The Doors of Perception

The media, psyops, propaganda, and control of the narrative.

For many of us, the hardest thing about losing the 2024 presidential election was the bitter injustice that the American people could look at the most manifestly terrible, openly criminal president in US history — one who had already demonstrated his unfitness in office to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dead, kidnapping of children as a matter of state policy, wanton kleptocracy, and a violent attempt to overturn an election, a man who ran a batshit crazy re-election campaign openly promising retribution and dictatorship — and return him to the White House anyway.

Is our country really that ill?

On that count, amid all the think-pieces that have come out in the wake of the election, the one that has given me the most clarity was from Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic. In the piece, called “Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?”, he argues convincingly that the heart of the problem is the massive right wing propaganda machine that has assumed dominance in most of this country.

Today, the right-wing media — Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X…