Long-forgotten author and political observer Gore Vidal once remarked that the U.S.A. stood for the United States of Amnesia. It’s an even more apt observation now.
Remember when the Internet was touted as “the Information Superhighway?” It seemed it might stick at first, but the term was forgotten by the end of 1995, that same year all of the world got email accounts and discovered the magic and wonder of the World Wide Web via AOL and CompuServe.
One thing I can’t get over people forgetting—especially those on the generally smarter and more honest Dissident Right—is that, for decades, the media was slapping down Democrats and overall left-liberalism with the same glee they attack productive, high-functioning humans of normal sexuality now. How could anyone adult and alive in November 1994 forget how the CNN bobbleheads chortled and crowed for the historic defeat of the Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party in 1994 mid-terms, resulting in a Republican majority in the House of Representative for the first time in nearly half a century?
According to the narrative all across the right side of the U.S. political spectrum, the media has always had a liberal bias. Yet I remember most articles written about the Vietnam War as it was happening having a pro-war slant. Yes, Walter Cronkite, the Most Trusted Man in America, lied about the 1968 Tet Offensive, but my local paper and TV news were loyal to the end. The media might not have liked Nixon or Ford but they absolutely despised President Carter, and were all-in on their cringey, fawning adulation of St. Ronald the Reagan, who, we’re told, strategically napped and cleverly quipped the U.S.S.R. out of existence.
Fast-forward back to November 1994, which people 10 to 15 years younger than I should remember. “The Incredible Shrinking Presidency” was how Time magazine had described the Clinton administration. Every major news magazine at the supermarket checkout featured a humiliating depiction of the then-Leader of the Free World.
Much was made of a press conference in which a reporter sneeringly asked President Clinton if he thought he was still relevant, given the GOP’s domination of the legislative branch. Clinton stammered something about the Constitution and the press and cable and radio show people viciously mocked him over that for weeks. Compare and contrast to the even more extreme “shellacking” the Obama administration suffered in the 2010 midterms, which was downplayed in favor of mocking “teabaggers” in the now-forgotten Tea Party.
As many former Republicans will point out, though, a fat lot of good that did, huh?
Throughout the entirety of the 1990s and well past the 11 September 2001 attacks when the media was praising the obviously hapless, unintelligent, and, yes, fraudulently elected George W. Bush as an all-wise and super-competent War President, newspaper and magazine columns online and off would solemnly remind us that “the United States is and always has been a center-right country.” (Italics and other emphasis mine.) I had listened and enjoyed National Public Radio and its news programs since 1983, but cut it off forever after Bush the Lesser’s first inauguration in 2001. Daniel Schorr and Cokie Roberts were nigh-insufferable in their partisanship during Bill Clinton’s sham impeachment in the summer of ‘98, but when I heard that smug bastard Schorr growl, “Nothing that man does surprises me anymore” in naked hatred of the outgoing President (after repeating the later-confirmed lie of Clinton’s staff vandalizing the White House office keyboards on the way out), I hit the power button on my stereo.
That’s right, you read right: The Notorious N.P.R. was once very biased in favor of anything anti-Clinton, even as they supported everything else bourgie-liberal.
Let’s recap: According to the U.S. mass media, print, broadcast, and online, Bill and Hillary Clinton were the embodiment of pure, traitorous evil when they were not mindlessly, hilariously stupid. This went on from Clinton’s election in 1992 to at least the middle of 2005, when the media decided they didn’t like George W. Bush anymore. But exactly when did this negative collective attitude towards the Clintons change, and why? Who got paid, and how much? What was the deal struck here?
You’d never have known Hillary Clinton was once the most hated woman in America when she ran for President in 2016. No one anywhere on the political spectrum brought it up. The answers to my above questions would explain much of what’s going on now. Suffice it to say that the so-called news media has always been mendacious, reliably biased towards power, and often genuinely evil in the false narratives they promote. The Fearless Crusading Reporter risking his life to bring you the capital-T Truth is and always was a Hollywood myth. No one in his or her right mind would speak with a reporter any more than they would the Federal Bureau of Entrapment that more accurately describes the F.B.I.
