Five Quick Things: Shouldn’t This Election Be a Referendum on the Legacy Corporate Media?

A couple of months back, this column noted a narrative being pushed by, among others, Donald Trump surrogate and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Trump isn’t really running against Kamala Harris, said Ramaswamy; instead, he’s running against a machine.

Instinctively, pretty much everybody understands that Ramaswamy was correct. Harris, like Joe Biden, the predecessor she helped to overthrow at the top of the Democrats’ ticket, can’t really be discussed as a candidate per se but is really more of a corporate being. She’s a product assembled by a cabal of handlers, consultants, donors, and propagandists much more than a stateswoman or a leader, and in fact there is little in the way of personal substance she can offer to the American people.

“These are my core principles. These are my achievements. This is how you should judge my fitness as a candidate for the most important job in the world.” Ask Harris to present anything like that and you’ll get a word slaw that ought to irritate and offend you.

The fact that she’s a machine candidate who can’t even offer a plausible facade of leadership tells you a lot about the machine. That they’ve descended from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton to Joe Biden to Kamala Harris is a pretty damning indictment.

Oh, and the machine has played on the Republican side, too, let’s not gloss over that fact. It pitted Nikki Haley against Trump as long as it could before it became perfectly obvious that wasn’t going to fly with the folks. But when it became obvious that Haley wasn’t unseating Trump, the machine went all in to keep its appointed puppets — and thus itself — in power.

It doesn’t look like that bet will pay off, though nothing about that is guaranteed.

But one thing is absolutely, positively clear: a key component, if not perhaps the dominant component, of the machine is the rancid, toxic sludge blob that is the legacy corporate “mainstream” media. From the New York Times to the Washington Post to the Chicago Tribune to the Los Angeles Times to the Hill and Politico to NBC, MSNBC, CBS, CNN, PBS, ABC, and NPR, the sludge blob is what has been greasing the machine’s wheels as it continues spinning its way to self-preservation.

1. Which Is Why Voters Ought to Consider the Media as the Enemy It Is

There should be a colossal flaw in this analysis, which would be to say that each of the aforementioned entities has an editorial viewpoint distinct from the others. Even better would be if you could say that within those entities are contained lots of distinct viewpoints indicative of a robust debate inside their newsrooms.

But neither are true. The media is a monolith. The sludge blob has no spots or stripes.

Here’s how bad it is. After Harris’ catastrophic interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, which any rational human could identify as a disqualifying performance to rival the debate disaster that sent Joe Biden on the fast track to political oblivion, the headlines from the sludge blob’s various organs all spoke the same words:

Interesting coincidence pic.twitter.com/tMhtK1P3Nq

— The Rabbit Hole (@TheRabbitHole84) October 17, 2024

The interview wasn’t “testy.” Harris was “testy.” Baier just wanted to get his questions out and have them answered, and she got hostile at the idea that he was intent on having that happen.

That it’s “testy” for a media organ to make demands of a candidate in an effort to vet him or her should tell you something about the sludge blob.

Interviews Trump has done have certainly been “testy.” The one he did with Bloomberg’s silly editor-in-chief John Micklethwait qualified as that, because Micklethwait insisted on fact-checking most of his answers, which ultimately led to Trump pointing out that Bloomberg constantly gets things wrong.

And almost always when they do, it’s because they’re representing the power elite to the people, rather than speaking truth to power and holding the elite accountable.

Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable was how H. L. Mencken defined the role of the media. That perhaps wasn’t spot-on correct, but certainly it’s the job of the Fourth Estate, and a job specified in the First Amendment as important enough to be protected by the Constitution. They are to vet the elite and check their lies and abuses.

The sludge blob doesn’t do any of that. When all the stories of Democrat scandals and failures are headlined with “Republicans Pounce” markers, and when we’re deluged with demands to see Trump’s cholesterol levels and accusations he’s going to sic the U.S. military on average Americans (which wasn’t what he said, of course, and if this was a real threat, how come he didn’t do any of that in his first term?), it’s no longer a question of there being an objective, truth-seeking media in America.

Should Trump win and should he have a majority in Congress to work with, one key task has to be to break up the sludge blob. Too many of those entities are bundled into a fairly small number of media conglomerates, and breaking up those giant megaliths with antitrust actions has to be on his agenda.

The sludge blob is all-in for Kamala. It plays a lot larger role in American politics than she does. And it’s what Trump is really running against at this point.

