Archive for 2024

November 10, 2024

STEPHEN MILLER: The election was a referendum on the American media.

In the final month of the 2024 election, the national media existed in another solar system from the country for whom is tasked at reporting accurate, unbiased and truthful information. The final month started with Jeffrey Goldberg and the Atlantic attempting to regurgitate their anonymously sourced “suckers and losers” hit against Trump from 2020. With the help of CNN and others, they resurfaced General John Kelly. Then they went and got their full Reich on by comparing Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally to a 1939 Nazi rally there. At said rally a comedian known for celebrity roasts made a crass joke about Puerto Rico, which blanketed the whole of national media outlets for four days.

When the October jobs report was released on the final Friday of October, showing an anemic growth of only 12,000 jobs, the national media focused all of their attention on comments Trump made about former representative Liz Cheney, who had become a Kamala Harris campaign surrogate, regarding sending her off to fight the wars her family and in particular her father had endorsed.

The Atlantic, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC created an echo chamber of thought bubbles that only they were listening to. The country had completely tuned them out. None of these stories actually mattered to voting audiences and the election result, with almost every major voting demographic moving toward Donald Trump in an electoral blowout.

And now the MSM are currently attempting to play the “right wing media bias” canard on Barry Bonds-levels of steroids. At Power Line, in a post headlined, “The Left’s Parallel Universe,” Steve Hayward quotes “Michael Tomasky, a former thinker and current editor of The New Republic (a former magazine)” on “the real reason Democrats lost the election:”

Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often. . . This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. [Emphasis added.]

Tomasky includes Elon Musk and Joe Rogan as part of “the right-wing media,” but Rogan was a former Bernie Bro, and Musk has been quoted as saying, “They try to paint me as a far-right guy which is absurd because I like to make electric vehicles … I supported Obama. I stood in line for six hours to shake Obama’s hand.”

As Glenn noted in the very early days of Instapundit, “As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they’re looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don’t. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 10th, 2024

DISPATCHES FROM THE MARGARET DUMONT PARTY: Rich Lowry writes that “Trans Moralism Is Killing the Democrats.”

This is what happened on trans issues in the election. Donald Trump’s “she’s for they/them” attack ad was the most effective and consequential political spot of this century.

After writing up “Progressive” Jay Michaelson’s performative struggle-session freakout on CNN when “Republican strategist Shermichael Singleton said a lot of families don’t think that boys should play girls’ sports,” which we mentioned yesterday, Lowry provides additional examples:

The longtime chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, Gilberto Hinojosa, just got defenestrated at least in part for daring to say the obvious on the trans issues.

“You can support transgender rights up and down all the categories where the issue comes up, or you can understand that there’s certain things that we just go too far on, that a big bulk of our population does not support,” he said in an election postmortem.

He’d have been better off saying that the party should in the future call for the official end of the gender binary, by violence if necessary.

* * * * * * * * *

A top aide to Democratic representative Seth Moulton resigned after the congressman had the temerity to say that his party may have gone too far on the trans stuff. “I have two little girls,” he said. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Well, he’s supposed to be afraid for a reason.

The co-chair of the Bay State Stonewall Democrats said his remarks were “harmful to the queer community.” Mass Equality called him out for using the terms “male or formerly male,” which, of course, are “harmful and factually inaccurate.” And so it went.

The Left’s moralistic browbeating may succeed in reinforcing the trans orthodoxy among its own, despite the bitter electoral consequences. As we learned last Tuesday, though, the rest of the country won’t play by these poisonously stupid and illiberal rules, nor should it.

That was the game the DNC-MSM tried to play for years by attempting to toss the phrase “illegal immigration” down the memory hole amongst polite company, until June, when Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, decided he wasn’t going to play along on MSNBC when confronted by former Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris flack Symone Sanders-Townsend: “That’s Sweet. They’re illegal aliens.”

As one of the characters working on the ever-shrinking “Newspeak Dictionary” in Orwell’s 1984 said about his job, “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words… Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” Which in the modern left’s fantasies means not voting for Republicans, ever. And when the voters have temerity not to follow the Inner Party’s rules, as James Piereson writes, their operatives with bylines lash out at them: Democrats and never-Trumpers blame the voters.

Jill Filipovic, a feminist author and columnist: “In the coming days there’s gonna be a lot of opining about what the Harris campaign did wrong, but this election was not an indictment of Kamala Harris. It was an indictment of America.”

Peter Wehner, a fellow at the Trinity Forum: “This election was a CAT scan on the American people, and as difficult as it is to say, as hard as it is to name, what it revealed, at least in part, is a frightening affinity for a man of borderless corruption. Donald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.”

George T. Conway, a never-Trumper: “America did this to itself. And now we must all suffer through it.”

Jonathan Last, of The Bulwark: “Joe Biden was given the choice of betting liberal democracy on structures and the levers of power, or on the innate goodness of the American people. He put his entire chip stack on the American people and lost.”

William Kristol, also of The Bulwark: “The American people have made a disastrous choice. And they have done so decisively, and with their eyes wide open. . . . After everything . . . the American people liked what they saw [in Trump]. At a minimum, they were willing to accept what they saw.”

David Frum, an author and columnist for The Atlantic: “Above all, we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt.

Yes David, but we eventually got through the Obama years just fine. Speaking of whom:

As he’s been doing throughout the past week, allow Scott Jennings to put things neatly into perspective: ‘Fainting Party:’ Scott Jennings Advising the Democrats About Why They Suck Is Hilariously Brutal (Watch).

Exit quote: “Even Van Jones laughed at that.”

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 10th, 2024

#JOURNALISM:

Related:

Posted at 11:46 am by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 10th, 2024

WHOEVER TRUMP PICKS AS TREASURY SECRETARY WILL NEED TO BE GOOD AT ADMINISTERING CUTS: Bessent, Seen as a Leading Candidate for Treasury Secretary, Meets With Trump, Sources Say. “Prominent investor Scott Bessent met with Donald Trump on Friday as he and fellow investor John Paulson emerge as leading candidates for the key role of U.S. Treasury Secretary, according to two people close to the president-elect. . . . A longtime hedge fund investor who taught at Yale University for several years, Bessent has a warm relationship with the president-elect and has spoken highly of Trump’s use of tariffs as a negotiating tool. Paulson, a billionaire investor and major Trump donor, is a longtime proponent of tax cuts and deregulation.”

Posted at 9:42 am by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 10th, 2024

WELL, YES:

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds on Nov 10th, 2024
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