When I was in college, a liberal professor drew a diagram on the blackboard.  It was a scale, with the right side more heavily weighted than the left.  He claimed this was a representation of how money and power are on the side of the right in the United States.  I was astonished.  How could someone say something so obviously untrue?  And yet my former professor isn’t alone.  Millions of Americans agree with him despite all evidence to the contrary.  Progressives really do believe that the right has more money and power than the left.  To justify their claim that the right has more power in the United States, many progressives point to the fact that the presidency and both houses of Congress are currently controlled by the Republican Party.  However, these are only the elected positions in government.  The bureaucracy is heavily left-wing.  Washington, D.C. is heavily Democratic, as are the surrounding counties in Maryland and Northern Virginia.  Many residents of the Washington metropolitan area are government employees.  Besides, political power is less important than institutional power.  The corporations, media, entertainment, and academia in the United States and the rest of the Western world have been dominated by the left for decades.

Big corporations are strongly liberal, frequently singing the praises of progressive values such as “diversity” and “inclusion.”  Many progressives who rail against corporations would be surprised to find that both the CEOs and employees of the big corporations they protested against in Occupy Wall Street have the much same political views as they do.  Most of the people who both run and work for big corporations are left-wing, and those who claim to be conservative often have liberal views on everything except economics.  This is especially true of tech companies such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Apple, which are based in Silicon Valley in the heavily left-wing Bay area.  Many billionaires are left-wing, such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and of course George Soros.  These people contribute millions and in some cases billions of dollars to progressive causes.  Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, plans to spend $80 million to try to flip control of the House of Representatives to the Democrats this November.  He also spoke to the Democratic National Convention in 2016, as did fellow billionaire Tom Steyer in 2012.  In response, progressives often point to conservative billionaires such as the Koch brothers and Donald Trump.  But these are very much the exception to the rule, and the Koch brothers aren’t all that conservative.  They support same-sex marriage, mass immigration, amnesty, free trade, and are #NeverTrumpers.  The only things that make them conservative are their support of low taxes and opposition to unions.

The mainstream media also has a strong left-wing bias, which is most prominent in networks such as CNN and MSNBC.  In the 2016 election, 96% of political donations made by journalists went to Hillary Clinton, and a 2014 study found that four times as many journalists identified as Democrats than Republicans.  Progressives will of course respond, “but what about Fox News?”  It is true that Fox News is biased to the right, but all the other networks are biased in the other direction.  Many progressives claim that the media is a check on the power of government and corporations, holding the powerful accountable for their actions.  This is just ridiculous.  In the United States, 90% of the media is controlled by six big corporations.  The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world; and the largest shareholder in the New York Times is Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim.  Do progressives not realize that the “free and independent press” they crow about is bought and paid for by the very same big corporations they have deluded themselves into thinking are controlled by the right?  Do they really expect journalists employed by these publications to cover the news objectively? 

To see media bias, look no further than how they cover stories differently based on politics.  Eric Schneiderman, the former Democratic attorney general of New York, physically abused his Sri Lankan American girlfriend and called her his “brown slave.”  If he had been a Republican, there would have been countless op-eds and news segments about how this was proof that racism was rampant on the right, and that his behavior was inspired by Trump’s rhetoric.  But Schneiderman was a Democrat, and the incident just faded away.  And the bias doesn’t stop with mere liberalism or progressivism.  Recently there has been a rise in pro-communist and pro-Marxist articles from publications such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and even “The Week.”  Many important publications praised Karl Marx on his 200th birthday this May 5.  Michael Moore, one of the most influential liberals in the United States, wished Marx a happy birthday.  All these people and publications are considered mainstream.  Meanwhile, any right-wing publication that opposes mass immigration is branded “far right.”  It is not an exaggeration to say that the media is less critical of communism than it is of conservatism.

Once upon a time the elites in most Western countries were staunchly conservative.  But that is no longer the case and hasn’t been for a very long time.  And yet progressives claim to be the underdogs when the entire power structure is on their side.  It is like a man being evicted from a house, and the squatter acting as though the original owner still lives there years later.  Progressives like to think of themselves as plucky activists going up against the powers that be, who are evil racist backward conservatives.  In reality, the powers that be fully support the changes they seek to implement.  They view themselves as critical thinkers when all their beliefs have been spoon-fed to them by the media, academia and popular culture since the day they were born.  It has always struck me as odd when Marxist and other Leftist professors claim to be fighting the system when they are in fact in a crucial position of power in that system, influencing what the young think.  Doesn’t it occur to them that if the system really saw them as a threat they wouldn’t be allowed to hold such a key position of power?  Black Lives Matter supporters believe they are fighting against the allegedly white supremacist power structure.  And yet Barack Obama, once the powerful man in the world, spoke positively of BLM and met with some of their leaders when he was president.  Hillary Clinton has had ties to national politics since she became First Lady in 1993, but still considered herself an outsider when running for president because she was a woman.  Progressives still go about their lives believing that they are rebels, and that their beliefs and values are not shared by the power structure.  After all, that is what teachers, professors, and news anchors have always told them.