After fluttering around different arguments and positions “joy”, “turn the page” and “protecting democracy”, the Kamala campaign has settled on abortion as its final closing argument. Faced…

“Win or lose, fans of the Philly Eagles go out into the street and smash things. Whoever wins on Election Day, leftists will smash things,” is how I began my recent article ‘Fear and Loathing on…

The tower of terror.

Hope is on the horizon.

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Politics Trump’s Independent Media Election The Republican nominee is harnessing an important new force in politics that left elites can’t even acknowledge. Credit: image via Shutterstock As of this writing, Donald Trump’s interview with Joe Rogan is above 40 million views on YouTube. It is three hours long, expansive, substantive, and challenging, particularly regarding Trump’s 2020 election claims. Comparatively, Kamala Harris’s only interview with Fox News, consistently cable’s most popular outlet, outpacing rivals CNN and MSNBC, had 9.2 million viewers on their channel. Released in mid-October, it has 6.2 million views on Fox News’s YouTube. Also as of this writing, Harris is refusing to do Rogan’s show unless he travels to her and only for a 45 minute interview. Rogan says no, insisting that his format is always going to be anywhere from 90 minutes to three hours in his Austin studio, where he says he can get to know a person, including the Democratic presidential nominee, should she finally choose to join him. As the most popular podcaster in the world, Rogan doesn’t need Harris. She might need him, as her campaign now weighs that gamble. Some speculate her campaign might see a danger in voters really getting to know Kamala the person in an extended interview. They might have a point. J.D. Vance sat down with Joe Rogan on Wednesday. In fact, in addition to appearing on Rogan, both the Republican presidential nominee and vice presidential nominee have made a string of appearances on podcasts far beyond the world of cable news and traditional legacy media. Trump’s interview with the comedian Theo Von from late August sits at 14 million views on YouTube. Trump and/or Vance have also been interviewed by the comedian Andrew Schulz on his “Flagrant” podcast, WWE legend The Undertaker, the streamer Adin Ross, the YouTubers “the Nelk Boys,” and Barstool Sports’ “Bussin’ with the Boys” hosted by two former NFL players. Trump’s sit-down on the “Impaulsive” podcast with boxer and pro wrestler Logan Paul from June, now sits at 6.6 million views on YouTube. There are more interviews done by Team Trump of this sort. As the Trump campaign is aggressively hitting independent media, particularly podcasts with large male audiences, Harris has done limited interviews with establishment media. Harris’s single independent podcast appearance, her October 6 turn on “Call Her Daddy,” which boasts a large female audience, now has about 760,000 views on YouTube. Simultaneously, and somewhat unprecedentedly, some major traditional newspapers like the Washington Post, L.A. Times and USA Today have decided not to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024. Facing overwhelming anger from his vigorously anti-Trump reader base over this decision, Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post’s owner, listed some reasons for his paper’s non-endorsement in an op-ed titled “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media.” “Most people believe the media is biased,” Bezos wrote. “Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion… We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.” He continued, “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.” Bezos lamented that so many were now turning to podcasts instead of news institutions like his own. “Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions,” Bezos worried. “The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves.” You have to admire his sincere and brutal introspection. Bezos continued, “While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs….” Bezos gets it. His staff? Washington Post editorial board members have stepped down, writers have quit, and subscribers have canceled. Which is precisely why so many of these “off-the-cuff” and “unresearched” podcasts have larger audiences now than the Post does. Bezos is right that sometimes these podcasters get things wrong. Obviously, most haven’t gone to journalism school. But plenty of supposed journalistic professionals have told us—with all the pomp, circumstance, and authority that they imagine they have—that Covid-19 absolutely did not come from a Chinese lab, that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation, and that Russia blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. We know how all that turned out. When the mainstream press lies to its readers time and again, and no one is ever held accountable after getting news so wrong, combined with the perception that these outlets only serve a certain subset of elites, people are going to stop paying attention or even having basic respect for what they do. People are going to look elsewhere. And they have, as Bezos acknowledges. Trump and his campaign have acknowledged this too, in a significant way. While elites like Bezos and the staff of the Post and other major outlets might look down on these podcasters and their large audiences, regular Americans see cable news outlets who lie to them and only talk about Trump in the context of January 6 and fascism, as if there’s nothing more to his candidacy. While someone like Rogan is willing to sit down with anyone from any political party and get to know them. He’s intellectually curious, like many people who don’t live and breathe politics. It’s genuine and relatable. The appeal of Rogan and some like him is not hard to understand. Unless figures like him are a threat to you. When it was announced that Trump would be appearing on Rogan last week, the New Republic, founded in 1914, went with the headline, “Trump Cancels All His Events in Favor of One of the Worst People Ever.” Envious much? In 2008, Barack Obama and his campaign were hailed for their ability to see the increasing importance of social media in elections at the time, and how deft they were compared to the Republican John McCain’s clunky, old-man campaign. In 2024, the oldest man in the race has been quick to take advantage of a new alternative media that has risen organically in the last few years, and that now serves as the media for large swaths of Americans. If he manages to win, don’t expect legacy media to point out how ahead of the curve Donald Trump was in harnessing independent media in this election. And it won’t be just because they hate Donald Trump. The post Trump’s Independent Media Election appeared first on The American Conservative.

