It’s a sentence that keeps popping up over and over again online: “You don’t hate the media enough.”
It’s used when the press lie about former President Donald Trump or when they try to destroy an innocent person or when they leave out facts that would disrupt their narrative. In an attempt to encourage readers finally to appreciate how horrible the press are, Republicans say it again and again: “You don’t hate the media enough. You think you do, but you don’t.”
But what if conservatives deployed a more artful tactic and simply stopped referring to the activists in newsrooms today as “the media”? The Fourth Estate is an evil entity and needs a new name to reflect that.
For several years, I have advocated calling the media the American Stasi, or even just the Stasi. That is, of course, the name of the feared German communist secret police that terrorized the country from 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Stasi was an evil force and one that included many journalists, artists, and writers.
It is much easier to confront an evil if you know the proper name for that evil. Just citing “the media” or “the propaganda press” these days doesn’t cut it. But if the media are called the Stasi, or something equally pungent, confusion and frustration over their actions evaporates. There is clarity, like a doctor properly diagnosing an illness or a priest identifying a demon.
Writing recently in National Review, Becket Adams was incredulous at the reaction of the Stasi over the two recent assassination attempts on Trump. “These should be significant moments in our collective psyche,” he wrote. “It’s not every day you see a former president covered in his own blood, rushed from the stage by a panic-stricken security detail. It’s not every day you learn his security detail spotted and took a shot at a second would-be presidential assassin, who was captured and arrested later while attempting to flee.”
Adams was shocked that the New York Times’s Peter Baker “parroted the refrain, highlighting during a discussion titled ‘Trump and a New Era of Political Violence’ that the former president ‘has long been seen as an instigator of political violence.’”
Adams concluded: “We’ve lost the plot. Our ability to see the larger context and view major events in terms of our broader American history has degraded considerably — to the point where what should be generationally defining incidents are covered about as carefully as any horse-race journalism.”
Adams would not be confused or frustrated if he just used the proper word to describe what he is describing: evil. Of course, the American Stasi don’t care about the assassination attempts on Trump. These are the people who tried to destroy a Covington Catholic high school student and accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of gang rape. They ruined Richard Jewell as brutally as an East German propagandist.
Does this mean any journalist who doesn’t support Trump is evil? Of course not. Honorable journalists such as Quin Hillyer and Matt Taibbi are not Trump supporters. They also do not try and destroy people through lies.
Writers and journalists working in this way is not new. In a compelling new book, A State of Secrecy: Stasi Informers and the Culture of Surveillance, University of Melbourne scholar Alison Lewis reveals that while dictators such as Hitler or Stalin sought to crush writers and other artists because they feared the freedom they represented, the German Stasi saw writers, journalists, and artists as allies.
“From its inception to its dissolution,” Lewis writes, “the Ministry for State Security recruited an alarmingly high proportion of writers as informants. It recruited sources from deep inside official circles, such as the consecrated spheres of the German Writers’ Guild (Deutscher Schriftstellerverband), as well as from the fringes of society. The Stasi touched the life of virtually every writer in the country. Writers, whether of poetry, novels, drama, essays, radio, television, or film scripts, belonged to the intelligentsia.”
Lewis offers that “although writers were persecuted in the Soviet Union by Stalin in his cultural revolution of the 1930s, postwar-era Eastern European regimes desperately relied on them to shape Soviet-style revolutions.”
In theology and popular culture, there has always been an emphasis on the power to deal with something evil, to gain control over it, simply by calling that thing by its right name. Horror movies from The Exorcist to The Conjuring pivot upon the good guys finding out the real name of the demons they are battling. In The Pope’s Exorcist, a priest played by Russell Crowe is trying to exorcize a child possessed by a demon but is failing. Why? Because he doesn’t know the demon’s name.
In her classic 1968 novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin creates an incredible fantasy world that also has layers of spiritual and psychological meaning. In Earthsea, every living thing has a hidden true name that defines its essence. Knowing something’s true name provides remarkable power. You can control a person, an animal, or even minerals. Wizards in the book spend months studying the true names of every living thing.
In the best part of the story, the young wizard Ged sails to the island of Pendor to confront a dragon, which has been destroying local villages. The dragon, like a modern journalist, speaks in a sinister, solicitous way, offering to help Ged while simultaneously mocking him, “twisting the true words to false ends, catching the unwary in a maze of mirror words each of which reflects the truth and none of which leads anywhere.”
There’s only one unexpected twist: Ged knows the dragon’s true name. Asked by the towering serpent what he could possibly have to threaten him with, Ged answers: “With your name, Yevaud.”
Then it happens: “When he spoke the dragon’s name it was as if he held the huge being on a fine, thin leash, tightening it on his throat. He could feel the ancient malice and experience of men in the dragon’s gaze that rested on him, he could see the steel talons each as long as a man’s forearm, and the stone-hard hide, and the withering fire that lurked in the dragon’s throat: and yet always the leash tightened, tightened.”
Forget “the liberal media” or “the propaganda press.” We are dealing with an American Stasi. It is evil.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.