Influence Operations
September 5, 2024
A telling piece of public opinion-setting from NPR this morning.
https://www.npr.org/player/embed/nx-s1-5099467/nx-s1-5b6c1ff5-2731-426b-b81b-8b3e0cb4f0b2
Steven Inskeep invites Martin Kaste to share the good news of the demise of Polymer80, who “still [hopes] the Supreme Court can save them.” David Pacino of Giffords led the suits that ended the rash of murders driven by this American ghost gun seller, but he warns us the pesky Supreme Court might still throw these bad actors a lifeline.
Everytown and The Trace, Bloomberg organizations, began the push for victory lap pieces on Polymer80 last month. After drifting prole-ward, the news became a part of the elite pressure campaign on the Supreme Court for next month’s oral arguments in VanDerStok.
This is a technical case about federal regulations, Mr. Kaste reminds us, and this is technically true. But the framing is a way to support the modern, adaptive fiction of “our democracy.” A good (democratic) outcome may be undone on a technicality by a political (non-democratic) Supreme Court at the 11th hour. Nevermind that the VanDerStok plaintiffs have been winning since day one, or that the Supreme Court has only been sending lifelines to a hapless, pleading ATF.
That this is national news at least helps us understand the nature of the Republic, so-called Constitutional law, and the role of the “specialized class” of American journalists. The US government is a network of competing power centers. When the New York Times (or The Trace) runs a story on the “secret,” unseen environment in which common sense (democratic) gun laws are undermined in the federal courts, understand that this is one power center of the Republic attempting to influence and delegitimize another.
Of course the useful idiots in our space will fall for this trap and label their mistakes “journalism,” so a rule of thumb: Journalism, since at least Walter Lippmann, is another word for the “post-partisan state,” which is another word for “gun control.”
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