But what if conservatives deployed a more artful tactic and simply stopped referring to the activists in newsrooms today as “the media”? The Fourth Estate is an evil entity and needs a new name to reflect that.

For several years, I have advocated calling the media the American Stasi, or even just the Stasi. That is, of course, the name of the feared German communist secret police that terrorized the country from 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Stasi was an evil force and one that included many journalists, artists, and writers.

It is much easier to confront an evil if you know the proper name for that evil. Just citing “the media” or “the propaganda press” these days doesn’t cut it. But if the media are called the Stasi, or something equally pungent, confusion and frustration over their actions evaporates. There is clarity, like a doctor properly diagnosing an illness or a priest identifying a demon.