CHAPTER SEVEN 
Institutionalized
In 2017, Gallup’s annual poll of Americans’ faith in their institutions registered a big 35 percent of respondents answering that they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in fourteen different major American institutions.1 So about 65 percent thought America’s institutions generally suck.
That’s a landslide. When is the last time 65 percent of Americans agreed on anything?
The people have spoken, and spoken wisely. America’s institutions—the various entities comprising the government, the press, academia, Hollywood, business, and other sectors of society—are a disaster. They have stopped working for the people they were supposed to work for, but the Elite will not admit it. It can’t admit it. In fact, the Elite’s struggle to retain power in the wake of this rebellion by Normals consists largely of trying to use these institutions to avoid accountability, to crush the insurgents, and to get back to business as usual.
Sadly, the business of America’s institutions has largely become to provide soft, comfy sinecures for members of the Elite and to be a club to use to beat upon the hated Normals.
The Elite are bound to society’s institutions since their main function is to run them. No institutions, no Elite. That’s why it’s always amusing to watch the liberal version of the Elite rail against “the Establishment” as if they weren’t themselves The Man. Or The Woman. Or The Non-Binary Metaphor For Some All–Powerful Oppressor.
Whatever.
For their part, the conservative wing of the Elite delights in institutions, too. That’s the focus of what they wish to conserve—a status quo that conveniently provides them a comfortable place to nest and essentially do nothing. That’s why you see the conservative members of the Elites sometimes dismiss substantial evidence of institutional corruption as mere “conspiracy theories” and oppose even the most minimal attempts to rein them in. Take the FBI. Is there an institution with a grander façade of righteousness or a more sordid track record of failure? Even the Bureau’s yeoman efforts to dispute the Efrem Zimbalist Jr. image of squeaky-clean pros just doin’ their job can’t keep Bill Kristol and his buddies from donning their evening dress and listening to the string quartet cranking out “Nearer to God than Thee” as the iceberg-ruined ship slips under the water.
Here’s the problem: Our institutions are terrible.
Actually, that statement is incorrect. It’s only a problem for Normals. Failing institutions are not a problem for the Elite except to the extent the failure of those institutions riles up the rubes.
Well, the rubes are getting riled.
All across our society, in government and out, prominent and hidden, our institutions have been generally failing Normal Americans for the last half century. Sure, there have been intermittent successes, but their very rarity is what makes the few and far between successes so noticeable. If the Elite was working with the level of talent and competence that the Elite imagines it possesses, then we would be shocked by the statistically inevitable failures. Instead, we’re shocked when an institution doesn’t completely screw something up.
Were you to survey the major institutions of American life, what you would see is a major disconnect between the principles and values they seek to portray and the sordid reality. That gap between how the Elite wishes its institutions to be seen and how they truly are is the key to the unrest, and the gap is a result of the Elite’s utter refusal to accept even the most modest imposition of accountability by those the institutions are purportedly chartered to serve.
That’s because today, the major institutions of American life do not exist to serve the Normals. In fact, when they actually serve the Normals it is a pleasant surprise and often, as we have seen in the wake of Trump’s regulatory rollback, the cause of much Elite wailing and gnashing of sparkly white teeth. They have grown used to serving only the Elite who man them, and the Normals have noticed. This is a big reason why we now have a president who specializes in denying the Elite members of these institutions the reverence they demand.
Let’s start with the government, and why not the FBI? Because since J. Edgar Hoover slipped into his nightie and sipped the tea Clyde Tolson brought him as he rifled through the surveillance reports on his political opponents his agents gathered, the FBI’s image has been about 180 degrees off from reality.
For those of us who grew up watching The FBI and immediately have the urge to follow those words with the stentorian phrase “A Quinn Martin Production,” we default into thinking of the Bureau as the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency. That image was part of Hoover’s cunning game plan to protect himself and solidify his reign—to make the FBI’s integrity and professionalism so beyond question that to attack its leadership is to tread on the flag and curse the very concept of motherhood. And the legacy lives on, notably in the tiresome form of the shameless James Comey, whose post-firing life has been devoted to working with his friends to avenge his humiliation and to tweeting out a nearly endless series of quotations designed to restore the “sterling reputation” he once enjoyed and subsequently defecated upon.
Professionalism. Integrity. Crime-solving savvy that leverages highly trained experts and the latest technology to nab wrongdoers and bring them to justice. That’s what we are supposed to think of when we think of the FBI. And here’s their professionalism and integrity, as reported by the Washington Post on April 18, 2015: “Nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.”2
It gets even better: Thirty-two of those cases resulted in a death sentence.
So, basically, for twenty years the FBI was sending its techs into court, having them swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and then they proceeded not to do so. Those jurors took notice when the district attorney announced in their openings, “And ladies and gentlemen, we will offer you testimony regarding unquestionable forensic evidence of guilt supplied by a technician from the preeminent law enforcement agency in the world, the FBI.” Might as well skip the trial and get right to the conviction.
