I saw Michael Tomasky’s whining article in The New Republic on Friday, and mused about commenting on it, but Robert Stacy McCain beat me to it. It’s a good article, and I recommend it.

Mr Tomasky blames Kamala Harris Emhoff’s defeat on those poor, ignorant, unedumacated saps who don’t get their information exclusively from the mostly liberal credentialed media, The New York Times, The Washington Post — which lost over 250,000 subscribers when owner Jeff Bezos cancelled the upcoming endorsement of Mrs Emhoff — ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and the other approved credentialed media outlets. I’m guessing that he wouldn’t have included the much more conservative New York Post!

I’ve had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion times. And so on.

These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?

The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”

But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.

The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media — Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more — sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

There’s a lot to say on all of that, but I’m going to (mostly) limit this to Twitter. We noted previously, before being bought out by Elon Musk, Twitter had already taken sides on the issue of ‘transgenderism,’ and bans ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering,’^[1]‘Deadnaming’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by his given name at birth, rather than the name he has taken to match the sex he claims to be; ‘misgendering’ means referring to a … Continue reading as though the issue is settled, no dissent can be tolerated, and dissention could result in the suspension of your Twitter account. Mr McCain has lost his old @rsmccain account, which had something like 10,000 followers, and his newer The Patriarch Tree account has only 2,522, because he said politically incorrect things.

The New York Times has published articles claiming that Free Speech is killing us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence, and that Twitter’s bans on ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering’ actually promotes freedom of speech. The Times told us how wonderful it was that Jeff Bezos was able to deplatform Parler, but lamented that some of those who lost their speech on Parler migrated to Gab and Rumble.

The left were predictably aghast when Mr Musk did buy Twitter and imposed a much broader freedom of speech regime. When it comes to the American left, and how the Biden Administration tried to create a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, and that very liberal hater of free speech, Nina Jankowicz.

On April 25, 2022, Miss Jankowicz told us exactly how she felt about our Freedom of Speech^[2]You may not be able to verify my reference; Miss Jankowicz now limits who can see her tweets.:

I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking control over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities .  .  . which are already shouldering .  .  . disproportionate amounts of this abuse.

Prior to its purchase by Mr Musk, Twitter did protect such “marginalized people”. One way was to prohibit “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” Simply put, if someone wanted to tweet something about William Thomas, the male swimmer who claims to be female and was on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swim team using the name “Lia,” that person would have to concede to Mr Thomas’ claim that he is a woman by using the feminine pronouns and his assumed name, not his real one.

Now, the popular social media site allows conservative speech, which thoroughly annoys Mr Tomasky. But in allowing conservatives to yse Twitter, Mr Musk and his staff still allow the left to use Twitter. I follow a few, the operative word being “few,” liberals on Twitter, but not that many. Nevertheless, my Twitter feed has been full of posts by Democrats and the left, telling me what a horrible person our past and future President is, how Senator and now incoming Vice President J D Vance is even worse than Mr Trump, full of continual anti-Semitism by the defenders of the ‘Palestinians’ and Hamas and Hezbollah, full of the liberal rage concerning Mr Bezos cancellation of the Post’s planned endorsement, full of people telling me just how boneheadedly stupid I am for having voted for Mr Trump, and that I support “genocide” for supporting Israel. I get pro-Democrat tweets from Brian Krassenstein and, less frequently, his brother Ed Krassenstein, neither of whom I follow, and who were subject to a civil forfieture for publishing wire fraud schemes by others. I even sometimes see the tweets by the repugnant BrooklynDad_Defiant!

Yet, according to Mr Tomasky, Twitter is “right-wing media.” I guess he means that freedom of speech and of the press itself is “right-wing.”

Well, I’d accept that, because today, freedom of speech and of the press are conservative values; it hasn’t been the right which has been trying to stifle people’s public expressions.