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Can Trump get through the firewall?

The New Neo Posted on by

The media is bound and determined to present Trump in the worst light possible, and Harris in the best light possible. To do this they will outright lie, distort the facts in more subtle ways, and ignore what doesn’t fit their narrative. For the most part, social media puts its finger on the anti-Trump scale, too.

It is propaganda, and do not underestimate its influence, which is pervasive.

One of Trump’s many problems, now that the Democrats got the impediment of Joe Biden out of the way, is to cut through all of that. During the 2016 campaign the anti-Trump propaganda was already present, but since then we’ve been subjected to nine years (starting in the summer of 2015) of it, nonstop and escalating. The lies build on the previous lies to form an edifice of anti-Trump lies, and there is also widespread ignorance about the good things that haven’t been covered or that have hardly been covered.

At this point there are a lot of Trump supporters and there are also a lot of people who would never vote for him (or perhaps for any Republican). It may be that those two groups are roughly equal in number, so let’s ignore them for a moment. It’s those voters in-between who matter in this particular election. But even they have been subjected to that relentless 9-year anti-Trump campaign in all its manifestations.

Let’s take commenter “Bauxite” at this blog, who does not like Trump but who is not – if I’m correct – any sort of Democrat. He (I assume “Bauxite” is a he; apologies if I’m wrong) writes:

If Harris was relentlessly being defined as a San Francisco progressive, who holds all of the positions that she held until about two weeks ago and utterly failed to manage the border, she might have to come out and actually take questions from the press and respond.

Instead, for the first two weeks of her campaign, when the fight to define her was on, Trump chose to focus his attacks on calling her a DEI hire and questioning her racial identity. These attacks did not land, to put it mildly. Harris is more than happy to have a campaign about diversity, firsts, and Donald Trump’s bad manners.

If Harris isn’t taking any flack on issues that the electorate actually cares about, she’s going remain behind her moat. Trump has already kissed away the best timing he will ever have in this campaign with frivolous drivel. It is debatable whether he has time to recover. It is less debatable whether he possesses the character and temperament to recover.

I disagree utterly with the first paragraph there. The MSM has its own agenda and they will interview Harris if and when they think it will help the Democrats, or if something absolutely seismic occurs with her – and those interviews, if they do occur, will be designed to enhance her campaign. The press does not respond to Trump’s accusations except to supposedly “debunk” them.

For paragraph two, I agree that we’ve heard little from Trump except tangential remarks that could hurt him as well as help him. The “Kamala wasn’t black till recently” remark was at the National Association of Black Journalists get-together, and it was in response to a question about whether Kamala was a DEI hire. The questions at that interview were in the form of “gotcha” queries and the press controlled the narrative. In fact, his remark may have helped him with black male voters, but it’s not clear whether that’s correct, and in any case it allowed the press to control the narrative.

But the press controls the narrative for the most part anyway, and they have a virulently anti-Trump agenda.

Take a look at the transcript of that Trump appearance. He said more – a great deal more – than that remark about Kamala’s ethnicity. But the press picked up on that and practically nothing else, as though that’s all he said. And that’s what always will happen, and Trump can’t avoid making occasional remarks that they’ll exploit.

Is this a character flaw of Trump’s? I’m not at all sure, because sometimes the amplification of his controversial remarks actually helps him more than it hurts him. Those who hate him will not be changing their minds, but what about those in the middle? I don’t know the answer, but that’s the question.

However, all one has to do is remember the Romney campaign in 2012 to realize that the press will do this to any Republican candidate. You can say that it’s easier to do it to Trump because he gives them more ammunition, but as I’ve said, the ammunition cuts both ways. Romney wasn’t into saying controversial things, but the press made the most of what he did say and it very much framed his image, particularly among women. Remember “binders of women”? If not, take a look. And if you think it didn’t matter, think again; it was a big deal among the vast majority of the women I know.

So the question I would ask everyone is this: how do you know what Trump has said and what he hasn’t said about Harris? Isn’t it that the MSM has amplified a controversial remark, and then it’s discussed and discussed until the next remark comes along that they can exploit?

As far as Harris is concerned, it was only on July 21 that Biden said he wasn’t running, and endorsed her. That was about three weeks ago. You can take a look at Trump’s public appearances since that date, and see the full transcripts of his remarks at this site. As far as I can see, he’s done the aforementioned interview with black journalists, a press conference, and a rally in Atlanta since then. He’s also posted on TruthSocial, and then last night there was the interview on “X” with Musk.

If you look, for example, at the transcript of the Atlanta rally (about a week ago), you’ll see plenty of hard-hitting policy criticism of Kamala Harris. But it doesn’t get covered that way, and most people aren’t in attendance at the rally.

The press conference transcript is here. Of course, as with all press conferences, Trump is responding to questions, and therefore doesn’t have total control of the topics. But here’s a quote about Harris (he said many other things about her, but this is the one most relevant to Bauxite’s critique and suggestions) [my emphasis]:

Question: How have you recalibrated your strategy to compete against Harris?

Donald Trump:

I haven’t recalibrated strategy at all. It’s the same policies, open borders, weak on crime. I think she’s worse than Biden because he got forced into the position. She was there long before. She destroyed San Francisco. She destroyed California as the AG, but as the DA, she destroyed… San Francisco… Friend of mine, Bob Tisch, you all know the Tisch family, he was in many cities with companies. He said the greatest city in the country is San Francisco. That was about 20 years ago, and he passed away a while ago and he would be looking down, said, “What happened?” He thought it was the best city in the country. He had divisions there, loads, and he would be looking down in horror now when he sees. She destroyed no cash bail, weak on crime. She’s terrible.

And then there’s this from the transcript of yesterday’s interview with Musk:

Well, the good thing is that you and I have and some people, very few, we can get the word out. Although sometimes it’s hard because they don’t want to print it, you know, like, like we’re having a great conversation right now. Kamala wouldn’t have this conversation. She can’t because she’s not. You know, she’s not a smart person, by the way. She can’t have this conversation.

Or:

[Harris] is considered more liberal by far than Bernie Sanders. She’s a radical left lunatic. And if she’s going to be our president, very quickly you’re not going to have a country anymore. And she’ll go back to all the things that she believes in.

She believes in defunding the police. She believes in no fracking, zero. Now, all of a sudden, she’s saying, no, I will. I really want to see frackets — that if they got in the day she got in, she’ll end fracking. …

A lot of people thought she’d pick sort of the opposite [as VP], but she picked an anti-Israel radical left person. But she is far worse, they say, than Bernie Sanders. If we have her as a president, if we have a Democrat at this moment as a president, I don’t think our country can survive.

Until now, Trump has also posted on TruthSocial, but that’s more or less an echo chamber. I don’t know what messages he’s posted there, but I can almost guarantee they have included branding Harris as a San Francisco progressive who’s been destructive to that city, because that’s something he’s been saying for a while. Now he’s posting on X again, starting very recently (I believe yesterday), and checking it out just now I saw this:

Exactly what Bauxite is complaining that he didn’t do. But perhaps Trump could be criticized for not doing this sooner? Well, I went to YouTube, and found that the same ad was posted there two weeks ago. Where did the ad air? I don’t know, other than YouTube, and I don’t watch TV for the most part.

This is a lengthy post, but my basic message is one I’ve delivered before, and not just about Trump: how do you know a person or people haven’t done something, if the MSM isn’t reporting on it? Of course a candidate should be able to get past that – must be able to get past that – but how? People may not trust the MSM (and many social media outlets) but one or the other or both still shape their perceptions – and that’s even true of many people on the right as well as the left. This may happen by omission even if we’re unaware we’re being influenced.

Comments

Can Trump get through the firewall? — 89 Comments

  1. Wow-do people really think this? I think Bauxite is pretty spot on. And the Trump quotes you provide-they are rambling and incoherent and he’s just saying nonsense things not really based in fact. “She destroyed SF. She destroyed CA”. While I am sure many would disagree, that can be a policy argument, were it advanced by someone less stupid and lazy than Trump. It would go “She supports X policy-she advanced it in the following situations/times/bills, etc. This policy directly led to this problem, which is destroying SF”. Really-this is not hard. It’s just that your guy is brain dead.

  2. People may not trust the MSM

    There’s a little blurb going around conservative sites today about how Stephen Colbert had some CNN hack on his show yesterday, and at one point Colbert said : “I know you guys are objective over there, that you just report the news as it is” and evidently the audience busted out into laughter over that comment. And this is a hyper leftwing audience. It seems like at least some people on the left are well aware that CNN (and likely pretty much all the other mainstream “News” outlets) are not at all objective. It’s just a matter of whether or not they care or agree with the propaganda. It is interesting though. In poll after poll trust in the media is at rock bottom.

  3. honestly I think either people on our side, don’t really want to win, or don’t care about the consequences of a loss, we accepted the treacherous lie of a steal, certain all our betters did and it was left to sydney powell and Guiliani and Eastman to fend for themselves, when attacked by that hack Marc Elias, and everything that has followed, from the Supreme Courts unwilling to enforce the election law to that tragic episode on January 6th,

    every calamity that has befallen us, and our allies, on three continents, and yet they say, it’s fine, nothing to see here, the Maralago raid which certainly looks like a probe of an hitjob, the simultaneous wave of indictments in four jurisdictions based on nothing, this crescendo of events that led to July 13th

  4. Also, “the MSM has it in for Trump and really wants to help democrats” is, like, next-level delusion. News Flash: the MSM wants to sell news. They have to adhere to some standard of accuracy and accountability, but they are going to fram coverage for maximal visibility. I actually think a lot of respectable outlests are being overly deferential to Trump. They are printing his rambling nonsense, and then providing a summary in the coherent English, as if what he is saying has any merit whatsoever. And They are not stating the obvious fact that this person is cognitively impaired.

    Biden’s debate performance was terrible, and rightly drew concern. But it also shielded Trump from the scrutiny he deserved. He has not uttered a coherent sentence in years. He is unable to focus and launch a credible attack against Harris-who I hope kicks his fat white ass-but she’s not the strongest candidate ever and there are clear vulnerabilities. But he is so focused on how he was wronged by Biden’s withdrawal, how Harris is “a low IQ person”, that he can not formulate an English language sentence that would constitute a substantive attack

  5. People like Baby Giraffe are why we have been suffering under the present administration these last 4 years. All the Democrats have is “hate and fear” and anyone I know supporting a Democrat has drunk that deadly mixture and that is carrying the day. Policies? Give me a break!