But hey—we can’t dare damage the institution by pointing out that it is unable to perform its most basic task in an honest and accurate manner. Instead, let us lavish it with praise.
Maybe those thirty-two guys sweating it out on the Green Mile thanks to bad testimony ought to disregard those horrendous conspiracy theories. The same with the families of the people murdered by killers the FBI let slip through its fingers—fingers that were likely occupied sexting on the job.
Of course, it goes without saying that there is nothing wrong with a conspiracy theory if it is true.
Accidents happen. Twenty years of almost universal false testimony could be just an error, a simple mistake. Maybe it was just an oopsie we all just need to move past, though those thirty-two guys might not be so indulgent. We don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, though if it’s really more like Rosemary’s Baby maybe we ought to give that some thought. In any case, we still have the FBI’s shining reputation for integrity. J. Edgar used to hire only lawyers and accountants as agents and held them to the highest standards—the best people, taking on the mob and commie spies and civil rights leaders with total integrity.
So, we come to the 2016 election and the revelation—partly obtained from the thousands of texts between a couple of married FBI employees who were banging each other—that the big bosses had decided early on that Hillary Clinton was never going to be held accountable for what anyone who has been in the same ZIP code as someone holding a security clearance knows were multiple criminal acts involving classified material that would have gotten a Normal clamped in irons.
Let’s leave aside the texting on company time part and the cheating on their spouses’ part, even though back in the day both shameless time wasting and shameless adultery would have gotten these bureaucratic bums booted. Let’s get to the key part—the FBI was completely in the tank for one political party and gleefully helped cover up crimes for which it would have charged anyone not at the pinnacle of the Elite.
Hillary Clinton got off because the political party in power wanted her to, and the FBI leadership made it happen.
Think about that.
Think about what would happen if you were the one with the email shenanigans. Do you imagine you would have gotten the benefit of the doubt? Do you think the FBI leadership would have thought, “Well, for the good of our country, we should totally pass on prosecuting this person who is likely to be our boss and would be totally grateful to us for our help in her time of need?”
No.
You would be in prison, making new friends.
And the Christopher Steele dossier, packed with tales of collusion and water sports, was just another example. The FBI was absolutely delighted to take a political campaign’s sketchy oppo and use it to get warrants to listen into the party-out-of-power’s presidential campaign.
Think about that. If Nixon were alive, he would be kicking himself. Why send some bumbling hacks to break into the other side’s offices if you can fast-talk a court into giving you a warrant to do it using the dirt your own campaign guys dug up?
But hey, the Elite has to protect the Elite. Today, that’s the FBI’s real mission statement.
The judiciary is another institution that has chosen to trash its reputation in order to pursue Elite goals, which means largely liberal goals. You see statues of Lady Justice holding the scales and you see the blindfold and you recall the saying, “Justice is blind,” and then you watch what happens and you think, “Well, this is just more bullshit.”
The FBI is merely an agency. The judiciary is a branch of government, and it exists both within each state and within the federal government. As such, its fall from respect and reverence among the Normals is even more dangerous to the long-term health of the Republic than that of the Bureau.
The failure of the judiciary is a failure of democracy. The idea underlying the United States of America is that the people of the United States of America, the Normals, should have some say in how they are governed. Our Elite, as manifested by the courts, no longer believes this. And it has not for a while.
You go back to Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), the decision that somehow located the right to an abortion somewhere in the Constitution, and you wonder if there is a secret footnote in that document you did not learn about in civics class. Of course there is no right to an abortion in the Constitution, not behind any penumbras, not lurking adjacent to some emanation. But the Supreme Court found one, because it wanted to find one.
And it was perfectly willing to strip away the say of Normal Americans on the issue of abortion to do it.
Now, perhaps this could be understood in the context of a consistent reading of the Constitution that broadly and liberally (in the true sense of the term) construes the protections offered by our Bill of Rights. A judicial philosophy that consistently and without favor finds that the Constitution broadly bars the government from the regulation of individuals’ decision making regardless of those protections being expressly enumerated might be a coherent one, even if most people might disagree.
But that’s not what is happening here. There’s no philosophy; this is cafeteria jurisprudence imposed by a prix fixe judiciary. As law professor Glenn Reynolds points out in The Judiciary’s Class War (New York: Encounter Broadsides, 2018), the judiciary is composed of people with the same background, the same degrees, and the same world view. It’s a branch of government that requires you to possess an advanced degree to enter. He calls them “front-row kids,” and he is talking about the Elite.
And this means the liberal wing of the Elite in particular. Through the judgeships it holds, it regularly invents rights that the liberal wing of the Elite favors, despite their absence from the text, while negating the rights that are right there on the parchment in black and tan.
