Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

November 11, 2024

THERE’S A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN—And I suspect he might just be slightly more effective than Joe Biden’s Border Czar:

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll on Nov 11th, 2024

JUST NBC THE MELTDOWN! ‘Unhinged’ NBC Reporter Rips Off Daily Wire Story, Nerfs It, Then Self-Immolates On X When Called Out.

The story went viral – and was eventually picked up by NBC News reporter Mirna Alsharif (formerly CNN), who proceeded to not only rip off the report without citing the Daily Wire, she completely nerf’d it — failing to adhere to basic journalistic standards despite all of that information having been reported by DW.

When she was called out for her shitty reporting, Alsharif had a complete meltdown on X — claiming that the Daily Wire wasn’t her source, and hurtling High School insults at reporters.

And while she just deleted her account, we’ve got receipts…

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: FEMA is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful federal agency I have ever known in my life!

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Nov 11th, 2024

November 10, 2024

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: Worst Election Media Meltdowns: An American ‘Nightmare.’

It’s been a rough few days for the leftist media elites, they have been in anguish ever since Election Day.

The mix of anger and sadness poured out as they called the massive win for Donald Trump and the GOP a “nightmare” and questioned if America had “given up on democracy.” Journalists like Stephanie Ruhle warned that the voters had just “f’d around” and were about to “find out.” 

MSNBC’s Joy Reid lectured Latino men: “Y’all voted with….David Duke and against your own sisters.” MSNBC’s Claire McCaskill choked back tears as she worried that America had turned their backs on their “better angels,” by electing Trump.

The following are just a few of the most epic election meltdowns from the leftist media elite:

Earlier today, I wrote, “We Need a Mental Health Check On Millions of American Leftists.” In large part, the madness of individual Dems (particularly the performative stuff on social media) is driven by the freakouts by those who create the media they consume. And while Kamala staffers are having cognitive dissonance over how she flipped on a dime from “Hitler!!!!” to “Well, we’ll get ’em next time,” the media seemingly have no desire to dial back the hatred they displayed in the weeks leading up to the election.

Posted at 5:15 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 10th, 2024

WE NEED A MENTAL HEALTH CHECK ON MILLIONS OF AMERICAN LEFTISTS: After the election, the rage against white women.

White women who did not vote for Trump now seem to be having a collective meltdown at the actions of their sisters. One suggestion doing the rounds on social media is that female Harris-backers wear a blue bracelet so that they can identify one another and distinguish themselves from Trump voters. Elsewhere, women wanting to punish men for voting the wrong way are proposing a ‘sex strike’ and pledging ‘no sex, no dating or marriage and no having children with men – for the next four years’. And these women fancy themselves as feminists? It’s like the sexual revolution never happened.

No matter how many women don blue bracelets or refuse to have sex, Donald Trump will still be their president. It’s called democracy. So-called feminists can cry all they like about Harris not making ‘history as the first female president’. They fail to understand that voters do not want a ‘female’ president, they want a good president. They want someone who addresses their concerns, whether with the economy, inflation, men in women’s sports and changing rooms, gender identity and sexuality classes in schools, or immigration. Women voted for Trump not because he is male but because they weighed up the two candidates put before the public and decided he was the best choice. Those currently shouting ‘Karen’ and ‘internalised misogyny’ might not realise it, but women vote with their brains, not with their genitals.

And, as Bill Clinton’s Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders liked to emote, “think of the children!” Post-election, the (liberal) moms are not OK — and it’s hurting their kids.

All of the grown-ups posting about how their kids are crying and scared are revealing the kinds of parents they themselves are.

Hint: They aren’t the good guys they think they are.

Observing the phenomenon on her own social-media feed, Emily Rose Chadwick, founder of the nonprofit Mama Wilder Foundation, posted, “If your young children are in tears over the election results, it’s because you’re the kind of parent who traumatizes your kids to feel good about your political choices.”

What are these liberal parents afraid of, anyway?

That Trump will close the schools or deny basic services to disabled children?

I have to wonder: Where was the outrage from these same liberals on the fainting couches when progressive teachers unions and their Democratic supporters closed schools for over a year and a half in blue areas, denying children the right to literally show their faces in public, play on a playground, let alone get an education?

