Lamestream Media Trying to Figure Out What Went Wrong

Iran, Take Notice: Trump Foreign Policy Gets Muscular with Rubio, Stefanik

Nothing underlines the partisan nature of PBS right now than The Atlantic magazine being allowed to take over the long-running Washington Week program in August of 2023. This was not a hostile takeover, but a deeper branding of what PBS is – taxpayer-funded mangle-MAGA TV. Four years ago, The Atlantic tried to take Donald Trump down with anonymous sources claiming he called the American war dead “suckers” and “losers” on a European trip (which was strongly rebuked by Team Trump). In 2024, they did it again with anonymous sources claiming after pledging to pay for a funeral for a murdered Mexican-American soldier, Trump raged, “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a f---ing Mexican!” All their anonymous sources sound like rhetorical assassins. Now, they have a PBS platform to promote this – on Washington Week with The Atlantic and on other PBS shows like the News Hour. How partisan is this gang? Let's make a list: 1. The Atlantic has endorsed Donald Trump’s opponent in three straight cycles. This year, they typically proclaimed him “manifestly unstable and incompetent” and “one of the most personally malignant and politically dangerous candidates in American history.” 2. Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who has railed against Trump for those three cycles, was very tight with Barack Obama. He was  granted hours of interviews with President Obama to promote his “Obama Doctrine,” went on NPR in 2016 gushing that Obama was “the greatest terrorist hunter in the history of the American presidency.” 3. This year, Goldberg did a round of interviews promoting his new partisan book of old essays, titled Goldberg to promote his new book (of old essays) titled On Heroism: McCain, Milley, Mattis, and the Cowardice of Donald Trump. The promotional text said Goldberg explores “Donald Trump’s trenchant disdain for military personnel, a preoccupation that reveals the extent to which Trump is grossly unfit to serve…. Goldberg paints a portrait of a president whose impulse is to dismiss acts of heroism in pursuit of dangerously undemocratic processes and ideals.” 4.  Laurene Powell Jobs, the multi-billionaire widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs who bought a majority share in The Atlantic in 2017, celebrated Hillary Clinton in Time magazine in 2015 as “one of America’s greatest modern creations.” In 2016, Mrs. Jobs donated $2 million to her Priorities USA super PAC via her nonprofit and hosted a $200,000-a-plate fundraiser that raised more than $4 million. 5. In the 2020 cycle, Mrs. Jobs donated the individual maximum contribution of $2,800 to eight different Democrat presidential contenders, not just Joe Biden, but Michael Bennet, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg,  Amy Klobuchar, Tom Steyer, Andrew Yang….and Kamala Harris.  After Biden became the nominee, she donated $600,000 toward Biden’s election and donated $70,800 to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. 6. In 2023, Mrs. Jobs donated $10,000 to the Democratic Party apparatus in 49 states and the District of Columbia. She threw another $288,500 at the Democratic National Committee. There were no donations to Republicans. 7. Mrs. Jobs is a close friend of Kamala Harris. Semafor reported when Harris abruptly secured the Democratic nomination, Jobs made no secret of her delight. “She’s overjoyed,” said Susie Tompkins Buell, the major San Francisco Democrat donor who has known both women for decades. Republicans in Congress should be asking in the new year why the Trump-supporting half of America is forced to subsidize The Atlantic’s blatant and vicious partisanship on supposedly civilized “public” television. 

Donald Trump. He’s back. After the most dramatic election cycle in modern American history, Trump has won a sweeping victory, moving every single state in America in his direction from 2020. He didn’t just sweep the swing states. He only lost New Jersey by five points. He won Miami-Dade County in Florida -- the first Republican presidential candidate to win the county since George H.W. Bush in 1988. He won 45% of the Hispanic vote. In several of the key swing states, he broke 40% with the Jewish vote. He won north of 20% of the Black male vote. Trump grew his coalition in every single area. Across the board. So, what happened? The answer has two components: first, Trump. And second, the Democratic Party and its apparatchiks in the media. First, Trump. Trump is a unique figure. He was one of the most famous people on earth before he ever ran for president. This made him immune to attempts to characterize him in overwrought fashion. Nobody truly believed Donald Trump was Hitler; after his first term, there was literally zero evidence that he would ever be. Yet Democrats continued to treat him as a threat to the very fabric of the republic, a would-be dictator hell-bent on seizing power and wielding it against his enemies. The attack didn’t land. Trump also has magnetic charisma. It’s a sort of charisma that many Americans don’t understand: he rambles, he jokes, he says silly things. But he is absolutely himself, 100% of the time. He is the most authentic political candidate of our lifetimes. Americans trust him, despite his penchant for exaggeration and tall tales, because they know him. And what’s more, Trump knows them, too. Trump has an innate love for the American people. When he dons an apron at a McDonald’s and serves fries, he’s not doing that because he wants Americans to believe that he’s suddenly a blue-collar fry cook. It’s because he wants them to know he likes and respects them. And that he likes and respects their values. Which brings us to the Democratic Party and their propagandists in the media. The story of the 2024 election isn’t about Kamala Harris. She is a nothingburger. She always was. She was never “joy” or “brat.” She is a career politician who has never won a vote outside of California. She was slotted into Joe Biden’s nomination because the sitting president physically expired on the debate stage. And she then proceeded to act as a fresh coat of paint on the battered jalopy of the Democratic Party record. Americans saw through it. What Americans saw, instead of her celebrity-flecked candidacy of pseudo-excitement, was yet another iteration of the Democratic Party’s playbook: transgressive values disconnected from the traditional family values Americans like; a peculiarly insular view of the economy that believes a government handout can make up for expensive groceries and declining prospects; an arrogance rooted in the supposed superiority of a pseudo-intellectual self-appointed nobility -- a nobility that scorns achievement and innovation in the name of luxury beliefs; an anti-American sense of our country’s history and role in the world. Americans have been saddled with this Democratic playbook since the Obama era. And they hate it. That’s why Trump won in 2016. And it’s why Trump won again in 2024. Because while the left likes to proclaim that Trump isn’t normal, the reality is that their agenda isn’t normal. The form of normality they cherish is deeply abnormal. It runs counter to American notions of virtue and individual freedom, of property rights and American exceptionalism. Slathering platitudinous nonsense on that abnormality doesn’t render it more normal; it just renders it more dishonest. And so the normies struck back. They said enough. They want the American dream -- Hispanics in south Texas and white Americans in northern Ohio and Black voters in Wisconsin; Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Muslims. It turns out the American dream is still alive in the hearts of Americans. We want our share of that dream. Even more, we want to dream that dream together. That’s why Donald Trump is back. Because America is back. Ben Shapiro’s new collection, “Facts and Furious: The Facts About America and Why They Make Leftists Furious,” is available now. Shapiro is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and co-founder of Daily Wire+. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author. To find out more about Ben Shapiro and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

A surprise winner for me at Gamescom this year was Towerborne, the new co-op action RPG from Xbox Game Studios and Stoic, developer of The Banner Saga. A dramatic departure from that game, this colorful, loot-led romp combines satisfying combat inspired by fighting games and soulslikes with stat-rich gear reminiscent of ARPGs like Diablo. The result is a package that’s simple to get into but offers plenty of depth if you want it. Its new update ratchets up the level cap and the threat alike, so I sat down with the team to discuss the changes and what lies ahead. Continue reading Co-op RPG Towerborne’s biggest update adds a new boss, gear, and a group finder MORE FROM PCGAMESN: The best action-adventure games, The best co-op games

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