Xequecal wrote:
They've since backed off the full on never-Trump rhetoric but the National Review is extremely anti-Trump for a right wing publication, and the Trump camp generally dislikes it. They also went hard in on attacking Arpaio which also did not go over well with the Trump camp. I like to use Arpaio as an example of how deep the divide has gotten because he has widespread support amongst Trump's base despite, well, doing exactly the same thing Hillary did by weaponizing the apparatus of the state against his political opponents. That's in addition to all his other abuses, obviously. If you head on over to Breitbart it's pretty common to see sentiment like how California is only blue because of millions of illegal voters, claiming there are more illegal voters than there actually are illegals in total, etc.
I read the National Review every day, and there is a variety of opinion there. However, the National Review is one of the most credible media organizations out there right now (possibly
the most) while Breitbart is... not. The sort of people who take Breitbart seriously are mostly younger than my daughter and are more interested in trolling for the sake of trolling than anything else.
The difference between the left and the right is that while the National Review will criticize, often strongly, the President, they also don't post hysterics about how the end of the Republic is nigh because he said something mean, or legal theories for which "dubious" would be a generous description, such as the idea that Trump criticizing the Russia investigation or firing Comey is "obstruction" which serious publications on the left have put forth, despite the fact that one must be Constitutionally, and possibly functionally, illiterate to hold such a view - the "indepedence" of the FBI is not a thing we need to worry about because it is
not a thing under the Constitution.
In many ways, the reaction to Trump is the recation to Bush turned up to 11. The left felt entitled to win after Clinton; they believed history had ended, they had a demographic permanent lock on the Presidency and the Republicans were to be a permanent opposition party. To be fair, Bush's win was a bizarre electoral happenstance, but even had he lost the vote would have been close enough to show that the Democrats had no mandate for permanent rule.
Trump had different happenstances, but the fact that someone like Donald Trump was able to even get within striking distance of your candidate should speak volumes about just how wrong the left is. Hillary Clinton embodied leftist assumptions about how the world works - she was supposed to win, no matter what else, because vagina. The status quo was supposed to go on where a left agenda is ever pushed forward by claiming that opposition is hate, no matter how unsustainable it is. The media was supposed to be able to isolate out opposition by asking questions in just the right way, using just the right amount of bias to portray center-left as the center, just as they have for decades.
The problem was, those were not rules. They were assumptions. The FBI is a microcosm of this - rules are rules when Trump is the target, but they can be waived aside for Hillary because she's supposed to be the next President. That's what's "supposed to" happen. After all, our degrees from Georgetown tell us so. Wisconsin hasn't gone Republican since 1988 therefore it never will because it isn't supposed to.
The left - and not just the media, but the average voter on the left - must learn that the left does not set norms unchecked. The left does not represent progress or any "right side of history"; it is a different political viewpoint and that's all. It is not entitled to a media and bureaucracy weighted playing field.