Free Republic

It’s not Trump supporters who are living in a fantasyland, but members of the corporate media who sense their power and influence waning.With the end of Donald Trump’s presidency fast approaching, we’ve seen a surge of columns and posts asserting that Republicans and Trump supporters have lost touch with reality. After four years of marinating in “falsehoods” and “disinformation”—a term that really just means “information I don’t like”—Trump’s backers are all turned around, we’re told. They believe much that isn’t so. David Brooks of The New York Times explains that these poor saps, most of whom, he says, are uneducated,...

When I was growing up in Ohio, the South began at the banks of the Ohio river. Below that muddy line, everyone knew, there lived a different breed of backward and uneducated people with lazy minds and even lazier language skills. You could have contempt for them, a privilege I indulged from time to time. I personally learned this contempt from two main sources.

In his new book, “Fall,” the celebrated sci-fi author Neal Stephenson envisions a future United States split between the violent, gun-toting, uneducated, cross-burning religious fanatics of bullet-ridden “Ameristan” and the peaceful, educated, secular denizens of the nation’s Blue enclaves, where decorum and truth always prevail. Stephenson, one of the most imaginative novelists of our time, fails to live up to his usual standards with “Fall.” Cultural and political elites have long depicted a Red America teeming with slack-jawed extremists; there is nothing original about his vision. In fact, it isn’t very far ­removed from the perception many coastal elites hold...