Mate, I tell ya. Jim-friggin’-Allan. No one else’s writing quite has the power to make me physically sick. His piece in the last issue, ‘Trump, Turnbull & Abbott’, hit me like a steel-toe boot to the gonads. ‘To be blunt,’ Jim writes, ‘I can’t help thinking that there are more than a few embarrassed conservatives who were sucked into the ABC worldview in which Turnbull was preferable to Abbott and now, after the fact, are looking to offer up some rationales for their support for the insupportable. And there are plenty of these people out there, including more than one of the columnists for the Australian.’ And, I’ll add, at least one contributor to The Spectator Australia. Is there anything left for us in the Tories-for-Turnbull brigade to say except, ‘Not only did we screw the pooch – we took a few tasteless, post-coital selfies and posted them on Twitter’?

By all means, rub that egg on our faces. Go on: get it nice and deep. Good for the pores. Yet I’m still grateful for the experience. Those of us who fell for Turnbull’s Colin Firth-meets-Justin Trudeau act suddenly found ourselves with a far healthier appreciation for the mainstream media’s duplicity. And just in time for the US presidential race, too. When they started pushing the narrative of Donald Trump qua cross-burning, Hitler-heiling, concentration-camping hooch-fondler, we weren’t as quick to take them at their word. The Left’s Pavlovian bell stopped making us drool. (Or, in this case, froth.) We weren’t going to dismiss another mainstream conservative as an extremist, just because he had the gall to expound in public what we all say in private.

So the spell is broken, hopefully forever, and it feels good. But the truth is that, outside a few of us Sleeping Fogies, the greater public remains enthralled by the mainstream media’s mind-control gimmicks. Most poignant was the North Carolina Republican Party headquarters that was firebombed and the remains defaced by graffiti saying, ‘NAZI REPUBLICANS GET OUT OF TOWN OR ELSE’. Only two kinds of people can seriously believe that Trump’s GOP resembles the Nazi Party: the mentally ill, or the readers and viewers of any major newspaper or television network in America. This is the blatant untruth that our press has been pushing since Donald Trump entered the Republican primary. We shouldn’t be surprised that people who hear it so often from once-respectable media outlets start to behave as though it’s true. I mean, if you could go back to Germany in 1932 and firebomb the Nazi Party’s HQ, wouldn’t you?

My hope was that, if by some miracle Trump won the election, all the hysteria would quickly die out. Once it became clear to the press that their scare-mongering couldn’t influence public opinion en masse, they’d go back to doing their job – reporting factually on the events of the day – in a pathetic attempt to salvage their dignity. Wrooooooooong, quoth the Don. The outright slander levied against Steve Bannon, President Trump’s senior counsel and my old boss at Breitbart, showed the media was determined to redouble their efforts to pervert public opinion. For instance: the Washington Post, gatekeeper of our own ‘sensible center’, called Bannon the Goebbels to Trump’s Hitler.

It would almost be amusing if it wasn’t literally costing innocent people’s lives. We have the sad case of one Jeff Gillenkirk, an acclaimed author, who died of a heart attack just two days after penning a column titled ‘The New PTSD: Post-Trump Stress Disorder’. Poor bloke literally scared himself to death. And the transgender advocacy group Gender Inc. has reported a spike in trans suicides since the election. This one’s particularly f–ked because The Donald is more pro-gay rights than Obama was when he was elected in 2008. It’s literally the one issue he’s consistently, defiantly, alarmingly un-conservative on.

Yet that doesn’t matter to the leftist media, who will drive thousands of vulnerable minorities to their deaths if it serves their agenda. I wrote about this phenomenon in these pages back in September, but in the context of the gay marriage plebiscite. I said there would indeed be a spike in LGBT suicides during the campaign, because the media would do everything in its power to convince queer youths that Australia is a country full of hateful bigots who want them dead. Josh Manuatu – as good a chap as they come, and gay to boot – criticised those of us who took that line in an article for Flat White, saying ‘the stereotype that all homosexuals are sad, impulsive and not in control of their emotions to the extent that a TV advertisement may force them to commit suicide is… offensive and deeply demeaning’. Sorry, mate, but you missed the point. It’s not that gays are gullible, hysterical dupes: it’s that most people are gullible, hysterical dupes. Including, at least until recently, yours truly. The media knows that, and they play us like Neronian fiddles. There’s no lie too unfounded, no conspiracy too bat-shit crazy, for them to print – or for us to believe.

Those of us who’ve taken the red pill now have a duty to speak up on behalf of those still laboring under the media’s intricate, self-serving Matrix. We have to expose the mainstream press for what it is: an international conspiracy to spread left-wing propaganda. Because they’re not just a threat to our democracy anymore. They’re also endangering the lives of millions of innocent dimwits. To (mis)quote the late, great, William F. Buckley: ‘Cancel your god-damn subscriptions.’

The post Media notes appeared first on The Spectator.