About five years ago, I wrote a column about the Ring of Gyges, which may have been the inspiration for the ring of invisibility that sucked the soul out of Gollum in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.”
Plato’s brother Glaucon tells the story in the “Republic” of how Gyges, a shepherd, found the ring and, having become invisible, discovered he could commit any crime without being caught.
Glaucon said, “No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would…”
I noted back then that the media had had a similar effect on the Democrats. Hiding the corruption and abuses of the Obama administration, the press made them invisible and so the abuses grew worse. Obama went from unleashing the IRS on his political opponents, to selling his soul to the terrorist regime in Iran, and finally to spying on the opposition presidential candidate. Shielded by the ring of media invisibility, Obama became President Gollum.
Since then, though, the power of social media and of right-wing rebel media has grown, and the power of the media ring of invisibility is wearing off.
We see you, Democrats.
Nancy Pelosi must have thought the media ring would protect her when she sought to turn an emergency relief bill into a leftist wish list. Government-enforced board room diversity for businesses. Government-enforced emission postings for airlines. New voting rules to make fraud easier.
“Everything we are suggesting just relates to COVID-19,” Pelosi lied boldly. She must have thought she was still invisible.
But we see you, Nancy.
The New York Times worked hard to make the Democrats’ unforgivable behavior unseeable as well. At first they told the truth: “Democrats Block Action on $1.8 Trillion Stimulus.” Then they softened the truth: “Democrats Block Action on Stimulus Plan, Seeking Worker Protections.” Then they disappeared it: “Partisan Divide Threatens Deal on Rescue Bill.” Then they lied: “The Coronavirus Bailout Stalled, and it’s Mitch McConnell’s Fault.”
In the old days, they could have gotten away with it, but screenshots captured the crime against journalism, and social media spread them around.
We see you, New York Times.
President Trump’s daily press briefings have caused his popularity to rise while the media’s falls. So CNN and NBC have simply stopped full coverage of the briefings. When Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said the media is overplaying worst case scenarios and inflated numbers – which they are – CNN actually cut away.
But it won’t work. We see Trump doing his job well in a crisis. And we see you, media. You’re not invisible anymore, and you can’t make the Democrats invisible either.
Speaking of which: Joe Biden. His attempts at a response to the crisis have been pitiful. His “shadow briefing” was filled with blather and technical glitches. His interviews have been rambling and incomprehensible. And his action plans have been full of refried Pelosi don’t-let-a-crisis-go-to-waste gimmes: the Green New Deal, Student Loan forgiveness. Yeah, that oughta help.
In what has to be the funniest piece of the crisis not written by me, Showtime’s “The Circus” co-host Alex Wagner begged Biden just to “stay alive,” saying, “Democrats need little from the front-runner beyond his corporeal presence.”
She wrote, “Biden was never really convincing anyone on the stump – his political power at this point is an idea, held collectively, about how to defeat Trump. The work now is to keep that idea convincing enough, for long enough, among as many people as possible, for the corporeal man to actually win.”
In other words, the actual Biden has to be rendered invisible. So when writer Tara Reade said Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993, forcing her against a wall and shoving his fingers into her before she could break free, the press simply ignored it.
When the attempt to destroy Brett Kavanaugh was underway in 2018, Biden said that when a woman makes such an accusation, you have to “start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real.” Now he says Reade’s charges are untrue. And the media has done everything it knows how to bury Reade’s story and the story of the seven other women who’ve made similar accusations.
But the media ring of invisibility does not work anymore. The Daily Wire is here now and Fox News and The Bongino Report and every honest citizen who knows how to use screenshot and social media.
We see you, Joe. We see you, media. We see you, Democrats.
We see every damn one of you.