‘Mayday, Mayday’ For The Democrat Warplane

In a recent piece, I analogized the Democrats’ propaganda machine and the heart of their political strategy to an F-47 Stealth Fighter — one of the most expensive, sophisticated, and powerful weapons in existence. I would like to build on that comparison and clarify three big problems emerging with the Democrat warplane.

#1. Their stealth fighter has lost a lot of its stealth

Thanks to whistleblowers, the Twitter Files release, the Facebook censorship documents, a few brave reporters, and the DOGE exposure of the USAID fraud, the most surreptitious and underhanded features of the Democrat war machine have now been revealed to the American public. Their use of taxpayer money and government agency clout to simultaneously fund and/or threaten respective media platforms and individuals regarding their positions and messaging became apparent. The public now clearly sees exactly how pseudo support has been astroturfed by the Left for their causes and candidates — and competing voices extinguished.

In his recent essay “The Artificial Culture,” Mathew Gasda describes the landscape: 

If you want to ask why certain so-called socialist, left-leaning magazines failed to ever substantially criticize the DNC and Democratic politics in more than a superficial way (despite positioning themselves as independent or even adversarial), it’s because they were functionally part of the DNC (as evidenced by their reliance on grants from foundations tied to Democratic donors, they’re hiring patterns, favoring staff with direct party affiliations, and their editorial alignment with DNC priorities during election cycles), part of DNC patronage networks (with documented financial ties to progressive nonprofits, think tanks, and media funds that coordinate messaging with the party).

NGOs play a critical role in supporting this messaging, not only by funding media platforms and supportive activists, but by providing employment to loyal soldiers. In “Subsidizing the Left: How NGOs Become a Jobs Program for Democrats,” AmuseOnX explains how NGOs and USAID itself have been critical parts of this Democrat apparatus, pointing out that “over 90% of pass-through organizations are run by Left-wing activists and politically connected individuals from prior Democrat administrations.” Often, the pass-through has multiple layers, obscuring purpose and usage. As but one example, he points to the Climate Justice Alliance, which received some $50 million from the EPA supposedly to fight climate change, but instead, funneled this taxpayer money into pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel propaganda campaigns in the U.S., helping to fuel campus protests.

USAID has been exposed as a gigantic slush fund for the Left. Elon Musk concluded bluntly that USAID is beyond repair, calling it a “criminal organization” and “a viper’s nest filled with radical-left Marxists that hate America.” Tellingly, former State Department official Mike Benz responded to that post with, “I cannot adequately convey to you how many dozens of former members of the intelligence community have written to me this exact sentiment about USAID.”

The public now understands both that they were deceived, and somewhat how they were deceived. But even if they don’t understand all of the parameters of the latter, they now solidly grasp the former.

#2. Their stealth fighter has lost significant clout

David Samuels’ piece “Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment — How Barack Obama Built an Omnipotent Thought-Machine and How It Was Destroyed” explains how, aided by a massive shift in consumer usage to digital format and his embrace of chief strategist David Axelrod’s “permission structures,” Obama was able to architect a “digital switchboard” controlled by a small class of operatives and essentially create the realities he desired.

With command of this network says Samuels:

Catchphrases like ‘defund the police,’ ‘structural racism,’ ‘white privilege,’ ‘children don’t belong in cages,’ ‘assigned gender,’ or ‘stop the genocide in Gaza’ would emerge and marinate in meme-generating pools like the academy or activist organizations, and then jump the fence — or be fed — into rich groups and threads on Twitter and Reddit.

He goes on to outline how Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter broke the stranglehold of this new digital leviathan which not only allowed for counter-narratives, but exposed the unethical and likely illegal methods used by the Democrat administrations to censor and promote various stories.

The 2024 Presidential election pivoted largely on a growing portion of the electorate recognizing the absurdity of many leftist claims. The Left had finally jumped the shark. John Nolte outlines a sampling of over 40 hoaxes reported as truths by the AP over the last several years including topics ranging from the origins of COVID, the lockdown mandates, and vaccine efficacy, to Hunter Biden’s laptop, to tropes about various leaders like Trump, Biden, Pelosi, and Gabbard to the belief in multiple genders, to the environment, to January 6, and more.

Thanks to the debunking of those hoaxes and others, most Americans, including a growing number of Independents, no longer trust or believe in the Democrat orthodoxy that has been endlessly repeated through mainstream and social media.

Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan first advised us that the medium cannot be separated from the message. And a bit prior to him, Aristotle admonished us that “We are what we repeatedly do.” Thus, a growing number of Americans are rightly concluding, ipso facto, that the people who have been trying to get them to swallow these whoppers are liars.

Thus exposed, Democrats and their media sycophants have been reduced to pouting, yelling, and crying while their approval ratings plummet to record lows. Further, in lock-step, the credibility/viewership of sycophant media outlets is withering. A 2024 Gallup poll shows that Americans now see the news media as the least trusted group among 10 U.S. civic and political institutions involved in the democratic process — even lower than Congress. The polling firm reported, “For the third consecutive year, more U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media (36%) than trust it a great deal or fair amount. Another 33% of Americans express ‘not very much’ confidence.” This means that trust in the mass media is at its lowest point in five decades.

This sharp drop in credibility is utterly devastating to Democrats. Since the Obama reign, Democrats have grown accustomed to the luxury of being able to spin whatever hokum they desired with unquestioned belief and support from the requisite number of politicians and voters.

#3. Their stealth fighter is very, very expensive to operate

How do you ensure that media outlets and their representatives will push some stories and quash others? You pay them. A quick review of the USAID funding shows that some 6,200 journalists at nearly 1,000 different platforms, including hundreds of NGO’s, were receiving USAID payments of some form — including but in no way limited to the AP, Reuters, The BBC, and Politico. This was an expensive proposition indeed — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Even more USAID funds, perhaps tens of billions of dollars, were funneled to far-Left opposition groups, NGOs, and Soros-related projects and candidates. DOGE is now working to shut that down.

One of Democrats’ largest fundraising organizations, ActBlue, which has funneled over $16 billion to all levels of Democrat campaigns since its inception seems to be imploding amid allegations of fraud, foreign money laundering, and sponsoring terrorism. At least seven senior officers have left the organization and congressional investigations loom. To make matters worse, the Dem’s usual billionaire class may be defecting. Victor Davis Hanson speculates that Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, and perhaps even Jeff Bezos appear to be questioning their Democrat loyalty as demonstrated by some of their recent hesitancy to provide usual levels of support.

Without the usual hundreds of billions of dollars, clandestine and otherwise, to update and expand the capabilities of their warplane, it will quickly become both antiquated and impotent.

The Democrat stealth fighter has been exposed. Its methods of funding and the damage it has both inflicted and incurred over the last few years are massive stories. The future of the Democratic Party in the near term seems inextricably bound to this machine — particularly because Democrats seem to be doubling down on keeping it as an integral part of their strategy. Damaged or not, that is currently all they have.

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Greg Salsbury, Ph.D. is former president of Western Colorado University and Board of Advisor member for STARRS.US.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.