The media tells Judge Roy Moore that his Christian views have no place in this time period dominated by hectoring progressivism and moral rot across all civic and cultural institutions. He is, they say, a relic, a demographic outlier, a dangerous radical sticking his backward ideas in the gears of change just as their bandwagon rolls toward collectivist globalism and taxpayer-funded abortions next to Whole Foods. With the entire world so miserable, where does he get off being so righteous?

He is so moral, in fact, so tethered to traditional Christian values that they have to taint his image on moral grounds. They call him a sexual predator based on completely unsubstantiated allegations that he pursued and touched a 14-year old girl (which he adamantly denies). They, in concert with Gloria Allred, claim that he signed a woman’s high school yearbook, but then it comes out that she forged at least some of the yearbook signature. They say he was banned from the Gadsden mall for stalking girls, but the mall’s longtime security chief and other employees say it’s all a load of bunk. They smear his name in newspapers and Hollywood without proving a word of it.

That, my friends, is the media strategy. Everything in their world is about image and branding. So if they can associate the most vile predatory crimes to a Christian man in a cowboy hat holding a gun, then they can discolor the entire Christian cowboy hat gun-toting brand. Get it? Roy Moore stands for God and family, so therefore God and family are vile and despicable.

Don’t believe it.

The people of Alabama sure don’t. Judge Roy leads by four in our latest Big League Politics-Gravis poll, and by seven in the Change Research poll with two days to go until Tuesday’s election. Only five days ago, our Big League-Gravis survey had Moore down four. That means Moore gained five points and his Democrat opponent Doug Jones lost three points in less than a week, during which time the people of Alabama were inundated with media sensationalism and also learned the truth about the forged yearbook signature. The media’s presence in Alabama, then, lifted Judge Roy Moore by a net eight points.

So we arrive at a new theory: the media, when it tries to involve itself in Middle American political races, always manages to make things worse for the candidate that they support. The anti-media candidate, meanwhile, gains a new gust of momentum, courtesy of the public’s downright hatred for those mobs of carpetbagging weasels trampling over their yard signs and smirking at their values. People who didn’t care about the election one way or another all of a sudden vote for the guy getting vilified by the snobby people, because they see themselves in him. Populism is an instinct. That’s why the mainstream media is the most effective weapon patriotic Americans have to destroy the mainstream media.

Let’s look at recent history: In Montana, Don Trump Jr. stumped for House candidate Greg Gianforte in the special election for the state’s only congressional seat. Gianforte liked hunting and other traditionally American things, and so of course the media hated him, flocking to Montana to boost his Democrat opponent, who was about as important and memorable to the whole thing as Doug Jones is to the Alabama race (i.e. not at all). On the night of May 24, history was made. Gianforte, the candidate, bodyslammed a liberal reporter for the British newspaper the Guardian named Ben Jacobs. Gianforte claimed that Jacobs incited the incident, an explanation believed by some political observers familiar with Jacobs’ hyper-partisan work. But he never actually denied that he assaulted the young man, and in fact he was charged with and pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault. When Jacobs’ whiny tattle-tale voice on the audiotape croaked, “You just bodyslammed me,” he was actually telling the truth. This was, more or less, an unprecedented situation in modern American politics. People called for him to drop out of the race. Fair-weather Republicans got cold feet. But then something beautiful happened. Gianforte won the election the next day.

The people of Montana, having heard the news and heard the tape, sided with the Republican who bodyslammed the liberal reporter. The bodyslam made him more appealing to the voters. Said Bozeman’s James Baker: ”A lot of reporters get aggressive. And I guess, after the heat of a long campaign, people can lose tempers. But obviously I don’t endorse it, but I think that in some cases it’s understandable even if it isn’t forgivable.” Said Kalispell’s Vaughn Warriner: “And now the night before the election, what do they do? They bring some outsider in, barges in, causes a scene, and make Gianforte look bad, when it was his fault in the first place.”

Ben Jacobs’ MSNBC “Chris Hayes” appearance did nothing to sway the good people of Montana to his cause. The good people of Montana simply hated him so much that they elected the guy who violently threw him to the ground.

In Georgia, the Democrats spent record-breaking amounts of money to try to elect some lightweight named Jon Ossoff to Congress in a special election for Tom Price’s seat, but it backfired. A Republican named Karen Handel beat him with 51.9 percent of the vote even though she got less than 20 percent in the primary. The voters didn’t care much about her either way. They simply hated Jon Ossoff, who, it turns out, didn’t even live in the district he was running in.

This is President Donald Trump’s America, where the Fake News is on the run but too ignorant to realize it, where reporters like Dave Weigel, who post blatantly false information, finally have to apologize for it and be held accountable to the American people forced to imbibe their errors and fabrications.

Look at this video from Alabama, where Judge Roy Moore supporters plead with a frothing-at-the-mouth crowd of hacks to report on the real issues. Look at the hatred in your eyes, the man says in this moving clip. If only you could see yourselves, what you look like, he says. But they can’t see themselves. They’re lost. They are morally adrift.

So why don’t people believe the media now when they tell us that a Republican candidate is a bad person? Because we already know the media has no values.

The media is for killing babies, covering up for Clintons, starting nation-building wars in countries they’d never deign to fight in, and advertising pornographic gun violence in movies even as they fight to disarm the lawful citizenry. They undress women on their stupid reality shows and patronize women on their braindead daytime talk shows. And now, as we find, the truly bad people in the workplace aren’t the conservative Republicans they tell us to hate. The bad people are Matt Lauer. Harvey Weinstein. Democrats so high on their own moral self-satisfaction that they forget to practice any morality whatsoever. They are the ones who hurt and abuse others more vulnerable than them. They are the ones who have turned against God or whatever conception of basic human decency guides the lot of us. So their moral posturing rings false.

The term “media backlash” now refers to a new phenomenon: backlash against the media. So for the sake of Judge Roy Moore, please, reporters, keep on doing what you do.

Patrick Howley is editor in chief of Big League Politics.