Freedom of speech? It’s protected if you wear a jacket in a courthouse that says, “Fuck the Draft.” That’s a form of self-expression, don’t you know. Under Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971), this powerful intellectual statement gets First Amendment protection, and it should. But what if you want to display the American flag in a school? Nope. The notorious Ninth Circuit does not think that deserves First Amendment protection, and the Supreme Court refused to review the decision. Dariano v. Morgan Hill Unified School District, 767 F.3d 764 (9th Cir. 2014), cert. denied, 2015 WL 1400871. Well, it’s a school, and schools are different. Except, no. The First Amendment does not stop at the schoolhouse doors if the expression at issue is one the liberal Elite approves of, like wearing armbands to protest the Vietnam War, per Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969).
Funny how the Constitution always seems to support what the Elite prefers.
And then there is the right to keep and bear arms set out in the Second Amendment. This is the most basic of rights, as it establishes the ability of the people to maintain the means of replacing their government if and when it becomes tyrannical. After all, that’s what the Founders did starting in 1775 when they got tired of the British elite governing the colonies for their own benefit and not for that of the colonists.
The Elite also hates that idea with a burning passion, of course, since they are the ones who would be overthrown if the Normals got so sick of their nonsense that they went into their gun safes and decided to enact some large-caliber hope and change.
But the Elite hates the Second Amendment for another reason—it hates it because it’s so important to the Normals. The Normals see their right to keep and bear arms as central to their dignity as citizens, a physical manifestation of their ultimate right to cast a veto of the acts of those appointed to lead them, or who seize those positions of leadership without the benefit of the consent of the governed.
The Second Amendment both empowers the Normals and imbues them with dignity. Naturally, it has to go.
It has not gone quite yet, though, with a thin conservative Supreme Court majority twice speaking out in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), and McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010), to reaffirm what is right there on the paper—that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” But it does not matter to the liberal Elite what is there on the paper, because when the Constitution becomes an obstacle it should be either disregarded completely or interpreted in such a way as to yield the precise opposition result intended. And that is why in the decade since Heller, the party of the liberal Elite, the Democrats, has engaged in a campaign of massive resistance against gun rights whose only parallel is the Democrats’ campaign of massive resistance against school integration, and civil rights in general, in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), the decision desegregating the schools.
There are myriad other examples of this behavior from the courts, of laws that Normals enact being overturned on shaky or nonsensical grounds, of criminals being set free despite evidence of their guilt, of judges taking unto themselves the powers reserved to the people or their representatives. The courts will never be perfect—there will always be bad decisions, thanks to the cruel laws of probabilities—but this is different. This is not a few blips but a theme.
This is the Elite using an institution to usurp the right of the Normals to govern themselves. The courts are not there to do so except to the extent the Constitution authorizes them to do so. The courts are a check on the people, but checking the people when the people overstep the bounds of their Constitution is quite a different matter. Telling overwrought Normals that they cannot ban the building of any mosques in their town is a proper exercise of the judiciary’s power as granted by those Normals via the Constitution’s First Amendment. But telling the Normals they cannot place a menorah and a nativity scene in the park during December is overstepping the authority granted to the courts.
The decline in respect for the courts as an institution is, as with all of these institutions, a direct consequence of the Elite members in those institutions trying to use those institutions not to perform their proper task but to impose Elite (usually liberal Elite) values upon the Normals.
Normals see the courts ignoring the laws that the Normals passed and, instead, imposing what the liberal Elite considers better ones through judicial fiat. That is disenfranchisement. That is the elimination of the Normals’ sovereignty, and it is no wonder that they so greatly resent it.
In the end, the courts depend on the respect the institution holds among the people. The courts have no men with guns to impose its dictates. They cannot make anyone do anything, except by the power of their own moral authority. And when the judiciary loses that, it’s just a bunch of eggheads in black dresses banging little wooden hammers.
Not all institutions have yet come in for the intense contempt that others enjoy. The military remains America’s most respected major institution. In 2017, 72 percent of respondents reported to Gallup that they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in America’s armed forces. But don’t worry—the Elite running the military bureaucracy can still come through and tank those numbers.
The defeat of ISIS under President Trump and Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis have partially reversed a disturbing trend that had not gotten a lot of attention—the inability of the United States to decisively win a ground war since Operation Desert Storm in 1991. While the Iraqi insurgency seemed to be on its back foot by the time Barack Obama decided to turn tail and run instead of finishing the job, it was far from dead. It came roaring back in the form of ISIS.
Iraq dragged on and on under Bush and Obama, and Afghanistan is still dragging on, and in Asia, China is getting feisty in the South China Sea, and North Korea is testing American resolve, as it always does. We hear lots about how a war with either one would be violent and bloody but short, and how America would eventually emerge the victor. Are we so sure?
The Air Force is running out of pilots because they can’t wait to bail out and escape the soul-crushing double-whammy of too many deployments and too many chickenshit administrative tasks. The Army has been trying for years to get its troops a new rifle that will actually hit bad guys at a distance; it figures that it needs a better part of a decade to do that, though a civilian can buy a better rifle off the shelf than the aging M4, albeit without the selective fire option. But fear not—the Army is rolling along toward yet another dress uniform changeover because if you want to win a war, you need snazzy dress uniforms. By the way, the Army is down to ten active duty divisions.
