Censorship By The Press
Note: This is a guest contribution. Please share your thoughts with the author, Gary Potter, in the comments.
It’s a fair assumption that more or less everyone on the planet knows who Donald Trump is. It’s an equally fair assumption, as derived from the rise of the “alt-right” media, that many even know why Donald Trump is. Those that don’t – lately you can catch them in places like Portland or behind a desk at the New York Times – are suffering a very real existential crisis with regards to this question; they certainly know who Trump is, and there seems to be too much evidence from too many sources to continue the pretense he will not become the President of the United States in 2017.
But why?
A fortunate few have been sated by simple charts and pretty diagrams, popular vote-this and Russians-that, and yet for the liberal “elite” – not placated by these opiates despite these prophylactics being of their own design – find themselves turning ever-inward and downward without meeting anything solid.
Perhaps it’s not who you know. Maybe it’s who you don’t. Maybe it’s what you don’t – and though exploring that line of inquiry linearly and literally would, in the cases of the American liberal elite and MSM, exhaust even the patience of an eternally extant being – it ought not be beyond the charity nor ken of an uneducated redneck deplorable Trump supporter to point them in the direction of absolution:
“We have almost up to the last instant trusted the newspapers as organs of public opinion. Just recently some of us have seen (not slowly, but with a start) that they are obviously nothing of the kind. They are, by the nature of the case, the hobbies of a few rich men. We have not any need to rebel against antiquity; we have to rebel against novelty. It is the new rulers, the capitalist or the editor, who really hold up the modern world. There is no fear that a modern king will attempt to override the constitution; it is more likely that he will ignore the constitution and work behind its back; he will take no advantage of his kingly power; it is more likely that he will take advantage of his kingly powerlessness, of the fact that he is free from criticism and publicity. For the king is the most private person of our time. It will not be necessary for anyone to fight again against the proposal of a censorship of the press. We do not need a censorship of the press.
“We have a censorship by the press.”
This excerpt comes from the pages of GK Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, published in 1908 – over a century ago. Chesterton was an English conservative and Christian apologist who enjoyed slinging phrases like:
“The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.“
One might call that anti-establishment.
And yet despite Chesterton’s contemporary ‘frenemy’ George Bernard Shaw declaring him “a man of colossal genius,” there exists no excavational implement capable of unearthing his presence in the modern American educational system. He remains ignored by mainstream pedagogy, despite his contemporary and 1936 eulogizer Ronald Knox declaring “All of this generation has grown up under Chesterton’s influence so completely that we do not even know when we are thinking Chesterton.” He is at best dismissed in favor of epicureans like Oscar Wilde despite Trump-esque gems like “Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.”
GK Chesterton, whether for calling out a corrupt fourth estate or repeatedly out-witting the liberal wits, has been relegated to that special historical prison for those who publicly dissent against the hypocrites who have neither the will nor need to address a man who counter-attacked in their own style with substantially more skill.
Sound familiar?
Why Trump? The MSM, the ‘liberals,’ the young and naive offspring of Silicon Valley billionaires protesting in Palo Alto about not getting their way, cannot answer this question because doing so would require them to acknowledge the one singular concept they quite seriously lack the capability to understand – because Trump was the better candidate. Because the alt-right media is a better media. Because reserved, quiet, charitable American conservatives are better people.
Donald Trump’s presidency, to reduce it to an oversimplification, is the result of natural evolution; of the universal law of change, of competition. His election illustrates an implicit, encouraging profundity – a majority who not only can, but more importantly will think for themselves; a groundswell of ideologically self-reliant adults who trust their own sensory organs and, when confronted with obvious bias and corruption, will exercise the quintessential American right to find and consume better resources.
Perhaps in so doing they will stumble across the work of GK Chesterton.
And perhaps in conjunction with Orthodoxy they will stumble across Heretics, a 1905 volume that evinced Chesterton’s growing disgust with eugenics. Though lifelong friends with Shaw, Chesterton was far from afraid to speak freely – it was precisely what earned him respect. From that work:
“If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby.”
Trump won the election because he didn’t ask for a new baby; because he and the majority of Americans know doing so is ridiculous. Because Trump knows, and espoused publicly, shamelessly, and honestly, that the problem is with the bitter food. With consuming the MSM and liberal lies and delusions. With being force-fed ideological ‘sustenance’ we are by nature not designed to ingest – because it is objectively wrong.
“It will not be necessary for anyone to fight again against the proposal of a censorship of the press. We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press.”
Trump won because he won’t throw out the baby. He’ll just make it healthy again.
