Media Derangement Syndrome

How their mountain of lies add up and break down

I finally figured out why the deep divide over Trump’s character bothers me so much.

It isn’t the scolds with their heavily implied (or flat-out spoken) judgment that a moral person who truly opposes bigotry and believes character matters could never vote for Trump!

It isn’t the people like Sweeper698, whose righteous demand for an “f*ing explanation” from Trump supporters I fulfilled last week, whose dearth of self-awareness and dripping condescension make them easy to refute. (Or ignore.)

No, it’s the more open-hearted Trump-antipathists (new word😎), whose visceral aversion to him does not short-circuit their willingness to hold friendships with the Trump voters in their lives—theirs is the judgment that stings. Needles. Unsettles.

Because although our relationships aren’t cut off over our political disagreements, still, it seems we Trump supporters are perceived as simply upholding a lower moral bar. Our backing of him signals a degree of willingness to justify or excuse bigotry and hatefulness in our commitment to the greater good we perceive. We’re accepted despite our willingness to compromise on those bottom-feeder traits, to overlook them for our causes, placing our faith in a leader disposed to indulge them.

Except we’re not. We don’t.

I can explain.

All this occurred to me after reading a Facebook thread where an acquaintance posted that he’d lost an old friend—been “cancelled over politics”—because of his support for Trump. He received many sympathetic replies, mostly (I’d guess) from Trump voters, but then a mutual friend of ours—a Harris voter—chimed in with this: [edited for punctuation]

I suspect your friend didn't “cancel” you over politics. They likely don't understand supporting of a convicted felon, sexual predator, and someone that attempted to overthrow the 2020 election results, breaking their oath to the Constitution. It's not about politics. It's about basic right and wrong. About first protecting our democracy against wannabe dictators. I suspect that you don't see it this way but that your friend does.

Not surprisingly, that remark received pushback and so the commenter followed up:

I don’t claim to know what is in anybody’s heart. I am not going to stereotype all Trump voters as terrible people or anything like that. I know many wonderful people that voted for Trump. All I am saying is that there is easily verifiable evidence of Trump’s corrupt and immoral nature and your friend’s distancing himself is likely due to his beliefs that these things should not be supported. I know you don’t agree with that assessment or might say Kamala is just as corrupt, or think I am mistaken or whatever. My point is that the distancing from you is not about politics, it’s about taking a moral stance. If the Republican candidate was Mitt Romney, there would be no issue. Though I don’t like his policies, Romney is a well-intentioned, normal conservative, not someone that spreads hatred and division like Trump does. You did cast a vote for the guy so you need to take responsibility for that. Maybe you are 100% comfortable with Trump. What I hear most people that support him say are things like “I don't like the way he talks,” or “I wish he would be more presidential,” or “he may be creepy but he’s effective and gets things done,” or “God works through flawed humans.” So, I think many Trump voters acknowledge his flaws but chose to accept them. For me, that is sad as I could not vote for someone that is so far over the line of decency, kindness and respect for others. I suspect that is what your friend is upset about.

Since this person and I have previously disagreed about Trump in online discussions, I can provide a couple more samples (again lightly edited) from those pre-election threads:

I feel like you are missing a major point. There may be some amount of truth in what [Trump] says on [Venezuelan gangs taking over in Colorado], but his whole message is one of othering, of demonizing immigrants, and pushing a narrative that all immigrants are criminals, rapists, thugs, terrorists, vermin. This is not harmless hyperbole. It’s causing harm in real people’s lives. It’s spreading a false narrative in order to spread fear. Fear of other humans.

From a different thread:

I understand that you are not a fan of Harris, the democratic party and its process. Those are not reasons to support Trump, however. Support for a person who is clearly unfit in so many ways (pathological, immoral, self dealing, fascist leanings, stoking hatred against immigrants to name a few). But above all, the guy attempted to overthrow the 2020 election. Speaking for myself, I would never vote for a person regardless of party or how bad the other candidate was, who did that.

At the outset, I want to emphasize that my takeaway from these remarks is that they are inspired by genuine concern for our country and its people. I have known this person for decades and this is someone who cares about showing kindness towards others—who seeks to live from a charitable heart, who does not sever connections based on politics. This is also not someone who lacks intelligence. The issue here is not a failure of love or thoughtful regard, but a lack of knowledge. And this is what’s so disturbing about our divide: it is so avoidable. Because it’s been so manufactured.

In reply to that last comment, here’s what I wrote in the discussion thread, not really appreciating at the time how perfectly it encapsulates the whole dynamic our nation is locked into:

If my understanding of the facts mirrored yours, I would have come to your same conclusions. But they don't so I haven't.

And that’s really it, in a nutshell. It’s not that our moral bars are set widely apart, not even in regard to the polarizing figure of Trump. The disconnect is that we live in two entirely different realities, each constructed from our divergent sources of information. So while we may indeed have political differences disposing us to choose different leaders, the fact is, I didn’t vote for the chimera described by that List of Undeniable Sins my friend attributes to the Orange Fascist, because that candidate doesn’t exist. Indeed, the List is far less a reflection of anything Trump actually said or did than it is of the way his words, phrases, and actions have been deliberately misconstrued and dishonestly misrepresented by hostile legacy media.