Ten. It had over ninety during World War II.
But interservice rivalry being what it is, the swabbies are doing their best to compete with the ground pounders. The Navy has about two-thirds of the minimum number of ships it needs and can’t train the crews for those. In a few months, it managed to lose major surface ships to collisions with civilian cargo vessels not once but twice. Its new, super-pricey Zumwalt-class guided-missile destroyers are stealthy and can sneak right up on the enemy and not shoot its gun at them; the Navy has not figured out what ammunition to buy.
So, no bang for the 4 billion bucks. Literally.
It does not take an expert to see that a ship that cannot shoot its main gun is problematic. In fact, veterans of the service have been trying to raise a ruckus about the disaster of modern American military readiness. They have a vested interest not only because of their own service, but because America’s military is now a family affair, with the forces composed largely of the relatives of veterans. Their own kids and grandkids are going to be the ones sent out to fight outnumbered and outgunned. And since few of them are Elite, it will be the Normals who once again pay the price in lives and limbs for the Elite failing to prepare.
The guy from Fontana spills his blood in the sand and Kaden spills his artisanal pumpkin ale at a trendy gastropub.
Much of this has to do with funding, but it is not as if the United States Treasury cannot fund the military America needs. It’s that the Elite with the checkbook won’t say no to deadbeat Democrat constituents and yes to our fighting men and women. Entitlement spending is pre-rigged. It goes up up up on autopilot while the people actually serving the country, rather than demanding that they be served, end up last in line with empty bowls going full Oliver Twist and begging Congress, “Please, sir, I want some more.”
But another deadly problem is the same one we see in other institutions—a gross lack of leadership followed by a gross lack of accountability. Let’s leave aside the dozens of senior Navy officers under investigation in the “Fat Leonard” corruption probe—how many of these guys took money or gifts of hookers from this or some other contractor? Let’s also leave aside the Air Force nuke general who went to Moscow—Moscow!—and got completely shit-faced and had to be relieved of command? And let’s leave aside the 82nd Airborne general who used his staff as a sex harem, and let’s leave David Petraeus aside, too—he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for classified materials antics. He walked on the adultery charge for nailing some adoring light colonel.
Let’s leave all those fiascos aside and focus on the guys who couldn’t win a war. Who got fired for failing to win a war? What was the name of a general who got canned for failing to defeat the enemy in Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere since maybe Vietnam?
Not transferred. Not retired. Not rotated. Relieved. Because that’s what happened in World War II. You performed or you were gone. But these days? It is like every other institution. You perform and you get promoted, or you don’t perform and you get promoted anyway. Look at retired Army Lieutenant General David Sanchez. He was the commander of Coalition ground forces in Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004. That was a pretty memorable period, when the insurgency got kicked into high gear and Abu Ghraib happened. It was memorable because it was a total disaster. So did the military fire him for his terrible performance in command, or did it reward him?
It rewarded him.
Sanchez got rotated to Europe and issued a third star. After he retired, he ran for a Texas Senate seat as a Democrat. The message is clear—accountability is for the buck sergeant who misplaces his night vision goggles, not for the brass. Not for the Elite.
We all know who will pay the price if a serious, cunning enemy with top-shelf equipment decides to take on a military that spends a decade and a half stymied by a bunch of glorified bandits with old AK-47s.
Normals. And when the Elite leads them into a bloodbath, it will be everyone else’s fault.
If you drive through a Middle American neighborhood in the early morning, and you are of a certain age, you notice something missing from peoples’ driveways and front lawns.
Where are the newspapers?
Our key institutions are not all, or even mostly, governmental. The mainstream news media is a key institution with an important role in a democratic republic. It earns respect by being an objective, neutral truth teller that courageously brings the public the facts in a fair and impartial manner so that the people can exercise their right to self-determination in a wise and informed way.
It is by those very principles of objectivity and neutrality that the news media lays claim to the respect and reverence of the people it serves. And, since the mainstream media generally practices none of those highfalutin principles, Gallup’s 2017 poll had newspapers at 27 percent approval and television news at 24 percent. There are STDs that could poll higher.
It should have been an indicator that when candidate Trump mentioned the mainstream media during his rallies, it provoked boos. And it was not because Americans were outraged that reporters were being objective, neutral truth tellers who courageously bring the public the facts in a fair and impartial manner so that the people can exercise their right to self-determination in a wise and informed manner.
But the Elite did not take it as an indicator. It took it as an outrage. The very institution charged with keeping other institutions accountable was, itself, being held accountable for failing to perform its assigned task adequately, and it couldn’t handle the criticism. It fell back on the oldest and lamest of canards, that a criticism of Institution X is an attack on the very concept of Institution X.
It was the same lame excuse every other institution reflexively offered whenever the press focused on them.
