For legacy media, it’s déjà vu all over again

Nobody is surprised at how the legacy media are reacting to the juggernaut of reforms unleashed in the first two weeks of the second Trump administration.

The biblical term “gnashing of teeth” comes to mind. The media meltdown includes caterwauling, deep sighs of grave concern, pledges of resistance and lying through their teeth.

Also, they are displaying their usual self-righteousness unburdened by moral discernment, just like during Donald Trump’s first term.

It’s déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra would say. Or, if you prefer, it’s the media version of the Bill Murray movie “Groundhog Day,” where they wake up every day to the same song.

For example, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow lectured viewers at the conclusion of her Jan. 20 show: “You are going to want to have a good answer when you get asked what you did for your country when your country started to take a turn this radical.”

By “radical,” she means Mr. Trump’s order defining gender as only two sexes – male and female. Or halting the evil practice of subjecting hapless children to dangerous gender drugs and surgeries. Or halting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in federal agencies. Or closing the border and arresting illegal immigrant criminals who had been terrorizing American neighborhoods. Or unleashing America’s energy potential.

How about his authorizing compensation for people who were dismissed from their jobs, including in the armed forces, for not taking the experimental COVID-19 shots?

Then there’s the federal funding freeze, which the media are misrepresenting so badly that professional fact checkers should take them to the woodshed.

The trouble is, the woodshed is very selective when it comes to whose butt gets smacked.

The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler showed how it’s done recently with his dissection of Mr. Trump’s second inaugural address.

He quotes Mr. Trump saying, “The vicious, violent and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end.”

Hooray!

But wait. Mr. Kessler says this is “code for President Joe Biden supposedly using the resources of the U.S. government to target his political opponent. There is no evidence that Biden directed the Justice Department or local prosecutors to pursue prosecutions of Trump – and the actions were not violent.” No evidence?

And what actions? You mean the prosecution against Mr. Trump on bogus charges in four Democrat-run jurisdictions and the FBI’s armed raid on Mar-a-Lago? Or the dispatching of a Justice Department lawyer to assist New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s kangaroo court conviction of Mr. Trump on 34 trumped up felony charges? Or the jailing of two of Mr. Trump’s top aides?

Elsewhere, Mr. Kessler disputes Mr. Trump’s spot-on assertion that “the inflation crisis was caused by massive overspending and escalating energy prices.”

Mr. Kessler: “Trump is leaving out the biggest factor for the 9 percent inflation in June 2022, the highest in 40 years: the covid pandemic.”

This is nonsense. Inflation was 1.4 percent when Trump left office, even after spending heavily on the pandemic. Inflation began rising immediately after Mr. Biden attacked America’s fossil fuels industry and drove up the price of transporting goods.

There’s more: Mr. Trump said, “We will end the Green New Deal and revoke the electric car mandate.”

Hallelujah!

However, here’s Mr. Kessler: “Biden never passed the Green New Deal (which was a nonbinding resolution proposed by liberals years ago), and he never mandated the purchase of electric vehicles. Instead, the Biden-Harris administration promoted incentives for electric vehicles.”

That’s all? Incentives? This is so flat-out misleading that it’s a jaw-drop.

The Inflation Reduction Act functioned as the Green New Deal in all but name, allocating hundreds of millions in subsidies to advance the climate hysteria agenda. So what if it didn’t outlaw cow flatulence?

Biden’s EPA, like California’s leftist government, issued an emissions mandate that would halt the sale of gas-and diesel-powered vehicles within a decade. That’s a ban.

One way to mislead people is to cast a paraphrased truth as a literal misstatement, like Mr. Kessler did with the Green New Deal.

You can also showcase a false authority. Ms. Maddow had as a guest on her Jan. 22 show the Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, the high priestess of the National Cathedral who lectured President Trump during a service on Jan. 21.

Fake church meets fake news.

I say this as someone who was raised Episcopal back when the Scripture-inspired 1928 Book of Common Prayer was the foundation for the liturgy and marriages were between a man and a woman.

The remnant who still believe in the Bible’s authority over all matters has since fled to the American Anglican Church or to other churches that don’t pretend that God is an ever-evolving figure who tells people what their itching ears want to hear.

“Don’t sleep on religion,” Maddow said. “None of us know where grace or power or bravery or hard work or luck might come together to change the course of where the country is going.”

Indeed. Millions of people believe that God spared Mr. Trump from a would-be assassin’s bullet “for such a time as this.”

Let the teeth-gnashing continue. Good things are happening. Over and over.

This column was first published at the Washington Times.