Thousands of Trump supporters flooded the typically liberal city on Sunday afternoon, filling Madison Square Garden to kick off the campaign’s final week before Election Day. Joining a lineup of Republican figures like businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, Florida Rep. Byron Donalds and former Democrat Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard — Carlson took the stage, quickly voicing his confidence in a Trump victory.

” … That’s Donald Trump, back in the city that produced him with no embarrassment at all in a room full of his friends. The stones that takes, the bravery that takes is incredible. Donald Trump’s gonna win. He’s gonna win. I know that that’s true,” Carlson said.

“The people he’s about to defeat have no idea and they’re panicked,” Carlson added. “They have no idea why, people like Donald Trump, and their first theory was, ‘Well, Donald Trump is evil, so half the country’s evil also,’ and that’s one of the reasons they spent the last four years trying to destroy the country, because they’re mad at its voters for liking Donald Trump.”

Carlson continued to call out Democrats’ confusion over voter support for Trump, noting two reasons the former president is popular: his genuine “affection” for voters and the “liberation” he believes Trump has brought to Americans. Carlson argued that, through this liberation, voters have started to see through the “lies” of the Democratic Party, pointing to what he claims is their biggest lie — convincing others they’re “impressive.”

” … But the big lie, you know what the big lie is? The big lie is that they’re impressive. That’s what the big lie is. That the people in charge have somehow earned the right to rule over you and they haven’t. And you know that. These are the single most useless people in the United States. They have no skills whatsoever. They’ve got three quarters of the money, and they didn’t earn it,” Carlson said.

“They set up a system precisely for the purpose of awarding themselves wealth and power when it’s undeserved. You look at Liz Cheney and you ask yourself, honestly, what skill could she possibly have that allowed her to send hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths? Did she earn that?” Carlson asked. “I don’t think she did. No fair system would make Liz Cheney powerful. No fair system would make Larry Fink rich. No fair system would elevate someone like Kamala Harris to a presidential nomination.”

Carlson then stated that by sticking with the party, Trump has inspired Republicans to “call bs” on the “charade” of the Democratic Party. The DCNF co-founder noted that as more people come forward to openly support Trump, it will become harder for voters to believe Harris could win.

“What’s embarrassing is to take a perfectly great country and destroy it as they have … It’s going to be pretty tough for them,” Carlson said. “Ten days from now, to look in the eye to America with a straight face, it’s gonna be pretty hard to look at us and say, ‘You know what? Kamala Harris, she’s just got 85 million votes because she’s just so impressive as the first Samoan Malaysian low IQ, former California prosecutor, ever to be elected president. It was just a groundswell of popular support, and anyone who thinks otherwise just a freak or a criminal.’”

“At this stage of the game, after nine years of listening to their lies and finding every single one of them totally false. No, it’s not safe and effective and no, she’s not impressive,” Carlson added. “It’s very hard for me to believe the rest of us are going to say, ‘You know what? Joe Scarborough, you’re right, you’re right. She won fair and square because she’s just so impressive.’ I don’t think so.”

Carlson concluded by calling this new defiance a liberation and a freedom “to say what’s obviously true,” expressing gratitude to Donald Trump for it.

Trump took the stage last in the evening, greeted by a roaring crowd, and spoke for roughly an hour to supporters. The former president focused on his policy platform, addressing top voter concerns about the economy, inflation and immigration. He encouraged the crowd to vote and noted that Republicans could take both the Senate and House — hinting at an unreleased plan he has discussed with Republican Speaker Mike Johnson to secure Congress.

Featured Image: Gage Skidmore/Flickr

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She has six employees. When she was fired by NBC in 2018, she believed that it was the end of her career. She went to dark places in her mind.

But she bounced back with her own broadcasting company and has never been happier or more influential.

The same story has been told by Tucker Carlson, whose network is gigantic and whose influence is far beyond even the heights that he obtained at Fox in the old days. I have no direct knowledge of how many people work for his personal channel, but it is a reasonable guess that it is no more than a dozen.

Everyone knows about the success and reach of Joe Rogan’s show. Apart from that, there are many thousands more with influence in their own sectors of reach. The share of influence dominated by legacy seems to be falling dramatically. You can detect their influence in this election season in which candidates are working the podcast circuit.

You might chalk this up to technology: Everyone has the capacity now to make content and distribute it. Therefore, of course, people do it.

The real story, however, is more complicated.

A new poll from Gallup offers an intriguing look. The latest polls show trust in major media is at an all-time low. It’s fallen from a post-Watergate high in 1976 of 72 percent to 31 percent today. That is an enormous slide, impossible to dismiss as mere technological change. Along with that, the poll documents dramatic losses of trust in government and essentially all official institutions.