  6. Assuming I understand Neo’s point correctly…

    Vance seems to handle himself better than Trump in that regard. In some of the clips I’ve seen (eg, with Dana Bash), he calls out the uselessness of the MSM’s trivial talking point and counters, We really need to be talking about x and y.

    So, yes, the MSM does focus on bad-sounding trivia and magnifies Trump’s responses thereto. But if Trump were simply to (1) not bring up such matters in the first place and (2) **not engage** when questioned on them (ie, observe Vance and learn), we might hear more of substance from the MSM. Of course, the MSM could simply then report nothing on Trump, but even that would be preferable to the focus on the trivia.

    Unfortunately, I don’t think Trump can or will change, such that the problem identified by Neo will continue for the duration. (So, I guess I’m saying, with Neo as I understand her, that it’s the MSM’s fault — but it’s also Trump’s in significant part.)

    Fortunately, we have (1) Vance and (2) the forthcoming debate(s) between Trump and Harris. Re the latter, the MSM will likely pose some questions on the trivial stuff, but there will be a good deal of substance as well. And Trump did a good job in the debate with Biden when, several times, he essentially ignored the question and made his own substantive points. As long as people actually watch the debates and don’t rely solely on the MSM’s post-debate analysis…

    PS: The “Preview” button doesn’t seem to do anything.

  8. Excellent post, neo. And one of the key issues in this election.

    Trump has to get to the persuadable voters. The people who have been hit hard by crime, inflation or immigration. Or people whose kids had to attend school from home. Or people who hated the unnecessary lockdowns. There’s some evidence that Blacks and Hispanics are joining this group as they’ve seen the results of Dem rule “with their own lyin’ eyes.”

    I have an ex-girlfriend whose dad was a fireman. She’s an Irish, Catholic union Democrat from the Kennedy era. She gets all her “news” from ABC. If it’s not on ABC, it didn’t happen for her.

    As a woman, she just hates Trump. So many women do. I’m on dating websites and I frequently see women (in Omaha!) who won’t date a Trump supporter.

    The shocker for me is that people don’t seem to understand that all of our wild inflation is a direct result of the insane spending by the Dems.

    We had a giant windstorm in Omaha on July 31. I’ve asked people if they knew that OPPD has a net zero policy. Only one out of 12 knew it. People don’t pay attention and the media doesn’t help one bit. The connection here is that OPPD has spent millions on worthless solar and wind when it should have spent the money trimming trees and hardening the infrastructure.

    Elon made an excellent point in his interview with Trump. He said he lost his son to the woke mind virus. He is so, so right.

    As Baltasar Gracian, S.J. wrote in 1647, “Open your eyes before it is too late.”

  9. Please, please, someone provide an example of a substantive point that Trump has made in 2024. I mean, really we can go back further, but I’m dying to understand what you all mean when you say he can make substantive points.

  10. Watt:

    I’ve written many times that Trump is not anywhere near as articulate as he should be on issues. I didn’t support him in the primaries, but here we are. And I agree that Vance does much better on that dimension, as does DeSantis. Trump is good at entertaining crowds in the rallies; he’s pretty funny as well. He’s good at stirring up controversy. But still, his record as president was 1000% better than that of Biden.

    However, this post isn’t about whether Trump can say articulate things in interviews. It’s not his forte. But it doesn’t matter, because look what the MSM is saying about Vance, for example (or what they said about Romney). That’s my point – it almost doesn’t matter what any GOP candidate says or how well it’s articulated (short of some sort of genius at it), because the MSM is out to destroy that person and the MSM and social media still have a lot of power. That’s my point. And in line with that point, in this post I’m saying that Trump – and Trump ads – has actually been calling Kamala a radical leftist right from the get-go. But most of us (including Bauxite) are unaware of it. The only things the media wants to make us aware of are the things they think will hurt Trump and/or Republicans in general.

  11. “The shocker for me is that people don’t seem to understand that all of our wild inflation is a direct result of the insane spending by the Dems.”

    Let me fix this for you:

    “The The shocker for me is that people don’t seem to understand the reduction of inflation is a direct result of the controlled spending by the Dems.”

    There

  12. the crime wave the inflation the wars on every continent, all of it has her bloody hands on it, Kabul capitulation, the Kiev invasion, the kibbutzes of southern israel
    the way she empowers gang leaders and terrorists and every combination of same, how she is part an parcel of the wretched Fani and Fat Alvin and the DC nazgul who has led the criminals loose and made the citizens cower
    I really don’t even want to talk about a wretched creature like they have foisted on is she is lazy evil and ridiculous, all at once, the fact the regime the combine chose her, is a reflection of their contempt for us,

    which reduction in spending every continuing resolution drives the spiral higher, thats why the highest interest rates in a generation have not solved the problem, because this balloon is being inflated tohindenberg size

    it would be small confort that these expenses were directed to necessary measures but this isn’t that at all, its a colossal boondoggle to so called clean energy programs to diversity sinecures et al, while we drain our own fuel reserves, our own ammunition, while they attack our own food supply,

  13. I see we have a visit from a new troll today, an unintentionally humorous one: “Also, ‘the MSM has it in for Trump and really wants to help democrats’ is, like, next-level delusion.”

    Funny stuff.

  14. It’s been a long time since I’ve commented, but I have this blog in my RSS feeds and I read every entry. Long time lurker, although I’ve commented here and there.

    I want to take this time and pour some cold water on the notion that “if only Trump would talk policy, Kamala Harris’ campaign would crash and Trump would win in a landslide.” (Or at least, that seems to be the implicit idea. I threw in the landslide exaggeration just to be funny.)

    I actually understand the argument, and I understand why it’s being offered. But the argument simply won’t work in contemporary America. Let me explain why. Folks: We’re in the post-truth era. Just because YOU care about the policies and are eminently rational in all your political calculations and estimations doesn’t mean that 97% of the folks out there are just like you. Far from it, actually.

    I’m sorry to break it to you – they aren’t. I’ve been following politics closely for 32 years. Facts and policy issues no longer matter. We’re over that cliff. Truth and accuracy and facts are no longer relevant. Because if they were, Kamala’s poll numbers would be in the mid 20’s. People simply don’t care about policy facts or positions. They care about Narrative and Story.

    We shifted to a Narrative culture a couple of decades ago. You can tell this by simply jumping on YouTube and watching a daytime/evening TV interview of a celebrity or politician, particularly from the 70s or 80s. They were largely sterile, serious conversations. (Interesting, but rarely entertaining.) Perhaps with a few jokes sprinkled here and there, but the presentation and, more importantly, the substance, was deeply serious. It mattered what the facts were. We were still an Enlightenment society.

    Take the 1988 election, for instance. Dukakis left the DNC Convention with a 17 point lead over George H. W. Bush. However, over the next two months, as people focused in on Dukakis’ record, his numbers collapsed and Bush Sr. — Bush Sr!! — beat Dukakis by 8 points and won over 400 electoral votes.

    Now, the country is in a far different position today. Yes, people are going to pay more attention to Kamala’s past policy positions, and she very well might lose some points that way. But — It would no shock me if they didn’t. Why? Because people no longer care about factual issues. They care about the almighty Narrative. Narrative is king.

    And that is why Trump keeps harping on her as a DEI-hire, as a woke prosecutor, as someone who crapped on California, etc. It doesn’t matter that the proximate cause may be too attenuated to truly link Kamala *factually* to those assertions. What matters is the Narrative that she’s only gotten to where she is because she was Indian until she was Black.

    Now, that story might not resonate with you or me. But let me tell you, I know a LOT of blue collar folks to whom that DOES resonate. And some of them aren’t white.

    We’re in a different political ballgame than where we were even 20 years ago. Trump, with all his flaws, instinctively and intuitively seems to know this, and that’s why he does what he does. He’s playing the Narrative game, and it might — might — pay off this November. (Barring the usual caveats with cheating, black swans, etc.)

    What I can tell you for sure: if he were to stop playing the Narrative game and just talk about policy matters, he won’t win in November guaranteed. Guaranteed. Why? Most people don’t care about those granular details any more.

    You may disagree with my assertions here. That’s fine. But I’m reasonably certain that I’m right on the money with this.

  15. I have noticed that it’s not just highly biased coverage of Trump (unfavorable) and Harris (fawning) this time around, from the Legacy Mainstream Media. This time around, the saturation of stories is on the Harris / Walz campaign. The Trump / Vance campaign is being starved of airtime.

    There must be a neutral party organization that tracks news coverage as a part of polling. I wonder where the stories are (I don’t really wonder). But I note that the ratio is roughly 4 : 1, maybe worse, when it comes to measuring the airtime for stories on these two subjects. The Borg has realized that Trump thrives on media coverage, and has decided to starve the beast.

    Listening to some of the blogs and podcasts, I can see that I’m not the only one noticing.

  16. Got into politics in 2001 right after 911; however, had starting noticing a lot of weird media happening on election day 2000. George W. Bush against Vice President Al Gore. On the way home from a legal job that day, the radio announced that someone was calling the race for Al Gore. I’ve told this story before here, but even for non-political me that didn’t sound right. It couldn’t have been much later than 5-5:30 PM EST, and Al Gore had won—according to the news announcement. What about the other time zones—heck, it was still early in California!?!

    Anyway, turns out the liberal media was discouraging voters in my area to not waste their time. On reflection, it seems that that tactic would’ve worked against DEM voters also.

    Wasn’t much into news at that time either, but the turmoil of who had actually won couldn’t be avoided even by non-political me. I barely watched or heard news back then, but had relatives call me asking what was going on in Florida. I dunno…I don’t vote.

    Anyway, Bush eventually won, and I ended up thinking that the MSM acted weird during that time.

    911 happened, and MSM was asking where is the President during these trying times for our Nation. At that point I knew MSM was a bunch of shysters or enemy infiltrators. MSM never gave him a break, but Bush never whined or complained about them—‘Just politics’ he would reply when asked about it.

