Luke Ford

Mark said Friday (11-8-24): “The media continues to be out of touch. CNN’s media reporter Brian Stelter was forced in his newsletter to address the question of how did Democrats miss the story of Trump’s victory. I was curious about how he would address that because none of the answers fit in his propaganda about Donald Trump. He said the Democrats missed the story because too many reporters are privileged. Therefore, they didn’t see the story. I’m very privileged. I didn’t miss the story. Being privileged doesn’t mean you can’t see the story. I was privileged eight years ago too and I didn’t miss the story. The various straw men they are throwing up such as Harris couldn’t have won… Stelter wrote disaprovingly in his newsletter as he always does of employers such as the Washington Post requiring its employees to work in the office five days a week. That’s a crazy mindset.”

“There’s an Iranian plot to kill Donald Trump. People were indicted. If this were an attempted assassination of Barack Obama or Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton, it would get a lot more attention.”

Caller: “If you were in charge of the New York Times, Mark?”

Mark: “The only thing harder than running against Donald Trump is covering him. He lies all the time. He does things outside the norms… He’s rude. He’s abrasive… The press should scrutinize what he does and not making things up. The vice-president, a big part of her speech, was about [the Trump quote] that there are good people on both sides [which she distorted because Trump said he didn’t mean neo-nazis at Charlottesville] and that there will be a bloodbath [Trump was talking about the American auto industry]. Saying those things as an indictment of Donald Trump are a lie. Never once holding her accountable for saying things that are not true. I’m trying to treat everybody equally, not a different standard for Donald Trump.”

“If the New York Times hired me as a consultant and said, we’ve seen the light. We no longer want to be unfair. Stop writing things about Donald Trump that are unfair or false. Stop quoting Democrats saying false things about him as if they are true. Focus on what he does that affects the lives of people. Don’t focus on the parlor games of Washington, that he was rude to a senator or he made a joke that people didn’t like.”

“Stop assuming that if someone says something on the record about him it must be true. General Kelly must be telling the truth. Donald Trump must be lying. They let anyone make an accusation about him and they build their news coverage around it. Start over with editors and reporters and say, are you indifferent to the success of Donald Trump? Are you for the public interest or do you have an ideological rooting interest to stop Donald Trump’s agenda? If they have an ideological interest, tell them to work some place else. Fill the newsroom with people who want to hold powerful people including Donald Trump accountable to the public interest. Take out all the liberals because they will always revert back to being liberal and to being against Donald Trump. If you asked the reporters for the ten major news organizations in the US and they were honest — who do you want to win? Harris or Trump? It would be 99-1 [Harris]. It doesn’t make sense to have [reporters] with a rooting interest against one of the candidates.”

“I wouldn’t let political reporters write the policy stories because most political reporters don’t know anything about policy. If Donald Trump makes a speech about healthcare, have it covered by the healthcare reporter.”

“The same reporters who spent three years covering up Joe Biden’s loss of mental acuity in conspiracy with the White House are the same people who are covering the Trump administration. They have never acknowledged their role in [covering up Joe Biden’s senility]. How could any Trump supporter says these are the right people to report on Donald Trump?”

“Everyone is familiar with women who told stories about being adversely affected by the overturning of Roe v Wade? Those stories are covered all the time. President Trump in 2016 and in 2024 highlighted the stories of those families whose loved ones were murdered by [illegal aliens]. The media never talks about them. Never interviews them.”

David Samuels writes Nov. 8:

I don’t need to hear Trump’s stunned-looking critics in the Party commentariat speak, though. The expressions on their pallid faces say it all. They are reckoning with the extent of their loss, which is turn related to their collective sense of self-importance — which is belied both by tonight’s result and by their viewership numbers. Having cratered public trust in their profession over the past decade by routinely lying to their audience on behalf of the government, which they identified in turn with the Democratic Party, the country’s self-identified defenders of democracy can fume all they want about Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic, fascist, Hitlerian leanings. The rest of America is as deaf to their blather as I am.

Praising Elon Musk, the country’s most successful technologist, Trump looks more like an avuncular Caribbean vacation package or waterbed salesman than a would-be Hitler. Meanwhile, party hacks like Joy Reid and the political consultants turned “commentators” like David Axelrod, along with supposed “straight news” types like Jake Tapper of CNN, who had all long ago become indistinguishable from each other, by virtue of drinking the Party Kool-Aid are waving their hands at the cameras like they were calling for smelling salts. But once lost, the trust of an audience is hard to win back.

