A SENATE CONFIRMATION REMINDS US THAT THE MEDIA'S MASTER NARRATIVE OF THE PARTIES IS COMPLETELY WRONG

HuffPost reports:

Senate Republicans voted Wednesday to confirm Joe Kent, a conspiracy theorist with alarming ties to white nationalists and far-right groups, to lead the National Counterterrorism Center.

Kent was confirmed, 52-44. Every Republican but one, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, voted for him.

Every Democrat present opposed him.

And if the four absent Democrats had voted no, Kent's nomination still would have been confirmed.

A former CIA paramilitary officer and twice-failed congressional candidate backed by Trump, Kent has regularly aligned himself with far-right extremists. He talked to white nationalist Nick Fuentes about helping him with his social media strategy, gave an interview to a Nazi sympathizer, downplayed the extremism of the neofascist Proud Boys and grouped the Black Lives Matter racial justice movement with “child trafficking rings and cartels,” saying they should all face “federal terrorism charges.”

Kent has also pushed dangerous conspiracies, like the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection being a “deep state” plot and the Secret Service being “in on” last year’s assassination attempt against Trump.

Also, he has called COVID mRNA vaccines "experimental gene therapy," and he wants to defund the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, as well as repeal the 1934 National Firearms Act.

What the HuffPost story doesn't mention is that Kent came very close to winning a seat in the House of Representatives in 2022 and 2024. The Democrat who defeated him in both elections was a party gadfly who's become a media darling, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. (Gluesenkamp Perez beat Kent by less than a point in 2022 and by 3.8 points in 2024.)

The mainstream press loves Gluesenkamp Perez, The New York Times in particular. Here she is being interviewed just after the 2024 election by the paper's Annie Karni. Karni's lede:

It’s not always fun to say I told you so.

For two years, Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat from a rural, red district in Washington State, has been criticizing her party for being too dismissive of working-class voters.

That message appears to have helped Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez, long considered perhaps the most vulnerable Democrat in the House, defy the odds in this week’s election. Even with President-elect Donald J. Trump at the top of the ticket and winning her district for the third cycle in a row, she appears on track to beat the same candidate she faced two years ago, the far-right Republican and former Green Beret Joe Kent, by a larger margin.

Here's an admiring profile of Gluesenkamp Perez that appeared a few months before the election in The New York Times Magazine just after Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the ticket (headline: "The Blue-Collar Democrat Who Wants to Fix the Party’s Other Big Problem"). And here's Ezra Klein interviewing Gluesenkamp Perez for his podcast this past May (I wrote about that interview here). The message of all of this media coverage is the same: The Democratic Party is too elitist and too woke. Democrats could emerge from the wilderness if they'd just listen to the scolding of this blue-collar bike-shop owner turned congresswoman.

The mainstream press loves to portray the Democratic Party as much too far to the left. But where are the media's deep dives on the extremist state of the GOP? At most, we're told that Donald Trump is a crackpot leading an administration of extremists, and that a handful of Republican members of Congress -- Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, the House Freedom Caucus -- are as far to the right as he is. (And even then we're told that Trump is "transactional" and has no firm ideology.) The master media narrative of the GOP is this: Most congressional Republicans quietly despair at what Trump is doing to the country and to their party. They're afraid to challenge him openly, but they really, really wish they could. Secretly, they'd love to return the GOP to what it was before Trump became its leader: a moderate, Reaganite party.

The party of Reagan wasn't moderate, of course. And the fact that Republicans in Congress invariably endorse Trump's extremism out of fear of losing their seats to more radical primary challengers tells us that most Republican voters are as far to the right as Trump.

But the media doesn't cover this as a story. The media writes endlessly about real or mythical Democratic radicalism, always arguing that it's a party-wide problem, but the same news outlets never portray the entire Republican Party as dangerously radical, even though there's far more evidence to support that narrative. And now much of America believes we have an effete, extremist Democratic Party and a normal-people party called the GOP.