    I voted for Trump twice. Wanted to vote for Cruz or Rubio, but MAGA was strong pestering even back then. Was NPA voter at the time, so didn’t vote in primaries.

    Was already close to not voting for Trump this time—his selection of Vance made it official that I would not vote for the Trump/Vance ticket.

    Am tired of hearing how bad MSM treats Trump, how ‘Democrats CHEATED to win’, and the 24/7 non-stop complaining from far too many in the Republican party. Does such behavior turnoff any voters? It has for me. Only way I would vote for Trump again is if Michelle Obama was running, and my vote would actually be against her.

    How bad does Trump seem to a lot of voters? DEMs can flip from Biden to Harris, and a lot of voters are happy with the change to Harris.

    Meanwhile… Harris is up by 2.7 in the 538 poll.

  17. So, the talking points seem to be coalescing around “it’s all Trump’s fault that he can’t get his message out, and despite the media’s best attempts to be fair and balanced, they can’t help focusing on the trivial rather than the substantive points of his campaign, because he makes such an easy target.”

    It’s called advocacy journalism for a reason. It’s not new, and the debate was heating up in the late 60’s- early 70’s when I was in journalism school.

    POV journalism was more the norm in the history of journalism (which was only the print variety). In an attempt to elevate journalism to a “profession” rather than a trade– the idea of the objective, unaligned, unbiased reporter was born.

    The POV was relegated to the Editorial pages– and the hard news was supposed to be fact based. Journalism has moved to the airwaves and in the 24 hour cycle we have been in for a decade or two, the amount of Editorial/Opinion content dwarves the slice of “hard news” sprinkled in between.

    And the amount of liberal opinion shows dwarves conservative opinion. Add to that younger people (under 40?) rely on shows like Jon Stewart for their news, where news/entertainment blur to “newstainment”.

    And we end up with a very uninformed citizenry.

  18. lost in 2000, by a margin of 537 votes, discarding military ballots, allowing a horde of inelligible ones, in counties like Hillsborough for instance,
    they they decided standard voting machines were not sufficient, so they had to go digital but the results did not pan out and they blamed Diebold, then they proceeded to play a same game in 2004, with Ahia as the target, the whole Conyers swansong all those who are ‘defenders of democracy’ now, then in 2006, they managed to get the Secretary of States in a few key states, so the Obama cult of personality, of course no one really complained McCain basically threw the match and threw a capable and earnest young woman under the bus, of course Charlies Cheetah had basically drained the party funds with his major domo Jim Greer,

    by 2012, they had totally coordinated the collusion with tech companies like Facebook and Twitter, and of course the hapless Romney campaign did not help things along, no one protested then, the GOP reaction to the lawfare against the Tea Party and the steal was to entertain amnesty, Ted Cruz was one oft he few that held that deluge away

    Mcconnell ran inference against any real challenge to Obama in the years between the Obama election and 2016, as you may know from my appearances in 2015, I was not a fan of Trump, but people I trusted did see some value in him, many of those have sadly passed on, some rather recently, When all of these games were played in 2016, all of a sudden, the Democrats discovered that democracy isn’t really all that if it’s orange,

  19. Michael Towns @ 4:46 pm. I was thinking of commenting that we had entered the post-truth era. I would add that being nice now trumps issues.

    I was thinking about this in relation to a conversation going on in another thread about climate change. It doesn’t matter whether or not climate change is human caused– or whether or not there is a steady increase in temperatures– the decision has been made to re-order the world. Regardless of the consequences.

    The global food system, from fertilizer manufacture to food storage and packaging, is responsible for up to one-third of all human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions, according to the latest figures from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a partnership of 15 research centres around the world.

    The attack on food is inevitable.

  20. There has been a very overt effort by Fox and Friends to keep Trump on message. Same for Victor Davis Hanson.

  21. Michael Towns:

    Welcome!

    I haven’t read all the comments, but I certainly am NOT saying that if Trump was better at talking policy he would be winning. That’s not the way things work, as I indicated in my comment at 4:31. Those who are more articulate about issues – such as Vance and DeSantis – get the same MSM treatment.

    When Trump made that remark about Kamala being Indian, I wrote this post in which I said something similar to what you’re saying:

    The question, of course, was a “gotcha” one, as were nearly all the questions. How might he have answered instead? He could have given a more boring version of the same thing, such as: “Whether or not Kamala Harris is a DEI hire, she plays the ethnicity card very well, and the ethnicity she emphasizes changes depending on her audience: sometimes Indian, sometimes black.” Would that have helped? I don’t think so, because he wanted to get the attention of black listeners (or any listeners) who might be susceptible to his sort of plain speaking and then have them ponder what he was actually saying, which is that Kamala is a shape-shifting racial opportunist. Dramatic remarks are better for that than bland remarks.

    Or he might have just dodged the question and said: “I don’t know. But whether she was or wasn’t a DEI hire, she has been an integral part of a failed administration and as VP has no accomplishments to her credit.” Would that have been better? Maybe; darned if I know. I doubt it would have gotten the widespread coverage he wants. His actual remarks certainly accomplished that.

    The odd thing is that of course Kamala was a DEI hire and everyone knows it. How do they know it? Joe Biden basically said it when he announced that his pick needed to be a black woman. Not “the best person for the job,” but a person hired for ethnicity and sex. He was upfront about it.

    So another response might have been to quote Biden on it. However, then the rejoinder would have been something like, “Are you suggesting that limiting the choice to a black woman means that by definition it wouldn’t be the best person for the job?” Another trap.

    All questions asked by leftist media are traps for Trump. He negotiates them in the way he thinks will reach people who still might be reached.

  22. Brian E; Michael Towns:

    I have notes for a post on the fact that Harris’ entire campaign is about identity and personality rather than issues (except for the issue of abortion, and she lies about Trump’s position on that). Oh, and party affiliation. That’s it.

  23. Michael Towns @ 4:46 pm.

    I agree with some of your thesis, that narrative is truth now for a (significant?) portion of the citizenry. This is emotion based and is a product of anxiety induced flight to safe spaces. Conflict produces anxiety. Being “nice” is the salve.

    Kamala is going to run the “joyful” campaign. Is this the first entirely psy-ops driven election in history?

    So the issue that Neo confronts is how can Trump-Vance campaign break through that firewall?

    It can’t be done with anger. Happy warrior. I think Trump can project that temperament as it appears to be his natural state. It will take discipline though. Trump needs to present his vision.

    How to wage a guerilla campaign for 2024, where the authoritarian nature of Harris-Walz as it relates to the economy and culture are hammered on social media platforms, using a citizen based talking points that would highlight the defects of the Harris-Walz ticket.

  24. A few points – Everyone cites “binders full of women” and Romney as evidence that “they’ll do it to any Republican.” I think “binders full of women” is a lot like the “JD Vance is weird and wears eyeliner” thing and the crude lies about a couch. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it a frightening demonstration of seamless oneness of the media, the left, and the Democratic party? Yes. Does it move many votes? I seriously doubt it.

    On the other hand, does the “Trump is a racist” narrative drive votes? I strongly suspect that it does. This narrative is much more powerful because Trump has a long, long history of saying racially insensitive things like . . . Kamala just became black a few years ago. Did the “McCain is a racist” narrative drive as many votes? Did the “Romney is a racist” narrative drive as many votes? I doubt it. Neither man fed that narrative the way that Trump does.

    Also, does the “Trump is an abuser of women” narrative drive votes? Again, I strongly suspect that it does. And again, Trump has fed this narrative repeatedly. Compare to “binders of women,” which was one Romney comment, one time, that didn’t even make sense.

    Also, to refine my point about lost opportunities – there is a limited amount of media “oxygen” available to Trump. Even if you can find examples in his long, rambling answers where he actually hints at the right message, Trump is wasting his “oxygen” with the stupid attacks. And the stupid attacks are the things that people remember, not the strong points.

  25. Don Imus had his own newsreader.
    When I listen to talk radio, every half hour after hear the heel clicking apparatchiks of the mainstream media. Why can’t people like Buck and Clay get their own newsreader so I don’t have to hear Karen Travers.
    It’s insidious ways like this that the mainstream media still controls what gets out?

  26. Kamala is a DEI hire
    And since she is more white than black and is of slaveowning heritage I’m glad she was called out
    She is no different from Dolezal or Warren

  27. Fantastic thread. I appreciate hearing people’s thoughts, and now that Neo reminded me, I do remember her commentary on the whole “Kamala Indian” issue.

    May I share a few additional thoughts? Just rambling, really. But everything about the last four years seems surreal. I can’t shake off that feeling. And this presidential election cycle has already ended up historic for numerous reasons relating to assassination attempts and Presidential drop outs. Stuff we haven’t seen in decades. Most Americans don’t really remember 1968. Even Reagan’s assassination attempt has largely faded. I watched a documentary on YouTube about it last week. Incredible how close Reagan was to dying, something they kept secret for a long time.

    I think we’re going to see something beyond strange either in September or October. I can’t say what it is going to be. I won’t speculate more. But let me tell you something: I’ve never felt more anxious about where the country is, spiritually and viscerally, than I feel right now. It’s dark, and getting darker.

    Even if Trump wins, it’s a short reprieve. Has anyone given any thought to the political world post-Trump? Whether that comes in November or January 2029?

    Regardless, despite the gloom, I still try to appreciate the good things in life while I still have them. Going on walks, watching sunsets. Eating ice cream with family. But the corruption, the rot is so deep, I think things are going to have to collapse and be purged before true reform or cleansing takes place.

    Sorry to ramble. I appreciate a great blog like Neo’s.

  28. I’m glad Neo has pointed this out. It was the main idea of my open thread post this morning. Again, how to break the castle walls??? Still no idea on my part.

    Baby Giraffe?.. better name would be baby elephant…ie Dumbo.

  29. Bauxite:

    Very few single statements move many votes. But I can assure you that the propaganda around Romney’s binder statement absolutely defined him among many many many woman – defined him as a woman-hater, which was ridiculous. It was highly successfully. I can’t say how many votes it changed, but it solidified him as anti-woman in the eyes of an enormous number of women who weren’t previously familiar with him.