Then there are the “White liberals after having to be nice to minorities for years.” (Language alert):

Finally, from Jonathan Turley: Yale Psychiatrist: Harris Voters May Need to Cut Off Friends and Family Members.

With women pledging to break up with their boyfriends and divorce their husbands over the Trump victory, Yale University chief psychiatry resident Dr. Amanda Calhoun is advising that it may also be necessary for your mental health to cut off your family and friends who supported Trump. In that way, you can avoid being “triggered” by opposing political views — much like Yale itself.
As academics, we are dealing with the election on campuses across America. After the election, I had some valuable discussions with students who supported Harris and some who supported Trump. I wish there would be more interaction between the two groups. That is why this story stood out for me. I do not believe that further separation or isolation will help this country or these individuals.

Dr. Calhoun went on MSNBC’s Joy Reid to offer the curious take on good mental health. Reid has spent the week condemning the majority of voters (particularly minority voters) in the nation as racists and misogynists for the Trump victory.

Dive for those fainting couches!

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 10th, 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

November 9, 2024

JOHN PODHORETZ: Pogrom 2024.

Early Friday morning in Amsterdam, in the shadow of the house in which Anne Frank hid and where her family was betrayed, rampaging mobs of Muslim men targeted Israeli attendees of a soccer match featuring the Maccabi team. They beat up men and women. They broke into buildings searching for Israelis to attack. They assaulted at least one child. For hours, the streets were not clear of them, as the authorities in the Dutch city had no clue what to do or how to engage. The mobs had been prepositioned at stadium exits, subway station entrances, and near and around the hotels at which Israelis who had come to town to support their team were staying. This was a pre-planned attack. We are mere days away from the 86th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the day when Jews and Jewish businesses were specifically targeted for arrest, injury, and destruction. We’ve only ever really seen still photographs of the damage. You want to know what Kristallnacht was like? Go to Twitter and watch the videos, taken by the GoPro cameras of the goons, and you’ll get some flavor of what the word “pogrom” means. We have just seen the first unambiguous pogrom after October 7.

Now go to the home page of the New York Times. Go to the home page of the Washington Post. Go to CNN. Go. See where they have placed this story. It is two screens down, in smaller type. Now, fair is fair—it happened in the evening and these organizations no longer have things like Amsterdam bureaus. So this is a rare moment to thank God for the existence of social media; without X the world would not have known that the horror was upon us.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 6:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 9th, 2024

NIALL FERGUSON: Appalled by Trump? Read how Kamala’s woke ideology has left my beloved San Francisco a cesspit of drugs and crime, and you’ll begin to see why it’s lucky she didn’t win.

California has been ruled by Democrats since the mid-1990s. There hasn’t been a Republican governor since Arnold Schwarzenegger’s term expired in January 2011. There hasn’t been a Republican mayor of San Francisco since 1964. So the Dems have been able to run the experiment. And the results of one-party rule are stunning.

State taxes on the well-off are amongst the highest in the US, and set to rise higher, driving the wealthy away to low-tax states such as Florida and Texas. At the same time, the state has made itself a magnet for illegal immigrants by establishing no fewer than 20 ‘sanctuary’ cities or counties that refuse to enforce immigration law.

And the results? California now has 12 per cent of the nation’s population, but over 30 per cent of its welfare recipients. According to a 2020 Census Bureau report, which took housing and other costs into account, the poverty rate in California is 17.2 per cent, the highest of any state.

There’s a chronic housing shortage, mainly because a plethora of regulations make the construction of affordable housing well-nigh impossible. The state’s public schools rank 34th in the country overall and have the highest pupil-teacher ratio. Oh, and there are recurrent wildfires because of chronic management of public woodlands, and periodic droughts because of insufficient investment in reservoirs.

When I first visited San Francisco in 1981, it was still one of the loveliest cities I had ever beheld. Now its streets are so filthy – human excrement and syringe needles are the principal hazards – that I avoid it. The leaders of Democraticy Inc. – the Donorcrats who raised the billion dollars squandered by the Harris campaign since July – thought they could seize control of the whole of America, red states and all, and so perform the same reverse alchemy, turning gold into lead from coast to coast.