2. Show Me No More of Collin Allred

Harris’ Fox News interview wasn’t the worst political catastrophe of the week for the Democrats. Oh, no. That title goes to Collin Allred, the congressman from the Dallas suburbs who’s being boosted into a surprisingly close race for the U.S. Senate against incumbent Republican Ted Cruz.

Allred could be Gloria Allred, or Red Buttons. It wouldn’t matter. They’ve thrown $100 million plus at him because the machine hates Cruz so much. And to be fair, the GOP wing of the machine hates Cruz, too — Mitch McConnell has done nothing whatsoever to protect him from that $100 million onslaught.

The race is close. There are even polls showing Cruz behind. He’s probably going to pull out a 52–48 win, or something close to that, having withstood the $100 million in attack ads and other political acts of aggression committed against him.

But this week Cruz got to debate Allred and he destroyed him. This was a total evisceration:

Ted Cruz DEMOLISHES Colin Allred with his voting record in which Colin supported boys in girl’s sports and girl’s bathrooms, s*x change surgery for minors, and taxpayer funded drag shows and se*x change surgeries for military members pic.twitter.com/azxZI1ulPV

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 16, 2024

Cruz crushed Allred on Israel. He pummeled him on late-term abortion. He annihilated him on border and immigration policy. It got so bad that Allred was swaying back and forth like Jim Cantore in a hurricane. All he could do in defense of himself as Cruz brought receipts and pounded him into the dirt over his repeated votes to inflict confused men on female athletes was to say that Cruz “wants you thinking about kids in bathrooms so you’re not thinking about women in hospitals.”

That’s it? That’s the best you’ve got?

Sludge blob entities like the Nation, where the imbecile John Nichols posted something with a headline saying Cruz was as “hapless and beatable” as Trump (both are favored to win), rejoiced at Allred’s performance. Not many others did.

Will Cruz win big? No. Cruz doesn’t win big. Cruz, who’s actually very nice in person, presents in public as your obnoxious lawyer rather than your drinking buddy, and there are too many voters who think a Pepsodent smile and a little small talk are signifiers of statesmanship. And Cruz attracts big money for his opponents from unhinged Democrat donors lining up to take him out, while at the same time the Chamber of Commerce crowd doesn’t feel it for him like they do Texas’ other senator, John Cornyn, who believes in nothing but a big smile.

So it’s always going to be a fight to keep Cruz in the Senate. But it’s a fight worth engaging.

3. Can’t We Get Rid of the Disgusting Rick Wilson?

What needs to be said about this? Wilson is the grotesque in charge of the pedo-friendly grift known as the Lincoln Project, and he’s still around after all this time.

This is disgraceful from Rick Wilson of the Lincoln Project, after multiple assassination attempts already on Trump he still goes on national television and says this:

“they’re still going to have to go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump” pic.twitter.com/a1p5W5O33c

— Sean (@Xcellent78) October 16, 2024

These people are the product of the media sludge blob, which continues propping them up, and the various leftist donors who continue funding them. There is no discernible merit to any of what Wilson does, and yet this persists.

It’s an interesting case study in the strange staying power of certain grifts.

4. Trump Says Obama Is “An Angry Guy” in Patrick Bet David Interview

The interview Donald Trump did with Patrick Bet David on his podcast was maybe one of his best, and one of the reasons was that the questions were excellent. Here was a segment from that interview talking about Barack Obama and his pot-shots at Trump’s economy:

Compare Trump’s demeanor and candor in that interview with Harris’ in that room with Baier, and you can understand why things are beginning to turn.

5. The From Hellmarsh With Love Podcast

As is my wont, having finished writing From Hellmarsh With Love, I’m engaging in a little bit of book promotion with this final thing of the week. In case you missed it, one of last week’s Spectacle Podcast segments contained a discussion of the book and its main subject matter — which is the assault on free speech being perpetrated by the ruling elites of the various Western countries, particularly on the issue of mass migration and its effect on the culture of those affected Western countries.

Melissa and I had a good discussion about that subject, so I wanted to give you folks another opportunity to have a look:

The seventh episode (out of eight) of the serialized version of From Hellmarsh With Love will pop here at The American Spectator over the weekend (keep this link handy; it’s where you can find the whole series). But also, click here if you’d like to pre-order a signed copy of the book and get it in advance of the crowd.

READ MORE:

Is This Right? Is America Now R+7?

And Now, the Cholesterol Race Begins

Aftershocks: From Hellmarsh With Love Ep. 6

The post Five Quick Things: Shouldn’t This Election Be a Referendum on the Legacy Corporate Media? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.