… the national establishment corporate media, for they are done. Roasted to a turn, reduced to irrelevancy, as has been predicted by Insty and others for lo these many years. I had a sense that for decades, everyone kind of expected a sudden, catastrophic loss of credibility at every significant moment – a single spectacular event, abrupt like the sinking of the Titanic. But on and on the ship of national corporate media went, seemingly undisturbed by any such disastrous encounter with an iceberg. We kept waiting for that spectacular collapse, but it never happened, and so we started to route around. Still simmering, of course, over the willful and sneaky partisanship, the slanted coverage, and the constant overt or subtle name-calling, the constant reliance on the same-old-same-old experts from the same old same old press rolodex. We took heart in fact-checking their a**ses, but remained mildly disheartened that there was never an apology or a walk-back that mattered. About the best that we could hope for might be one of those sniveling “we’re sorry you stupid deplorable garbage people were offended” non-apology apologies. Alternate media, in the form of internet blogs – which rose and fell over two decades – Substack, Reddit, Twitter/X but more of a slow accumulation of small leaks … until everything fell apart at the final blow, and there we are.
Elections
2024 Election Plus/Delta
Pluses: admittedly much the shorter list, but we did resolve a few things.
- Thanks mainly to vote shifts in California and New York, the popular vote outcome was not at variance with the Electoral College vote, and it wasn’t particularly close (over 4-1/2 million votes).
- Largely as a result, the losing side, and VP Harris herself, have indicated cooperation with formal certification and transition processes.
- Harris is gone. She’ll get a chunk of money for a book and retire to the lecture circuit.
- Walz, same, and given the likelihood that he would have been a 21st-century version of Henry Wallace, with Chinese instead of Soviet agents in his inner circle, that might be more important than getting rid of Harris.
- Taking a somewhat longer view, Trump is gone too (perhaps not a much longer view; see the final Delta item below).
- By extension, there is some chance that ’28 will not have the electorate choosing between a crook and an idiot for President.
- Whatever one may think of prediction markets, and there are arguments on both sides regarding their functionality, the biggest prediction market of all, the US stock market, was forecasting a Trump victory all year (not coincidentally, the same thing happened in 2016).
- By the way, the media will actually report negative economic news now.
- I could have put this in either category, but I’ll leave it here: your Cluebat of the Day is a reminder that Trump is as old as Biden was in ’20, and notwithstanding some of my more apprehensive items below, to expect anything much of him is a waste of time.
- Likely continuation of relatively good space-industry policy across Administrations, which should be the only thing that matters several decades from now.
Day Two of the Trump Administration
Now that the Election is out of the way, Trump can focus on hitting the ground running next January. I hope there is “shock and awe” as he gets down to the serious work of getting the country back on its feet.
There is a lot of work to be done on important things like trade, immigration, ripping the bloated national government down to the studs, and national security. I bet Trump is going to have a stack of executive orders to sign on Day One to address those urgent national issues.
However, there is also time and slack to pursue secondary objectives meant for delivering some well-deserved justice after the past four years. Call it payback, call it game theory, but hopefully after we re-establish some order we can all be friends again. Not only that but some of things are just the right thing to do, for all Americans.
The best part is that these initiatives have all the right enemies and all can be done mostly through the Executive Branch.
First some nice things:
The Day After
Some thoughts on last night
First, I think what happened (so far) is the most optimistic election result that anybody could have hoped for. Electoral college? Popular vote? Senate majority and growing? Probably keep the House with expanded majority? Yes, please. Trump’s margins may shrink and the growth in seats in the Senate and House may stall to something less than spectacular but this was an amazing result.
Second, I bet the Democrats will develop a strange new respect for the filibuster and federalism. Always remember in our system where ambition is to be checked with ambition, the reason you keep the filibuster around is not out of some sentimentality but rather because you will find yourself needing it one day.
Third, on the Powerline podcast last night Steve Heyward speculated if this was the election that finally marked the shift from the traditional media model to podcasts. Maybe though we’ve been waiting for that death for a while. There was a lot of chatter in the past about how social media was going to be the one to torpedo the “SS Traditional Media” (keep in mind the Russian influence hysteria of 2016 centered on their purchase of ads on Facebook).
Fourth, I would imagine this is finally going to mark the fall of the House of Obama and maybe even get him to move out of Kalorama. That’s okay, I’ve heard he was renting anyway.
The Electoral Count Act and Lawfare
Our old friends in Maricopa County are back in the limelight again, having to deal with 90,000 last-minute voter registrations, 40,000 of which are too damaged to be processed. Wait until some of those 40,000 show up at the polls and find out they aren’t eligible to vote: can you say allegations of voter suppression?
I had outlined the Democrats’ obsession with “voter suppression” in a previous post; a term which seems to encompass any imposition of a requirement or restriction on voting. If you survey their various writings and pronouncements, you notice the topic has become part of their version of a Nicene Creed of belief regarding an unholy trinity also incorporating “fascism” and “Christian nationalism.”
I wrote in the same post about their hysterical response to the 2021 Election Integrity Act in Georgia which Joe Biden called “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.” The voter ID provisions that Biden and others pointed out as evidence of the return of Jim Crow? Overwhelming support among blacks in Georgia. The voting experience of blacks during the 2022 Georgia election? 72.6% said their experience was excellent with 0.0% citing a poor experience.
The two lessons from the Georgia experience are 1) blacks support common-sense voting requirements and 2) modern-day racial voting suppression for Democrats is a symbol with as much empirical evidence for its existence as the bogey-man. The best evidence that the Georgia laws didn’t suppress black turnout is that the Democrats no longer talk about it.
Put that aside for a moment. Let’s talk about the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 (ECA) and what lawfare might look over the next few months.