Writing for the conservative website amac in September, Seamus Brennan predicted that the midterms this year would be known as “the First Post-Media Election.” I suppose he was using the word “media,” as we conservatives so often do, to refer to that portion of the media that used to require some such qualifier as “liberal,” “mainstream,” or, more recently, “legacy” to make it clear that there was some alternative to it. But in the vast universe of today’s popular culture we alternatives may begin to feel almost vanishingly small, especially now that the social-media companies have enlisted in the service of the progressive media’s jihad against what President Biden was pleased to call, in his speech in Philadelphia at the beginning of September, extremist “maga Republicans” and all their works.

Mr. Brennan’s thesis was not supported by much in the way of evidence, beyond some vague references to public-opinion polling, but he contended that “large portions of the public saw right through the narrative manipulations” of the media—not only when these involved Mr. Biden’s tendentious characterizations of Mr. Trump and his supporters but also concerning such supposed election-year triumphs for the Democrats as the “Inflation Reduction Act.” I’d like to think that he and others who have said similar things about people “seeing through” Democrat media’s propaganda are right, but no one really knows just howlarge are those “portions of the public” who do so. We may not know this even after the