On Sunday morning, November 10, I attended the christening in New Jersey of a beautiful, newly-arrived great-niece. At the reception afterward, there were about 50 adults in attendance. If I had to guess, I would say all of them voted, half or a little more for Trump and half or a little less for Harris.

The media would have you believe that ours is such a divided country that the reception would have ended in fireworks: the purple-haired college student calling her boomer uncle a fascist, the uncle calling his niece a commie pig, the girl’s father punching the uncle, the uncle shooting the girl and her father. No, we didn’t have nearly that kind of fun. Everyone behaved him or herself, much as anticipated.

True, after flying into Newark on Saturday, my conservative kin and I indulged in an hours-long Schadenfreude fest. Having gotten that out of our system, we behaved admirably on Sunday. That should not surprise anyone. Ours is a divided country only superficially. As we all understood at the Christening, blood, and shared culture trump the politics of the moment.

The election of 1860 was divisive. The election of 2024 was a passing fit of hysteria ginned up by a dying and increasingly dishonest legacy media. In July, after a week-long family reunion at the New Jersey shore, I led my Book-TV presentation for Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6 with that very observation. Said I, “The divide in America right now is not about ideology but about where we get our information.”

To make my case, I cited a survey done by Franklin Templeton-Gallup during the last six months of 2020. In the survey, some 35,000 Americans were asked their assessment of COVID, a subject that had dominated the news, left and right, since the beginning of the year.           

The most revealing answer came in response to the question: “What percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized?” The Democrats who responded had no idea. Some 41 percent believed that 50 percent or more of those who contracted COVID would end up in the hospital. Another 28 percent said that 20–50 percent of COVID sufferers would be hospitalized.

The correct answer was 1–5 percent, an answer that Republicans were nearly three times as likely to get right. In sum, 69 percent of Democrats were deeply misinformed about a subject of critical importance, and 41 percent were grotesquely misinformed.

By contrast, the women I profile in Ashli saw through the media fog. Nine of the ten, including Ashli Babbit, were protesting masking and lockdowns from day one. Ashli, in fact, aptly called Covid the “controla virus.” The government’s Covid crackdown was one of the major reasons these women went to Washington on January 6.

When the Covid hysteria set in, I had no idea it would turn so political so quickly. With President Trump directing Covid policy through proxies like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, I would have expected liberals to reject their advice given the source. They did not. Their trust in the media overwhelmed their distrust of Donald Trump.

This misperception manifested itself in the summer of 2020 at our annual family reunion. The conservatives sat together maskless and talked. The liberals sat on the fringes of the group in masks. Even as Covid anxiety waned, many on the left refused to abandon the masks. They wore them the way Muslim women might wear a burka, as a sign of their faith.

But with an edge. One high school classmate still sports as his official Facebook image a picture of himself wearing a large black mask that reads, “Just wear the damn mask.” I suppose it shouldn’t surprise that our school’s most famous alum -- sorry, Buck Sexton -- is Anthony Fauci.

In 2020 and beyond, this mass delusion was obvious to anyone who cared to see, but the media and the medical-pharma complex encouraged its spread. Simultaneously, they projected this delusion onto the opposition.        

A case in point: During roughly the same period as the Gallup survey, researchers R. Kelly Garrett and Robert Bond performed a longitudinal study focused on political knowledge. The National Institutes of Health endorsed the resulting paper titled “Conservatives’ Susceptibility to Political Misperceptions.” Unable to say that conservatives knew less than liberals, the authors took solace in the belief that conservatives were “worse at distinguishing truths and falsehood.”       

The reason the Right failed to distinguish between the false and the true, the authors argued, was “that the most widely shared falsehoods tend to promote conservative positions, while corresponding truths typically favor liberals.” The authors’ confirmation bias flirted with parody, but that was not the most chilling part of the report.

That honor belonged to the authors’ unapologetically repressive solution. “These results,” they insisted, “underscore the importance of reducing the supply of right-leaning misinformation.” Yes, wear the damn mask and keep your mouth shut.

Over time, the major media had beguiled their audiences into believing an astonishing array of slanders and absurdities. Shocked by the emergence of Donald Trump, the deep state began to enforce the Left’s bizarre new orthodoxies and conspiracy theories by openly suppressing dissent. The media -- and their audiences -- pretended not to notice the slide into fascism.

Elon Musk did. The worm officially turned on liberation day, October 28, 2022, the day Musk sealed the deal on Twitter and rechristened it “X.” The results of this free speech renaissance were obvious on election day. Just about all demographic groups shifted in the direction of common sense.

I am hopeful that my liberal relatives will follow the trend. I can imagine one brave soul saying out loud at one future family reunion, “Did we almost elect a guy vice-president who thought it a swell idea to put tampons in Boys’ rooms?” Yup, you almost did.

Jack Cashill’s newest book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is available in all formats.

Image: OpenClipArt/Liftarn