Thank God, they were wrong. That is why their candidate Kamala Harris has joined the sad list of sitting vice-presidents who failed to win the presidency, along with Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Al Gore.

More news from the once golden state: California Air Regulators Vote on New Climate Program That Will Likely Increase Gas Prices Up to $1.50 Per Gallon After Election Where GOP Captured More Counties.

Posted at 6:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 9th, 2024

ABC NEWS CLEARLY TAKING TRUMP’S WIN WELL: Grocers ‘outraged’ after Whoopi Goldberg calls them ‘pigs’ over food inflation on The View.

Grocery store owners clapped back after Whoopi Goldberg on ABC’s “The View” called them “pigs” over food inflation — and raised concerns that the name-calling could expose store owners to further violence, The Post has learned.

The comedian claimed “the folks that own the groceries are pigs” as she blamed them for rising prices at supermarkets on the Thursday show — a day after Donald Trump won the presidential election by hammering on inflation in his campaign.

“Your pocketbook is bad, not because the Bidens did anything. Not because the economy is bad. Your grocery bills are what they are because the folks that own the groceries are pigs,” Goldberg said on the popular program.

Earlier: Milton Friedman’s Revenge.

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 9th, 2024

THIS IS CNN: CNN Panel Meltdown Over Trans Issue Shows Left Learned No Lessons From 2024 Defeat.

A CNN panel discussion this past week perfectly exemplified the Left’s remaining blindspot on the transgender issue, which the Wall Street Journal called the “sleeper issue” of the 2024 election.

One guest, Jay Michaelson, yelled at strategist Shermichael Singleton for supposedly being
“transphobic” for explaining that boys who identify as trans playing in female sports is not a popular policy with families across the country. Moreover, CNN host Abby Phillips, amazingly, tried to police Singleton’s language instead of shutting down Michaelson’s tantrum.

“They’re not boys! I’m not gonna listen to ‘transphobia’ at this table!” Michaelson interrupted Singleton. “Did you call a ‘trans girl’ a boy?! … When you use words as a slur, I’m gonna interrupt.”

“They’re not boys! They’re not boys!” Michaelson continued to interrupt. “I’m not gonna sit there and listen to that.”

Phillips tried to “reset” the discussion by saying the trans issue is a “heated” one, but notably called on Singleton to seemingly police his language to be “respectful” to Michaelson.

“I think out of respect for Jay, let’s try to talk about this in a way that is respectful,” Phillips said to Singleton.

It’s an astonishing bit of tag-team language bullying against Singleton, both by the world’s angriest rabbi, and the show’s equally leftist host:

UPDATE: As Richard Fernandez tweets, “One of the ways to defend a position is to insist on language that makes it impossible to attack or criticize it at all. Control of language is an immensely powerful tactic. Once you concede the vocabulary you are doomed.”

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 9th, 2024

WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PIERS MORGAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY:

Related: How Trump and Musk Could Cut $2 Trillion in Government Spending.

Posted at 2:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 9th, 2024

FLORIDA TRUMP SUPPORTERS WEARING THEIR SKIRTS TOO HIGH: FEMA Official Ordered Relief Workers To Skip Houses With Trump Signs.

A federal disaster relief official ordered workers to bypass the homes of Donald Trump’s supporters as they surveyed damage caused by Hurricane Milton in Florida, according to internal correspondence obtained by The Daily Wire and confirmed by multiple federal employees.

A FEMA supervisor told workers in a message to “avoid homes advertising Trump” as they canvassed Lake Placid, Florida to identify residents who could qualify for federal aid, internal messages viewed by The Daily Wire reveal. The supervisor, Marn’i Washington, relayed this message both verbally and in a group chat used by the relief team, multiple government employees told The Daily Wire.

The government employees told The Daily Wire that at least 20 homes with Trump signs or flags were skipped from the end of October and into November due to the guidance, meaning they were not given the opportunity to qualify for FEMA assistance. Images shared with The Daily Wire show that houses were skipped over by the workers, who wrote in the government system messages such as: “Trump sign no entry per leadership.”