The problem, which the press shared with the Elite that ran every other institution, was its hatred of accountability. The media simply did not feel that it was subject to criticism, particularly not by… well, those people.
The Normals.
And worse, the Normals dared seek out alternative voices. This was made possible largely by the internet—one of the few transformative success stories of our institutions in recent decades, though there is a good argument that it really came into its own because of the decentralized work of millions of individuals. Sites created by Andrew Breitbart before his untimely death, Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit.com) and clearinghouses of conservative and/or traditionalist writers like Townhall.com all built a space for Normal-friendly dissent. But mostly, they built morale—Normals who looked at the mainstream media and wondered if anyone else felt like they did learned that they were not alone.
There was also the explosion of talk radio, which gave voice to Normals’ interests and demands in a media space vacated by the Elite. The Elite media focused on print and television and left the door open for people like Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, and Sean Hannity to build audiences among the underserved Normal audience. Certainly, these hosts were not all themselves Normals, but they were Normal-friendly. Hewitt, for example, had a long history in government and academia and revered the concepts of experts and institutions while criticizing their individual shortcomings. Yet he remained grounded in his Normal upbringing in suburban Ohio. Mark Levin was a distinguished constitutional law litigator. Younger commentator Ben Shapiro was a Harvard-educated lawyer. Both retained a connection to the Normals and their values, Shapiro in no small part through his Orthodox Jewish religion, something the Elite could not fathom.
These alternative media outlets differed from the mainstream, Elite-run media. They made no pretense toward objectivity. They were advocates, but they did not seek to hide it. When they took a position on an issue, they were not betraying a principle. When the “objective” mainstream media did, it was.
The media seeks all the prestige that comes with being a caste of honest brokers, but it does not want to give up the power that comes from not being an honest broker and putting an ink-stained thumb on the scale. Journalists wanted the respect, but they didn’t want to actually earn it. And, of course, it was that residual respect—for the media had been slowly shedding the trust of the Normals over the last few decades—that gave the media the influence that might tip the scale in the first place. So, ironically, the more they tried to leverage their respect to influence events, the less respect, and therefore leverage, they had.
Pretty much every single major paper in America told its readers not to vote for Donald Trump. Pretty much every single television news outlet, cable or terrestrial, drummed his evil and unfitness into their viewers’ cerebellums for nearly eighteen months.
President Donald Trump won in spite of that. Maybe because of that.
The problem is that journalists today want to be Woodward and Bernstein, though many of them probably have no idea what those old people did to get on TV all the time. They want to be liberal activists in bad suits. What they don’t want to be is anonymous reporters toiling away in front of some video monitor and cold-calling sources. But that’s what reporting is. And it needs to be anonymous in the sense that there are no particular brands of truth—not Maggie Haberman’s, not Robert Costa’s. To the extent their byline should matter at all should be the art of their writing, the depth of their knowledge, and the insight of their sources. But today’s reporters don’t want to be like Woodward and Bernstein because of those things. They want to be like Woodward and Bernstein because of the book deals and the celebrity ex-wives.
And the Normals see that.
They see it when every time they are involved in a story and see it reported in the media, they see it is reported incompletely at best, and most likely inaccurately.
They see it when the news reports nothing but scandals, often based on anonymous sources, which often have to be walked back or disavowed entirely.
They see it when CNN gathers a half-dozen talking heads to yak about Donald Trump and their views range from mild disgust to wanting to put his orange noggin on a stake for the treason that Robert Mueller will totally find, fingers crossed.
They see it when the stories on guns or religion or the environment or family or standing up for the National Anthem always—always!—end up precisely aping the Elite views on the subject.
Every. Single. Time.
If the media’s target is the Elite’s priorities, it should say so. If the media’s goal is to guide and determine the debate, it should say so. If the media is going to be just another subset of the partisan hacks at the center of American culture and politics, it should say so.
But it won’t say those things. It can’t and still retain its power.
The irony is that to recover its power the media has to eschew its own power. But there’s no stomach for that. The new generation of reporters, the same ones who decided that Trump was so awful that they needed to jettison all those pretty principles they learned in J-school, has no concept of fading into the background and simply grinding out the truth. This is the selfie generation—what in a young person’s life experience or education has ever taught them to minimize themselves?
So, the media has a problem. It can return to its principles, or it can keep on this path and become a niche industry dedicated to its narrow readership. President Trump is wrong: The New York Times is not failing, sadly enough. Other papers are—the Los Angeles Times has shrunk down to a brochure and is likely to disappear entirely in the wake of its workforce treating its problems with the equivalent of leeching by voting to unionize. But the NYT is growing its readership. The problem is, its readership is tuning in for the Trump-bashing, and taking a more dispassionate, even objective tone toward the president might alienate the new subscriber base. Sure, lots of Elites read it today, and that could certainly sustain it, but no one else will.
In their pursuit of being thought leaders, the media—those that survive in the media—risk becoming mere thought reinforcers.
