Artist Bruce Springsteen performs onstage during an the Stand Up for Heroes special at Madison Square Garden in New York City, Nov. 5, 2014. (DoD Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Daniel Hinton/Released)
Before the 2020 election, Bruce Springsteen threatened/promised to move to the Land Down Under should Donald Trump be elected president. Well, it didn’t happen. Bruce’s moving, that is. Instead Super Bowl LV fans were subjected to Bruce’s preaching through very peculiar religious imagery to sell cars. Specifically, Bruce was selling Jeeps through “The Middle,” a two-minute car promo film.
Molly Hemingway in the Federalist writes about the ad – a Jeep with no top in the middle of a dismal road in Kansas. The imagery was so frosty, cold, and dark that no Jeep owner in her right mind would do such a thing. I, the driver of a 28-year-old Jeep (formerly Matt’s), heartily concur. I love driving my Jeep around Newport – on any sunny summer’s day.
But getting back to Bruce, famously known for being from New Jersey:
“The middle has been a hard place to get to lately. To The ReUnited States Of America.”
Mollie Hemingway asks what the earring-bejeweled, N.J. Hometown boy, decked out in cowboy hat and boots, didn’t ask,
“What until recently has made America divided?”
For 74 million Trump-voting Americans who lived through four years of epithets and refusal by elites such as Springsteen to treat the president of the United States as legitimate, it’s not hard to see why the ad is going over like a lead balloon.
One reason the middle has been a hard place to get to is because of wealthy and powerful people like Springsteen spewing hatred toward Republican presidents and their voters dating back to the 1980s.
Joe Biden, after winning a narrow election that came down to about 40,000 votes in three states, began asking the media to run with the narrative that he was a unifier. They dutifully did so, even as he signed radical executive orders and moved not one bit to the center but further and further to the left.
Corporate media, who have ignored or mocked concerns about election integrity despite the widespread sloppiness and rampant mail-in balloting associated with the 2020 election, have cheered on the crackdown of protesters in or near a riot at the nation’s capitol. They did so after spending months defending and contextualizing violent riots from the left that seized cities across the country, attacked federal buildings, killed dozens of Americans, set churches on fire, and terrorized small business owners.
As long as corporate America continues using dishonest, manipulative, partisan advertising for auto sales, the fabric of the country will not be healed, argues Mollie Hemingway.
