It has been a real eye-opener to watch the left go from smug confidence that Kamala was preordained to be the 47th president of the United States to the depth of despair as Donald Trump racked up 312 electoral votes and a popular vote victory to become the first president since Grover Cleveland to be elected to non-consecutive terms.
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This is just a snapshot of the changes.
See Ward Clark’s Anatomy of a Blowout: Major Shifts in the Electorate – RedState for more examples.
So, what caused this seismic shift? A sane person would say that the Democrats suffered from a spectacularly horrible candidate, a repulsive agenda for America, or both. But if you are a Democrat activist, you blame “right-wing media.”
This “journalist and political pundit” Anand “that is my hair, not a badger stuck to my head” Giridharadas on Morning Joe.
Particularly the media ecosystem they’ve…It’s not a good one, it’s a negative one. It’s a it’s a radicalization funnel.
But what they have done in their online media ecosystem is build a radicalization engine, literally the way militant groups do around the world, that takes people from relatively low-level annoyances with the world. Why are eggs so expensive? Why is my kid learning this new thing in American history in school that I didn’t learn? And then moves them through YouTube videos, through podcasts, moves them from that annoyance all the way, slowly, slowly, slowly, to a full-blown fascist politics.
It’s an elaborate, multibillion dollar infrastructure, and there is nothing like it on the pro-democracy side. When a man is just lost and lonely and not yet radicalized, we don’t have the equivalent of Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson to move that man in a feminist direction.
By the way, we should educate men, it’s actually really great to live with a strong woman who makes money. It’s actually easier, life is easier.
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Michael Tomasky, the neo-communist editor of The New Republic, has the same view. Trump won because right-wing media overpowered the truth.
But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.
The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.
(I love how they reflexively blame Fox News, though its usefulness as a conservative outlet is highly debatable.)
It’s really hard to know where to start on this bullsh**. To a large degree, conservative media has emerged organically because we were shut out of mainstream media. It is very difficult to find anything more than a token center-right voice on any of the networks, major papers, or cultural magazines. The Atlantic fired the pseudo-conservative Kevin Williamson. The New York Times staff ran Bari Weiss off, even though she was only mildly conservative depending on the sunspot patterns. NBC fired Megyn Kelly. My old blog project, RedMaryland, had a deal to provide a mainstream conservative viewpoint to the Baltimore Sun’s editorial page, we were booted thanks to a faux issue drummed up by Media Matters. Movies like Matt Walsh’s “What is a Woman?” (see This May Be the Most Absurd, Telling Exchange in Matt Walsh’s ‘What Is a Woman?’) and “Am I a Racist?” (see Matt Walsh’s ‘Am I Racist’ Uses Major DEI Figures to Expose and Lampoon It As the Racist Grift It Is) get no media promotion. Leftist media continues to dominate ratings.
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To be clear, the claim here is that “the left” and “center” do not have a “media ecosystem” capable of drowning out the “disinformation” of “right-wing” figures such as Elon Musk and Joe Rogan. One hardly knows where to begin with an argument this absurd. The “right-wing media ecosystem” exists only in reaction to the left’s complete dominance in legacy media, which is quite obviously a vast, multi-billion dollar industry encompassing the broadcast networks, CNN, MSNBC, and major publications. Kamala Harris was formally endorsed by The Atlantic, Vogue, The New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Houston Chronicle, the Seattle Times and, for some reason, the Scientific American. The list goes on.
A Fox News analysis found “In 2016, more than 240 newspapers endorsed Hillary Clinton, while only 20 endorsed Trump. In 2020, 14 newspapers endorsed Trump, and 120 endorsed Biden.” This election cycle, “nearly 80 newspapers endorsed Harris, and fewer than 10 endorsed Trump.” (Fox News, by the way, is virtually the only major corporate news outlet that leans right on most issues.)
With few exceptions, legacy outlets still dominate the all-important web traffic game. As of publication, the top 10 news podcasts on Apple include “The Daily,” “Pod Save America,” “Up First,” “NPR Politics” and “The Bulwark Podcast.” Those shows, all from legacy outlets or anti-Trump new media outlets, are competing right alongside Ben Shapiro, Megyn Kelly, Charlie Kirk, Dan Bongino, and Joe Rogan.
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The real question is, how can so much leftist media have so little impact on political discussions?
As Stephen Miller observed, Rogan is not conservative. Jordan Peters is not conservative. Our YouTube and Rumble channels rely on viewers, not George Soros or some other leftist billionaire, to survive. Here at RedState, if you don’t read us, we don’t get paid.
What makes us different than the media owned by the left is that we deeply believe in what we write, and monied interests don’t control us. Our writers and influencers are not a collection of paid-for twinks. The extremes to which the Biden administration went to silence us through coopting Meta and pre-Elon Musk Twitter gave us credibility that no leftist outlet will ever have because it demonstrated that the establishment feared our message. The authenticity of our message cuts through the clutter because it has the ring of truth.
The left can’t compete because they don’t have very many ideas, and those ideas they have cut against human freedom and autonomy. But if Kamala can drop a billion is leftist money on a losing election, those same donors can drop another building out another version of Air America radio network.