Pattern Recognition

 The question doesn’t mince words. Straight out, people were asked: “Do you agree or disagree with this statement: The media ‘are truly the enemy of the people?'”

Thirty-four percent strongly agreed, 24 percent somewhat agreed, 13 percent somewhat disagreed, and 23 percent strongly disagreed.

Allow me to reframe this for emphasis…

When voters were asked if the media are “truly the enemy of the people,” only 23 percent strongly disagreed.

The plurality strongly agrees; the majority of 58% agrees at least somewhat. 

I think of the way in which journalists were hotly opposed to Ronald Reagan, and compare and contrast that to how things have become since Obama's term. 

Obama's people didn't respect journalists at all -- recall his speech dude Ben Rhodes describing journalists as children who "literally know nothing" --  but they did enjoy almost complete submission from the press. In hindsight this was surely because of the proto-woke clarity that Barack Obama could not be criticized without one becoming subject to claims of racism that would be enforced by the whole social class of which journalists were a part.

It got much worse under Trump. As Angelo Codevilla points out -- in an excellent piece that questions Trump's worth as a future leader, and identifies his core failures -- Trump provoked a 'ruling class' consciousness to emerge. Journalists consider themselves to be a part of that class, though they are now even more obviously its abject servants than they were during the Obama administration. I note that the Codevilla essay is carried at no less than American Greatness, a journal whose very name was inspired by Trump's chief slogan. It is healthy to see criticism of the man there; indeed, it is exactly the kind of thing that a healthy journalism does (and ought to refute the pretense that Trump's popularity is the kind of cult of personality sometimes associated with fascism).

It is exactly that kind of criticism that is gone in the current period. The Biden administration finds that journalists are its allies, propping up his regime as hard as they can. They are doing so clearly out of service to this new class consciousness; they are of and for that class. 

What is that class of and for? To say whether they are truly the enemies of the people, you'd need to answer that question. The top of the class is composed of alumni of a particular consulting firm, The Intercept reports: WestExec Advisors, founded in 2017 by Obama alumni, has provided 15 top officials including the Secretary of State and the Director of National Intelligence. A look at the Secretary of State's work between the Obama and Trump administrations is even more telling about what they are of and for: he was paid as a consultant by "AT&T, defense contractor Boeing, shipping magnate FedEx, and the media company Discovery as a WestExec founding partner. He worked for Big Tech pillars Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Uber. He helped niche companies like speakers bureau GLG, art seller Sotheby’s, and biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences. Blinken also lists clients that are global investment firms and asset managers, like Blackstone, Lazard, Royal Bank of Canada, and the multinational conglomerate SoftBank[,]" The new DNI had "clients like Facebook, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, and Open Philanthropy," the latter being an NGO with ties to Facebook, whose NGOs also paid for all that 'election fortification' in swing states and counties. The journalists come from a lower tier of the same institutions -- elite colleges, international corporations, and NGOs aimed at transforming America. 

The ideology they espouse is the now-fully-formed wokeness, which is deeply hostile to America and to all of its traditions. This is true not only of the journalist servant class, but of the class of public sector unions -- especially teachers, for whom wokeness in the form of CRT is the lens through which all subjects must be taught. The military leadership is committed to it; the intelligence agencies are also (as you should expect, say our Marxists, because the CIA has been dividing other nations along race and ethnic lines for decades). 

One might well say that they are, then, for something that is against America -- at least as America was understood even in Reagan's time, even in Clinton's. They are of a class rather than the people writ large. It is a class that intends to rule and dominate the rest of the people, and thinks of itself as separate from and better than the ordinary people of the country. 

So it appears the majority is right, more or less. One can quibble about tone, but not substance.