The loss of trust has hit all age groups but more profoundly affects people younger than 40 years old. These are folks who have grown up with alternatives and developed a sophisticated understanding of information flows, and are deeply suspicious of any institution that seeks control over public culture.

Gallup stated: “The news media is the least trusted group among 10 U.S. civic and political institutions involved in the democratic process. The legislative branch of the federal government, consisting of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, is rated about as poorly as the media, with 34 percent trusting it.”

In contrast, “majorities of U.S. adults express at least a fair amount of trust in their local government to handle local problems (67 percent), their state government to address state problems (55 percent), and the American people as a whole when it comes to making judgments under our democratic system about the issues facing the country (54 percent).”

It seems based on this poll that, in people’s hearts and minds, we are defaulting back to the America of Alexis de Tocqueville, a network of self-governing communities of friends and neighbors rather than a centrally managed and controlled monolith. The farther the institutions get from people’s direct experiences, the less they are trusted. That is how it should be, even aside from other considerations.

In this case, the causal factors are not only the distance and not only the technology that allows for alternatives. Legacy media has been so aggressively partisan for at least nine years that it has alienated vast swaths of the viewing audience. Top executives have known about this problem for a very long time and worked to fix it, but they face tremendous pressure from within, from reporters and technicians with Ivy educations and a dedication to woke ideology.

The New York Times after 2016 attempted to repair the damage from having so completely mishandled and miscalled the election. It hired new editors and writers, but it was only a matter of time before they were driven out in a reminder to the top brass that there was a cultural revolution afoot, and that the personal is the political and visa-versa.

The newspaper defaulted back to extreme partisanship, leaving owners and managers to figure out other paths to sustaining profitability.

As a result, it appears that an entire industry is in the process of a long meltdown with no available fixes. Huge audiences have turned away from it toward alternatives that are not necessarily partisan on the other side but simply display a dedication to telling facts and truths about which actual readers care.

A question has long mystified me: Is this loss of trust entirely because of a change in media bias, or is it that new technological options have fully revealed what might always have been there but was not widely known? I don’t have the answer to that but it is worth some reflection.

When I was a kid, there were exactly three channels on television and one local newspaper. There was never a chance to see The New York Times except perhaps at the public library. The nightly news came on at 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. It lasted for 30 minutes. It opened with international news, moved to national news, turned to sports, and then the local affiliate took over with local news and weather.

There was perhaps 10 minutes per day of national news on three separate channels, each reporting more or less the same thing. That was it. People in those days chose their station based on whether they liked the voice and personality of the broadcaster. News media was highly trusted. But was that trust based on reliable and excellent reporting, or simply a reflection of all that people did not know?

In those days, my own father was deeply distrustful of what he saw on television. Somehow, he intuited that Richard Nixon was being railroaded by the Watergate scandal. He theorized that someone was out to get him, not for bad things he had done, but for the good he had done and had planned to do. He preached this opinion constantly and it set him apart from all conventional wisdom. Indeed, as a young man I knew for sure that my father was the outlier: None of my friend’s parents agreed and none of my teachers did, either.

Since then, much has come out that seems to reinforce my father’s views.

If Watergate happened in today’s world, there would be a huge explosion of opinions in all directions, with motives of all actors pushed out on every channel, and there would be widespread competition to find the real story. We certainly would not be relying on two relatively inexperienced reporters at The Washington Post.

I happen to believe that this is a good thing, even though it has come with a loss of trust. Maybe the old trust was not nearly as merited as people thought, simply because there were so few options. As the years went on, there were even more sources, starting with PBS but moving to CNN and C-SPAN. After the web came online and social media took off, that’s when the veil was really pulled back and media wholly transformed.

People on all sides of the political spectrum today express profound regret for this change. Former presidential candidate John Kerry has said that today’s media environment makes governing impossible, and Hillary Clinton has floated the idea of criminal penalties for misinformation, a word tossed around so frequently these days but rarely defined as anything other than speech that some people do not like.

All told, the rise of alternative media has surely contributed to the decline in public trust in the mainstream media. This might not reflect a fundamental change in the bias of media sources but simply the reality that we are only now fully aware of what has always been true. In that case, we are better off seeing these trends as good news all around, provided that we have an attachment to seeing reality as it is. In any case, we all should.

Returning to the Kelly/Carlson business model: They are doing far more with fewer staff members than was ever thought possible. It’s a solid prediction that many legacy media companies will be downsizing in terms of personnel in the future. They can do more with less. And they can do it with more fairness and less bias. Economic realities will likely make it so.

The entire landscape of information and media economies is dramatically shifting. That is precisely why we are hearing ever more calls for censorship. Many elites long for the old days of canned and constructed narratives with no other options. But the well-documented loss of trust makes that little more than a pipe dream. It cannot and will not happen.

The only viable path to earning audience loyalty in our times is to write and speak with fact-based integrity. Trust has to be earned.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.