MAGA and the Legacy Media Trap
Years ago, I knew a guy who desperately wanted to make a mark as a conservative activist. He was seriously naïve and ill-informed about most things (he’d been raised in a kind of self-segregated immigrant community). He used to call me up at five in the morning – don’t ask me what he was doing running around at that hour – and say things like, “I just saw the New York Times. They were saying bad things about President Reagan.”
So here I am, half asleep and scarcely able to think (not an uncommon problem with me). I tell him, “The Times, huh. The leading leftist paper in the U.S. What do you expect them to say?”
A long pause. “But…” A real sense of desperation here. “They’re saying bad things about President Reagan!”
It would go around a couple more times before I could get him off the phone, well aware that I hadn’t convinced him because he was beyond convincing. He fancied himself a movement conservative, and all the movement conservatives at the time believed in institutions. Ancient establishments that no matter what the field — media, finance, government, what have you — could be trusted implicitly and must not be questioned. So when a media institution — the NYT above all — said bad things about Reagan, they had to be true. (That “bad things,” with its kindergarten aura of “if you don’t actually say it, it won’t come true” is a tell. And no, he never did make any contribution.)
I’ve be
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