    And you are incorrect about how Trump was framed as a racist. Republicans in general have been framed as racists for many many decades, but prior to his candidacy Trump was much admired in the black community in general. In 2020, he did better than in 2016 among black voters, particularly black men, and he did better with them than other GOP presidential candidates have in recent years. The main perception of him as a racist was a result of MSM lies about his Charlottesville remarks. His actual remarks were quite innocuous – that there were “good people” on both sides of the statue-pulling-down issue. He also had condemned the neo-Nazis. The MSM lied about what he’d said, and the Biden campaign used it as a centerpiece of their message.

    In 2024, the left was terrified about the inroads Trump seemed to be making with black voters. That’s one of the main reason Kamala was put in there – to shore up black support. And Trump’s remark about Kamala being Indian and only adopting a black identity for political reasons was an effort by Trump to appeal to black male voters.

  30. @Baby Giraffe

    As usual, our gracious host is much too gracious to scum such as you. And it is ironic you call yourself something cutesy and even sweet while peddling quasi-totalitarian, abusive gaslighting. I’ve seen Baby Giraffes. I’ve even touched a couple. The only similarity you have to them is in the quantity of shit you generate, but unlike them you lack any justification.

    Now let’s dissect this bullshit.

    Wow-do people really think this?

    We don’t merely “think” this. In many ways it is provably true on a statistical level, as well as a tonal onne.

    I think Bauxite is pretty spot on.

    But of course you do. Because it is convenient for you. Leave alone how Bauxite’s rather extreme anti-Trump and pro-GOP Establishment biases have often led him into things such as trying to claim that Romney had a better “Get out the Vote” campaign than Trump, in spite of this being objectively false when you get down to the brass tacks of the actual numbers (to the point where he began to distort the actual criteria for how GOTV is assessed, focusing on vote Percentages while ignoring the actual raw vote counts).

    But for all of my many, many issues with Bauxite and how I believe he has acted in wantonly bad faith on occasion before (especially when it comes to his Great Orange Whale), he is nowhere near as remorselessly ignorant or bad faith as you are.

    And the Trump quotes you provide-they are rambling and incoherent and he’s just saying nonsense things not really based in fact. “She destroyed SF. She destroyed CA”.

    This is incoherent bullshit of your own trying to look profound. “Not really based in fact”? Ok. Prove it. Oh, and I’m a native born Californian who left the state years ago, in large part due to the crime problems, failures of infrastructure, inflation, and so on. So this should be rich.

    While I am sure many would disagree,

    “While I am sure many would disagree….”

    Word salad weaseling.

    I’m sure many would disagree with that. That has precious little value. There are “many that would disagree” that the Nazis committed the Holocaust, that North Korea is a totalitarian shithole, that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK, that the First Gulf of Tonkin Accident happened, that Saddam had WMD (please research WTF artillery laced with nerve agents and gas are) and ties to Al Qaeda (the Philippines in particular dropped a dime on him using Iraqi embassies to ferry Abu Sayyaf around), and that the Moon is not made of cheese.

    Indeed, there has been a recent resurgence in unironic Flat Eartherism. Indeed, there are probably more flat earthers around today than there were at any point since the Jesuits finally convinced the Chinese that the world is not in fact flat in the 1600s or so. On the grand scale of things these people are certainly small, but they are still “many people” and then some.

    So the point isn’t that “many people would disagree”, it’s HOW MANY PEOPLE WOULD, and if those that would can be persuaded.

    And there’s a reason why there’s been a significant amount of emigration from California and deregistration from the Democrat Party. And while some of those might be related to completely or largely unrelated matters like – say – Jose Sinaloa de los Zetas being told to migrate to Chicago by his Jefes to whack someone, or opportunistic Dems going to be Independents to try and outflank the party bosses, a lot of them ARE doing so due to discontent with Leftist politics in California, including by Kamala Harris.

    I would know. I’m one of them.

    And I don’t have to give a flying fuck if “many would” disagree on whether or not I or people like me exist any more than a geologist has to give a farq about Flat Earthers disagreeing on whether or not Earth’s Curvature exists.

    To be fair, I was already a conservative republican before I left Cali, but it’s safe to say many others have changed.

    that can be a policy argument, were it advanced by someone less stupid and lazy than Trump.

    This is quite literally a logical fallacy – specifically, an ad hominem – you stupid fucking idiot.

    Firstly: You don’t seem to get it. Policy arguments come in MANY DIFFERENT FORMS AND SHAPES. Sometimes it is scholarly analysis by well heeled academics or at least those patient enough to cite peer reviewed sources or data. Sometimes it is loud yelling and name calling in debates or pamphlets. Sometimes it is outright farce or satire, big unflattering cartoons or the equivalent of the opponent.

    (Also I’ll note that no one form of these is necessarily more accurate than another. And it is sobering beyond belief when you realize that much of modern 20th century history revolved around the work of John Maynard Keynes in general, but that he first came to prominence with his “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” about the Treaty of Versailles, which actual research has shown us could and should be retitled “I’m a biased, naive idiot who got scammed by the German Government peddling bullshit finance numbers precisely in an attempt to hide assets and play the victim”. So Dr. Keynes the trained economist’s arguments regarding reparations and Versailles were LESS accurate than low brow French ranters like Le Figaro demanding the Boche pay for enslaving dozens of thousands of civilians and turning much of the country into a moonscape using illegal methods.)

    And many aspects pull on multiple different forms. Indeed, if you possess more self-awareness than a plankton you might notice I am intentionally blending a couple different forms of this.

    Secondly: You are so stupid and lazy you do not even realize you are making an ad hominem. “This could be a policy argument…

    “that can be a policy argument, were it advanced by someone less stupid and lazy than Trump.”

    That’s not how it works. Especially since YOU ADMIT That this is a policy argument, or at least “could be” if it were advanced by someone other than the Bad Orange Man.

    The problem is that by any definition, Trump is advancing a policy argument. Period, Full Stop. You may not LIKE the method or form it is taking (indeed, even I have my issues with it though I largely agree with Michael Towns). But that is still what it is.

    Thirdly: “Stupid and Lazy”? I’ve never claimed Trump is a towering genius in all things, though he certainly is not so stupid he could not climb out of multiple holes (some of which he dug out) or figure out how to sustain his public profile. He also played many very bad and accomplished actors like Assad and Putin like a fiddle.

    But LAZY? Trump is quite energetic, ESPECIALLY for someone of his age and build.

    It would go “She supports X policy-she advanced it in the following situations/times/bills, etc. This policy directly led to this problem, which is destroying SF”. Really-this is not hard. It’s just that your guy is brain dead.

    It’s painfully annoying when someone acting in nakedly bad faith is torturing themselves and the point in order to avoid the issue. Trump is doing that, albeit in a far more bellicose and less precise fashion. Because again, MUCH (maybe even MOST) Policy Arguments are made on that basis.

    As for “brain dead”, remind me who won the Trump v. Biden debate according to the Democrat Party leadership?

    Also, “the MSM has it in for Trump and really wants to help democrats” is, like, next-level delusion.

    No, you’re just peddling 1984 level horse crap, complete with the demand like The Party that we ignore the evidence of our eyes and ears.

    The problem is that unlike them, you’re nowhere near as competent as an O’Brien and not operating in an environment so conducive to your lies being believed. We can QUITE LITERALLY muster a bunch of evidence on this.

    Firstly: We have overwhelming evidence that Democratic self-identification among the American Press (let alone abroad) dwarfs Republican self-identification by almost literally an order of magnitude.

    https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/reporters-party-affiliation-survey/2014/05/07/id/570091/

    https://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/05/survey-7-percent-of-reporters-identify-as-republican-188053

    https://www.statista.com/chart/21328/party-affiliation-by-news-source/

    Now to be fair this does not necessarily indicate Pro-or-Anti-Trump. After all, Zell Miller was a Democrat while the Romneys are (ostensibly) Republicans. But it’s an important bit of circumstantial evidence involving massive party preference.

    Secondly: We can quite literally see how News Coverage is comically, overwhelmingly negative towards Trump.

    https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/aug/17/broadcast-coverage-of-trump-95-negative-according-/

    https://www.npr.org/2017/10/02/555092743/study-news-coverage-of-trump-more-negative-than-for-other-presidents

    And moreover, that while usually not QUITE as extreme as against Trump, anti-Conservative and anti-Republican bias on the Presidential level is still rife.

    Thirdly: I know what you’re going to try and bullshit, and go “Oh no, you see, the reason the Press – who want to sell newspapers and have to maintain a certain level of accuracy – are so negative against Trump is because he is legit braindead, while the reason Biden the literal Basement Lid Addict idiot has so much positive press is due to how Awesome and WholesomeChungus he is and what a great job he is!”

    Except no, absolutely not. We quite literally have evidence of the same news outlets and journalists outright spinning the same policies or positions differently based on who is using them. We also have a lot of absolute, unfounded hysteria that turns out to be wrong, such as the claim that Trump’s retaliatory cratering of Assadist Airfields in Syria (used by both the Syrian Baathists and their Russian Allies) would start a war.

    Moreover, we have ample evidence of this in other things such as the wholesale vilification of people like Kyle RIttenhouse for a literally textbook self-defense shooting against a bunch of communist paramilitaries, including a pedophile.

    So no matter how you try and cut it, the Press has it out for Trump, and they do so far out of proportion to any actual flaws or failings or misdeeds he is responsible for (since WWIII was notably not present even given the Syrian strikes for the duration of Trump’s term but might be inching closer now, ask the Ukrainians and Israelis).

    News Flash: the MSM wants to sell news. They have to adhere to some standard of accuracy and accountability, but they are going to fram coverage for maximal visibility.

    Oh the joy of dealing with an idiot who apparently went through Journalism 101.

    Firstly: Frame, not fram.

    Secondly: “The MSM wants to sell news. They have to adhere to some standard of accuracy and accountability….”

    Cute myth bro. Now apply those same standards to La Libre Parole (the Jew Hate periodical that helped fuel the Dreyfus Affair) or modern Pravda.

    Or for that matter Jayson Blair or the UNRWA (who if anything should have EVEN MORE Stringent standards for “accuracy and accountability” than the MSM).

    What’s the matter? Not convenient for your narrative?