A most instructive example of this deceptive routine is the recent media freakout over Trump’s remarks about Liz Cheney just prior to the election:

Looking at these headlines . . . and thinking about the many many Americans who surf them for news rather than reading entire stories . . . it would seem clear Trump was calling for violence against Liz Cheney, suggesting she deserves to be shot. It would confirm the nightmare feared by every Blue patriot worried that a violence-prone fascist is standing on America’s doorstep.

The context of his remarks, however, shows Trump making a wholly different point that’s obviously benign and entirely recognizable. Here are his actual words:

But the reason she couldn’t stand me is that she always wanted to go to war with people. I don’t want to go to war. She wanted to go—she wanted to stay in Syria. I took ‘em out. She wanted to stay in Iraq. I took ‘em out. I mean, if it were up to her we’d, we’d be in 50 different countries. She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face. You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh, gee, we’ll, let’s . . . uh, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.

The point Trump was making is perfectly clear and not particularly controversial to any honest, well-intentioned person of average intelligence. He was relying on an extremely common rhetorical framing that likely all of us have used to make a point, namely, that a person’s tune would quickly change if they actually had to live out their cherished idea rather than push it from the safety of their protected circumstances, removed from their personal experience. There was no call anywhere in his remark, not even by implication, for Liz Cheney to actually be shot, much less placed before a firing squad. That reading was maliciously manufactured by the media reporting on his remarks, given that his graphic imagery is easily explained as an appeal to the horror of war—which was the entire premise of his point.

In this case, the uproar quickly blew back on the media as the original video clip went viral across independent social media platforms (i.e. those not owned or operated by Uniparty allies) thus exposing their lie and forcing the liars to revise their story. But here’s the thing: these independent platforms—X, Rumble, and Substack—which allowed for reality to be reasserted had nowhere near the user base¹ and thus nowhere near today’s reach back when Trump first came on the political scene in 2015, which is why there was no effective avenue for forcing the truth. Which is precisely why the dark mythology about ThE sInGuLaR ThReAt To DeMoCrAcY Trump supposedly poses was able to take root and grow. A constant frenzy of deliberate and shameless misrepresentation was perpetuated that has predisposed millions of Americans to believe the worst, to perceive the cartoon villain creation of legacy media propaganda as real, imminent, and dangerous.

And likewise Trump’s supporters as amoral zealots, or at the very least morally blinded and compromised.

So, going back to The List of Undeniable Sins established from the “easily verifiable evidence of Trump’s corrupt and immoral nature,” it’s worth sharing some of the actual context of his infamy, all of which can be dug up by anyone willing to first imagine he isn’t the blackguard of media fever dreams, and then do a bit of online searching for those honorable reporters who recognize the stark difference between serving as a journalist versus a corporate stenographer/propagandist.

Did Trump demonize Mexican immigrants as rapists? Read here.

Did Trump demonize all immigrants as criminals, terrorists, vermin? Read here and here and here.

Did Trump lead an insurrection on January 6th, 2020: Read here and here and here and here, and watch this and this.

Additionally, although it didn’t make The List of Undeniable Sins, I know it belongs there because I saw a different friend of mine assert Trump’s “mockery of disabled people” as a known fact. So I’m offering a bonus link to debunk that: here.

The point of that little library of links is not to suggest there’s nothing objectionable in Trump’s language; frankly I’d love to see him make an effort to sound more civilized, less inflammatory and crass so the media wasn’t able to turn his every speech into a pearl-clutching moment. But the point is that they lie, regardless, about what his rhetoric means. They ignore all his decades of history in the limelight, both professional and personal, demonstrating that he is not driven by bigotry. They refuse to acknowledge that there’s nothing in his prior term as president marking him as a unique threat to decent society. They prefer to advance the worst, rather than most reasonable reading of anything he says or does. It’s almost like they’re on a mission . . ..

Finally, recalling that politics is downstream of culture, it’s worth noting that the constellation of media outlets that forge our cultural landscape are all owned by a handful of multi-billion dollar corporations. This means any narrative that serves the status quo, which roughly equates to their bottom lines, is easy to forward and defend because they have a ready-made audience in the broad base of consumers who use and trust their “products,” be that news, commentary, even sports and entertainment.

Infographic 2018/Source

Trump has taken on the role of disruptor. He was elected to challenge the deeply entrenched status quo, to dismantle the broken system that has been enriching the mega-corporations and their cronies in government at the expense of average citizens. That is why he is the villain in their story. The man who must be stopped.

But that also makes him the anti-hero for everyone who sees their corruption.

The trick is that to find the counter-narratives you have to get outside their air space. You have to seek out independent media—the individuals, platforms, and companies that exist expressly to question and challenge the accepted values, facts, and narratives circumscribing the institutional bubble.

In other words, find the people practicing that thing we used to call journalism: letting the facts lead and holding the elite accountable—which is to say: speaking truth to power.

Where the counter-narrative facts will be found is also where a more clear-eyed, truth-based perspective on Trump, with all his flaws, can be gained. Because what we have learned for certain in the years since he so rudely oppugned his way to the top of the Republican ticket is that echo chambers are dangerous, information silos are deranging. And the corporate media stenographers must be made to account for propagandizing Americans into such a damaging and divisive delusion.

1. Obviously Twitter (now X) did have a gigantic user base in 2015. However, it did not function as a free speech platform capable of spreading counter information, challenging mainstream media narratives, as it was operated by Leftwing activists who were hostile to Trump and to conservative agendas, generally.