The Liberal (Media) Men Who Think They’re Gods, Part 2

Ok, the title of this piece is, I admit, a bit of clickbait. Because these male journalists may well be just as plagued by self-doubt as the rest of us. How would I know what is in their hearts? But what I do know is this: every time I listen to them they say mind-boggingly dumb shit with confident aplomb. Hence, the deliberately provocative title.

These are not dumb men. They are experienced, sophisticated, well-educated, with many years in the public eye. They surely know things I do not, and I am not casting aspersions on their careers as a whole. What I’m about to point out is a flaw in their worldview, a log in their eye, a weakness in the mainframe. A few years ago, this flaw did not seem so important — but given the ever-increasing pressure from elites on normal people, today it verges on journalistic malpractice.

Never in my lifetime has the elite’s hatred and contempt for regular people been so obvious. But within the magic circle — which anyone who still regularly consumes mainstream liberal-left media is in — this hatred and contempt goes mostly unobserved.

I am going to present below a few samples from interviews I listened to recently that I thought were particularly good examples of this bias, and its accompanying myopia, from some men at the highest levels of our Anglophone intelligentsia/media. I will quote from the discussions directly, then I will provide an analysis, or maybe translation is a better word for it.

Thomas Frank on Russell Brand

The American writer Thomas Frank is — to my knowledge — the only liberal-left defender of populism today. And as such, you would think he would support the populist surge happening across the US and Europe, no? 

No. Because, like every other fully paid up member of the mainstream media class, he cannot — and I mean, cannot — see what is in front of his face. He cannot accept that his beloved populists might want self-determination and fairness in a slightly different way than he does. Economic justice and opportunity for all races? Yes! No more unnecessary foreign wars? Totally! Break monopoly capital and dismantle Big Banks, Big Tech and Big Pharma? Absolutely! Support the only grassroots political movement calling for all of that, even if it happens to be republican? Hell no. Fuck off, movement of the people.

Despite Russell Brand’s best efforts to pull the wool from Frank’s eyes, the hapless writer instead insists that Bernie Sanders might just pull it off, next time. It was an embarrassment of an interview. 

But he does say something extremely revelatory, which explains why these liberals cannot accept that labels have changed. He explained to Brand that when he was a young man, in the 1980’s, everyone in his wealthy Kansas City neighbourhood voted Republican. Republicans controlled all levers of power. They were the ruling class. Not anymore:

“Well that neighbourhood [in 2020], Joe Biden won every single precinct. They’ve completely flipped. The ruling class of that city and state, it’s completely flipped. It is the freakiest thing. My whole life was defined…I was a little punk rocker and all that shit, it was all defined by NOT being those people. And now what do I say?”

And there it is folks. Being cool, being punk rock, being smart, being young — all of those things are permanently fused with being a liberal, being on the left. So to say “I am no longer a liberal, I am no longer on the left” is to say “I am no longer cool. I am no longer smart. I am no longer young.” 

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Dexter Filkins on Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan is perhaps at the top of my list of infuriating public intellectuals. He bothers me the most, I suspect, because he is capable of humility and insight, but cannot get over his own prejudices. Namely, his Trump Derangement Syndrome, in which he is second only to Sam “I Don’t Care if Democrats Murder Children and Bury Them in the Basement” Harris.

Sullivan interviewed the swashbuckling Dexter Filkins, who projects a world-weary, I’ve-seen-it all, I don’t-fall-for-anyone’s-bullshit vibe. In my mind’s eye, Dexter is always wearing a worn leather jacket. He has recently published a long profile of Governor Ron de Santis, which is why he was on Sullivan’s show. 

