VDH: Election revealed two sides – Big media/Big Tech vs. the people and Donald Trump

11/10/2020 / By News Editors

“I’m worried,” Victor Davis Hanson told Fox News host Tucker Carlson Wednesday after the election.

(Article by Victoria Taft republished from PJMedia.com)

He’s rightly concerned about the future of American elections and the outsized roles and biases that the media, pollsters, and Big Tech play in them. The people have become bit players.

And so I’m very worried that many people are gaining and using inordinate influence in a way that is really warping the constitutional system that’s worked really well for 233 years. So why can’t we just take a deep breath, not call these states before we know the decision, and let the people decide. And that’s not what they want.

The media set expectations about the outcome of the elections like the “Biden landslide” narrative, an outcome ratified by the pollsters, and supported by Big Tech’s censorship of those who defied it. At that point, the die was cast for the election. And everything else that didn’t agree was an outlier, an anomaly. The players swallowed whole the Democrats’ COVID-triggered, yet long desired, election law changes that dismantled safeguards. Gone were regular election deadlines, matching signatures, and postmarks for their planned avalanche of mail-in ballots. Ballots were delivered by postal workers whose own union endorsed the Democrat. Republicans were supposed to sit down and be quiet about it or risk being called racist voter suppressionists, if that’s even a word.

Hanson isn’t sure where the people fit in to that political equation but he knows they don’t sit at the cool kids’ table in the cafeteria.

The Hoover Institution scholar said that the media and pollsters have been wrong time and again and yet their discredited reputations are given credibility. He thinks there must be more to political contests than being in the bag for one side.

I’m worried like you are. A constitutional republic relies more than on just laws. It has protocols and good-faith traditions. We have been told for three months that this was going to be a landslide. That was the media mantra every day. This is the media that the Shorenstein Center says has a 93% bias.

[…]

It’s landslide, landslide, landslide and when you don’t get a landslide it’s oh. You won’t concede because the votes haven’t been counted, but they preconditioned the viewers not to accept that. And so, it’s very dangerous what they’re doing. It’s got a bad history in totalitarian societies when the media and pollsters and technology utilities do what they’re doing.

But, he asks, why did they do this? And the answer is, of course, to increase their own power.

Did they do it so we could get information so that we would be better citizens? No. They did it to gin up enthusiasm for one candidate and to decrease momentum for the other. And then we heard last night that Arizona was in the bag, that it’s all done, and people called that – and people called that state before they did Texas and Florida in some cases.

Then we go to the pollsters and we think, well, they learned their lesson in 2016 that all their pseudo-scientific 90.6% or 84.2%, that was all over with, they were completely discredited. They came back and by September, the guru Nate Silver, 89% chance of a Biden victory and we’re told landslide and so we turn on our televisions and what, what do we learn? Trump has leads.

The ramification of this obviously one-sided narrative is the loss of faith in our political institutions.

In this election, Tucker, it was a story between academia, Hollywood, celebrities, Silicon Valley, the media, big banks and Wall Street. And who did Donald Trump have on his side? He had those people at the rallies, he had an outreach to minorities, he had talk radio and that’s about it.

And he said another revelation of the election was that those media institutions and tech giants don’t have the heart of the people

It looks like Republicans have a good chance of keeping the Senate and they picked up seats in the House where we were told that would be impossible, and there is a pathway for Donald Trump to win the presidency and they’ve had none of the help of any of these warped institutions the Left relied on.

And what the bottom line and the subtext is that the Left doesn’t have 51% approval of the people and the people are not with them and they use all of these other levers to condition a predesired result, but they don’t have the people.

That opinion was shared by The New York Times opinion writer David Brooks, who stated the obvious when he said, “Our job in the media is to capture reality so that when reality voices itself, like last night, people aren’t surprised. Pretty massive failure. We still are not good at capturing the rightward half of the country.”

Our job in the media is to capture reality so that when reality voices itself, like last night, people aren’t surprised. Pretty massive failure. We still are not good at capturing the rightward half of the country.

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) November 4, 2020