The shocking collapse of the Left’s empire of lies

We all have a hard time believing that President Donald Trump took office just two-plus weeks ago. All those phenomena we accepted as givens – DEI, transgenderism, DoJ weaponization, medical tyranny, foreign aid, fentanyl deaths, endless wars, illegal immigration, bureaucratic bloat, government censorship – were, to say the least, no longer inevitable.

For 30 years the Left imposed its agenda through a media that lied to sustain that agenda. To be sure, American Marxists have always shown an indifference to the truth as profound as that of their Soviet role models.

Until 1994, however, media lies were generally plausible, their suppression of facts subtle. Although liberals dominated America’s cultural and political institutions, they were confident enough to do so with something of a gentle hand.

If any one individual embodied the post-war establishment spirit, it was Walter Cronkite, “America’s most trusted man.” The CBS News anchor from 1962 to 1981, Cronkite represented the gold standard of useful journalism during that era, namely the ability to feign objectivity.

But objective he never was. Biographer Douglas Brinkley quotes Cronkite as saying, “I thought that some day the roof was going to fall in. Somebody was going to write a big piece in the newspaper or something. I don’t know why to this day I got away with it.”

The “it” was Cronkite’s liberalism. After retirement, he could be more forthcoming. At a 1988 dinner honoring Democrat Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, Cronkite went full Howard Beale:

“God Almighty, God Almighty, we’ve got to shout these truths in which we believe from the rooftops, like that scene in the movie ‘Network.’ We’ve got to throw open our windows and shout these truths to the streets and to the heavens.” Cronkite made perfectly clear to this friendly crowd that “these truths” were the soft-core Marxist orthodoxies of the moment.

One powerful source of establishment confidence was the House of Representatives. Coming into November 1994, Democrats held an 82 seat majority in the House. They had controlled the House for 40 consecutive years and 58 of the previous 62.

Yes, Republicans could elect a president, but Democrats could, if need be, dispose of one. Richard Nixon may have won 49 states in 1972, but he lost the District of Columbia, then and now the power source for the WMD known as “lawfare.”

What changed the game, I’m convinced, was the midterm election of 1994. Democrats lost an incredible 52 seats in the House, eight in the Senate, and control of both. Going forward, a shocked media would do and say whatever was necessary to keep President Bill Clinton and the Democrats in power.

In the 30 years that followed, the Marxist infection metastasized. Ever more aggressively, our left-leaning elites labored under the grand illusion that “truth” was what they said was true and “just” was what they said was just.

Too bourgeois to be full-blown Marxists, these elites came to mimic, if anyone, the French Jacobins. In their fondness for the state and their hostility to faith, they launched a revolution of their own, a “fundamental transformation” of America, however dishonest and improvised.

Our Jacobins quickly moved beyond liberalism to progressivism. Here, as in revolutionary France, Jacobin orthodoxies were what the moment warranted, what the mobs demanded.

They used that open-ended ideology as bait to corral the radical among their intersectional ranks – the blacks, the browns, the greens, the gays, the lesbians, trans, the feminists, the Muslims, and any other “marginalized” group willing to make noise in the street.

Club members in the know did not really care about issues. For them, the ultimate goal was always power, global power. Having transcended the nation-state, they allied themselves with Jacobin elites throughout the world and proudly alienated those citizens who clung bitterly to their gods and their guns.

By 2020, every elected Democrat in Washington, some elected Republicans, much of the intelligence community and most of the administrative state belonged to Club Jacobin.

Jacobin clubs in Hollywood, on Broadway and in Silicon Valley exercised nearly monopolistic control over their respective industries. Jacobins ruled higher education and, through their unions, controlled the public-education establishment. They dominated almost every commercial newsroom and TV network as well as NPR and PBS.

By 2021, with the inauguration of President Joe Biden, Jacobins controlled the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives and many of the instruments of justice, including the D.C. courts and the FBI. They told America what it was permissible to think and say and were eager to punish those who thought and said differently.

If the Jacobins said the election of 2020 was “free and fair,” to say otherwise was to perpetuate “the big lie.”

If they said January 6 was an “insurrection,” to call it anything less was to side with “white supremacists.”

If they said President Biden was “sharp as a tack,” to say he was slipping was to pull a “deep fake” and risk rebuke from more enlightened members of the club. “I can tell you, I talked to Joe Biden in private for decades,” insisted MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough in March 2024. “This is the best Joe Biden.”

Even a child could pinpoint the moment the woke empire imploded. That would be, of course, June 27, 2024, when a senescent President Biden took the stage to debate former President Donald Trump and fell harder than Humpty Dumpty.

Biden promptly shattered the grand illusion that had sustained his coalition for the last four years, and not even the media could put it together again.

Jack Cashill’s most recent book, “Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6,” is available in all formats.