Millions of citizens have long since concluded that professional sports, academia, entertainment, and other entertainment institutions were not disinterested, but far-left and deliberately hostile to Middle America.
Yet American conservatives still adamantly supported the nation’s traditional investigatory, intelligence, and military agencies—especially when they came under budgetary or cultural attacks.
But not anymore.
Conservatives have connected the FBI hierarchy with bureaucratic waste, political bias, and even criminality for the first-ever time in recent memory.
The FBI has been in the news for the rocky careers of James Comey and Andrew McCabe, Robert Mueller and Lisa Page over the past five years. Add to that the criminality of Kevin Clinesmith, an FBI lawyer.
The colossal FBI-driven “Russian collusion” hoax was marked by the leaking of confidential FBI memos, forged documents, improper surveillance, and serial disinformation.
Prior heads of the CIA, FBI, and director of national intelligence have sometimes either not stated the truth or claimed amnesia without legal repercussions.
Conservative Americans today associate the military’s leadership with the disastrous flight out of Afghanistan. Few, if any, high-ranking officers have yet taken responsibility—much less resigned—for the worst military fiasco of the last half-century.
Instead, President Joe Biden argued with the top generals that one was responsible. Or both claimed that the abject flight was a logistical marvel.
Never before in U.S. history has so many retired four star admirals and generals criticized their president with accusations of being either a traitor or a liar, fascist,, or a virtual Nazi as it happened during the previous administration.
Never before has the correct advisory role of the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff been so brazenly taken away and contorted.
Never has the secretary of defense promised he would ferret out alleged “white supremacists,” without providing any evidence whatsoever of their supposedly ubiquitous presence and dangerous conspiracies.
Conservatives have always found the liberal biases in the old network news and big city print media amusing. However, they admitted that many liberal journalists in the last century were mostly professionals. Most news divisions reported the news and not just made it up.
Not so now with Big Tech and 21st-century “woke” journalism. Few reporters have offered an apology for helping to spread the Russian collusion hoax, which paralyzed the country over three years.
Few have admitted culpability for reporting as fact the various fantasies surrounding the Duke Lacrosse team’s prosecution or the Covington Catholic kids deception.
Many in the media ran uncritically with the Jussie Smollett concoction and the “hands-up-don’t shoot” Ferguson distortions. Journalists promulgated misinformation about the “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin encounter, and doctored photos and edited tapes.
They invented the myth of the supposedly brilliant—but now utterly disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo—as well as the “Russian disinformation” yarn that allegedly accounted for the missing Hunter Biden laptop.
Recent reports have spread a series of untruths about the Kyle Rittenhouse trial.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology was even mentioned in 2020 as a possible role in the creation and spread of COVID-19 earned media derision.
Few reporters suggested that federal health agencies, such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, might be disseminating incorrect or contradictory information regarding the pandemic. This belief earned the media condemnation as if one were a conspiracy theorist, or nut.
Rarely have communication industries—veritable utilities in the public domain—so asymmetrically censored speech and applied such one-sided standards of suppressing free expression.
Conservatives used to be against regulation of larger corporations. Ironically, many are now calling for the regulation and dissolution of multibillion-dollar social media conglomerates and monopolies that suppress as well as transmit private communications.
Conservatives also respected the American criminal justice system. As custodians for the public order, prosecuting attorneys, police chiefs, big-city mayors were also considered. They were charged with keeping the peace, investigating and prosecuting criminals, and preventing crime.
But again, not now.
After 120 days of mostly unchecked violence, arson and looting during the summer 2020, the public lost trust in their public safety services.
District attorneys in several major cities—Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and St. Louis—have often predicated prosecuting crimes on the basis of ideology, race, and careerism.
Brazen lawbreakers enjoy de facto immunity in the current crime wave. Mass looting goes unpunished. Indictments are often not only directed against those who defend their rights but also against criminals who attack innocent people.
Conservatives now have lost their former traditional confidence in the administration of justice, in the intelligence and investigatory agencies, in the nation’s military leadership, in the media, and the criminal justice system.
It is not yet clear what the impact of half of the country losing faith and belief in American civilization’s pillars will be.
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