America is at a crossroads. In just a few weeks, an election will take place. Though it should allow all of us to step back from the ledge, that is not likely to happen no matter whoever wins the presidency.
If President Donald Trump is reelected to a second term, BLM, Antifa and other illiberal anarchist organizations have already declared that there will be blood in the streets. Interestingly, conservatives have not issued such an edict if former Vice President Joe Biden is elected because we understand that elections have consequences. Trump supporters will be bitterly disappointed if our candidate loses, but we will not tear America apart just to show that we can.
Predictions are often just wishful thinking, but I firmly believe that the results will give America, once again, a divided government after the election. Whether Trump wins or not, I believe that the U.S. Senate will stay in GOP hands and, accordingly, will be in a position to stop the radical, un-American ideas of packing the U.S. Supreme Court with more justices and bringing D.C. and Puerto Rico into the Union as new states. And I believe that this will reflect what Americans collectively are thinking that there is right in both the Democratic and Republican philosophies.
I honestly never could have imagined that 2020 would bring us the cancel culture; the demolition and defacing of national monuments erected to honor our past in all its glory and infamy; calls to defund the police; the rise of the woke movement; increasing refusals to honor the American flag; and a loud, but minority opinion that condemns America as a systemically racist nation.
Nor could I ever imagine that the venerable New York Times would try to re-write American history by alleging, albeit with flawed logic and little proof, that our country was settled in 1619 by slaves, thus justifying our inherent subjugation of the black man throughout our history.
If Biden wins the presidency, it will prove that old adage by Adolf Hitler, found in his 1925 book Mein Kampf (BTW, I’m NOT comparing Biden to Hitler), “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” To bring this to fruition, however, takes a willing partner such as the Mainstream Media (MSM).
Ever since Trump’s election in 2016, which by the way was encouraged initially by the MSM because they believed he would easily be defeated by “Crooked Hillary Clinton,” the MSM has taken on the role of being the opposition government-in-waiting. The MSM has unabashedly allied themselves with the Democratic Party. This is like how the United Kingdom operates when one party assumes the prime ministership of their country. The politicians who are booted out and their newspaper lackeys create a mirror government whereby members of the minority party take similar roles to the government in power.
To America’s detriment, it’s not just the print media that has aligned itself with the Democrats. Almost all of the television networks and, more dangerously, all of social media have lined up behind them as well. A sizable portion of our population relies on propaganda espoused ad nauseam 24/7 by the MSM, which is literally and figuratively in bed with the Democrats as their only source of information.
It has gotten to the point that if you want any objective reporting of both sides of the coin on any issue, one must look to Fox News, a former bastion of conservative propaganda, for a more honest recitation of the facts.
Every dictator, communist or otherwise, has succeeded because they could take control of the media and, therefore, slowly but consistently, their citizens’ minds and thinking. With only one outlet for news, always slanted to favor the man in power, the people are force-fed a daily trope of information to keep them complacent and unquestioning, despite what is going on around them.
This insidious and contemptuous marriage between the media and only one side of the equation has the power to indoctrinate the willing citizenry. This alliance between the media and a political faction can inform the populace that everything is wrong and must be destroyed to the ground and rebuilt. This is what is happening in our country now. If they are in power, everything is fine and better times are ahead. This is what is happening in Venezuela, Cuba, Russia and China.
So, again if Biden wins, the propaganda techniques utilized by the MSM over the last four years in cahoots with the Democratic Party will prove that by not telling the truth and the whole truth, some people can be herded like sheep into believing just about anything if they are repeatedly told the big lie long enough.
What makes this so dangerous for our country’s future is that the indoctrination is not just happening to the adult population. Our children are being systemically prepared for a dystopian future where free-thinking and non-conformity will be culled from the herd and ostracized into a minority that will be perennially on the outside looking in. When the nanny-state takes over the parenting function, which has been evolving for a generation in our Pre-K to graduate schools, the final capitulation will be swift and brutal.
America’s crossroads, though, is not just political. It is cultural as well, and the “rot from within” has the potential of destroying the ethnocentrism that has made America united, confident, strong, and feared. If we are a weak, self-indulgent and ashamed nation that must destroy our history to cleanse ourselves of our vapid past, then we are indeed on the road to ruin. The Islamic State (ISIS) and its insistent mandate to destroy the history, monuments, churches and everything that represents the decadent past of Iraq stretching back thousands of years could be what America has to look forward to as those that control the message and the government have the power to instill their new values.
The system that our brilliant Founding Fathers created more than 240 years ago, including protecting the minority from the tyranny of the majority, will go down in flames on the altar of conformity, acquiescence and wokeness.
Our recent history does not portend well for our future.
I am a Trump supporter. I backed him in 2016 and still support him now. But the best thing that could happen on Election Day is the furtherance of a divided government so that neither side has complete control over all of the levers of power. But it is difficult to understand how our great country can move forward with a Mainstream Media that is more interested in manipulating the news to achieve governmental control than remaining on the outside to hold everyone accountable. Until that perspective changes significantly, America’s future is in dire peril as the checks and balances created at our nation’s founding are being whittled away before our very eyes, perhaps to become just a footnote in world history.
Barney Bishop III, is a former executive director of the Florida Democratic Party and is the immediate past-CEO of Associated Industries of Florida, founded in 1920, known as “The Voice of Florida Business.” He is the CEO of Barney Bishop Consulting, a strategic public affairs firm in Tallahassee. He can be reached at Barney@BarneyBishop.com.
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