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Before I conclude with the most recent example of forgotten recent history, I would like to take this moment to savor the bitterest irony of the above story: Throughout the 1990s, Bill and Hillary Clinton were accused of everything from serial rape to serial murder when they weren’t being busted over an incomprehensible real estate deal from when Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas. It turns out the worst of all those accusations, prosecuted by a media so viciously partisan most people ignored them as hyperbole at the time, may have been true after all.
When Vincent Foster turned up dead in a city park in 1993 people thought it ridiculous that Hillary Clinton had ordered the murder to look like a suicide, as much, if not all of the media had promoted the idea at the time. In 2021, the idea of Hillary “suiciding” people is a funny meme. It’s generally accepted Hillary Clinton has had her enemies liquidated and made to look like suicides/ robberies turned deadly (cf. Sean Rich), and so what?
That former President Bill Clinton hardly comes up at all—he was conspicuously absent during his wife’s 2016 campaign; he might as well be dead now—indicates there is much the media would prefer we forget by way of the media’s ignoring him. At this point, I think the less we know, the happier we all are. No one is getting the justice they deserve on this Earth anyway, not until Christ Himself returns. This should be well-established among sensible observers of history from the git-go. It is what it was, and is what it shall be until it’s stopped.
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The notion of a stolen national election goes back at least to 1960, when John F. Kennedy lost the popular vote, but won the electoral vote. It’s a joke to this very day how many dead citizens cast votes for Kennedy in Illinois, and JFK himself even joked on camea that his wealthy and influential father promised to buy him Illinois, not the entire country, ha-ha. It’s not generally accepted that Kennedy won by fraud alone, but it’s known there was enough fraud to swing one major state.
It’s worth noting that while Kennedy did have the support of Hollywood, he did not have the support of the general public. Indeed, JFK was despised among conservatives, including conservative Democrats, who did exist back then. It wasn’t until after his assassination that Kennedy assumed national sainthood, and even most of that was grudging on the part of conservatives, back when “conservative” still meant something.
The Republicans got their revenge in 2000 when the Republican candidate’s very own brother happened to be governor of the critical swing state of Florida. Talk about appearances of impropriety, this nepotistic fact should have sealed the deal for everyone. Instead, Republicans gloated and laughed—and the media gloated right along with them, reminding us once more that “the United States has, since it’s founding, always been a center-right country.” George Bush the Lesser enjoyed no respect from the general population until a fortuitous catastrophe his administration should have prevented happened that September. According to the U.S. media, he was then the greatest president ever until Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, safe within Bush’s second term. Incidentally, the 2000 election fraud was so grievous the United Nations sent in observers to our national election in 2004. Most of them ended up arrested for trespassing by local law enforcement. No one seems to remember that, either, but it happened.
For the longest time I used to say 12 December 2000 was the day the American Republic died, because that was when a clearly partisan U.S. Supreme Court ordered the recounts of the 2000 election to stop. We all thought it was Happy Days Are Here Again when Obama won the White House in 2008. That turned out to be the most bitter thing of all once his eight years in office were done. Obama started out against homosexual marriage and ended with transsexuals getting sex-change operations at taxpayer expense via a U.S. military that used to exclude homosexuals as a matter of national security. We’re at Weimar Republic levels of social degradation now, and it's getting worse by the day.
It’s an entertaining parlor game among amateur historians when it was really over for the United States of America. The consensus I see now is split either right at the beginning of the U.S. Civil War in 1861, or with the industrial North’s victory in 1865. A sizable amount of crimethinkers behind them say it was 100 years later with the passage of the Hart-Celler law liberalizing immigration, which forever changed national demographics, and therefore the nation. It certainly accelerated things. Behind them are people who will argue it started when we allowed the Irish and Italians to immigrate en masse much earlier in the 20th century. These people also make compelling arguments.
It’s an entertaining parlor game, nothing more, because it hardly matters now. We are where we are. There’s no going back, and why should we? Any given point back there is how we got here. That’s all.
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