The End of Their Authority
Editor's Note
The destructive Left isn’t interested in argument; it commands. It invents stories, demands obedience, and punishes doubt. The assassination of Charlie Kirk revealed the pattern in full: violence committed, fantasy supplied, celebration permitted. The institutions charged with making sense of America have become instruments of denial and contempt.
Chris Bray contends here that such a regime cannot last. Authority withers when it collides with what people see for themselves. The Left, having chosen delusion over truth, finds its power slipping away. What follows is not equilibrium but reformation — the search for new voices willing to speak plainly in a nation starved for reality.
The American Left is rapidly losing authority. That’s not to say we’re about to live without any version of a political Left. The institutions that organize and distribute the sentiment of the Left aren’t set to dissipate. But we’re entering what will be a much-needed political reformation.
It was an inevitable outcome. Our sense-making organizations, the institutions that narrate our society, flood us with a narrative that’s plainly empty. We live in a media stream of radically disconnected societal dialogue, battered by insistent and totalizing falsehood.
Our conflict, then, isn’t merely the “Left versus the Right” — our conflict remains “the Left versus the plainest forms of observable reality.”
The latest example: the “coverage” of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Instead of anything that could help us understand the atrocity that took place, the Left has given us a week of imposed psychosis. Kirk, they say, was shot by a supporter firing celebratory gunfire. Also, he was shot because his hate speech was a violent force that activated a bullet. But don’t forget: he was shot by a Trump supporter who lived with his transgender lover and wrote Antifa slogans on his ammunition.
Our news media are insane, along with the academics and politicians who regurgitate those very same narratives.
This derangement, which cannot call a spade a spade, isn’t organized by a coherent ideology. It’s organized, instead, by a shared contempt. As Christopher Lasch wrote 30 years ago, a set of overlapping status groups have perceived themselves as a “new elite,” built around their sense of America as a dark and ugly society. The institutional Left understands itself as high-status, living exclusively in an echelon created by a common opposition: a disgust for an “incorrigibly racist” and backward country. They’re self-isolating, withdrawing from a culture they regard as provincial and bigoted. They see themselves as an “expert class” that the country is too dumb to properly obey.
“The new elites,” Lasch wrote, “are in revolt against ‘Middle America’ as they imagine it: a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy…It is a question whether they think of themselves as American at all.” He described them as people in America but not of it, like eternal visitors, carrying “a tourist’s view of the world.”
These are the people who describe us to us. They’re sitting in a studio or a classroom that’s never heard a Republican speak aloud, and telling us what the murder of Charlie Kirk means.
It’s a cycle from hell. The sense-making institutions tell us what is, and then we’re forced to ignore them. Armies of credentialed specialists endlessly narrate America to people who don’t care about their storytelling at all. As they would put it, we don’t “listen to the experts.”
Remember the reaction in early 2016, when Bill Maher asked his guests which Republican had the best chance of becoming president? Ann Coulter said the answer was Donald Trump, prompting derisive laughter as the other panelists scrunched their noses. The idea, to them, was pathetic, insane, impossible — a bizarre fever dream from a moron.
Within the hallowed halls of our sensemaking institutions that year, everyone knew Trump had no chance. Of the top 100 newspapers, 57 endorsed Hillary Clinton, 26 offered no endorsement, several endorsed “not Trump” or some version of “none of the above,” and a grand total of two endorsed the man who actually ended up winning the election.
The consensus of the sense-making institutions wasn’t that Trump shouldn’t become president; rather, it was that Trump couldn’t possibly become president. It was utterly absurd to think that this horrible man might ever occupy the presidency, a thing that was more impossible than the sudden disappearance of gravity.
Then he did.
But in 2024, their renewed anti-Trump consensus solidified and became hysterical: Hitler Hitler Hitler Hitler Hitler Hitler Hitler, they told us. To return Donald Trump to the presidency was to end America, to shutter the republic, to choose literal fascism. Democratic prosecutors sued and prosecuted the man who would obviously become the Republican presidential nominee, marking him as a monster. Then the country elected him to the presidency for the second time.
This outcome couldn’t happen if sensemaking institutions retained any degree of cultural authority whatsoever. Their authority is gone.
It’s evident on a local level, too. I live in Los Angeles County, a mile or so outside the city proper. I regularly travel through California, the state that I’ve lived in for most of my life.
The news tells me that Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass are virtuous leaders, standing up to Donald Trump’s authoritarian bigotry, bravely fighting for order and decency. My eyes tell me something else: that I live in a state collapsing into decay so rapidly that I’ll often pull my car off the road just to sit and ponder how bad it’s gotten.
During the Los Angeles fires in January, I drove for miles through streets of burning Altadena houses — with no fire department presence that I could ever see — to help a friend save what was left from his burning home. Arriving on the second day of the fires, I stood in his driveway and watched a neighborhood burn, flames rising from debris collapsed into foundations. There was no sign of any government agency coming to help.
In July, after federal immigration officers raided the prominent mid-city landmark of MacArthur Park, Bass said that Trump had sent armed men to terrorize a peaceful urban paradise where children played and families enjoyed picnics. I drove over to the park, then. I watched a small army of drug addicts openly smoking fentanyl in a park with no children in sight.
This is the state government so courageous that it’s standing up to the allegedly fascist feds?
The dire American reality is hard to dismiss, though the Left will dismiss it all the same. On a recent weekend, 58 people were shot on the streets of Chicago, shortly after the governor of Illinois had issued an angry statement declaring that “There is no emergency” in Chicago. “Donald Trump is attempting to manufacture a crisis” by suggesting a federal intervention against violent crime in the city, they said. The progressive narrative trips over bodies in the street.
We’re all staring into the yawning chasm, the one that stretches between the horror of Charlie Kirk’s murder and the morally insane response of leftist media figures who spend their time exclusively tone-policing their opponents.
The Left has become a kind of Jonestown, departing from reality with a growing aggression as the people who remain inside the false narrative become more firmly committed to it. They will escalate. They are escalating now. They’ll get louder, angrier, and more bizarre as the hard kernel of true believers becomes more isolated.
I see where I live, as do you. I know the description doesn’t match what my eyes tell me, as do you. We know that our uniquely decent and successful state and local governments in narrative are appalling failures in reality. The good people always and forever confronting “Fascist Trump” are not good people. They’re sociopaths — agents of ruin, grinding down the places they govern and sowing misery in the lives of the people who made the tragic choice to elect them.
And we know what happened to Charlie Kirk, no matter what they try to insist. This eyes-versus-narrative crisis is ubiquitous, and has been for long enough. Cultural psychosis is unsustainable as an American political culture.
Normal people have already noticed. As a result, institutions that abused their authority by engaging in fantasy and vanity, like the Democratic Party and The New York Times, are no longer our dominating forces.
They’ll continue to exist. They’ll still produce noises, and even more Americans will heed their directives — the way we listened to their demands that we prevent Donald Trump from retaking the White House.
The nation is ready to stop arguing with lunatics, and start building alternatives to their madness. The loop has become tedious; we want what comes next. It’s time we find it.