The Normals will never notice that the mainstream media has shrunk to a shell of its former self. And without the attention of the Normals it will fade away into a largely irrelevant circle of Elite onanism.
How apt.
The mainstream media’s sister institution is Hollywood and the entertainment industry. And it’s a more attractive sister—sexier, richer, and a lot more fun. In fact, a significant part of the mainstream media’s current troubles can be traced back to it trying to be like Big Sis.
But where attention and self-aggrandizement are counter to the mainstream media’s alleged purpose, attention and self-aggrandizement are the whole purpose behind Hollywood. News sells the news, but the entertainment industry sells the stars. You don’t go to see Action-Adventure Film. You go to see Die Hard with Bruce Willis. You don’t buy Rock Album. You buy London Calling by The Clash.
Hollywood offers money and prestige, and that really should be enough. It sure was in the Golden Age, when stars kept their politics (and their personal proclivities) well under wraps, while still paying at least lip service to the values of the Normals. After all, everything had to play in Peoria.
And even where they tried to slip in some leftist message, they cloaked it in Normal terms. High Noon (1952), the story of a sheriff forced to face a gang of outlaws alone, was an allegory of blacklisting. The film treats the cowardly Normal townspeople as aberrations and Gary Cooper’s lonely sheriff as the true epitome of the individuality and courage Normals see as two of their most important characteristics. In doing so, they made a movie about standing up to the popular will into one Normals saw as validating their self-image.
Not so much anymore.
By the late sixties and seventies, the younger Elite was getting a toehold in Hollywood and aiming its hatred not just at the older Elite but at the Normals themselves. In Easy Rider (1969), slack-jawed yokels wax the laid-back heroes just because. In Bonnie and Clyde (1967), it depicted the villains as stylish, sexy folks who refused to be dragged into the hell that was normality; the cops, all Normals, were worse than the supposed criminals. Even The Godfather (1972) attacked what the young Elite saw as the hypocrisy of Normal values; the murderous Corleones were all about the faith and the family, and when Kay laughs off the idea that the government doesn’t have people killed, Michael calls her “naïve.” And John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972)? That Elite paranoia about Normals (or their caricature of Normals) could not have been more on the nose, or on the snout, as the case may be.
But at first, it was hard to notice that Hollywood was now biting the hand that fed it. The Godfather is a great film. It’s easy to overlook the fact that the film is deeply cynical about Normal values. It became more and more obvious that instead of celebrating Normal values, Hollywood’s edgiest players were targeting them. All in the Family was a frontal assault on those values, with some (very) light mockery of Meathead’s new left antics tossed in. Its message was the same one the liberal Elite howls to this day: Normals are dumb and bigoted and proud of it.
Hollywood certainly got dirtier since the sixties, but this was not quite the same as Norman Lear’s blistering attack on the Normals. In fact, Normals were not anti-sex—to this day, they are the ones making most of the babies. It was just that the liberal Elite enjoyed depicting them as frustrated, sexophobic prudes. That’s how you got the eighties flick Footloose (1984), where Normals out in some generic farm town hate dancing because, well, everyone knows that everyone outside the New York metro area hates dancing because of Jesus, somehow.
Hollywood occasionally got it right. It depicted real Normal life in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a crude but accurate account of the ambiguities and issues around suburban teen sex that resonated with its young audience, though Phoebe Cates’s famous pool scene probably greatly assisted in said resonation.
Hollywood continued on two tracks, the projects celebrating (or at least treating with respect) Normals and their values, and the projects that attacked them. And there were some in-between. The Simpsons mocks Normals, and especially the value of faith (those few viewers still watching the third decade’s episodes have noticed it has gotten more virulently anti-Christian). The show wears its Elitism on its sleeve (Harvard and its ilk have traditionally provided it with writers) but for an Elite show, it does pay some respect to other Normal values, like the family. It’s just not as funny when it does so. Particularly in its later and weaker years, it gets somewhat maudlin with “Let’s hug it out” endings that reaffirm the value of the—pardon the pun—nuclear family.
The Elite’s double standard regarding those Normal values is especially obvious in Hollywood. The Elite, particularly the liberal Elite, is always willing to make excuses when some favored demographic, like the underclass Normals, indulges in actions that violate traditional Normal norms—single motherhood, petty criminality, drug addiction—the transgressive stuff that makes for Oscar-winning roles and critical hosannas. The real underclass gets a pass because they are obedient to their betters, who feed them scraps from the proverbial table in the form of welfare. Of course, the Elite would themselves rarely indulge in those kinds of self-destructive behaviors—they tend to hamper one’s future success.
Having babies out of wedlock is one example. Though certainly not unknown to Normals, it is hardly a traditional American value and remains disfavored. Similarly, Hollywood Elites are rarely going to do it themselves (and the ones who do generally have the financial wherewithal to ameliorate the consequences, such as by hiring nannies). But often the shows they write and produce gloss over the reality of that situation. You get a brave and plucky heroine and she has a kid and she decides to keep it, though the script always notes that it could totally be her choice to abort it if she felt like it. What you don’t see is her alone when the baby cries at two a.m. and she has to be up in three hours to go to her job.
