As I watched the Vice Presidential debate, I knew the media would declare Mike Pence the winner. Why? America is mostly about entertainment. America has become a country where facts are fungible. The fungibility of facts is a direct reflection of a traditional mainstream news media with an agenda, a puppeteered corporate shill. The fact that a focus group who watch the debate and voted before hearing media debate media spin believed that Tim Kaine won is telling.
A friend I hadn’t seen in a while walked into Starbucks, my office away from my home office where I spend dozens of hours a week. He saw my car parked outside and decided he wanted to have a political discussion. This man is a financial planner that is doing very well and a TEA Party member here in Kingwood, Texas. Kingwood, a suburb of Houston has one of the strongest and most active TEA Party groups in the country. In fact, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), Congressman Ted Poe (R-TX), Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick (R-TX), and many other Texas politicians are frequent visitors to the community to have rallies and fundraisers.
My friend asked me who I was voting for, given that my candidate, Bernie Sanders’ did not win. I told him I was now a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton. He was not surprised.
I asked him who he was supporting. I expected him to tell me, Gary Johnson. He said the election was a binary choice and weighing all options he had to go with Donald Trump. I asked him if he read the Hillary Clinton endorsement by the Arizona Republic and the Dallas Morning News who only endorses Republicans. He said he had not. I gave him the URL for two blogs I wrote on the endorsements.
What I found striking was the demonstrable alternate state of reality my friend was living in with no regards to the possibility that he could be wrong about his analysis. I listened to him intently for 15 minutes as he justified voting for Donald Trump. He attempted to make Trump’s flaws falsely equivalent to Clinton’s perceived flaws — both Trump and Hillary are liars; both foundations have problems, both enrich themselves inappropriately — and in the end, given his perceived equivalence, he believes Trump assigning a conservative Supreme Court justice like Scalia is the cinch.
It was clear that he was regurgitating the standard cliches from the Right Wing media. It was evident he relied on sources like Fox News, the Blaze, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, The Drudge Report, and WorldNetDaily. I invited him to visit a few conservative sites like Steve Deace who understands the danger of Donald Trump. He was likely not listening by then as I pointed out that attempts at false equivalences are the only comfort some conservative have in making their most patently destructive vote to the country.
The media gave legs to Donald Trump’s foray into birthirism. The media gave legs to the fallacy that Donald Trump is a billionaire who got rich because he is a great businessman. The truth that many investigative reporters are digging up now was always available for the taking. NewsWeeks’s Kurt Eichenwald finally blew the lid on that fallacy in his piece “Donald Trump’s Tax Records: A Tale of Business Failures.” The media chose to normalize Donald Trump’s behavior throughout his coverage and as such many ignore the media’s 180-degree switch in coverage. After all, they just recently decided to call his untruths by name, LIES.
My friend is the result of a delegitimized media, a media that plays to recessive prejudices as a form of control. He believes Trump is a racist. But he also believes Clinton is one too. He believes Trump is a misogynist. But he believes Clinton is too based on the Right Wing media’s well-designed framing. In effect, the media gave him cover for his flawed decisions, his flawed ideology, and the expression of his recessive prejudices via a vote for America’s most recent clear and present danger, Donald Trump.