A Ratings Boost For The Devil
Lo and behold, it turns out that right from the beginning of Donald Trump’s election fraud hoax, the leading voices in the so-called conservative media — the prime time hosts at Fox News — openly stated among themselves that they knew this was a hoax, that there was no massive election fraud, and that Joe Biden had won the election. But they decided, individually and collectively, to pretend they did not know the obvious truth, because admitting that obvious truth would anger their viewers, therefore killing their ratings, and thus, most importantly, costing them their multi-million dollar celebrity lives. In short, they deliberately lied or denied the truth about the most divisive, damaging, and conservatism-destroying story in the electoral history of their country, and knowingly avoided standing against the unhinged and tyrannical infant tearing their political faction and party to shreds with his megalomaniacal lunacy, and they have continued to do so for more than two years, for one reason and one reason only: to protect their own wealth and fame.
Not saying I told you so, but, well…. And please don’t waste my time or yours imagining that the machinations in the tiny minds at Fox News were the exception, and that all the other “conservative media” voices defending Trump’s election fraud hoax honestly believed it. They all knew, and they all made the same calculation. And their calculation, made entirely for personal material gain, fueled the fire that has burned out the last patches of the conservative grassroots that once seemed like America’s last hope. The whole field has been destroyed over two years of desperate clinging to the national insanity that was and is “the Trump era.” Now it is too late, the damage is done, and all those millions who held on in defense of Trump — and in defense of their own support for Trump — in the face of Trump’s increasingly obvious disdain for them and their country, have lost the game outright. Most of this conflagration, it is plain to see, could have been smothered before it got out of control, if only the “conservative media” frauds had thought for ten seconds about anything other than audience size and profit potential. The riled-up grassroots, too desperate to think clearly, too frightened to see through the bluster of a world famous “alpha man” who promised to protect them and stand up for them, needed the public voices they had trusted and adhered to for years to cut through the fog, tamp down their excessive fear, and rally their better angels to resist the foolishness of demagoguery and charisma. If a critical mass of these “conservative media” fakers — and I mean all of them, from Fox News to Rush Limbaugh to Mark Levin to Ben Shapiro to Mark Steyn to Dennis Prager to the conservative website editors to every stupid bandwagon-hopping podcast profiteer and pied piper — had had the virtue and the genuine concern for liberty to simply tell the plain truth from the outset, this whole Trump catastrophe, from 2015 onward, and certainly the final post-2020 implosion, would have been avoided.
But no, they all had to think with their jacuzzis and their advertising revenue, instead of with whatever shred of political intelligence and moral decency they might ever have had. The ugly fallout of this mess — the rapid rise of progressive authoritarianism and the Marxist left’s opportunistic rebranding of “conservatism” as a violent, anti-democratic hate crime mob, which is exactly what I was already publicly predicting a Trumpified Republican Party would result in, back before the 2016 Iowa caucus — lies at their feet. And they deserve to have to look at it there, smoldering forever.
Never has the idiom “To hell with them!” flowed more trippingly off the tongue. If Dante’s vision of that place is correct, which I happen to believe that in many ways it is, then surely these ultimately anti-American frauds, who have sold themselves as America Firsters for cash and popularity while actively helping to lead their followers and their country to self-annihilation for nothing but their own petty advantage, are having a nice warm place prepared for them as we speak. The only question remaining is whether any of them will be spared the ninth (lowest) circle, and merely be condemned to the eighth, the circle of “simple frauds,” including, most appropriately, the grafters, hypocrites, fraudulent counselors, and sowers of scandal.