Liberal Elites are unwilling to side with the Normals in public by including those principles in their art where they absolutely include those principles in their own lives.
Pregnant at seventeen? In the movies, the Christian father inevitably shrieks that she has ruined her life because of her sin. In real life, the Elite parents shriek that she ruined her life by jeopardizing her admission to Oberlin.
Of course, there is one noted exception—the elephant-sized creep in the room. Starting with the revelations about Harvey Weinstein, Hollywood was rocked by the fact that many of the leading lights of cinema, music, and the other arts were skeevy pervs of the most grotesque kind. But the Normal values that forbade these kinds of activities were exactly the kind of values that the modern Elite has been happy to cast off as puritan shackles on their self-expression. Values that helped them succeed in business? Embrace those, at least in private. Values that let them succeed with that busty new production assistant? Don’t let the sex dungeon door Matt Lauer controlled with the red button under his desk hit you on the ass as you leave.
Sure, Normals get that the casting couch is going to be a thing. And part of the reason people want to be famous, particularly men, is the implied easy availability of high-end romantic attention. Being on camera may add ten pounds, but it also adds a bunch of points to your attractiveness. Normals get that some side action is part of the skim the Hollywood Elite gets to take for doing its job. But cornering women and forcing them to watch you punish the primate and finish on a fern—there are lines, and that behavior crosses them.
That behavior bulldozes them.
There was a reason movie stars back in the day hid their perversions—and they were perverted. But they wanted audiences to like them, and, moreover, the studios that owned them wanted audiences to like their chattels, so they kept the cauldron of fornication to a low simmer. Sometimes it boiled over—Charlie Chaplin was ruined by a public paternity suit. But by and large, old-school stars may have had reputations as rogues and men about town and temptresses, but allegedly drugging dozens of women between Jell-O pudding pop commercials like Bill Cosby? Nope.
Not coincidentally, there are few real movie stars left today, people who can not only open a film to gangbuster box office on the power of their names but who walk on the screen and you know you are in the presence of a star. Denzel Washington probably; Tom Cruise maybe, despite his bad press. Perhaps not coincidentally, neither tweets.
But who else? Can you tell Brie Larson from Jennifer Lawrence? They both won Academy Awards for movies probably 98 percent of America has not seen. They also both tweet. They both feel they have much to say of importance regarding today’s political and cultural scene, like many of today’s Hollywood crowd, and they are wrong.
Moreover, they are dumb. Injecting themselves into polarized debates necessarily alienates the people who disagree. Lawrence, who grew up in Kentucky but has bought into the Elite completely, decided the smart career move for her was to make an anti-Christian allegory called Mother! (2017), with the emphasis on gory. Among other things, a baby gets eaten, which would seem more apt for a Planned Parenthood allegory. Lawrence plays a sort of Mother Earth (someone else is Eve) who gets set on fire and has her beating heart ripped out, just like in the New Testament, except totally not. She got lots of Elite praise for her courage in taking it to those backwoods Bible thumpers onscreen, and in case anyone missed the point she emphasized it in interviews. And she can’t open a movie.
She followed it up with a spy melodrama called Red Sparrow (2018), which she promoted by doing lots of press talking about the courage she displayed to do a bunch of nude scenes, subtly emphasizing that she did a bunch of nude scenes. But it tanked, too. When Hollywood can’t sell a naked Jennifer Lawrence, then they can’t sell any Jennifer Lawrence.
What’s the name of a Normal who says, “Jennifer Lawrence? I don’t care what the movie is about—let’s go spend fifteen dollars for a ticket”?
Well, she and the other outspoken liberals who can’t seem to come up with a hit lately—like Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Jessica Chastain, and Matt Damon—can still count on the support of their Elite pals. At least until their pals realize that these folks aren’t putting butts in seats. And that’s when it will get real.
Look at Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Chris Pratt. When you hear from them outside of the theater, they are visiting some sick kid in their superhero getup or tweeting about how much they appreciate veterans. They embrace the values of Normality and celebrate them. And people usually flock to their movies.
The guy from Fontana took his kids to see The Rock in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. Kaden, who won’t consider having a family until his late thirties, would sooner be caught at an anti-Trump protest without his gyno-beanie than see a Dwayne Johnson movie.
It is not all the slow accumulation of programs that mocks Normals’ values and the essential scumminess of so many in Hollywood that has hurt the box office. Technology is also an important reason for the change in viewing habits by Normal audiences over the last decades. The fact is that audiences are no longer at the mercy of what’s in TV Guide, if that still exists, or what’s playing down at the Bijou 26. Technology makes the viewers able to demonstrate their frustration more readily since there is always something else to watch besides the latest Normals-trashing garbage.
