The podcast, which you can view at the bottom of this article, is interesting for several reasons. Chris Hedges and Matt Taibbi are both what would, until very recently, be considered mainstream journalists. Now they see themselves on the outside of a monolithic system where information has been completely politicized to the point of it being, in Taibbi’s words, “a one-party media environment.” I rather doubt that either of them are Trump supporters, but they realize that if Trump loses, things will get even worse. Self-censorship, which is undoubtedly already high, will increase as lines that cannot be crossed without ending one’s career touch on ever more subjects. They compare the situation to the Soviet Union where everyone knew that the official media could not be trusted, but underground Samizdat documents were treasured. I can’t help thinking we are already there in the sense that people like me are forced to turn to podcasts and websites that are well outside the mainstream, in a situation of constant deplatforming by financial companies and media companies like YouTube.
Taibbi notes that there was a sea change after the 2016 election where basically organizations like the NYTimes had a “come to Jesus” moment” when they asked themselves how could we let this happen and decided to become overtly political, throwing a sop to conservatives by hiring someone like neocon Bret Stephens to appease conservatives while at the same time promoting the Trump-Russia collusion hoax and ginning up the White guilt narrative with the 1619 Project, while completely suppressing the Hunter Biden-Joe Biden scandal, the evidence for which, in my opinion, is overwhelming. At the same time they ignored the real reasons why Trump won—Taibbi mentions neoliberal economics (implying replacement-level immigration and outsourcing American jobs) and economically struggling and poor Americans. But left unmentioned is the feeling of unease by a broad swathe of White Americans that their country is being taken away from them and that it’s increasingly unrecognizable from the country they grew up in. Unmentioned also is that a great many Whites are feeling racially dispossessed by the replacement-level immigration that has occurred, and they are increasingly aware that they are hated by our liberal-left hostile elite.
As they note, the problem is that when you suppress what is really going on and the reasons for it, you are left with increasingly unconvincing narratives—as happened in the USSR. And in the US, where there is still a large segment of the White population that has not trusted the liberal media for decades, mainly because of mainstream conservative media figures like Rush Limbaugh, what is happening before our eyes is radical polarization. The possibility of civil war is discussed—a possibility mentioned several times on this site. Civil war seems reasonably likely if Trump wins. One can imagine antifa-BLM violence far beyond anything seen thus far breaking out in all major urban areas, and it would inevitably require a major military force to bring it under control. And if he loses, there will deep anger among Trump supporters. Unlike the left, the right has not shown much of an appetite for violence lately, but that could change. We have already seen armed White men standing up against antifa-BLM protesters who were bussed in to their communities. For many such White men, free speech may not be their #1 priority, but having guns is very important and would loom large in the context of a far left government influenced by the likes of Kamala Harris (who has already said she would issue an executive order on gun ownership if Congress fails to act). It seems likely that Biden would be similarly prone to such actions.
Undiscussed by Hedges and Taibbi is the very prominent role of Jews in all this. Throughout the 2016 campaign and beyond there have been intense denunciation s in the Jewish media and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself) comparing Trump to Hitler, promoting impeachment, etc. The apocalyptic response to Trump’s election went far beyond the New York Times. And, while acknowledging that a minority of Jews supported Trump and still do, Jewish power in terms of media ownership and production is also a critical aspect. Journalism is like the academic world in that it is a top-down system where the elite media play an outsized role. In academia, Harvard professors train graduate students who get positions at UC-Berkeley, who then get graduate students who staff lower-level state colleges, who then train K-12 teachers. In the media, the New York Times, Jewish-owned for over a century, is the Harvard of the media food chain, and other outlets, from WaPo, the LATimes and NPR to CNN and MSNBC—all with large Jewish ownership and/or staffing, take the Times’ lead. In effect this media behemoth ends up speaking with one voice. And in the internet age, this one voice has been amplified considerably by the dominant social media companies—again with large Jewish ownership and staffing, and all of which have slanted searches or censored posts that they view as contrary to their liberal-left political agenda. The suppression of the New York Post story by Twitter is Exhibit A. And again, we on the dissident right have been dealing with this for years. It’s obvious that another Trump victory would be seen in apocalyptic terms by the liberal-left media.
Also unmentioned is the role of the ADL in pressuring media companies to censor speech they don’t like. This has been going on for decades but quite obviously is reaching fruition now. I wrote this in 2002 (Preface to the paperback edition of Culture of Critique, lvii: