Sadly, you have to start with the premise that the media are lying to you. That has to be your starting point on any story of political substance. Just assume the media are lying, because they likely are.

The media themselves have made this so, by repeatedly, blatantly and instinctively lying for decades now to protect liberals and Democrats and assail conservatives and Republicans.

This is not a matter of opinion. It’s a matter of public record.

They’ve managed, most shamefully, to defame the two greatest populist movements since the Civil Rights era: the Tea Party and Make America Great Again causes.

The Tea Party movement was sown in the runaway spending of the George W. Bush presidency and the 2008 financial collapse. Then, early in the Barack Obama administration, the movement blossomed after CNBC business reporter Rick Santelli’s viral suggestion to hold a Boston Tea Party-style protest over plans to have taxpayers bail out what many considered to be irresponsible home loans.

This was – and still is – a movement of selfless patriots, mostly older citizens who aren’t so much worried about their own financial futures as their children’s and grandchildren’s.

Historic slander of Tea Party movement

Yet, the media derided the movement as racist and selfish. CNN’s Anderson Cooper mocked them with a disgusting reference to a sexual act known as “teabagging.” Obama’s IRS would later admit to targeting them unlawfully, apparently in an effort to slow them or silence them just prior to Obama’s 2012 reelection.

“Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS unit that oversees tax-exempt groups, said organizations that included the words ‘tea party’ or ‘patriot’ in their applications for tax-exempt status were singled out for additional reviews,” USA Today belatedly reported well after the election.

Since then, the media dutifully aided and abetted Democrats in smearing and slandering Americans who only want to Make America Great Again.

A cynical, coordinated effort has somehow, successfully in many circles, made that a bad thing. They’ve done it through simple repetition of wholly scurrilous chants designed to turn MAGA into a slur.

But they’ve also done it by leaving no smear unturned in their attacks on candidate and President Donald Trump.

Unquestioningly drooling over Democrat talking points like the lazy loyal lap dogs they are, the media tried to frame the America-loving businessman as a Russian agent.

Obama seems to have had his minions carry out the plot.

“The US Intelligence Community asked foreign spy agencies to surveil 26 associates of Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election, which triggered the allegations that the former president’s campaign had been colluding with Russia, according to a report,” the New York Post notes.

That report remains uncontroverted to this day. So, while the Hillary Clinton campaign and DNC actually concocted the Russia hoax, the Obama administration had foreign spies from friendly nations try to buttress the fraudulent claim by spying on their political rival’s campaign.

Then came the sham Mueller investigation – again, trying to find something, anything, to make the Russia lie look credible.

Then came the impeachments – and the lie by 51 U.S. intelligence agents that the very incriminating Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.

Clinging to cheap fakes

That all helped Biden defeat Trump in 2020. But when Trump announced for 2024, they had to do something more. So all of a sudden Trump was Public Enemy No. 1 in the courts.

And the media have pretended it’s not political, that it’s all organic.

Even when Biden’s long but precipitous decline became undeniable, the media denied it. Before Biden’s catatonic, catastrophic debate performance, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre lied through her teeth that videos of Biden’s mumbles and stumbles were dirty political tricks – “cheap fakes,” she called them.

The lapdog media ran with that lie like a stray dog sprinting after a trash truck, in an attempt to discredit truthful conservative media outlets and citizen journalists that were exposing Biden for what he’d become.

MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace called it “a growing and insidious trend in right-wing media — broadcast, print and social media. It is to take highly misleading and selectively edited videos of President Biden, directly from Republican National Committee social media accounts, and then use those videos to spread messages virally to cast doubt on President Biden’s fitness for office.”

How does someone like Wallace retain a “news” job while spreading such a cynical partisan lie — unless her entire news outlet is hopelessly corrupt?

Well, question answered.

Astoundingly, even after the debate exposed her lie about “cheap fakes,” Jean-Pierre clung tightly to it – insisting “at the end of the day, they’re fakes – that’s what they were – targeting the president.”

That’s a doubled-down lie so bald-faced and brazen it would make a Bolshevik blush.

The media’s latest fairy tale

They tried to tell you Trump was a foreign agent when, in fact, it was they who marshaled the awesome power of the administrative state to collude traitorously against an American presidential nominee and then president. Then the media gave themselves prestigious awards for it.

All along, and undeniably aided by his own New York developer brusqueness, they’ve smeared Trump as mean and dictatorial – to the point that it may have inspired a would-be assassin.

Today’s worn-out, fairy-tale canard is that Trump is a danger to democracy. This, from people who’ve illegally spied on him, spent millions of taxpayer funds investigating their own lies about him, and assembled a group of 51 spooks to run cover for their favored candidate Biden.

After all this and more, you would now be a fool to assume any utterance from the left and its mistress media – be it good for new nominee Kamala Harris or bad for Trump – was anything but a lie.

How many Democrat/media fabrications will some voters be bombarded with before they see the truth? This is what they do, the media. They lie. They lie in order to put both their thumbs and remaining eight fingers on the scale to tip it to the left, where they and everyone they consort with live so comfortably and obliviously.

They are, in short, in the process creating a mediacracy – rule by a corrupt, elite media. They will tell you whom and whom not to vote for.

Rest assured: As they hastily and feverishly promote the now-presumptive Democrat nominee, expect the lies to be amplified and accelerated. The media will consider it their job – which it is not – to personally resuscitate the Democrat Party from its current code blue, and to trumpet its successor nominee as an exciting, competent, glass ceiling-breaking messiah. That’s just what they do.

When someone demonstrates over and over who they really are, it’s smart to believe them.

So assume the media are lying, because the record clearly shows they will be.