Most Americans are keenly interested in the truth about things. And, we despise being lied to. We loathe the lectures of overpaid media pedants, their gassy, putrid arrogance swelling them into purple-face lugubriousness. Hubris and the cult of personality used to be the purview of the monolithic, establishment media. But, no more. The conservative movement has developed its own cadre of sycophants and personalities ravenous for the glittering pyrite of Facebook adulation, Twitter followers, Instagram celebrity, coveted panel positions, and Fox news appearances. The spirit of Nora Desmond is alive and well in the lust for the camera’s unblinking eye. Desmond’s specter looms large in social media profiles administered by the muscled or busty vainglorious. What used to be considered anathema for those hoping to be taken seriously is now eagerly sacrificed for a leering Instagram audience.
In an environment driven by accolade, we would do well to remember what was accomplished by Christ who only had twelve followers.
The new media is a derivative of the invention, development, and staggering success of social media. It is a democratization of information, a decentralization of news, entertainment, and opinion that shattered the monopoly of the Cronkite club and has slain the print media ogre, grubbing sullenly under his jealously guarded bridge. Now, anyone with a computer and internet access can create a blog and journal inanities or profundities into the digital ether.
But, success breeds its own unique problems. Some leaders in the new media and conservative broadcast outlets are adopting the entitled attitudes and arrogance of the now outmoded, monolithic, and liberal media. The last two Republican debates have illustrated just how quickly the revolutionary can become cynical and establishment. It seems that the allure of ratings and applause overrides faithfulness to principle with alarming speed. But, it isn’t just Fox News who panders, many who occupy the celestial sphere of conservative media are quick to abandon the principles that undergird the free marketplace of ideas and play the part of gatekeeper, barring the way except for those who meet with their enlightened sense of what is “presidential”—a euphemism for staid, politic, and establishment; all the things that infuriate and disgust the Republican base.
Consuming our own is not a demonstration of authenticity but of gullibility and it will certainly never satiate a liberal media who cares nothing for intellectual integrity, prosecuting their totalitarian agenda by any means necessary. Their design is destruction and they wage war while conservatives bicker over Marques of Queensberry Rules. Assaulting candidates with cheap "gotcha" questions does nothing to prepare them for liberal interrogations but only enhances the vitriol by which they will be accosted and panders to the media's perennial quest to embarrass, demean, and marginalize conservative candidates. Knowing that the liberal media's only objective is to destroy a GOP candidate, one simply becomes a fellow traveler when engaging in the same manners and methods. Conservative media ought to be moving political debate toward the substantive and eschewing the tactics of the Jerry Springer media, who inflame the prurient and salacious with questions as vapid as "who's your baby daddy?" We face a constitutional crisis and what is most needed in conservative media is leadership, not a cadre of useful idiots.
The opposition isn't interested in debate but in propaganda. Therefore, our tactics must be developed and implemented with a view toward the destruction of the enemy through the total victory of conservative principles. This goal must be long term and tactics calibrated to the rigors of extended conflict. Liberals are generational in their strategic objectives and conservatives must regain a strategy that looks far beyond the current and the petty.
We have candidates with the power to control the direction of the narrative, overriding establishment norms and expectations by sheer force of patriotic conviction. Reagan was this kind of man. His was a personality invested with a Jovian gravity that bent the trajectory of political discourse to the right by dint of a simple faith in American exceptionalism--a dense mass of moral conviction that captured everything drawn to its orbit. This conviction created an organic boldness that impelled confrontation with liberalism's unnatural tenants and with its droning automatons.
Conservatives crave a political warrior who will unflinchingly and unapologetically battle against the totalitarian encroachments of the Obama administration, waging war on illegal immigration, Obamacare, and the radial Islamic terrorist. Conservative media members who thwart bold candidates in favor of the politically androgynous “presidential” do so at the peril of their own credibility.