Regime Media

But why speak of his friends, his enemies? It is all so ugly, and all the more ugly, the more accurately it is drawn from life. These are however the only teachers of ethics that the people have, and without them where should we be? Will the newspaper ever manage to take the place of the parish priest?

Stendhal - The Red and the Black (1830)

Sustained and frequently hysterical media opposition to President Trump over four years must have left a strong sense of unease among many neutral observers - those who do not regard hysteria as a mode of thinking.

During the Trump years, mainstream media opposition was too uniform, too persistent, too biased and too international to be genuine. It was suspiciously coordinated even if we ignore the obviously fraudulent attempts to link Trump with Russian electoral interference.

The whole sorry charade was more like the servile bias we see in totalitarian regimes. Regimes where the media pile on to any semblance of political opposition including criticism from outside. Effective in suppressing internal dissent but too obvious to take seriously.

Almost as if we should refer to international mainstream media as ‘regime media’. The regime already has an informal name - woke. Perhaps cultural decline has reached a stage where we have a totalitarian transnational woke regime media spanning most developed democracies. Soon to be former democracies. It certainly feels like a nascent regime – real enough but no flag yet.

Yet it also feels fluid. As if the woke part is not absolutely essential, as if boundaries are being tested but not necessarily long-term boundaries. As if the woke part is more to do with humiliating the majority of the population before moving on. A way to suppress expectations and smooth the way towards something else.

Not so much a conspiracy as a search for a superior identity by a somewhat diffuse but thoroughly aware social class approximating to the upper middle class and a host of useful idiots. Plus some oligarchs of course. An emergent property of an over-connected world filled with too many educated people who feel threatened by practical abilities they do not possess.

A core desire seems to be the relegation of the great mass of practical people to a status below that of woke. Those people who make something work or keep something working.

To make it difficult for ordinary working people to elevate matters of fact above political expediency.

To attract accredited professionals towards political expediency and away from the integrity implicit in their accreditation.

To corrupt professional standards where matters of fact are a key aspect of those standards.