President Biden may have cried out for unity, but he is also trying to quickly dismantle Trump’s legacy. How did your busy first week go down with the conservative media?
“They are coming after us,” Greg Kelly of Newsmax warned his viewers this week.
Joe Biden and the other liberals in Washington were trying to “cancel us and what we stand for,” Kelly explained, just as Donald Trump said they would.
For those unfamiliar with the conservative media landscape, their warning may have sounded melodramatic.
But Kelly knows her audience – and how to explore her deep uneasiness about where Biden will take America, economically and culturally.
People in places like Kansas, Oklahoma and other Republican-oriented states are openly concerned about the government trying to control their lives and take their livelihoods.
And in the flood of executive orders from Biden – he has signed more than three dozen, including some on LGBT rights, racial justice, immigration and the environment – the president has provided his critics on the right with ammunition.
Biden is trying to “radically change the nature of the country,” said conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. He alerted listeners to a future “dictatorship” that could be orchestrated through his presidential orders.
Shapiro took aim at the president’s pressure for racial equality and the decision to revoke an order, signed by Trump, that prohibited federal funding for workplace training that urges employees to recognize concepts like white supremacy and white privilege.
Shapiro described the workshops as “pathetic fighting sessions in which you are called upon by some kind of human resource, quote, quote, expert”, and then tell him that you have to learn not to use offensive language.
The new government’s actions at the White House come at a time when conservatives feel attacked from all sides. The former president was silenced on Twitter and they claim that social media companies are censoring conservative voices on their platforms.
As Fox News’ Tucker Carlson explained to Axios, many at Trump’s base feel as though “the combined forces of global power have turned against them and are cracking down hard – hilariously, in the name of democracy.”
“It’s a recurring theme,” says Howard Polskin, editor of a newsletter, The Righting, which monitors conservative media. “They say that there will be massive overtaking by the big government and re-education camps. Many Americans feel that their freedoms are at stake, and this is obviously untrue. ”
Polskin believes that these media outlets deliberately exaggerate the threat to address public fears – but he argues that it is vital for moderate and liberal America to understand the conversations that are taking place.
More from Tara
Some of these conservative Americans get news from Fox, the Washington Times and other more established brands.
But many rely on emerging media organizations, like Newsmax and One America News, equipment that sometimes turns into conspiracy. Newsmax made unsubstantiated allegations of electoral fraud in the fall and released stories about defective voting machines.
They were later threatened with lawsuits from electoral machine manufacturers and forced to issue “clarification” notes.
Trump promoted the work of these vehicles and denigrated the mainstream media as “fake news”. Meanwhile, his ardent critics in the left-wing media have spent the past four years trying to overthrow him.
What Republican voters think
The percentage of conservatives who thought they could trust traditional media dropped from 25% in 2015 to 13% in 2020, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.
Conservatives have increasingly turned to the right-wing media to hear news aligned with their worldview, and they now rely on them as a guide for Biden’s Washington.
Biden made national unity a central message during his campaign. In his inaugural address, he urged Americans to come together and listen to each other, “not as opponents, but as neighbors”.
His message of harmony inevitably comes up against the reality that he too needs to keep the promises he made to the voters who gave him the victory. Therefore, he is now dismantling much of what Trump did as president, a move that has hardly made him dear to Trump’s conservatives and supporters.
But the elections have consequences, as Republicans have often reminded Democrats in the past four years, while Trump was in office – and as President Obama told his Republican rivals before that.
In a way, this is the natural cycle of politics. Power changes hands and the other side – the politicians, the media, the voters – change the roles of cheerleader to complainant. But can this year be different?
Biden knows that the people who live in these parts of the country, “Forgotten America”, as it is sometimes called, are the ones who stood up and supported Trump, helping to overthrow his and Obama’s legacy.
Democrats now have a majority in Congress, but it is small, and Biden will need the support of Republicans to pass important legislation. He will have a hard time winning over the ultraconservatives. But some moderate Republicans, even in the “forgotten” parts of the country, may be open to your ideas. He cannot afford to ignore his voices today.
Away from cultural wars – discussions about race, sexuality, religion and freedom of expression – and baseless allegations about electoral fraud, conservatives have practical concerns about the economy, now and in the future. What are pandemic restrictions doing to businesses and schools? Will switching from fossil fuels to renewable energies really protect jobs?
For most conservatives, the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline project to transport oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico was not a good start.
While liberals applauded their attempt to fight climate change, conservatives warned that workers would be beaten.
“In seven days, this clod of president dirt has lost more jobs than it would ever create,” Texas radio announcer Rick Roberts said earlier this week.
Others warned that their efforts to raise hourly wages would hurt small businesses.
Jackie Taylor, editor of Linn County News, a conservative Kansas newspaper, says she was furious at his order regarding federal workers’ salaries, laying the groundwork for raising the hourly rate to $ 15.
It fuels a greedy, “give me, give me” mentality, she says, and it will hurt small businesses and their employees. “I will end up firing people.”
There is also concern about the policies of Biden and his new secretary of state, Antony Blinken, for China. They said the U.S. will face Chinese aggression, just as Trump officials did. In contrast to his predecessors, however, Blinken said he would work closely with the allies to achieve his goals.
Conservatives see it differently: that Biden and his employees will be soft on China and may not be willing to extend the kind of harsh sanctions that Trump has imposed.
Many of those living in Trump’s country are concerned about China’s rise and their own prospects in Biden’s America.
Industrial cities and rural communities in the midwest have been hit hard by the economic crisis and are unlikely to recover as fast as digital centers on the east and west coasts.
“They will be out of the American dream in 2021,” said Polskin, the former journalist who now monitors the conservative media.
In his view: “They are not on that train of joy.”