For a long time now, there have been people on this side of the great divide arguing that the real source of power in American society is the media. The media has power because they control the moral framework and the discourse within it. If the media declares a set of facts unacceptable, then no one talks about them, unless they have a desire to be hurled into the void. The media controls what is allowed to be said, so they control how things are done and by whom.

On the surface, this was true, and it was always true to some degree. A popular political quip from the analog days was that “You should never pick fights with people who buy ink by the barrel.” If the New York Times decided to declare a fatwah on you, there was a very good chance you were going to lose. This was why so-called conservatives and Republicans would crawl on their bellies to talk with the press, even though the media treated them as the official punching bag.

The model for this was Watergate. If not for media pressure, the political class would not have done anything about Nixon. The reason for that is they had no reason to hate Nixon, even if they disagreed with him. It was the media that made Nixon into a villain and then demanded the political class do something. Congress did not force Nixon out of office because they hated him or they believed he violated the rules of politics, but because they feared the media.

Ever since, the name of the game in politics has been to make sure you manage the media, which meant hiring an army of media consultants. Often, these people came out of the media. Of course, the media was an extension of the managerial class, so this new relationship created good jobs at good wages for people long on credentials and short on practical talent. This peaked under Obama when hundreds of media members got jobs in his administration.

This is why politics shifted from backrooms and onto the pages of the media, where narratives, narrative management and narrative collapse became the defining features of the public debate. The point of politics was to create a story, in which the hero defeated the villain and everyone clapped. This was to herd the managerial class into the hero side and paint the enemies of the managerial class as the villain. Politics was all about good guys and bad guys, as determined by the media.

In the end, American politics was like a Greek drama. The players on the stage were cast in their roles not by their actions, but by the commentary provided by the chorus, which was the media. It reached the point where in the Obama years, people truly thought “healthcare” was a thing that existed in unlimited quantities, but needed to be freed from the grasp of the monster called the insurance companies. Healthcare reform was a bizarre pantomime for the entertainment of Washington.

In the digital age, it went beyond the parlor games of the political class so that media power became the tip of the spear in the cultural revolution. Every activist declared herself a journalist and dedicated her life to finding heretics. Her job was to “report on the heretic” but her hope was that major media would pick up her “reporting” and have the heretic hurled into the void. Like every political terror in the ideological age, what started with the politicians was visited on the people.

This is when ideological and theological fevers break. People can suspend their disbelief and accept even the most bizarre moral framing, when it is limited to the action on the stage. They know it is just entertainment. Even when in the form of a lecture or sermon, they believe they can take from it what they will. When the directors of the moral drama begin dragging the people onto the stage, or off to the gulag, then the people can no longer suspend their disbelief.

The natural questions of all moral disputes then begin to appear. Those questions are “Who says?” and “So what?”. These questions crept up on the managerial class over the last ten years and they were never able or willing to answer them. This became obvious in the runup to the election. The media kept screaming, “Trump is evil!” and the people kept wondering, “Who says?” When they yelled about his alleged crimes and indictments, the response was, “So what?”

A great man once said that you will know that the revolution is upon us when a conservative waddles onto the stage muttering about the various “isms” and “who we are” and the audience remains silent. Then someone giggles, then another laughs and suddenly a wave of laughter sweeps the room. The great preference cascade is unleashed as everyone all at once seems to realize that everyone else thinks what they think about these ridiculous fools.

It is what we are now witnessing. Team Trump has started smashing up the managerial system in ways thought impossible. The media rushed to their pulpits to give their sermons, but the audience just laughed. The Wall Street Journal did the point and shriek at one of the DOGE kids and the audience not only laughed but turned “Big Balls” into a hero of the cause. The Vice President now goes on Twitter and mocks reporters who do the point and shriek.

There was a scene in the movie Braveheart in which William Wallace kills a group the king’s soldiers in an effort to free his wife. The last of them is the magistrate, who had killed Wallace’s wife. Wallace initially lowers his eye when he confronts him, then looks him straight in the eye and slashes the man’s throat. It is a great scene because it reflects the reality of power. The man had power over Wallace, as long as had moral authority, but he had squandered it.

That is what is happening in the United States. The media and the managerial class they represented held the moral high ground and people accepted it. This was the real power of the media. Then they squandered their moral capital on the cultural terror of the last decade. Their excesses not only damaged their credibility but also discredited their moral claims. They are now on the same level as the rest of us and we are cheering as the DOGE kids put them against the post.