Not up for the latest interchangeable film about our troops coming home from Iraq as emotional basket cases in need of—wait for it—Elite expert help to regain their sanity? Noting the irony of how it was Elite experts who thought it was a great idea to send them there in the first place? There’s a good chance you’ll find Where Eagles Dare (1968) playing on Amazon or Netflix.
Hard pass on the latest independent flick about the Christian teen girl who frees herself from the tyranny of Jesus and learns to be a free spirit by embracing Elite attitudes? She’s going to be a poet, damn it, even if the preacher says the Bible tells us girls can’t be poets! Maybe watch a Tyler Perry film—these Christian-infused films make a boatload of money precisely because they refuse to insult their viewers’ beliefs.
Tired of all the crap that tells you you’re dumb and racist and that you should sit down and shut up and let the Elite make the decisions? Especially nonsense like The X-Files, which flatters its Elite nerd viewers by masquerading as antiestablishment while simply advocating a different faction of the Elite be in charge? Maybe shut off the television and walk your corgi. Or go get a girlfriend.
The Hollywood Elite was always among the most cunning of the Elite, and it requires massive infusions of money to maintain Hollywood Elite status in the way it is not required for Little Sis mainstream media. Unencumbered by a need to be respected, Hollywood’s Elite merely needs to be loved, and we may well see a return to the old days where stars were elusive about their lives and their politics. What we have today won’t work for much longer, and at its core, Hollywood is still a business.
Big Business is another institution that Normals distrust, and it’s not hard to see why Gallup’s respondents gave it a whopping 21 percent approval rating in 2017. Big Business, with all its yakking and posturing about social responsibility and greenness, has shafted the Normals for decades. It has also insulted them. During the 2018 Super Bowl, T-Mobile ran a spot that showed a United Nations of multiethnic infants to the strains of Nirvana’s “All Apologies,” as the narrator explained that T-Mobile was against discrimination. Apparently, Normals who use cell phones need big corporations to help them get woke.
Normals never expected “social responsibility” from the corporations—that was gobbledygook for the benefit of liberal Elitists, just like all the green nonsense. Normals expected jobs, the chance to work hard for fair wages and fair treatment. But the corporations did what corporations will do, especially when backed up by cynical liberal Elitists in government they could buy off and gullible conservative Elitists they could count on ideologically. Under that Elite consensus, “free trade” became unfair trade, trade where Normal American workers’ interests were never, ever a priority.
The basic fact is that corporations found American workers too expensive—they simply could not be exploited like foreigners could be. Hence the push overseas, moves enabled by favorable tax treatment and laws that allowed the reimportation of often subsidized goods back into the United States so they could be sold to these same workers under cost. Manufacturing jobs plummeted. Normals watched the jobs they thought they would be able to support their families with until retirement suddenly vanish.
And the Elite did not care.
It occurred to many union workers that the unions’ bosses were more interested in the bizarre social priorities of their Elite pals than with making sure the workers were squared away. In fact, a number of unions donated substantial sums to Planned Parenthood and other leftist organizations that have nothing to do with protecting worker interests. Hey, the unions may be failing their members, but at least the workers can rest assured that their dues are being spent wokely.
The Normals cried out about their economic troubles, but the Elite could not hear them over the clinking of their Champagne glasses. The good times rolled for the ruling class. The good times always rolled. They rolled right up until 2008, when Wall Street’s incompetence put the whole economy on the precipice. And then, after the Normals bailed them out with their tax money, the good times resumed rolling.
It was different in the heartland. Mom-and-pop shops on Main Street, the kind of place Normal entrepreneurs owned and operated and supported their families with, suddenly found themselves under assault by big box stores selling imported goods their huge buying power could acquire at a substantial discount. Boarded-up windows across America testify to that. Hillary Clinton would take a call from Walmart; she had served on its board at one point. Fred from Fred’s Fashions in Tulsa, not so much.
In fact, who would take their call? The Chamber of Commerce? It was too busy agitating for illegal alien amnesty and more “free trade.”
Big Business was part of the problem. But small business? That was part of the solution, a traditional way for Normals to succeed. And the people agreed. Gallup reported that 70 percent of Americans looked favorably upon small business, second only to the military.
Let’s review where Donald Trump stood while running for election in 2016 and after being elected:
- Trump thought the FBI had covered up for Hillary, which it had.
- Trump accused the judiciary of being out of control, which it was.
- Trump supported the military, but promised to help it rebuild and win again.
- Trump labeled the mainstream news media “fake news,” which was undeniable.
- Trump attacked loudmouthed celebrities, who deserved it.
- Trump called out Big Business for putting Normals’ concerns at the back of the line, and the CEOs acknowledged it and started changing.
- Trump praised small business, which has since blossomed.
With regard to every one of these Elite-run institutions, Trump was on the side of the Normals.
With regard to every one of these Elite-run institutions, Hillary Clinton was on the side of the Elites.
And most of the Elite is still stunned that Trump is in the White House, and that Hillary is reduced to tweeting embarrassing shout-outs to her fans in the “activist bitches” community.