In the interview, Dexter explains to Andrew how Republicans of today differ from Republicans of a few decades ago. This apparently mysterious transformation from golf club member to F150 driver was explained to Dexter by the chief of staff of former Florida governor Bob Martinez. Filkins recounts this conversation to Sullivan:

“There was always an element of the republican party that was crazy, and it was 15 percent of the party. And we [Martinez and other top Republicans] told them whatever we needed to tell them to get them out to the polls. We made a bunch of promises to them, we’d blow them off…— whatever it took to get them to the polls. And that worked for us. It worked to get people like Bob Martinez, whose kind of an old style Republican, elected to office. What changed was Trump. Trump came and energised the population in a way that got people to the polls who had never voted before and kind of took the lid off the self-restraint of the rest of the party. And so now, Max said, it’s 85 percent of the party is crazy, and there is no way to go back.”

An energised voter base in a democracy? How ghastly. 

Let me translate this for all of you in possession of a functioning moral compass. What this Republican admitted to Filkins, and Filkins passes along approvingly to Sullivan, is that the political class spent decades lying, manipulating and misrepresenting itself to the plebs. Basically, they stole voters’ tax dollars by taking salaries while not doing *expressly* the job they were hired to do. And when the jig was finally up, exposed by the wrecking ball that was Trump, these establishment types had the cojones to call the irate voter class crazy, for saying “enough. We don’t believe you and we will not support you anymore.”

Let’s focus on the word crazy. I do not care if this so-called crazy element of Republicans thought Jesus himself was going to fly down to the Florida panhandle on a UFO and make everybody pancakes. They were still done wrong by a set of oleaginous hustlers, for decades. And these supposedly clear-eyed journalists, who fancy themselves speakers of truth to that power, are simply stenographers for it. At least the hustlers admit to the hustle. Journalists still pretend they have the moral high ground.

Gross.

Sohrab Ahmari on Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Sullivan does say some redeeming things in this interview, even allowing that the media way overplayed its hand over Trump, that the British elites were shocking in their condescension toward Brexit voters, and saying “there has to be humility in faith, there has to be doubt.”

Ok, that’s a fairly wise thing to say. Doubt has an important function as a hedge against hubris. And yet! 

Given that this was a discussion on liberalism and its failures (a subject dear to my heart), they eventually got around to Drag Queen Story Hour. And Sullivan stubbornly pretends not to understand what is so gosh darn terrible about it. He says:

“Absolutely, stop anything that could be misbehaviour. But having parents, voluntarily, bring their children to a voluntary event with a man dressed up in women’s clothes to read them stories, I cannot understand why that is such a terrible violation.”

Ahmari gives a valid response, but even he misses the deeper point. Which is that drag queens, by definition, are misbehaviour. The reason they have any power at all is because they are breaking taboos, transgressing the order of things. They are the demimonde, and the demimonde is where rules are broken and turned upside down. Adults have every right to participate, enjoy and support these activities. But you have to be either a naif or a predator to think that children belong in that space. Childhood is not for transgressive sexual pantomimes. Only a few years ago, this was most obvious thing in the world. Now, thanks to liberal derangement, we must fight for children’s innocence and we are treated like unsophisticated rubes or Nazi bigots for doing so.

At another point in the interview, Sullivan says, “the unintended consequences of liberal society can be addressed within the rubric of liberal society.” Sullivan has apparently learned nothing from his national humiliation at the hands of “liberal” Jon Stewart and his race-baiting guests a few months ago. I would love to ask Andrew: if it can be addressed by liberal society, then why isn’t it? Can he really not see just how far the rot has set in? 

Toward the end, after being presented for over an hour with evidence by Ahmari of the many symptoms of our current decline, Sullivan offers this solution:

“The answer is to restore trade unions, the answer is to restore churches.”

But the answer is not in institutions, Andrew. All institutions are corruptible and most have failed us in terrible ways — trade unions were riddled with organised crime; churches infiltrated by child rapists and vicious misogynists. Why would you want to restore that?

The answer is in the restoration of personal morality which is both privately held, but commonly shared —  because we, the adults, all understand that the benefits of participating in the moral code outweigh the limitations. Perhaps Sullivan has only benefited from institutions, and that’s why he still remains naive enough to think they will save us. As I’ve said before, I don’t see inside the hearts of men. But I do know this: the only thing that will save us is ourselves.