President Obama and Hillary Clinton struck positive notes of healing and reconciliation in their public remarks following President-elect Donald Trump’s stunning victory. However, the elite liberal media establishment, which had largely served as a propaganda arm of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, continues to lash out at the president-elect as if the campaign were still in full swing.
The New York Times’ lead editorial on November 9th, entitled “The Trump Revolt,” regurgitated the charges the Times’ editors and columnists have leveled at Trump so frequently during the last year. Trump “has shown himself to be temperamentally unfit to lead a diverse nation of 320 million people,” the post-election editorial proclaimed. “We know he lies without compunction,” intoned the Times’ editors, who seem to have forgotten the description by the Times’ late columnist William Safire of Hillary Clinton as a “congenital liar.” Using typical left-wing race-baiting tactics, the editors wrote that Trump “has recruited as his allies a dark combination of racists, white supremacists and anti-Semites,” citing a celebratory tweet by David Duke, whom Trump and his campaign have repeatedly disavowed.
To top it off, the Times’ editors darkly warned that the change Trump’s supporters had voted for risks placing the United States “on a precipice.”
One of the New York Times’ lead op-ed writers, Thomas Friedman, wailed that “at the moment I am in anguish, frightened for my country and for our unity. And for the first time, I feel homeless in America.”
The leftist Huffington Post’s senior politics editor, Sam Stein, wrote that Americans “chose to jump into the abyss” by electing Trump. Mirroring the Times’ race-baiting, Stein wrote that Trump “is a nativist, and one who has brought in his wake a scary thread of anti-Semitism and racism that has marred the entire 16-month presidential campaign.”
Slate featured articles with such outrageous headlines as “White Women Sold Out the Sisterhood and the World by Voting for Trump” and “White Won.” The latter article’s sub-heading was “We are still the country that produced George Wallace. We are still the country that killed Emmett Till.” One headline Slate did probably get right was “Donald Trump Will Erase the Obama Era.” Obama had made the election a referendum on his own legacy and the voters gave him their verdict.
David Corn wrote in Mother Jones that “America is broken.” Trying to be too clever by half, Corn added that “Hate did trump.”
ABC’s Martha Raddatz, who had moderated one of the presidential debates, had to hold back tears acknowledging Trump winning the presidency, insinuating soldiers’ lives could be in danger.
CNN’s Van Jones called the election of Donald Trump a “nightmare,” which represented a “white lash against a changing country…a white lash against a black president in part.”
Finally, MSNBC’s commentators were apoplectic. Chris Matthews certainly did not have the Obama-induced thrill up his leg when he complained, “This is a shot against meritocracy, I think.” Rachel Maddow told her audience, as Trump’s victory was becoming a reality, “you’re not having a terrible, terrible dream. Also you’re not dead and you haven’t gone to hell.”
The left-leaning media establishment lives in a bubble. It cannot accept the fact that many Americans are sick and tired of being told how they should think, how they should speak and how they should act. They are sick and tired of political correctness. They are sick and tired of being branded Islamophobes just because they have genuine concerns about the safety of themselves and their families if many thousands of “refugees” from countries beset by jihad-inspired violence are allowed to settle in this country without careful vetting. They are sick and tired of being branded racists because they want real security to be put into place at our southern border and an end to “sanctuary cities” where illegal immigrants with criminal records can return time and again from deportation to inflict more harm on innocent American citizens. They watched the news of Kate Steinle being shot to death by an illegal immigrant who had been deported multiple times from the United States. They could not understand why no action was taken by the Obama administration to prevent such tragedies from happening again, and why the Democrats in the Senate killed Kate’s Law. And many Americans are sick and tired of the crony capitalism and double standards practiced by the elite establishment at ordinary Americans’ expense.
Pollster Pat Caddell, who lived through an analogous game-changing election in 1980 when Ronald Reagan soundly beat Caddell’s client Jimmy Carter, saw the change coming this time around. Caddell understood that a major structural re-alignment of the electorate was taking place that defied traditional party and ideological labels. Caddell concluded, based on an exhaustive study of public opinion, that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe (1) “America is in actual decline,” (2) their “children will be worse off than they themselves are today,” and (3) there are “different rules for well-connected and people with money.”
Caddell found that likely voters questioned the fairness of the system. 87 percent of those polled agreed with the statement, “The country is run by an alliance of incumbent politicians, media pundits, lobbyists and other powerful money interests for their own gain at the expense of the American people.” 67 percent agreed with the statement, “The real struggle for America is not between Democrats and Republicans but between mainstream American and the ruling political elites.”
Caddell wrote that the mainstream media “refuse to recognize much less acknowledge” the widening gap between ordinary Americans and “the actions and leadership of their establishment institutions.” President-elect Donald Trump was able to successfully tap into many Americans’ frustrations in this regard. The mainstream press, however, continues to exist in its own elitist bubble, blaming the messenger rather than absorbing the true message the voters have delivered.
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