Two Versions of Reality in America’s Media Today

It’s startling to read the differences between “mainstream” media and the pro-Trump media. Even the headlines.

In the case of left-wing or “mainstream” media, the impeachment is underway and the President’s days in office are numbered. Read the headlines at places like MSN, CNN, etc. and see for yourself. These news sources blow up the fact that Republicans in the Senate like Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse will undoubtedly vote to remove Trump from office (will any other Republicans?), and it’s game over for the President as soon as Pelosi rams this impeachment through the House. If I were a leftist Democrat and I only read these sources, I’d be jubilant right now.

When you look at Breitbart, the Daily Wire and Fox News (sometimes), you will get the opposite impression — that the case for impeachment is full of holes, lies and duplicity and could fall apart before it starts. And, of course, it is full of lies and duplicity. But nobody knows that — except the millions of people reading the right-wing news. The millions of people getting their news and thinking from the equivalent of state-run media are left with a TOTALLY opposite impression.

Has there ever been a time in American history when the country was so divided? I know of one other time. It didn’t end so well.

Does anyone understand that President Trump is only the symptom, or the catalyst — not the cause? Leftists seem to assume that if we can just get rid of Trump, all will be well. Citizens will happily hand over their guns and submit to socialism, they assume — an extreme, undiluted form of socialism now embraced by mainstream Democrats that even Barack Obama dared not endorse. We simply must get rid of Trump, they assume.

And on the right, I’m not sure anyone has thought out what will happen beyond President Trump’s hoped-for second term. Because the media, academia, the corporate world, and most if not all of the Deep State federal government still belong to the left.

Facts are facts. The right-wing media is not always truthful and unbiased. No media ever is. But I find the magnitude of deception in the left-wing media (CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, etc.) truly staggering. It almost makes me feel sorry for some of the miserably hateful leftists who threaten to boycott, intimidate or otherwise obliterate people who disagree with them on social and political issues, particularly President Trump. They are being lied to on such a scale that it seems like we are past the point of no return in redeeming any of these lost souls, assuming they are not simply bad people who want to believe untruths (as I have found many of them to be.)

But forget about my own view that the left-wing media is wrong. You cannot argue with this: We have a country so deeply divided that each side gets two utterly different versions of what’s actually going on.

How is this sustainable?

If this were a marriage, I’d say the differences are irreconcilable. I’d suggest, as a professional therapist, that the two persons are actually better off divorced. But in that case people can, for the most part, go their separate ways. How will the two Americas that now exist resolve this one? How do we reconcile socialism with capitalism? Or the First and Second Amendments with their absence? Or the replacement of a Bill of Rights and a constitutional republic with a state-run, command-and-control economy like in China, Russia, North Korea, Venezuela or parts of Europe, in varying degrees?

We will soon know. As Ayn Rand used to write, America is a country without precedent. It survived a Civil War once before. We are — without question — in the midst of a psychological and political civil war right now.

It will be interesting, but also deeply unsettling, to watch all this play out. It already is, for those with their eyes fully open. Not just impeachment, and not just President Trump. But America, and where we are. And where the hell are we going?

 

 

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