    THE TRUTH of the matter is that while truth and accuracy are admirable goals in their own right, they are not goals shared by everyone. Moreover, they often run in counter to things like the profit motive for a given newspaper. And finally, there are matters such as ideological, philosophical, or personal bias that are often as powerful or even MORESO Than the ones you attribute.

    And we have ample evidence of this overriding the profit motive – let alone the idea of truth or accuracy – time and again even in the supposedly modern, “accountable” MSM. Hence the “Too Good to Check” things. As well as the attempts to retroactively rewrite the history behind Rathergate in order to smear a political enemy who – for whatever his other failings – was a dutiful member of the Air National Guard and did not shirk from duty, with the use of a forgery so blatant that only an idiot or a modern journalist could believe it.

    (Gee, history rhymes a fair bit, doesn’t it? Especially given the attempts to manipulate the evidence and historical memory of other politicians’ military careers, albeit in opposite directions given Vance and Walz).

    This is also not terribly in dispute, especially when you talk about things sufficiently far back in time we can not only assess both the accuracy and integrity of the reporting and given actors involved, but also not step on any contentious political toes such as pointing out that Rather and Mapes were lying liars that lied (or at the ABSOLUTE BEST were so staggeringly lazy, stupid, and intellectually dishonest they not only didn’t check the blatant forgery, but ALSO rejected or ignored the criticism and analysis of it until forced to by their higher ups). If you analyze things such as American newspaper coverage of the Cuban Wars of Independence or French Newspapers on matters like the Dreyfus Affair it’s really hard to avoid. And of course nobody remotely sane or honest expects North Korean outlets to voice any dissent or critique from the party line that is not at least tacitly accepted by said leadership.

    But we’re supposed to believe these well documented drives and facts – many of which we can correlate with our own eyes on things like coverage of Trump on No Tax Tips versus Kamala on them – are not present with the modern MSM?

    No, fuck that noise and fuck your gaslighting. This is what makes you not only a troll, but a staggeringly incompetent and stupid one.

    I actually think a lot of respectable outlests are being overly deferential to Trump.

    Of course you do. Because you’re a terminally biased, dishonest idjiot.

    Firstly: Outlets, not outlests.

    Secondly: Who defines “respectable”? And what does one do when the “respectable outlets” run many of the same stories and pitches as the likes of Unz and Stormfront (such as demonizing Trump for his support of Jews and Israel)?

    Thirdly: Define “deferential.”

    They are printing his rambling nonsense, and then providing a summary in the coherent English, as if what he is saying has any merit whatsoever.

    This is monumentally stupid, dishonest, and retarded on multiple levels, starting with its face.

    Firstly: It apparently completely escapes your attention (or at least your willingness to note) that such “summaries” are often a vehicle for egregious bias in their own right, such as the “Fine People on Both Sides” claim (where they ignored how he denounced White Supremacists), the “Bloodbath” (talking about the American Auto Industry’s likely losses under a second term of the Biden/Harris/Obama Complex), and so on.

    Nor is this limited to journalism. Bismarck’s self-confessed manipulation of the Ems Dispatch (to turn what was a polite rebuff into what FALSELY APPEARED to be a scathing act of disrespect to the French government in the hopes of triggering a war) is a good example of this. The fact that you do not even consider this avenue is telling.

    Secondly: You ignore the reasons why news sources would want to quote major political figures, whether or not they like it or not. Since many of your ilk like claiming Trump is or is akin to Hitler/Mussolini/FillInTheBlank, well…. are you LITERALLY so logically and historically illiterate you cannot imagine why a newspaper article would wish to report on oh…say… Hitler’s claims of Versailles as a Carthaginian Peace, claims that Danzig was rightful German clay that had to be returned at bayonet point, or the like?

    In addition to the aforementioned capacity for twisting and manipulation, it helps to know what your opponents are doing or thinking. And indeed this has come back to bite you and your ilk many times over, since many on the left have legitimately no idea what right wingers actually believe or what the different camps are, while all right wingers in the US have to do to get a good dose of the left is about is turn on the news or show up to a school board meeting.

    And They are not stating the obvious fact that this person is cognitively impaired.

    Firstly: Many of them are. Feel free to search the internet for some making this exact claim, it will not be long.

    Secondly: “Obvious fact.”

    This is fucking hilarious. Trump is the one who was happy to accept cognitive testing in public. In no small part because he (as well as anyone who has even passing experience with cognitive testing that is not so blinded by TDS would realize) knows he would pass. This is in contrast to Biden.

    You know, Slow Joe? Who has had multiple excuses trotted out for his “Stutter” (which he has shown scant evidence of before)? Or so on?

    Biden’s debate performance was terrible, and rightly drew concern. But it also shielded Trump from the scrutiny he deserved.

    Define “the scrutiny he deserved.”

    Secondly: Biden’s debate performance underlines how if Trump is “cognitively impaired”, Biden is unquestionably far more so.

    He has not uttered a coherent sentence in years.

    I’m not even going to ask you to define what “a coherent sentence” is according to whatever self-serving, idiotic delusions run through the thing you call a brain. I will simply reject this as self-evidently false based on any logical or coherent definition of “coherent”, “sentence”, or “years.”

    And before you try to whine that I am being pedantic and you were engaging in obvious hyperbole…

    A: Yes, I am being pedantic. Because I am an amateur historian and credited Game Tester. Being Pedantic is an ESSENTIAL SKILL.

    B: Context is important, and whether or not you were engaging in “obvious hyperbole” or are actually stupid enough to believe this horsecrap you spout is irrelevant, it makes you both stupid and utterly unaware.

    He is unable to focus and launch a credible attack against Harris-

    Define “credible attack.”

    Especially since he clearly can launch credible attacks, and has done so on both Harris and Biden, as the debate showed. Why do you think the Left Wing dominated MSM is working so hard to deny Kamala is or was a “Border Czar” in spite of this literally being what was stated before?

    who I hope kicks his fat white ass-

    A: Ah yes. So in addition to steaming crap, lies, logical fallacies, and so on we have a dollop of racism. Lovely.

    B: Of course you hope that.

    but she’s not the strongest candidate ever and there are clear vulnerabilities.

    Indeed.

    But he is so focused on how he was wronged by Biden’s withdrawal, how Harris is “a low IQ person”, that he can not formulate an English language sentence that would constitute a substantive attack

    This says nothing about Trump and everything about your brainless, nakedly self-serving and idiotic definition plays. If you want to be taken seriously, you’re going to have to do better.

    Please, please, someone provide an example of a substantive point that Trump has made in 2024. I mean, really we can go back further, but I’m dying to understand what you all mean when you say he can make substantive points.

    I see what you’re doing, and it’s not going to work. You don’t get to try and play Goalpost Moving here.

    First, put a definition of what “a substantive point” is in whatever septic system that the Devil installed as an excuse for your cranium.

    THEN that definition can be assessed and examples can be put forth.

    Or you know, we will simply drag your lying, idiotic, historically illiterate asshole for coming up with obviously, objectively false “definitions”.

  31. Michael Towns:

    I also have a feeling of anxiety, no matter who wins. I am especially afraid of Harris winning, and of a Democrat Congress. But I would also be anxious of what will happen from the left if Trump wins.

    If it’s any consolation – and it’s really not – most of the Democrats I know also are anxious, and not just about a possible Trump victory. Most people I know are upset about the wars, and the viciousness of the political discord, and depression and mental illness among children, and many other things as well.

  33. @Bauxite

    A few points – Everyone cites “binders full of women” and Romney as evidence that “they’ll do it to any Republican.” I think “binders full of women” is a lot like the “JD Vance is weird and wears eyeliner” thing and the crude lies about a couch. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it a frightening demonstration of seamless oneness of the media, the left, and the Democratic party? Yes. Does it move many votes? I seriously doubt it.

    You are welcome to “seriously doubt it”, but cumulatively it can be devastating, especially in a tight race. I’ve also seen many effects of this firsthand within my family, and while that is anecdotal it underlines it. It also overlooks how these attacks are usually:

    A: Matched with other attacks, including what you deem more substantive.

    B: Cumulative, and so counting on a barrage of Gish-Gallop like insinuations, lies, or attacks that are counted on to wear things down over time. Death by a thousand cuts. And that absolutely has an effect.

    On the other hand, does the “Trump is a racist” narrative drive votes? I strongly suspect that it does.

    Ironically this actually is more evidence for the “They’d do this to any Republican” argument, since the Democrats have been doing this almost endlessly since 1964, if not earlier. See: the attacks on Goldwater, Reagan, and so forth, such as the conflation of “States’s Rights” with Jim Crow and White Supremacy.

    This narrative is much more powerful because Trump has a long, long history of saying racially insensitive things like . . . Kamala just became black a few years ago.

    Firstly: Trump was pointing out Kamala’s naked hypocrisy, weaponization of race and gender politics, and opportunism.

    Secondly: I’d be willing to argue over whether Trump has such a long history of saying “racially insensitive things”, and moreover whether said history is longer or more sordid than that of other Republican POTUSes or Candidates (my guess? Probably). But the fact remains that the core issue of leftist, democrat weaponization of racial accusations is something they hurl at basically every Republican or conservative.

    Including non-whites. Often ESPECIALLY non-whites. Anybody remember Larry Elder, Black Face of White Supremacy?

    https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/larry-elder-latest-and-most-dangerous-black-face-of-white-supremacy-ce5dc9ae56f2

    Turtleridge Farms remembers.

    Moreover, you seem to be omitting or overlooking how many of these exact same attacks were trotted out against McCain and Romney.

    https://www.mic.com/articles/18495/mitt-romney-racist-paul-ryan-uses-white-supremacist-language-like-kkk-to-defeat-obama

    Now, I’ll happily admit Trump has screwed up on this and other issues, for instance being dumb and/or ignorant enough to dine with Nick Fuentes, and not airing things like Rick Spencer’s condemnation of him from the rooftops. But that’s a matter of personal failings without touching on the greater root issue. That the left and dems have been peddling these lies for a VERY long time, and not just against Trump but against any conservatives and republicans. And it is having an effect, and certainly having more of one than attacks on Trump’s record on these issues in isolation would have.

    Did the “McCain is a racist” narrative drive as many votes? Did the “Romney is a racist” narrative drive as many votes? I doubt it. Neither man fed that narrative the way that Trump does.

