Brent Bozell, founder of Media Research Center, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s a mindset. This is a radical Left that sees itself as on a Messianic mission to destroy Trump specifically and the conservative movement in general. This is not the liberalism of the past. These are the tactics of neo-Marxism. And by that I mean the ends justify the means. These people will lie with abandon and with absolutely no shame.”
For Bozell, the establishment machine kicked into high gear following Biden’s shaky debate performance in June — though it is always in operation to some degree. The debate gave license to Democratic Party-friendly news media to openly discuss Biden’s cognitive health, a topic seen as off-limits until that point. Only weeks prior, mainstream outlets such as the Washington Post and the New York Times ran pieces that described videos taken of an ailing Biden at the G7 Conference as “cheap fakes” — a term coined by the White House to discredit the videos as Republican attacks. But Biden’s alarmingly frail appearance at the debate rendered this tact untenable.
Once it became clear that Biden was likely to lose in his reelection battle, talk of replacing the president ran rampant throughout the establishment. Following Clooney’s op-ed, pundits across the liberal news media openly began to speculate about who might succeed Biden. Democratic Party powers, from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to former President Barack Obama to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), went public with their desire for Biden to step aside, creating an aura of inevitability around the president’s withdrawal.
Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA), whose district includes the site of the assassination attempt on Trump in July, was troubled by the apparent coordination but not surprised. In his 14 years in Congress, he said he’s seen this level of partnership between the media and Democrats before.
“They’re all part of the same choir,” he told the Washington Examiner. “So they are going to sing from the same song sheet. They can change speeds very quickly, and they can change positions just as quickly. A few weeks ago, the media said Biden was sharp as he’s ever been. He’s at work before everyone else gets there. And then he does the debate, and suddenly, they act like they never said any of this. Now the media just want him to enjoy whatever time he has left with Dr. Jill and the grandkids.”
It is no small irony that Biden himself has benefitted as much as anyone from previously being in the establishment’s good favor. When the owner of a Delaware computer shop announced that he possessed a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, the president’s son, in October 2020, the media and Big Tech, working in concert with government officials, effectively suppressed the story. A group of 51 former intelligence officials signed an open letter saying the laptop, which contained evidence of a foreign influence peddling scheme and scandalous pictures and videos of Hunter Biden, had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” The social media platform X actively blocked posts related to the laptop and suspended the New York Post‘s account for reporting on the incident. Legacy news outlets branded the story “misinformation.”
X officials have since apologized for the mistake, and most legacy news outlets have authenticated the laptop. But for Bozell, the damage was already done since the suppression of the story fundamentally interfered with the 2020 election results.
“We have proven empirically through polling data that if the media simply reported the Hunter Biden laptop story, Biden would not be president today,” he said. “The New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, CNN, NBC — all of them censored that story.”
In recent weeks, the media has coordinated in a comparable manner to expunge the role of “border czar” from Harris’s record due to her role in the immigration crisis being perceived as a liability. In 2021, analysts on CNN regularly referred to Harris as “border czar,” for instance. But now, CNN has aired numerous segments “debunking” the notion and has corrected guests swiftly who claim otherwise. Similarly, Axios recently scolded the Trump campaign for using the label on Harris despite having used it numerous times themselves in the past.
“I’ve never seen anybody change the script more often than they do,” Kelly said. “Now they say, ‘You misunderstand. She was never the ‘border czar.’ But she was. And the border is porous.”
Perhaps most troubling has been the skewed Google search results in recent weeks that promote Harris. As of Friday, the search “Trump rally” turns up information on Harris rallies and suppresses information related to the assassination attempt on the former president. The company’s “autocomplete function” allegedly diverted users away from the shooting in Butler and toward other presidential assassination attempts. The search “assassination attempt of” produces scores of suggestions related to other figures — but not Trump.
“I’m surprised people think this is new,” Bozell said of the incident. “Google has been doing this against Republicans for quite some time. Six percent of voters say they make their decision on who to vote for based on a Google search. And if you go on Google looking for information on Republicans, you don’t find it. You only see Democrats.”
The secular-liberal establishment’s power to censor political opposition is particularly disturbing for Christians who hold to universal and eternal truths. At the dawn of an artificial intelligence age in which digital technology plays an increasingly central role in human affairs, it is easy to imagine Christians coming under increased persecution — or, as in China, being driven underground by a powerful central authority.
Kelly believes Christians must remember to return to the fundamentals of the faith in these troubling times.
“We combat this the way we combat everything in our lives,” he said. “Bishop Fulton Sheen would say we have old problems with new labels. We can put new labels on things, but what’s right is right, and what’s wrong is wrong. Just because you talk in a different way about something that is wrong doesn’t make it less wrong. I do know there’s forgiveness and mercy, and I do know we have a God who is going to be just.”
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Peter Laffin is a staff writer for the National Catholic Register and a contributor at the Washington Examiner. His work has appeared in the Catholic Herald, The Catholic Thing, and RealClearPolitics.