“If they want a monster so badly, they ought to be provided by one.”
― Margaret Atwood
Their monster is Trump. He is the entire economy of the media machine. Without him, whole news networks would die, social media would become stagnant, and, more importantly, there would be no named evil for the New Puritans to unite in fear and hatred against.
Their God is Barack Obama. Yes, that’s right. We're caught in a clash of the titans that involves two movements, largely built and cultivated online, that now define two paths forward for America. Obama’s 1984-like dystopia or Trump’s populist revolt against monopolistic power at the top, not unlike Teddy Roosevelt driving a spike through the Gilded Age.
Trump is, without a doubt, and these trials prove it, the man in the arena.
You don’t have to see Trump as a hero worthy of Roosevelt’s words. You don’t even have to see him as a good person or a good president. But you should not see him as a monster just for refusing to stand down when so ordered. By the same token, we should not have seen Obama as a God. He is flawed, just like the rest of us.
That the Left now sees Trump as a monster and his supporters as an ongoing dangerous threat to THEIR “democracy” and THEIR “country” would have some validity if it weren’t based almost entirely on a mass delusion cultivated and nurtured by the media and social media’s need for such a monster.
No sane person can say with a straight face that any of this is normal. It is nothing less than the total collapse of everything we used to count on - a fair justice system, unbiased prosecutors and juries, and an objective press.
They say nothing about the censorship, the cancellations, or the convictions in the court of public opinion that define who they are — who they really are — now. Oh sure, they posture about book bannings because parents worry that sexually explicit texts are in elementary school libraries. That’s not censorship, that’s protective parenting. The Left used to care about that.
That’s why they need their monster. They know what they are doing is wrong. They know they have lost whatever value they ever had for the American public as writers, journalists, comedians, scientists, teachers, and medical professionals. They know they’ve traded ethics and truth for zealotry and fanaticism. But as long as they have their monster hurled into the Colosseum every day until Election Day, they have their emergency. Never let a crisis go to waste.
Are you not entertained?
There is no escape from their oppressive mandates on the media narrative we all must accept. 60 Minutes does a glowing portrait of Merrick Garland. He is asked point blank if he has anything to do with the investigations into Trump. No, he says. He probably isn’t lying. There is someone higher up on the food chain than Biden who likely is orchestrating the whole thing with the same invisible hands that helped orchestrate the 2020 election.
No one can say for sure if former President Obama is behind the monster hunt, but if Garland has an allegiance to anyone, it’s certainly not Joe Biden. No one serving in the current administration, no one in the Democratic Party writ large, does not defer to not just the God of the party, but of the entire cultural, corporate, and political Left.
Scary Monsters
They’ve escalated their attacks against Trump now that he’s leading Biden in the polls. Efforts to remove him from ballots in several states — because we can’t have democracy disrupting our Democracy — have, thus far, failed thanks, in large part, to the better angels of our nature.
Where they once ignored Trump’s speeches, they have relapsed and are going for the full dose. Even actor Mark Ruffalo got in on it because why wouldn’t he?
He might not remember the Trump supporter shot point blank in Portland. Or the endless attacks against Trump supporters, largely due to the media narrative Ruffalo is now perpetuating. He might not remember just how violent the Summer of 2020 actually was, how many people lost their businesses or were sent to the hospital.
He doesn’t think about the violence in cities like Chicago or St. Louis because of “defund the police,” the smash and grabs, subway assaults, or any of the other casual violence against citizens every second of every day in America. No, that would make him look bad, and no actor can tolerate that.
He might not know that by a nine-point margin, the American people see the Left, not the Right, as the more extreme.
In Hollywood, they make endless movies about Nazis and cast themselves as the resistance. They make movies admonishing slavery and racism and cast themselves as the “good liberals” who would have never gone along with all-white partisan juries and the mobs that gathered outside trials demanding convictions, eliminating the need for due process. Yet, here they are, justifying exactly the same thing in reverse.
Leave the Country Behind
On the one hand, a former president is on trial to dismantle his empire. On the other hand, another former president now presides over Higher Ground Productions, a deal that allegedly cost Netflix roughly $50 million.
But it wasn’t just a movie deal. The company was also a major donor to Obama’s presidential campaigns. According to the Daily Mail:
And according to the New York Times:
“Touching on issues of race and class, democracy and civil rights and much more, we believe each of these productions won’t just entertain, but will educate, connect and inspire us all,” Mr. Obama said in a statement.
In the same article, even the New York Times is in on the deal, with one of their own ideas turned into a documentary.
“■ An adaptation of a New York Times series, called “Overlooked,”about people whose deaths were previously not reported by the newspaper.
