RadixJournal - The Upside-Down Man

00:00:00.000 I think the Trump movement from its very inception was one that was through the looking glass,

00:00:08.400 or it was a kind of upside down campaign. And let me describe what I mean by that. So

00:00:18.840 Trump, when he's getting denounced by National Review, or when all of these Republican

00:00:28.400 bigwigs are saying, ah, we got to move past this guy, or worse, he's basically right back where he

00:00:39.100 started. We forget because these organs have become so sycophantic that they were all opposed

00:00:47.860 to Donald Trump. I mean, Fox News, most especially. Fox News had Megyn Kelly, who was then

00:00:57.860 the star of the network. She was the Tucker Carlson of 2015. They had her set Donald Trump up to be

00:01:08.860 destroyed. And he fought back with these, you know, crazy comments that I think later said,

00:01:17.180 it's like she's bleeding out of her eyes or somewhere else, or some kind of referenced

00:01:21.720 administration, I guess. But he counterpunched, he fought back, and he fought that off. But that was

00:01:29.160 a setup for a network that is the Murdoch network that was opposed to Donald Trump. The National

00:01:36.620 Review editorial saying no, period, about a Trump campaign reminds me again of a 2015 National Review

00:01:45.360 cover of Against Trump that had all of these, you know, stalwarts of the conservative movement and

00:01:52.360 even Glenn Beck and other people talking about why they would never vote for this man and why he's a

00:01:58.660 disgrace and a betrayal of conservatism. J.D. Vance was a very big never-Trumper before he became a Trump

00:02:08.160 ass kisser. Michelle Malkin. I could go on and on. I think there's a bit of a kind of 0.99

00:02:17.680 misunderstanding about the never-Trumpers when you focus on, say, like Bill Kristol or the Lincoln

00:02:23.920 project. The fact is, all of these never-Trumpers, National Review, Ben Shapiro, J.D. Vance,

00:02:32.280 Michelle Malkin, Kayleigh McEnany. I mean, I could go on and on. They all made their peace with Donald

00:02:40.600 Trump in one way or the other and, in fact, became sycophants and minions and underlings and

00:02:49.540 foot soldiers and propagandists for Donald Trump. So, one of the reasons why I do think that Trump has a

00:02:57.880 very good chance to prevail in this battle is just the fact that we've seen all this before.

00:03:07.320 He's been through this. This is back where he started. And so, to go back to what I mean by

00:03:13.360 saying that his Trump was always kind of, his, excuse me, his campaign was always through the

00:03:18.160 looking glass or it was a kind of upside down campaign. What I mean by that is that from the

00:03:25.480 very beginning, people who were mainstream Republicans, leadership figures, they either

00:03:32.920 ignored him or denounced him or scoffed at him or said he was a joke. He wasn't getting endorsements.

00:03:41.640 But what he was, was the first candidate from the internet, so to speak. So, Donald Trump,

00:03:52.520 because he was willing to go there, as I discussed earlier, he had this, he had effectively 100% name

00:04:01.400 recognition and he had this built-in fan base, people who knew him from World Wrestling, who knew

00:04:07.320 him from The Apprentice, who maybe knew him from Twitter, etc. And so, he, his was the first campaign,

00:04:16.120 campaign, at least successful campaign, real big campaign, that was internet first and then

00:04:24.360 mainstream second. And you make the mainstream fit the internet. Now, he wasn't exactly the first

00:04:32.200 one to do this. He was the first one to successfully win doing this. I do think that Ron Paul's 2008

00:04:39.880 campaign was a lot like this. So, Ron Paul is a well-known libertarian for some time.

00:04:50.280 But he, he got to people, particularly people who were disaffected with politics and who were very

00:04:58.360 online, so mostly younger people, he was able to reach them in a remarkable way. And they kind of

00:05:07.000 forced their way into the mainstream. So, the usual way these things go is that,

00:05:13.320 you know, the mainstream media will discuss some news story and then there'll be reaction

00:05:19.240 on Twitter or something. Or, you know, there'll be a new episode of some show that everyone's

00:05:25.000 streaming on Netflix or a popular television show, The Bachelor or something. And then there'll be,

00:05:30.760 you know, a pod, a podcast about it or a Facebook group will discuss it. So, that's the direction

00:05:38.040 that it goes. With Ron Paul, which again was a small campaign and one that never really could,

00:05:44.200 could win. And definitely with Trump in 2016, it went the other way. So, you had this fanatical

00:05:51.320 support online, on Facebook, on Twitter, on 4chan, et cetera, that kind of forced its way into the

00:06:01.400 mainstream. And so, what the mainstream said about Trump, you know, preemptively or the fact that they

00:06:08.680 were ignoring him didn't ultimately matter. You know, if someone in Iowa denounced, you know,

00:06:16.920 Donald Trump, Donald Trump could either ignore it and his Facebook readers wouldn't know about it,

00:06:23.320 or he could basically say something like, well, you know, this swamp creature,

00:06:28.120 he's a secret Democrat, folks. We don't like that. And he has denounced me, but, you know,

00:06:33.480 whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger. In the words of Friedrich Nietzsche. No, he,

00:06:39.320 of course, wouldn't say something like that, but you get the point. He kind of did say something

00:06:43.480 like that, though. But anyway. So, it was this upside-down campaign where the whole dynamic

00:06:50.760 had shifted. And in some ways, this is expressive of a broader phenomenon, which is the decline of the

00:07:01.640 technological society and the rise, you could say, I'm not exactly on board with this idea,

00:07:07.880 but you could say the rise of the network society. So, in a technological society, there do need to be

00:07:15.320 these organs of control and persuasion, what Jacques Ellul called propaganda. And so, in Ellul's sense,

00:07:29.080 it's not just, you know, a poster trying to sell war bonds as propaganda. No. The nightly news is

00:07:35.560 propaganda because it tells you what is relevant, all the news that's fit to print. It tells you

00:07:41.480 what's up, what's down, what's right, what's left. And these figures, Walter Cronkite being most iconic,

00:07:49.720 were on one level a kind of barometer of public opinion, but were really about creating public

00:07:56.280 opinion and evolving it and kind of molding it and maybe nudging it here and there.

00:08:01.880 So, that was a 20th century society. Most people had, you know, moved out of the countryside. They

00:08:10.120 were in cities or suburbs. There needed to be a new cathedral, as it were, or a new church, a new

00:08:17.720 religion. And this was largely provided by the mainstream media, which in comparison to what we

00:08:24.520 have today, even in comparison to what we had in, say, the 90s with, you know, 500 channels on cable or

00:08:30.120 whatever it was, was really small and focused and strict, you could say. Three big networks, PBS,

00:08:42.840 three big networks that were all more or less saying the same thing through a mouthpiece that reminded

00:08:50.040 you of your father or your grandfather, the Walter Cronkite, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather mold,

00:08:57.080 and that could channel society in a direction.

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RadixJournal - November 18, 2022

The Upside-Down Man

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