    Good people, this is what we call “Moving the Goal Posts.”

    Bauxite opened by asking if the relatively pettier attacks on Trump, Vance, or the like strongly drove votes and argued they doubted it. Ok, fair enough.

    Then they went on to go “On the other hand, does the “Trump is a racist” narrative drive votes? I strongly suspect that it does.”

    Ok, fair enough.

    But now comes the switcheroo, of asking whether or not the issue drove “AS MANY votes”. Which is different from the criteria of what they set up at the start, and also a convenient way to avoid the point. We can debate and argue about whether or not the “Trump is a Racist” narrative drives “AS MANY” votes as the “Romney is a Racist/McCain is a Racist/Bush is a Racist/Bush is a Racist/Reagan is a Racist/InsertRepubHere is a Racist” narrative.

    (In fact, I strongly doubt the “Trump is a racist” narrative drives as many votes as those attacks on Romney or McCain, and I can point to circumstantial proof for exit polling given the surge in support for Republicans among minorities, especially Black and Hispanic men, but that’s not something I can definitively prove).

    HOWEVER, the key point is that the “GenericRepublicanHere is a Racist” narrative drives votes. A lot of votes. And it has gained strength over decades of repetition. And while in some cases it’s justified (see: David Duke’s ill starred run for office), in the overwhelming majority of cases it is not.

    Also, does the “Trump is an abuser of women” narrative drive votes? Again, I strongly suspect that it does.

    That much I agree.

    And again, Trump has fed this narrative repeatedly. Compare to “binders of women,” which was one Romney comment, one time, that didn’t even make sense.

    And yet you seem to overlook how the fact that it didn’t even make sense did nothing to impede the Left. And indeed, it made no more sense than Trump being convicted of defamation for calling out Carroll the Fabulist.

    Trump has unique strengths and weaknesses, and we can happily debate if he would be the best candidate. But that doesn’t change the fact that the racism argument and allegations of abuse of women are weapons the left will bring out at any opportunity they can against any Republican they can, even when it makes literally no sense like Larry Elder.

    Also, to refine my point about lost opportunities – there is a limited amount of media “oxygen” available to Trump. Even if you can find examples in his long, rambling answers where he actually hints at the right message, Trump is wasting his “oxygen” with the stupid attacks. And the stupid attacks are the things that people remember, not the strong points.

    Perhaps, but that raises the issue of what are “strong points” or “stupid attacks.” “Lock her Up” probably counted as the latter on a legal or factual basis, especially since he woefully did not follow up on it. But it helped drive voter turnout.

  34. @Cornflour

    Unfortunately, I honestly expect riots nationwide whether Trump wins or loses. It’s that kind of situation.

  36. All you Trump critics, especially the ones that whine about his rhetorical style, campaign strategy, etc., need to grow up. This is politics, not tennis or badminton. Answer this one simple question before you cast your 2024 POTUS vote: are you and the United States better off today than when Donald Trump was president?

  37. steve walsh:

    Except for Karmi, I think all the Trump critics who regularly comment here will be voting for Trump (maybe even Bauxite, although I’m not totally certain of that). I think they are concerned that there’s a good chance he’ll nevertheless lose.

  38. neo:
    With the Dems commitment and ability to manage the results in key battleground states that is a well founded concern.

    The criticism rubs me a bit the wrong way because he ran his style of campaign in 2016 and defeated the (shoe in) Hillary Clinton. Then he ran against Biden in 2020, who didn’t really campaign, and got even more votes than he did in 2016 but was, in my view, cheated out of the victory. So complaints about his style and approach from people that have never run for anything are annoying.

  39. “if she’s going to be our president, very quickly you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Donald Trump

    However inarticulate Trump may be, he’s placed his finger firmly upon what counts most of all.

    “the corruption, the rot is so deep, I think things are going to have to collapse and be purged before true reform or cleansing takes place.” Michael Towns

    The Left is engineering an economic and societal/cultural collapse, they see it as essential to the nation’s final fundamental transformation into AmeriKa.

  40. Jon – reacting to Title IX is in the Trump platform

    “Republicans Will End Left-wing Gender Insanity

    We will keep men out of women’s sports, ban Taxpayer funding for sex change surgeries, and stop Taxpayer-funded Schools from promoting gender transition, reverse Biden’s radical rewrite of Title IX Education Regulations, and restore protections for women and girls.”

    https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform

    There are a lot of good goals listed in the platform. It is only 16 pages long. I hope that if Trump assigns Vance to any project that it is the one on reducing wasteful government spending and reducing the regulations.

    I hope that Trump’s staff will present him with a very tall stack of Executive Orders for him to sign. Each EO should have an explanation of why the old EO is being reversed. If they omit the explanation, then they will be subject to the MSM making up BS about the EO. Of course, if you ever compared the MSM comments on Trump’s EOs with the actual document, you would see how much they lied.

  41. liz:

    What’s in the platform doesn’t filter down to most people – it has to be talked about in a way that grabs attention.

  42. Michael Towns:

    I was going to write a post saying pretty much exactly what you said. I think that you are exactly right that we are now in a post-truth era. Trump understands this and treats political campaigns as if they were pro wrestling matches, which at this point, they pretty much are. Trump understands what actually moves people. The fact that Trump’s instincts are usually right is upsetting to a lot of people who wish that we were nobler than we are. The idea that a campaign in this era is going to be won by well-reasoned argument is fantasy.

    Do I wish things were different? Sure, but wishing won’t make it so.

    I also share your anxiety of what comes next no matter who wins this election. We are now like Wil E. Coyote after having run off the cliff. Some may not realize it now but we are in for a big fall.

  43. Neo: I agree about the need to discuss the platforms and it will be interesting to have some posts/comments about the differences between the D and the R platforms.

    Trump is putting out some ads on the web and I wonder if he is starting to talk about the platform via the ads.

    And people need to mention the Trump platform is not the same as the Agenda 2025.

  44. Reposting a link to the full Trump-Musk transcript (not audio):

    https://turboscribe.ai/transcript/share/4422534834081521519/HWE18owsC2u8E5u2HpZNikyBdermlV2YSwGlTEPKJJw/donald-trump-and-elon-musk-full-transcript-august-12-2024-https-x-com-i-spaces-1nakepnklwoxl

    Trump trumps in his Trumpish way, but there’s still plenty of meat on the bone.

    Elon Musk takes Trump seriously — no small thing. The interview has gotten millions of listens so, as neo notes, it’s not nothing in the game for Trump to get his message out through the firewall.

    I would argue that Trump skeptics are being too hard on him in this regard.

  46. “It’s the [24/7 demonization], stupid…”

    …and the venal 24/7 lies…and the venal 24/7 coverups…not to mention the rampant—and triumphalist—criminality…

    …the effectiveness of which appears to be “proven” (at least in part) by the adamantine views of our latest (bespeckled) guest….

    But, hey, if one wishes to call it “post-truth”….

  47. Just looked thru what I consider Right leaning and Right-wing news sites. Daily Mail is probably my most visited news site, and consider them fair & balanced for the most part—with a slight lean right, which shows in their comment and polls sections. I believe that a MAGA group got me banned from comments there…

    Certainly no shortage of Media-Right sites, and many are ‘bound and determined to present Trump Harris in the worst light possible, and Harris Trump in the best light possible.’ 😉 As GW Bush might say – ‘It’s just politics.’

    None are TV—tho could be wrong since I don’t watch TV News any more (since 2006??). Also, won’t be listing a lot of right-wing blogs (or leaning), right leaning media research sites—and such, Israeli & Ukrainian sites, or X & X news sites, or podcasts.

    NewsMax, The Daily Caller, Breitbart, New York Post, World Net Daily (WND), World Tribune, AEI (I use for news), National Review, The Daily SIGNAL, For America, True Pundit, RealClear Investigations, The Reactionary (Techno Fog), The Washington Times, Revolver, The Federalist, Washington Examiner, Kite & Key, Spiked, Townhall…hold on.

    Presidential Debates UPDATE

    Today, the Harris campaign agreed to a second debate on September 25 — so long as Trump shows up on September 10.

    Didn’t figure Harris would go for two debates, so maybe her prep work is looking good to her handlers.

    OK – don’t really have many more sites to list and am too tired anyway. There are other right-wing sources not listed. TV sites…I dunno, but Fox used to be one (?). Haven’t listened to radio either since even before Rush died, so I don’t know about that media source either.

    I just don’t see a news “firewall” issue for Trump, except maybe TV, and from what I’ve read TV news has been in a decline since at least 2016.

    Trump gets to debate Harris twice (so far) so that is probably going to be a biggie one way or the other—one debate crushed Biden. OK – that’s my 2-cents…

  48. As I understand it, no media outlet may legally refuse to run a political advertisement. If that is so, the Trump campaign can run messages on the networks. It would be the only way to get air time, but the campaign can control the message.

  49. @ Michael > ” I appreciate a great blog like Neo’s.”

    Second the motion.
    The debate here today, and on many other threads, is evidence that people with differing opinions can present those in a respectful and thoughtful dialogue (well, Baby Giraffe* excepted, but Turtleridge Farms took care of that anomaly).

    Two things I would like to add:
    (1) The jaw-dropping part about the Regime Media’s gaslighting of Romney’s “binders of women” remark is that he made that comment as evidence that he was actively engaged in seeking out females to hire — hence, binders of applications from women — which is something the progressives/Democrats/etc. claim as one of their goals.

    That the left was able to turn this positive response to their accusations of misogyny (which are also directed to any other Republican, including women) into a calumny implying he was into some kind of S&M bondage games and have that believed by so many Democrats cemented for me the prior niggling thought that maybe liberalism really WAS a mental disease.

    (2) Trump sounds inarticulate in transcripts of oral unscripted interviews or other remarks because EVERYONE sounds inarticulate in unedited audios or transcripts.
    Find someone who doesn’t and show us a link (I might allow that Victor Hanson could pull it off, or Thomas Sowell, or Jordan Peterson).

    *Well, three.
    (3) The quality of troll assigned to Neo’s blog has dropped sadly since the days of Manju and Montage. Perhaps they are now all DEI hires (and that list includes AWFLs and White Dudes for Harris).