FEMA has apparently confirmed this incident took place:

“FEMA admits this happened,” Ace writes. “They claim they took ‘extreme actions’ in response. I bet those ‘extreme actions’ consisted of one hour of ‘retraining.’”

Not even that. As the Daily Wire notes, “The employees say that Washington has not been punished for the guidance, but has been shifted to another county in Florida.”

UPDATE Ron DeSantis weighs in:

UPDATE (1:14 PM): Jennifer Rubin weighs in to defend FEMA, then deletes Tweet and vows to leave Twitter for Threads:

UPDATE: FEMA Fires Official Who Told Hurricane Relief Workers to Skip Trump Homes.

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 9th, 2024

CHARDONNAY IS A HELLUVA DRUG: Nancy Pelosi blames President Biden for Trump’s victory.

Nancy Pelosi has blamed President Biden for Donald Trump winning the White House as a Democrat blame game intensifies.

The former House speaker, a party grandee who was instrumental in persuading the president to eventually step aside, criticised Biden for not dropping out of the race sooner.

She also said there should have been an internal process to decide on the candidate rather than the coronation of Kamala Harris.

Pelosi, 84, believes Harris would have “done well” in the primary and “been stronger going forward”.

Back in February The Hill was reporting: Pelosi says Biden ‘very sharp’: ‘He’s younger than I am.’

AP reported in July that the Democrats needed Kamala on the ticket to legally (read “easily”) transfer Joe’s war chest:

Vice President Kamala Harris has been one of President Joe Biden’s staunchest defenders following his shaky performance in last week’s debate, but she’s also emerged as a potential option to lead the party herself if Biden opted not to continue his campaign.

One big question is what would happen to the current campaign’s $91 million cash on hand, according to its most recent filings. (Combined with allied Democratic organizations, the reelection effort has access to $240 million cash on hand, the campaign said this week.)

* * * * * * * *

Since their campaign account was registered with the Federal Election Commission in the name of both candidates, Harris could use those funds for her own presidential effort if Biden were to drop out, according to Kenneth Gross, senior political law counsel at Akin Gump and former associate general counsel for the Federal Election Commission.

* * * * * * * * *

What happens to the funds if neither Biden nor Harris is the nominee?

According to Gross, their campaign would have to give all the money back — sort of.

Any donations designated for the primary — which Biden won — would stay with the campaign, Gross said, something that technically could apply to any money taken in by Biden-Harris up until the Democratic National Convention in August.

“All contributions made prior to the August convention are deemed to be for the primary unless the donor designates in writing that the contribution is for general election,” Gross said.

According to Smith, if Biden left the race and Harris didn’t replace him as nominee, their former campaign could only transfer $2,000 of the money that had been collected to a new candidate.

No doubt, that was part of the calculus that led to the Sunday afternoon massacre in late July. About which, Jim Treacher writes:

By the way, we still don’t know why the president of the United States dropped out of the 2024 campaign on Twitter, during Sunday brunch, in the middle of a weeklong disappearance from the public eye. I want to know what happened to him that week, and who helped cover it up.

Maybe that’ll be Bob Woodward’s next book. He has nothing to lose now. The secret’s out.

In the meantime, America’s Newspaper of Record says that Pelosi has her eyes trained towards the horizon:

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 9th, 2024

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: CNN’s Bill Weir Declares ‘Notorious Climate Denier’ Trump Will Let Earth ‘Go to Hell.’

Making several appearances Thursday on CNN to discuss the aftermath of Donald Trump winning the presidential election, CNN chief climate correspondent Bill Weir fretted over a second Trump administration’s climate policies, and declared that the President-elect is “the most notorious climate denier in history” who will let the climate “go to hell.”

This is the same Bill Weir who famously declared “even the seagulls” were “awed” with Barack Obama’s first inauguration.

Sadly though, the seagulls, along with the rest of us, didn’t survive the era:

Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama’s first administration, he added.

— President ‘has four years to save Earth,’ the Grauniad, January 17, 2009.

And alas, we didn’t survive this deadline, either: Al Gore’s January 27, 2016 Prediction is Coming Near: The Earth Will End From Overheating.

—Newsalert, November 21, 2015.