Trump has also lost a step or two himself. His speeches, once gorgeous arias of invective, innuendo and insult comedy, delivered with the snappy timing of a Vegas Rat Pack headliner, have been transformed into rambling arabesques, like the musings of a slightly dotty family patriarch at the Thanksgiving table…

Trump had also learned a trick or two along the way, though. He graciously shares the stage, and allows the importance and accomplishments of others to validate his own role as MC. His timing clearly couldn’t have been better. Five years of Covid laws, a stagnant economy, direct and indirect government censorship of social media, official lying and gaslighting on every subject from trans surgeries to the efficacy of masking to the startling numbers of illegal immigrants entering the country to the spectacle of a dottering Joe Biden being barely able to remember his own name, had left most of the country dispirited and ready for change.

As the evening ends, Trump and the political movement he founded will likely control not just the White House but also the Senate, the House, and also the Supreme Court, giving Trump an actual, real-world chance to fulfill his mandate to Make America Great Again…

As it turns out, the American people are still allowed to vote, regardless of whether their betters decry their choices as racist, sexist, short-sighted, and above all anti-democratic. It’s a paradox that the country’s genius-level elites routinely fail to acknowledge, because they are all profoundly in agreement. We must protect our democracy from those evil anti-democratic forces, American voters, who vote for Donald Trump against the expert guidance of their betters, meaning us…

As the leader of the Democratic Party, Obama was hardly a pretender to power in Washington. Rather, between 2008 and the evening of 5 November 2024, he was usually the foremost power in the land. After serving two elected terms in the White House, Obama then set up and captained the so-called “Resistance” to Trump — an activity that was contrary to all prior American norms and practices. After Trump left, Obama stayed in Washington and continued his role as unelected Party Leader during what had been advertised as the Biden Presidency.

Obama’s method of avoiding scrutiny from the pliant DC press was entirely in character, alternately drawing back into the shadows and then, out of whatever ego weakness, announcing that he was the true mover of events. Free from normative oversight or responsibility, he and his retainers could also avoid answering questions about the size or sources of his personal fortune, which was rumoured to amount to somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. As a private citizen, Obama didn’t have to answer questions. He could have it both ways — state power, with no public responsibility.

Until he misstepped. By compelling Biden to withdraw in favour of Harris, who turned out to be an even worse candidate than a senile old man who had begun to resemble a badly taxidermied deer, Obama broke the unspoken agreement that had put him beyond scrutiny. Disappearing the sitting President from the Democratic Party ticket against his will, for reasons that were obviously contrary to what the press had been telling Americans about Biden’s incredibly acute mental functioning up, and replacing him with a candidate that no one in the party had actually voted for, required some sort of comment, however brief. It made it impossible, if only for a week or two, to maintain the fiction that Obama was simply living in Washington DC while staying out of politics. If Biden was senile, then who was actually running the country? Who had enough clout to order the President’s removal from the ticket?

The answer in both cases was Obama. And now he was on the hook not only for Kamala Harris, but retroactively for the more general mess that he and his operatives had helped to make of the country. Everywhere from Harvard University, his alma mater, where he helped install a repeat plagiarist as the University’s President, to the Middle East, which went up in flames the moment he was able to re-animate his Iran Deal, which appeared to be even stupider — if not as expensive — as George W. Bush’s determination to transform Afghanistan and Iraq into Western-style democratic societies at the point of a gun, the Party Leader’s Midas Touch-in-reverse was evident, even if no one ever breathed a single word of criticism…

Seeing Americans as one people, with a common culture and character, shaped by a common history, is not something that America’s new elites know how to do, though. From kindergarten on, they are taught otherwise. Ivy League universities, the crucible in which the new class has been forged, base admissions and hiring decisions not on measures of objective performance, but on their ranking in the ever-shifting hierarchies of Party-sanctioned identity groups. The ability to sort Americans into bureaucratic categories like BIPOC, MENA, LGBTQ+ and other alphabet soup constructions is in fact the defining skill of Obama-era elites. It signifies mastery of in-group codes that help the Democratic Party manage its own top-down constituencies, which are regimented by political operatives and NGO organisers, paid for by billionaire foundations, and embodied in bureaucratic regulations, executive orders, census categories and other legally-binding schemes meant to overcome historical American notions of equality. That’s how the party machine operates.

Now, in one night, the Obama machine, which he built on the model of the Chicago Democratic Party machine, and which he used to run the country, including the prestige institutions and the media, through a combination of bureaucratic capture and social pressure, accentuated by control of large tech platforms, was finally melting down. No wonder the press was in shock. None of the lines that they had been given could be reconciled with the numbers onscreen.

A reckoning will surely come. At the very least, the time has now arrived for Barack Obama to leave Washington and exit American politics, now that his Shadow Presidency — which proved to be even more counter-productive and chaotic than Trump’s first term in office — has gone down in flames.

Meanwhile, the gap between what America’s elites believe, and what the rest of the country believes, has never been wider, probably not since the late 19th century.

The bigger lesson being that America is just too big — and too wild, and too destructive, and rooted in the idea of individual freedom — for any self-styled “elite” to ride the horse for very long, without being thrown off.