  52. With a almost total Propaganda Ministry against you, it’s surprising anyone can win. Yet that’s what we have had for almost 50 years. The only saving grace is the Propaganda Ministry isn’t totally believed by most people, but that hasn’t harmed the Media companies except some recent down sizing.

  53. We are definitely on the road where, eventually, we will have to physically fight to keep or restore our country. Are we capable of that? Or will we become Venezuela?

  54. steve+walsh – Trump ran the same kind of campaign in 2016 and won – less than 47% of the vote against quite possibly the weakest major party nominee in American history. Every Trumpy GOP candidate who has run that kind of campaign outside of a deep red state has lost since, including Trump in 2020.

    Geoffrey Britain – Sure – Trump hit on the key point. He’s not wrong. But recall that Democrats are going around claiming that it will be the literal end of “our democracy(TM)” if Trump wins. That’s the same claim, more or less. Specifics are needed, and need to be hammered again and again. Trump trumping in his Trumpish way isn’t going to cut it. The media sure as heck isn’t going to delve into page 7 of the transcript to highlight the part where Trump, kind of, tangentially, referred to the specifics. He needs to be hitting them over the head with specifics, kind of like Vance, like DeSantis. H/t to Brian E, Byron Donalds is pretty good at it too. Trump is, shall we say, not.

    To the point about post-truth – maybe we’re in that era. Maybe Trump recognizes that. Or maybe he’s just a fabulist and a huckster who doesn’t bother to master the facts and regularly talks out of his rear end. It doesn’t really matter because even if he is some sort of post-truth seer, the results aren’t there. When it comes to winning presidential elections, Trump is no better than the Republicans who came before, and arguably worse. (Trump is set to go 1 for 3. The GOP went 1 for 3 in the three elections prior to Trump.) Before Trump, the GOP could at least win Congress, comfortably. No more. We haven’t had anything better than a “hang on by your fingernails” election for the GOP since 2014.

    So what’s my beef? I think Trump is very likely to lose in November. I don’t think that’s a secret. The GOP base never made it through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief after Trump lost in 2020 and ended up making a series of colossal mistakes by running so many Trumpy losers in 2022 and then running Trump again this year. When Trump loses again, we need to accept reality and try to find a way to keep progressives from destroying the country. I strongly fear a significant portion of the GOP base is going to dive down the “stolen election” rathole again, focus on how terrible Kamala is and, once again, completely fail to recognize that Trump is just a gawdawful candidate who got lucky, once, eight years ago. We can’t have Trump 2028. We can’t have Kari Lake and her ilk in 2026, for that matter. If we do, then we get to the scenario where we really won’t have a country anymore. It isn’t about policy. Trump’s policy positions are, for the most part, winners. It’s about the character and discipline of the candidates and about trying to shove repulsive candidates down the throat of an electorate that keeps telling us, again and again, that they don’t want them.

  56. Really-this is not hard. It’s just that your guy is brain dead.

    The above is exactly the type of herd mentality we have to live with throughout this election cycle. Never mind the fact that Trump is the head of Mensa compared to Harris; that Trump has actually done things outside of government, that he has a basic understanding of how regular people think.

    We literally have stupid people telling us things and not realizing that they’re the stupid ones. How do you deal with that?

  57. neo – I didn’t say that they could win the White House and Congress together. The GOP has had a very tough time doing that since the early 20th Century. I said that the used to be able to win Congress.

    In 2010, they comfortably won the House and picked up 6 Senate seats.
    In 2012, they lost 6 House seats and lost 2 Senate seats.
    In 2014, they comfortably won the House and picked up 9 Senate seats.

    In 2016, they lost 6 House seats and lost 2 Senate seats.
    In 2018, they lost 42 House seats and picked up 2 Senate seats.

    In 2020, they picked up 16 House seats and lost 3 Senate seats
    In 2022, they picked up 10 House seats and lost 1 Senate seat

    Regardless of whether the party holds the presidency, it’s better to have the Congress than not. In the Trump era, it’s becoming more often “not.”

    (It’s interesting to me that the GOP Congressional performance in 2016 was the same as 2012. There are a lot of similarities between Trump 2016 and Romney 2012 in terms of results. Really, Trump’s locations of strength were just better suited to the EC.)

  58. I Callahan – You could run Albert Einstein against a complete idiot, but if Einstein’s approval split was 42/54, he would lose.

  59. Karmic Tip: ‘Blame Game’ the horse is dead. Beat him all you want, but he is not going to get up ‘n run…

  60. Oh, and Turtler: That was a spectacularly epic takedown of Baby Giraffe’s utter BS. I may need to have a smoke after that…

  61. I agree that Trump is not as focused as he has to be, but painting the other candidate as a radical hasn’t worked since Nixon-McGovern in 1972. That tactic rallies one’s own voters, but it’s been used so often over the years that swing voters are deaf to it. America is a different country than it was then, and the Middle American majority doesn’t exist anymore.

    Trump is talking about Harris’s radicalism and her role in messing up California. The bigger problem is that the country was keyed up for the Biden-Trump rematch, and everything suddenly changed. Now Trump is thrown off his game. The old arguments against Biden don’t work anymore. The media is portraying Trump as yesterday’s man and Harris as something fresh and new.

    That ties into many people’s feeling bored with Trump and wanting something different. A lot can happen in the next 10 or so weeks, but if the election were held today Harris would win, certainly with all the “fortifications” and “enhancements” the Democrats have been working on. Can the Democrats keep this going? I don’t know, but a lot of people are willing to forget about the issues if it means moving beyond the Trump era.

  62. Bauxite:

    Look at the numbers I wrote about in that post I linked. The Republicans have almost never had large or “comfortable” majorities in Congress even when they DO have majorities. The Democrats have often had very large and very comfortable majorities. The contrast is very great. That was my point.

    Your cite the elections of 2010, 2012, and 2014. But in those years, Republican gains were with a Democrat president and therefore irrelevant to the question of comparing Trump to the records of other Republican presidents in winning or losing Congress, which is what you seemed to be doing when you criticized him. Nor we were talking about winning or losing seats; we were talking about winning Congress, and in 2016 when Trump won the election, even though some GOP seats were lost, the Republicans still comfortably controlled the House and Senate. In fact, the 2016 election, “marked the first and most recent time Republicans won or held unified control of the presidency and Congress since 2004.” And in the 2018 midterms, the GOP actually picked up Senate seats. The House was lost, however, but the Democrat margin there was small.

  63. The media is all out there this morning; even the daily mail. Reading everything this morning the election is over and Harris won.

    They are building the ramparts even higher. Is it they are still afraid of Trump, or taking advantage of the buzz word “momentum “. I think it’s the latter. They see a large opening to strike now and finish him off

  64. @Neo (August 13, 2024 at 4:22 pm)

    I am not talking about Trump’s vs. Vance’s articulateness; that isn’t the issue. It’s the ability to keep his (Trump’s) mouth shut on trivial issues and, relatedly, to deflect (i.e., as I emphasized earlier, to **not engage** in) such trivia when it is raised by a reporter. Vance can do both; Trump cannot. If an issue isn’t raised or addressed, the press cannot magnify it. 1000 times 0 is 0. (Of course, admittedly, the press can then find trivia of its own, like the fact that Trump rented a plane formerly owned by Epstein…)

    You appear to be saying that Trump simply cannot “cut through” the MSM’s shenanigans. Maybe so. If so, well, I guess we’re dead in the water.

    However, I still think that there is some chance of success if Trump could just control himself a little (well, a lot) and if people pay attention to the substance of interviews that do air and to the debates that apparently Kamala has agreed to.

  65. I think that Bauxite and Karmi are trolls, and any time reading or responding to their comments is wasted time.

  67. “Beware of gifts coming in horses”– or some such thing, but Frank Luntz offers some pretty granular advice for the Trump campaign.

    The word is “affordability”, not “inflation.” It’s “safety and security”, not “illegal immigration”. It’s “Washington spending”, voters hate wasteful spending.

    I have my reservations about Luntz and his focus groups which can be easily manipulated and their conclusions mis-interpreted.

    Expanding on the post-truth concept, I think catastrophic events affect people’s reasoning– post 9/11 we traded freedom for security. Post COVID we’ve traded truth for safety. We wanted so much for authority figures to tell us what to do to be safe, that they just made up rules out of thin air.

    My wife’s attitude about the competence of a doctor is affected by his/her bedside manner. So Luntz probably has something there.

    Donald Trump is actually giving away this election, says pollster Frank Luntz
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEqbfuWXpQw

  68. If, in fact, there has been shift in perception, post COVID, which have been described in psychological terms, and is real, may explain why President Trump’s instincts/ability to relate at a core level/speak in the common man’s terms hasn’t been as effective.
    Would this be skewed to the “independent voter”- someone who doesn’t have a secure set of core beliefs that would ground a person, for better or worse, to be less affected to the anxiety that COVID produced?
    What these people desire is to have their anxiety assuaged and are more receptive to emotional appeals than fact based appeals.

  70. huxley, I noticed that Luntz on July 24 talked about the Republican enthusiasm coming out of the convention, and then in this video it’s all about the Democrat enthusiasm. Well, if you’ve gone from a nearly comatose candidate to one with a pulse, it’s understandable their enthusiasm (or relief).

    At the same time, if we are to believe that people are voting for someone based on their “joy” and ignoring Kamala’s plans for the country, either they are mentally unstable/challenged or they are on board with what all that “joy” will bring.

    If changing the wording of your message can actually affect their perceptions, I would say to make those adjustments.

  71. “The fake news is a danger to our country” – President Donald J. Trump

    Karmi on August 13, 2024 at 11:37 pm suggested there was no problem and listed some right/right-leaning media outlets.

    My initial response was that separate but equal information sources isn’t a sustainable model for a country. It’s one of the reasons the divide in the country is great and getting greater.

    We need to have a single set of facts. And we’ve relied on our traditional news sources to be the keeper of facts. It was a critically important profession, and while it was never perfect, part of a journalist instruction was how to recognize and put aside the individual bias and focus on an objective story that fairly presented both sides of a story.

    When a reporter felt one side’s version was too skewed (false), you might add additional details correcting a statement or position. But in general, both sides were fairly presented.

