A New Villain

 

As recently as a couple of months ago the party line from Democrats and their public relations people in the traditional media was that Trump was a dangerous, out of control, megalomaniacal would be Duce who would try to lord it over us as a dictator.

That did not work out for them. Trump won, and according to polls is popular with the public. It became time to try something else. So the story this week is that Elon Musk is is the villain and real president calling all the shots and leading poor, hapless, helpless weenie boy Trump around by the nose. In its characterization of Trump, the whole thing is a fast one eighty suggesting 1984.

My guess is that the Rasputin story won’t work, and pretty soon we will be told that Musk is just another sycophant with no real authority, that the real danger is someone else (probably Trump again but maybe RFK), and that no one in the know ever thought otherwise. It is galling to be lied to so amateurishly and unconvincingly by people who think you are so stupid they do not have to keep their stories even semi-straight over short intervals. It can insult people’s intelligence and make them angry.

Not Dead Yet

 

Many Trumpists and conservatives are gloating that the results of this year’s election show that the traditional media organizations have lost their power to influence the country or even have become moribund. I think that is wrong, and those in the traditional media did remarkably well, given the cards they had drawn. One should remember that back in the spring Kamala Harris was less popular than Joe Biden and  publicly noticed mainly as an object  of ridicule.

Then Biden dropped out and she was picked as the candidate, giving the traditional media people the task of selling a foolish, unlikable, inarticulate, leftist, lightweight as America’s sweetheart. It was a hard job, and they did it fairly well. She did not lose by much. They were helped by the fact that her opponent was Donald Trump, but what they did is still impressive.

They are not dead yet, and those who do not care for them need to realize that and be ready to play the next hands. The game is not close to over.

Trouble at the Debate

 

A couple of things went very wrong Thursday for the people running the country. The first and most obvious is that millions of people saw directly that Joe Biden is in some stage of at least intermittent dementia and is not qualified to serve as president. The second is that millions of people who might not have thought about it before got pretty clear evidence that they had been lied to consistently about Biden’s condition by people in the traditional media.

Such lying is fairly typical behavior for many in that business. They lied for years about the origin of the Covid epidemic. They lie about apocalyptic claims on climate change. They lied about the riots in the summer of 2020. They lie about conditions on the Mexican border. They lie about critical race theory, DEI, BLM, “systematic racism”, and anti-white bigotry. They lie about the politicization of the FBI and the DOJ. They lie about the war in Gaza. They lied about Hunter Biden. They even lie a little about Donald Trump, which is silly since there is plenty of true stuff to go after there. What is not typical is getting caught at it so fully red handed by so many people.

They are important supporters of and public relations agents for the Democratic party and the bureaucratic state. To be effective they have to be believed. Public skepticism is the main danger for them. What happened on Thursday night should have made and probably did make for more skeptics.