Yep, they sure do.

But you can be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Media of all stripes tends to play up the egregious and the stupid. The left assures us all conservatives are mouth breathing morons that hate democracy and science. The right shows us blue haired crazies spouting that nonsense. Free speech is dangerous in the wrong hands and yet the blue haired crazies are out to save democracy.

Forget hypocrisy, they can’t even manage logical consistency!

Let’s not be too easy on the right. All Democrats aren’t blue haired crazies. Okay, I admit, I’d LOVE to see Alan Dershowitz in a blue wig!

He ever sees this and I’m never gonna hear the end of it!

Humor aside, the point stands. Democrats aren’t all crazy. Nor are they all rabid leftists. It’s just hard to see the normal ones for all the crazies and media on the right does play into that.

I don’t think the legacy media has realized this yet, but it’s not the 1970’s any longer. Sure, back in the day your media choices were TV or newspaper. If you really wanted to be informed, you read the paper. Otherwise, TV was fine so long as you had enough sense to never fully trust either one.

Yeah, even back then we had begun to doubt the media.

But only just. Truth was if you weren’t one of the nerds that bothered to read political books you got all your information from either TV or newspaper. The occasional magazine notwithstanding, the legacy media had a near monopoly.

Even then, mimeographs were a thing. Bald faced lies were difficult to pass off because those pesky nerds knew how to use a mimeograph and they really went to town when Xerox arrived.

Truth may be slow to get around but Truth will definitely catch up eventually.

The bias was present but more subtle. It became much less subtle in the Eighties but conservatives found AM radio. The monopoly developed cracks.

Fast forward to 2020 and the monopoly now has a superhighway running through it. The legacy media hasn’t gotten the memo yet but they no longer have a monopoly.

More like a train wreck.

All that stuff happens in the bases. Most Americans are blithely ignorant of just how biased their media is. Or so they were until the legacy media developed a very, very bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

The Center mostly ignores politics until close to the general election, if they even pay attention then. The legacy media used to know this and would tone down the worst as people got close to election. They would make exception for the obligatory October Surprise but the election was usually over by the time Truth showed up to that party.

Translation: media was seldom caught by the general public in their most egregious bias and misrepresentation.

Until Trump. All Trump had to do was get elected and the legacy media lost its collective mind.

As I explained last time, people are slow to change their minds. This has the unfortunate side effect of making it look like people don’t care.

Whether or not they are ready to reconsider their positions, people DO notice as the media and the Left push ever more insane theories and those theories are shot down one by one.

Remember ‘Russia, Russia, Russia!’? A lot of folks do and a lot of them are in the politically disinterested Center.

Normally, the Center is not paying attention before September. They’re doing really good if they bother to watch the debates. Not this go around. The Center is paying a LOT more attention than usual.

Or, more correctly, the Center has gotten smaller. That’s not necessarily a major shift but it is very, very telling that the Center seems to be making up its mind a LOT earlier than usual.

Part of that is likely a growth in the realization that the media is hypocritical.

This is probably the backfire from the Trump persecutions. The Center may be disinterested, but they aren’t stupid.

The primaries are more reliable than the polls but the polls are pretty consistent with the primaries. There is a distinct lack of interest in the Democrat Party and its presidential nominee. Even allowing for the crossover voting to support Haley, Biden’s turnout was lackluster in the extreme. Remember, Trump was the presumed nominee by February. If the presumption of an easy victory were all that kept people from voting in the primaries it should have affected Trump’s numbers, but it didn’t.

In very few races in deep blue states did Biden get more votes than Trump. Ignoring the ones where crossover is likely a factor, it’s even less. It doesn’t mean Trump would have won – general elections are a different animal – but it does mean that Biden does not have an energized base.

Trump, however, does.

What proportion of the Center that bothered to vote in the primaries seems to have gone more towards Trump. Now, don’t take that as ‘Trump wins’ because most of the Center historically sits our the primaries. Still, this is very weird.

These aren’t the folks that get excited about primaries. If they are just doing their civic duty, they should split pretty evenly. That does not seem to have happened.

Assuming I’m right – and I could be wrong – why is this happening?

I strongly suspect it’s the ‘odor of mendacity’. The general population is becoming politically aware much earlier than normal in all likelihood because they got a whiff of the mendacity and don’t care for it. At all.

Okay, for the more reliable analysis: Biden’s own base is diminished. They clearly didn’t turn out in the primaries in any large numbers. The base is losing interest in their nominee. They are also turning on that nominee.

Remember, the Democrat base isn’t all leftist blue haired loonies. Some are liberal pink haired diehards. But diehard isn’t never die. The primaries indicate a loss of support for Biden. Crazy policy didn’t seem to move the needle before 2023 in the base but something certainly appears to have moved it now.

Hypocrisy is the likely answer. Americans don’t like cheaters or liars. I think the nonstop craziness was already chipping away at the Democrat base as well as the disinterested Center. The over the top, obviously politically motivated lawfare against Trump seems to have taken a jack hammer to both.

Most Americans believe in that truth, justice and the American Way thing. They’ll live and let live as well as flat out ignore a lot of nonsense. But raw, blatant hypocrisy, especially over the legal system or the First Amendment? OH HECK NO!

Time will tell if the Center will come around and split in favor of the Democrats. Normally, that is what happens with large turnout. Normally, but not this time. The large turnout went to Trump in the primaries. It very well may do the same in the general election.

The more hypocrisy the left piles on, the stronger Trump gets.

That is the best proof of all that Americans do in fact notice hypocrisy. And they DON’T like it.

Not a bit.