Uncategorized The War on ‘Stupid-ism’ In a recent podcast, Donald Trump identified the problem. The solution? Be less nice. We aren’t being smart. I want us to be smarter.  You want to win the culture war? Make America smart again.  Allow me to introduce “Smart-ism”—a cure to what Donald Trump so rightly named “Stupid-ism”  in his recent interview with the philanthropist Tom Klingenstein. Trump coined the term “Stupid-ism” while he and Klingenstein were trying to find the most fitting moniker to give to our left-wing opponents.  Stupid-ism is a virus of the mind, but it is infecting the heart, body, and soul of America. We have a rapidly spreading infection that is seeping into our cities, government, schools, health care, and culture—an infection that we must address with swift and serious antiviral action. Unfortunately, this is an easily spreading invisible pathogen.  In part, that’s because our political adversary is difficult to fend off. And that’s because they are usually very nice.  David French, for example, is a nice man. In fact, in his critique of French, Sohrab Ahmari went so far as to say in his piece Against David French-ism that it “isn’t easy to critique the persona of someone as nice as French.” French has been a constant critic and opponent of Trump in his quest to supposedly “Save Conservatism from Itself.” Once a former legal champion of religious liberty and conservative causes, proud pro-lifer, and evangelical Christian, French has caught the Stupid-ism virus. He is not alone. He and his allies—the Liz Cheneys, Mitt Romneys, Paul Ryans, John Boltons, Mitch McConnells, and Jeff Flakes—are so sick with Stupid-ism that they don’t understand the warmth they feel from the left isn’t admiration, but rather the feverish glee of discovering a useful idiot. Falling in and out of lucidity, they cheer with joy when the Steve Bannons are unjustifiably imprisoned and weep with sorrow when the assassin’s bullet misses a president’s head.  This is a pandemic that kills virtue with politeness. It is reshaping our culture. Ahmari wisely adds of French’s niceness, “it is in part that earnest and insistently polite quality of his that I find unsuitable to the depth of the present crisis facing religious conservatives.” The trend of a certain breed of conservative taking a sharp left turn without common sense is clearly contagious. Smart-ism is the cure. The latest study shows that human IQ has decreased for the first time since they started measuring it in 1905. Our education system is abysmal compared to other developed countries and people spend an average of seven hours a day staring or swiping on a screen. The average student no longer wishes to answer questions in classrooms because they are so concerned about what others think of them. Psychology Today reports that students are “afraid of even letting themselves think out loud about a position that might land them in trouble through social sanctions and accusations that they are racists, fascists, bigots, or sexists.”  The same article warns that if political science students become accustomed to having to keep their mouths shut, then it’s “only a matter of time until the mind shuts, too.” Our classrooms make things even worse. Twenty percent of adults in the U.S. can’t read a book written at a fifth-grade level. These shocking literacy levels are important because uneducated citizens are unable to fully participate in a democracy.  How can you make an educated decision about which candidate to vote for or policy to oppose if you can’t read? How can you be a productive citizen if you can’t comprehend anything above a ninth-grade level—like the 75 percent of welfare recipients? What are you contributing to society when the only thing you can understand is the number on your monthly check from the government?  Being stupid makes you dependent upon the government. This the left knows well. Heaven forbid we continue to read the old white men who taught us about the essentiality of tradition to human flourishing and created the foundations of Western civilization. Out with Plato; in with poorly-written postmodern queer, feminist, and minority fiction. Dead white men, after all, could be considered offensive. L’horreur!  Instead, everyone should feel represented! Everyone should be comfortable! Everyone should win! That’s the nice thing to do, right? And that’s the problem. Our culture of nice is making us dumb.  That is why people are drawn to Donald Trump. It’s why they tolerate or even like the mean tweets. He may not always be nice, but he’s usually right. Trump doesn’t confuse empathy with intelligence, as our Stupid-ism infected friends do. He doesn’t cower to the peer pressure of social norms if those norms are bad, unhealthy, or dangerous for America and its people. He runs on facts, not feelings. Perhaps most importantly, Trump doesn’t care whether you like him. Elon Musk feels the same way, saying in a recent interview that wanting to be liked is a real weakness. He is correct. But it’s all anyone seems to value these days. We want to be liked. An entire generation has been raised receiving their affirmation and dopamine hits through digital “likes” via social media. Our neural pathways have been rewired to have an overwhelming desire for approval. We have become a society desperate for popularity. Which is stupid.  Saturated in nice, we have been told that tolerating everyone and everything is kindness or empathy. Because Trump isn’t this empty brand of nice, because he refuses to go along with the absurd and ridiculous, the enemy depicts him as someone like Hitler. Klingenstein remarked, “We have to understand, we’re in a war… and in a war, you play by different rules… there’s no basis for compromise.”  Trump added “The Republicans have to get tougher…. They don’t fight like they should fight.” He’s right. We don’t fight like we should fight. We’re too nice.  We fight with rules. They fight with Rules for Radicals. We keep bringing knives to gunfights and expecting the other side to act honorably.  They won’t.  Even if Trump wins the 2024 Presidential election, unless we conservatives become willing to be perhaps a little less nice—fighting back against lawfare, dismantling the administrative state, reaching voters like college-educated women and GenZ, changing tactics, and invoking the courageous spirit of Sir Winston Churchill over that of appeasing Neville Chamberlain—we will lose the greater war. We must be courageous truth-tellers, championing tradition and virtue, not acquiescing to peer pressure. But we must also show up for each other, even if we don’t completely agree on everything. As Benjamin Franklin reminds us, “We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” With Stupid-ism we are told to buy into the lies, the failed policies, the bad science, the outrageous government spending, the denial of the clear cognitive decline of a sitting president.  But no more. This is where we make our stand.  Help is not coming. We have to save ourselves from the infection of Stupid-ism. We must prioritize the harmonious health of our movement and act as one body. We must be unafraid to push back and reclaim our hitherto surrendered ground.  To eradicate Stupid-ism and make America smart again, we must stop being so terribly nice. That’s the cure.  It’s also how we win. The post The War on ‘Stupid-ism’ appeared first on The American Conservative.