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the importance of enjoying the moment, a post on urban dependency culture, a video from my creek and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

As expected, the lawsuits are quickly piling up as the regime tries to buy time to regroup after the initial attacks from the Trump administration. There are multiple cases involving the Treasury, all aimed at preventing Trump appointees from doing their jobs, at least without permission from the court. There is one case involving the FBI, where the judge is asked to stop the Justice Department from looking into J6 cases. There is at least one case challenging the buyout system.

All these cases have been launched by activists trying to halt the Trump agenda, but they all have something important in common. They revolve around a set of core questions about these executive agencies. Who controls these agencies, by what means do they control them and by whose authority? The activists are challenging the Trump admin on the claim that these are independent agencies. They do not report to the President, so he cannot take these actions.

The trouble with that is there is nothing in the Constitution defining a fourth branch of government under which these agencies are organized. At best, it is a bit of make-believe Washington has indulged since Nixon. The mythology of Watergate says Nixon used these agencies to terrorize his political opponents, so he was driven from the temple of the people. Ever since, permanent Washington has waved around the bloody shirt whenever they did not like what a President was doing.

There is something more important behind this. Watergate was the triumph of the managerial class over the political class. For fifty years, an unelected and unaccountable class of experts has been left to run the administrative state, only indulging the President when it comes to appointing agency heads. In most cases, the appointees were from the managerial elite. These people took turns circulating between government and the Blob.

In his first three weeks, Trump has launched a big arrow offensive on this system and the underlying logic of it. Once these cases get to Supreme Court, administration lawyers will point out that there is no fourth branch of government and that these agencies are part of the executive. While Congress maintains the power of the purse, it does not run these agencies. That is left to the executive branch, which means the President and whomever he appoints to do it.

This seems rather straight forward, but the courts are as corrupt as the rest of the managerial system, so there are plenty of judges who will issue crazy rulings to stop the Trump agenda. While the Supreme Court only has a few ideologically deranged judges, it may not be eager to get involved. This is fundamentally a political dispute, and the court prefers to stay out of those. At the minimum, it may wait until they can choose a clean case to make a clean ruling.

The people filing these suits seem to be banking on the courts dragging this out and never getting to a final decision. They think if they drag it out and make it an issue in the midterms, they can win the House and Senate, then impeach Trump. You can already see hints of this in their rhetoric. While this may sound insane, given the public response thus far, these people live in a bubble. That and they have no other options, given what Trump is doing.

Team Trump seems to be prepared for this. In fact, part of the overall reform agenda is to get one of these cases in front of the Supreme Court to argue for the unitary executive theory, which says the President of the United States has sole authority over the executive branch. Even if the Court rules that Congress plays a role in how these agencies are administered, it will be a massive win. It means the administrative state returns to the control of the political class.

Why is this important?

For the last fifty years, these agencies, along with the media, the academy and the vast network of not-for-profits has operated independent of the President. Further, they have used their capture of the regulatory mechanism and the political finance system to control both political parties, thus controlling the legislative branch. USAID used its billions, in part, to control more billions in the budgets of the agencies, which it directed into its political projects, foreign and domestic.

The reason elections have had no impact on public policy is that the people making public policy were not subject to the voters. The political system became a theater to keep the people distracted. It is why the politicians have become increasingly frivolous and absurd. When Congressman and Senators are furniture, props in the theater of democracy, they tend to be theater kids. No serious person wants to subject himself to the humiliation rituals required of elected office.

The hammer blow delivered to USAID was aimed at shattering the financial structure of the Blob by removing the mechanism the Blob used to circulate money. If they are no longer underwriting the vast network of non-for-profits and regime media outlets, those entities will struggle to control the discourse. The DOGE boys examining every disbursements from Treasury is about starving the Blob of money. The restructuring of the agencies removes their power over the political class.

The reason the economic elite is backing this is because they see that the Blob is threatening their interests. It is out of control. When a girl boss judge in Delaware can crater the state’s economic model, and threaten the country’s financial model, the system that makes her possible must be destroyed. A million girl bosses armed with taxpayer money have set fire to the country for the last decade. What we see now is an effort to put out the fire and eliminate the fire starters.

In the end, we are in one of those momentous times when the fundamental questions of every human society are in the balance. Who decides, by what means do they decide and by whose authority do they decide? The Constitution answers all these questions, but it has been ignored for at least fifty years. Trump wants to restore that old political order, while the Blob seeks to bury it forever. Every civil war and revolution have been fought over these questions, so the best is yet to come.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!