    I doubt we can ever get back to this– since our schools are the danger, producing not critical thinking but herd thinkers.

    Another real danger is the distorted/skewed results from search engines. It is getting worse. If you don’t use the correct set of keywords you can not find stories that are contradictory to the official narrative.

  73. @ CV – I won’t have room for all the “Make America ___ Again” hats.

    Affordable
    Brave
    Credible
    Decent
    Exceptional
    Great
    Humorous (we know the Left has no sense of humor)
    Joyful (that’s for the Kamala folks; if she can steal policies, we can appropriate emotions)
    Prosperous
    Righteous
    Safe (or Sane; take your pick)
    Tax-reduced (that’s not very euphonic, but I like the idea)
    Weird (in the J.D. Vance mold)

    Anyone want to add a few?

  75. If changing the wording of your message can actually affect their perceptions, I would say to make those adjustments.

    Brian E:

    I appreciate your response. But I say it’s trickier. I don’t know that anyone knows for sure how Trump should change his wording and whether it would work.

    Trump’s style has gotten him much farther than I would have thought in 2016 when he announced for Prez.

    Maybe the Rolling Stones would have done better if they had sounded more like the Beatles. God knows they tried, i.e. “Their Satanic Majesties Request.” Saner heads, i.e. Keith Richards, prevailed and they went back to being the Stones.

    I’d like to transplant Victor Davis Hanson’s brain into Trump’s body, but that’s not on the menu.

    Trump can make small changes and I think he has. He wasn’t kibitzing during the Biden-Harris transition, coup or whatever one calls it.

    Trump seems a weird throwback to P.T. Barnum and Andrew Jackson. He is in the American tradition and clearly some Americans are responding to him strongly.

    If Trump changed it up or toned it down, maybe people would hear him as Trump trying to be Romney.

    Disaster.

  76. huxley, thanks, I needed a chuckle.

    I listened to a fair bit of his economic speech in N. Carolina. It was a good/great speech, though he still rambles. He always returned to the subject. Trump is a story teller and entertainer.

    I think much of it is perspective. If I were going to one of his rallies, had waited several hours just to get in, would a two hour speech be too long, especially when he always ads a tidbit of humor about his opponents? You are there for the event.

    If I were going to a baseball game, would I think a 16 inning 3 hitter too long? No, because I was there for the event– regardless of the time.

    Watching it on tv isn’t the same and you lose that dynamic. On tv you’re only there for the content.

    Possibly he needs to have news conferences where his message is more scripted, and leave the entertainment for the rallies?

  77. Pingback:Instapundit » Blog Archive » NEO: Can Trump get through the firewall? The media is bound and determined to present Trump in the

  78. Main stream media is not “news.” It is entertainment. And entertainment is what Americans want. Pro wrestling, all the way down.

    This election will be won in the swing states by the party organization that can manufacture the most votes. The Dems in the big cities are masters at doing this. I have no sense at all that the Republicans are trying to meet this challenge.

    Basically, the Dems can nominate a ham sandwich and win the Presidency. Trump’s best chance was for Biden to stay in the race. He was rancid ham on moldy bread.

    Biden will resign by the beginning of October. The Dems will rally around President Harris. Maybe the Republicans will hold the House.

  79. HD, there is a functional limit to the amount malfeasance that can be committed in a few blue precincts. The RNC will be prepared, unlike 2020.

  80. @Brian E: We need to have a single set of facts. And we’ve relied on our traditional news sources to be the keeper of facts. It was a critically important profession, and while it was never perfect, part of a journalist instruction was how to recognize and put aside the individual bias and focus on an objective story that fairly presented both sides of a story.

    This was only true during the postwar Democratic dominance of Congress, and only seemed fair because the acceptable range of publicly expressible opinion was narrower. At the Founding people got their facts from pamphleteers and anyone with a printing press. In the nineteenth century every little town, and every little political faction in every big town, had its own paper. Affectionately caricatured by Twain in “Journalism in Tennessee”:

    …”Now, here is the way this stuff ought to be written.”

    I took the manuscript. It was scarred with erasures and interlineations till its mother wouldn’t have known it if it had had one. It now read as follows:

    SPIRIT OF THE TENNESSEE PRESS

    The inveterate liars of the Semi-Weekly Earthquake are evidently endeavoring to palm off upon a noble and chivalrous people another of their vile and brutal falsehoods with regard to that most glorious conception of the nineteenth century, the Ballyhack railroad. The idea that Buzzardville was to be left off at one side originated in their own fulsome brains–or rather in the settlings which they regard as brains. They had better swallow this lie if they want to save their abandoned reptile carcasses the cowhiding they so richly deserve.

    That ass, Blossom, of the Higginsville Thunderbolt and Battle Cry of Freedom, is down here again sponging at the Van Buren.

    We observe that the besotted blackguard of the Mud Springs Morning Howl is giving out, with his usual propensity for lying, that Van Werter is not elected. The heaven-born mission of journalism is to disseminate truth; to eradicate error; to educate, refine, and elevate the tone of public morals and manners, and make all men more gentle, more virtuous, more charitable, and in all ways better, and holier, and happier; and yet this blackhearted scoundrel degrades his great office persistently to the dissemination of falsehood, calumny, vituperation, and vulgarity.

    Blathersville wants a Nicholson pavement–it wants a jail and a poorhouse more. The idea of a pavement in a one-horse town composed of two gin-mills, a blacksmith shop, and that mustard-plaster of a newspaper, the Daily Hurrah! The crawling insect, Buckner, who edits the Hurrah, is braying about his business with his customary imbecility, and imagining that he is talking sense.

    “Now that is the way to write–peppery and to the point. Mush-and-milk journalism gives me the fan-tods.”

  81. Niketas, I address that on August 13, 2024 at 4:55 pm.

    How did yellow journalism get its name? (It was printed on yellow paper).

    Most of the history of newspaper reporting in the US was very pov. Most towns that could support them had at least two papers which represented different parties. And the coverage was nasty.

    The debate in j school over advocacy and even gonzo journalism was more of a thing on the broadcast side, rather than print side, at least at my school.

    How is the different than today? You know when you picked up a paper what the pov would be. Unlike today, where the people acting like journalists still try and pass themselves off as objective– rather than just telling folks what they are.

  83. Niketas, One of the reasons why advocacy journalism seems so enticing to reporters is it injects them into the story. An objective, balanced and fair story makes the reporter more of a scribe than an actor in the story.

    It could still be done and I’d like to see Cronkite and Rather and Russert and Jennings and the rest were dedicated to fair and balanced reporting. They had their failings, like Tet, but tried to retell the facts unvarnished by their own agenda.

  84. @ Brian E > “but tried to retell the facts unvarnished by their own agenda”

    Rathergate?

  85. @Brian E:dedicated to fair and balanced reporting.

    Remember in 1994 when Peter Jennings said “the voters threw a temper tantrum” and the Republican wins were uniformly attributed by the media to “angry white males”?

    Remember when Cronkite said it was wrong to think the US might be closer to victory in Vietnam? And when he said in 2007 he wished journalists could emulate him and turn public against the war in Iraq like he did against Vietnam?

    And of course Rather with his wholly-made-up TANG memos, which he never did repudiate. That was when “fake but accurate” was coined, in the New York Times headline describing the memos.

    They had the only megaphone. They told you they were fair and balanced and you didn’t have anything to compare with.

    There is no institution we’re going to able to trust to relieve us of the burden of critical thinking and carefully examining multiple sources of information before we accept a narrative.

  86. AsesopFan, Niketas, These are all long after journalists gave up any semblance of objective reporting, retaining on the veneer of objectivity.

  87. I am still predicting, in the two week run-up to the election, that there will be some deep fake video which purports to have Trump openly doing/saying something undeniably racist, sexist and/or otherwise remarkably offensive.

    2 weeks AFTER the election, everyone will know it was a total fake, but… on election day, it will sway too many people.

  88. }}} Wow-do people really think this? I think Bauxite is pretty spot on. And the Trump quotes you provide-they are rambling and incoherent and he’s just saying nonsense things not really based in fact. “She destroyed SF. She destroyed CA”.

    I imagine others have noted this… but:

    Wow, did you actually make this idiotic, incorrect, and ridiculous bloviation after watching the video? Clearly, the answer is “NO, I did not watch the video at all”.

    SMH — you’re clearly a two bit partisan hack. Yeah, that’s probably vastly overvaluing your capacity to contribute at cents on the dollar.

    You’re not in one of your liberal idiot echo chambers. Go somewhere else to troll.

  89. }}} Another real danger is the distorted/skewed results from search engines. It is getting worse. If you don’t use the correct set of keywords you can not find stories that are contradictory to the official narrative.

    Our current search engines are flat out liars, and have been for years, now.

    They do not actually provide anything resembling an actual search result. What they do is lock onto keywords in your search term and fetch an agenda-driven result set based on that keyword — you can — literally — enter in an actual headline for an article and not have it come up at all in the first several pages… if it isn’t within the guidelines of the agenda. The also tend to use only one word or term to provide that result, not combining anything to do more nuanced results. Consider that in the context of searches you make from now on.

    As an obvious example, there is this search:
    Jake Tapper Gets Fact Checked by Jake Tapper

    This is the first eight words of a headline, and should be one of the first results returned by any search on Google, or Duck Duck Go (which happens to use Bing, FWIW).

    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Jake+Tapper+Gets+Fact+Checked+by+Jake+Tapper&atb=v315-1&ia=web

    No article by that name is provided, at least, not early and not to any depth I have checked. Note that this used to be different, as Google did not return it, but DDG/Bing did.

    Not Any More

    Here is the actual article, which is blatantly factual, given that it restates Tapper’s own tweets and public comments to show his direct and undeniable perfidy:
    https://redstate.com/sister-toldjah/2020/10/01/jake-tapper-gets-fact-checked-by-jake-tapper-after-heated-exchange-on-trump-condemning-white-supremacy-n261084

    Both Google AND BING now refuse to link to Red State. If you did not save a bookmark to any RS article of value, your only hope is to actually go to RS to search for it there. If you did not, already, know it existed? Well, you shall remain ignorant of it.

    “Search engines” are now utterly unreliable and worthless.

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