In the year of Joe Biden, set to steal a fraudulently won presidency, the mainstream media are pushing another fraudulent "narrative," this one of America rejecting capitalism.

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post opened the new year with an appalling attack on free markets.

The page one headline from the Washington Post was this:

The stock market is ending 2020 at record highs, even as the virus surges and millions go hungry

Not to be outdone, the New York Times ran a front page explainer headlined with this:

Why Markets Boomed in a Year of Human Misery

The logic here is atrocious. Stocks rose because companies were developing new products and new services that people want to buy, and often showing months of double-digit profits. Vaccine, anyone? Why the hell shouldn't the companies that develop COVID vaccines in record time see some kind of stock market rise? Do we like and want vaccines? Or do vaccines just float in by themselves? Developments like these create votes of confidence from "the market," including those of fund managers who manage millions of little guys' 401(k)s. 

Meanwhile, why are Americans poor and hungry? Don't pin it on stocks. The blame for that squarely falls on the shoulders of blue-state Democrat governors, enacting unreasonable and selective COVID-justified lockdowns to crush much of the private sector. 

The sum picture here from these two headline points made is that the private sector creates, the government damages and destroys. 

But somehow, in the logic of the Times and Post, the stock market is to blame for all the restaurant workers, cruise ship porters, theatre employees, and personal trainers who are now left without their jobs.   

Oh, of course, they argue that some very rich people gained. Yes, we know. But what the media conceals is that so does everyone else, either through jobs created as companies find themselves capitalized from stocks, or else through their stock-laden 401(k)s. But according to the Post, rich guys made money, so that had to be what made so many workers poor, let's therefore get rid of capitalism and bring in more Andrew Cuomos.

Now, this is not to deny that a few rich people did gain, but not for the reasons the media is claiming. Here's a headline the Washington Post will never run:

"After a year of small shop closures, Amazon stock price up 577%"

In other words, some government actions did set the stage for some billionaires in a few select companies to take advantage and rise. Jeff Bezos made billions off the blue-state destruction of small business. That would certainly explain why his paper's a big booster for lockdowns. But his gains are far from perfect free market capitalism, they're the result of a government thumb on a scale that just happened to benefit him and his company at the expense of others.

Yet his paper goes all in for attacks on capitalism.

These attacks are propaganda, same as the Soviets used to do, designed to make Americans blame capitalism rather than big government, using the pandemic to extend its reach and power. A few crony capitalists gain in the process, creating a propagandistic narrative with the explicit aim of making Americans hate and blame capitalism, matching their other self-created narrative of encouraging Americans to hate their country. The aim of course is socialism.

Which is rather redolent of the last time they tried this, in the famous 2009 Newsweek headline in the wake of President Obama's election claiming: "We're All Socialists Now." We all know how well that worked out.

People are discouraged and blue over the sense of powerlessness this pandemic, and big state have created, but now's not the time to go wobbly. Conservatives must strike back harder in defense of free markets, in particular, exposing these lies, just as they are doing with the hate-America propaganda now polluting our schools. If Americans end up hating, blaming, and wishing an end to free markets, all over a Big Lie about stock markets somehow robbing us, when in fact it's state governments doing it, all power will slide with ease into in the hands of a greedy and grasping state, with no way out. The attack on free markets is a little reported, but extremely critical leftist assault that needs to be halted now.

Image credit: Pixabay public domain