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 12:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 9th, 2024

OLD AND BUSTED: An Army of Davids.

The New Hotness? An Army of Crybullies! I’m both in stitches, and for the first time somewhat sympathetic to the Kamala campaign, knowing that so many of its staffers are in the vein of this young man:

As Josh Barro wrote in 2022 when the WaPo was going through a de rigueur 202o-style DNC-MSM struggle session:

We have seen in the tech industry what it looks like for a company to rein in a culture of freewheeling, chaotic fighting. Google stopped telling employees to bring their whole selves to work, started telling them not to have bitter fights about politics, and punished those who wouldn’t follow the new rules. “Activist” employees got frustrated and left the company — good.1 Basecamp, a much smaller firm, drew a lot of attention for its declaration that political fights wouldn’t be allowed anymore, leading to much garment-rending and the departure of left-wing employees — something that was for the best, as it was an opportunity for workers and their organizations to be better aligned on values.

There are models for newsrooms where employees behave in a normal and professional manner on social media, in Slack, and in their general communications with and about each other. You don’t see, for instance, Wall Street Journal or Axiosreporters criticizing each other in public or decrying management for failing to run the outlet in exactly the way they would like. You also don’t see them sharing tasteless jokes. There are expectations of professionalism set from the top, and they’re followed. Axios CEO Jim VandeHei explained on a recent episode of the Very Serious podcast how they keep newsroom drama to a minimum — it starts with a clear expectation that reporters won’t “pop off” about their opinions and won’t badmouth each other. And the WSJ is a union shop, so I don’t want to hear about how it’s impossible to develop a culture where reporters stick to their knitting if they are unionized.

It’s ultimately on Post management that they never set the expectations they ended up wanting to enforce. But it’s not too late to start.

I would finally note one thing: Organizations primarily staffed by conservatives have various problems, but they don’t have this one. And this phenomenon extends well outside the media, to liberal-staffed nonprofit and political organizations, where leaders are terrified of their employees’ potential outbursts and are therefore letting them run roughshod over strategic goals — and especially over prudent decision-making that might help win elections but do not meet every checkbox of the left-wing keyboard warriors who could cause so much trouble inside and outside the organization.

Add to the safetyism-obsessed themes of the addled young man in the video above the campaign’s apocalyptic rhetoric about Looming Orange Hitler, and imagine how schizophrenic the young staffers felt when it was all over, and hey, let bygones be bygones, and good luck to the next president!

UPDATE:

Good luck with that.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 9th, 2024

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: A Landslide Against the Media.

Democrats now face a choice. On one side are party grown-ups who are publicly acknowledging this defeat as a sharp voter rebuke of progressive policies. They are admitting that lawfare was a mistake, that the party is culturally out of touch, that lunatic interest groups are running the asylum. They worry about a growing political realignment that threatens the party’s future. That we are hearing these voices is an improvement over the past eight years.

Yet on the other side are the progressive architects of the mess, already rationalizing away the night as a function of racism, sexism and America’s supposed love affair with “fascism.” They mark the loss down to “tactical” errors—the failure to court pro-Palestinian voters, a misallocation of door-knockers, poor timing in ad buys. The party just needs better “messaging” of its “historic achievements.”

No surprise, the media is already running with this latter narrative, again providing the party a soothing alternative to the blunt reality of its ideological fail. Will Democrats be lulled again? If they really want to reconnect with voters, they will at some point have to break with what is proving to be a debilitating feedback loop.

The media itself was put on sharp notice this cycle, pushed aside by podcasters and influencers whom voters now trust more to provide reality. Nearly 50 million people have listened to Joe Rogan’s interview of Mr. Trump, as it provided a more accurate assessment of the GOP nominee’s positions and the concerns of the country than “news” articles about the “authoritarian” intent on destroying the climate, abortion rights, democracy—choose your obsession.

The DNC-MSM are always shocked when the candidate they went all-in on supporting loses, and invariably spend about ten minutes after the election publicly feigning introspection — and then nothing changes, and their bias and hatred of all politicians with an (R) after their names only gets worse. Why should this election be any different?

Related: Good news: The public has stopped listening to mass media.

Posted at 8:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Nov 9th, 2024
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