It’s all one big happy family for at least part of the country. And they get to say, as the higher power or higher ground of everyone, what defines democracy. Who gets to participate in it. What counts as a protest, and what kind of protest counts as an insurrection. When it’s okay to doubt the results of an election and when it’s not.
They also have a near-monopoly on information and are working hard to complete it. If you search on Google for “Obama’s deal with Netflix,” the first story is the New York Times. Then maybe you get to wikipedia.
But they don’t just have their tentacles in news or information. No, they also have to remain influential in all areas of American cultural life, including film.
One of the two films that will play on Netflix from Higher Ground Productions is Rustin, a biopic about Bayard Rustin, an openly gay Black Civil Rights leader earmarked for the Oscar race. And the second is called Leave the World Behind. The trailer dropped today just as Trump was giving a statement about the trial in New York:
You could not have asked for a more stark example of the disconnect between these two men, these two presidents, these two Americas:
While the angry pitchfork mob was hunting the monster, their God was basking in the glory of universal love and acceptance.
According to the Hollywood Reporter:
I know what you’re thinking. You don’t have to tell me. You see Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke, and Kevin Bacon, and you think, please, no. Not another lecture. I can’t take it anymore. Not when the “special people” tell me how to live, think, say, what to like, what to eat, what to buy, what to drive. Please just leave me alone.
I didn’t used to know what that felt like. I was sucked into the bubble, blithely unaware of just how exclusive and exclusionary it was. But it’s like putting on the glasses in They Live, once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
It isn’t that there is anything wrong with these movies. They’re not offensive but his mere presence as a god-like leader over the entire left leaves no room for healthy pushback on them, the Left, or the Democrats.
Obama’s influence across all cultural platforms is ultimately suffocating for the Left because the message is already decided. Utopia already achieved as long as they can somehow eliminate the bad people.
If there are any columns criticizing the too-cozy deal with Netflix, you can’t find them on the mainstream Left, that’s for sure, and if they’re not there, most people will never hear about them.
The marriage between the Democrats and Hollywood has turned the film industry and much of our culture into a propaganda delivery system where no great stories can be told anymore. They’ve walled themselves off from the people who struggle daily just to put food on the table, whose biggest concerns aren’t identity politics or climate change.
How would they tell the story of the train derailment in East Palestine, and that when Trump showed up, it was the greatest day of their lives? How could they square that with their ongoing psyop that he’s a con man and the world’s greatest evil? They couldn’t tell that story, so they can’t tell that truth.
Instead, all we’ll get is propaganda about January 6th and so-called “violent extremism” every day for the next year. It’s destroying the fragile thread that ties us all together and all for what, so the upper decks of the Titanic can get safely into the lifeboats before the whole thing sinks?
And because they’ve insulated themselves from real life, and have no clue who Trump supporters are or what Trump actually says at his rallies - relying instead on deceptive cherry-picking distortions of what he said, they choose to sell irrational fear of those with less status and wealth in the country.
And because they have become disconnected from reality, they have nothing to replace what they’ve taken away. They can’t replace the best comedy on late night. They can’t replace the spirit and sharp insights of Tucker Carlson.
Never have we needed Tucker Carlson more than right now. And, as he points out in a recent speech where he urges everyone to fortify the things that really matter - family, relationships, friendships — we have no idea how bad this is going to get:
They can’t replace the great movies Hollywood used to make. They can’t replace the renaissance of standup comedy. If they are mandated to only parrot the party line why not replace them with AI? At least AI won’t hate themselves in the morning.
Maybe all that dead and stifled creativity manifested itself in their Trump creation, the Frankenstein monster they wrote because they can’t write anything that good anymore. As just as Nietzsche once foretold, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
Too late.
Why wouldn’t heretics like me not want to root for Trump? Not just to beat all charges against him, but to win the Republican nomination and the presidency.
Give me a good reason to not want him to prevail, when the party I used to call home has killed off everything I loved. Why wouldn’t I root for the one guy they can’t destroy? Oh they can run his businesses into the ground. They can pretend their monster really is the guy they lie about every day to the American public. But they can’t end him. All they can do is destroy themselves.
The best writers used to know the tragic monster stories of old. They never end well for the angry mob. We always sympathize with the monster, whether it’s the Hunchback of Notre Dame or Frankenstein. They bring out the worst in the persecutors but the best in ourselves.
Without those stories, we’re undone by our own worst instincts. That’s what great writing does. That’s the value of it. That’s why we need it and why we’ve always needed it, and why we have always turned to it when we can’t make sense of our own flawed nature. It holds up a mirror not to tell us how great we are, but to show us what monsters we can be. I can’t image a world without that.
/end
Gods and Monsters in America