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Notes -
The Political Horse Race Two Weeks Out
Apologies to our foreign or American friends who may be bored by the non-stop election coverage, but I just can't get enough.
A couple weeks ago I predicted with 50% confidence (the ultimate in weasly predictions) that we'd see an October surprise timed for maximum damage to the Trump campaign. I think we just saw the attempt. It was dumb as you could expect.
Yesterday, nearly every single media outlet in the country ran the same story. The story? John Kelly, Trump's former chief of staff, supposedly once said that Trump told him "Well, Hitler did a lot of good things". Kelly also said something about Trump praising Hitler's generals. The story was first reported in 2021. It was denied by Trump the next day.
Somehow, three years later, it was front page news in nearly every mainstream outlet. It was an incredible example of media discipline and coordination. See for yourself:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=trump%20hitler%20comments
So... did it land? No I don't think so. Comparing people to Hitler is the oldest game in the book. Does anyone remember the Lyndon Larouche campaigners with their Obama-as-Hitler posters? Moreover, we've heard everything about Trump. 99% of people have made up their mind already. And Trump is also omnipresent. Today's Hitler story is yesterday's news as Trump appears on Rogan or works at McDonald's or eats a burrito bowl or something.
Harris tried to make the story work. In between cringe videos of her latest town hall appearance, her Twitter account tweeted this:
So how are the betting markets taking it? Well, there were a couple more flash crashes in Trump shares on Polymarket. Around midnight, his odds briefly dipped under 60%. Was it manipulation? I don't think so. To paraphrase Stanley Druckenmiller, sometimes it's better to just buy the rumor and then ask questions later. Maybe it was worth a gamble to see if the attack stuck.
As of right now, Trump is up near 65% again. Interestingly, his chances of winning the popular vote have crept up to about 40%. In polls, according to Real Clear Politics, Harris's nationwide lead has fallen to 0.3%, while Trump maintains a 0.9% edge in the seven swing states.
It really is too close to call at this point. Will we see a "real" October surprise against Trump? It feels unlikely. There just isn't any more unspent ammunition. Will the Trump campaign produce some valuable oppo research against Harris? Again, unlikely, since the media wouldn't report on it anyway.
The election is 12 days out, and many ballots have already been cast.
What I don’t get is exactly how they thought a story first released in 2021, and that was debunked back then was supposed to move the needle. Not only is it old news, but the “my enemy is literally Hitler” game goes back to at least George W Bush. As an October Surprise, this is a nothing burger and the people pushing this narrative knew that. I suspect they have some other stories that this is softening the ground to build for.
There's a certain power that comes from knowing how everyone will react, and this drives a lot of things.
I keep coming back to the David Cameron PigGate scandal; there's a high chance it never happened to start with, the actual claimed behavior was little more than goofy fratboy jokes, but the initial book ran on a legal hack (Ashcroft reported only being told of the story) making it dangerous to contest under UK defamation law, while literally everybody up to the BBC could euphemistically reframe it to something far more serious, and everyone under that illustrious bar could reduce it to "Cameron fucked a pig".
It's establishing the room temperature.
See also the breathlessly-reported Epstein Connection (with a time paradox in the allegations) or a Trump Hates Vets (anonymously sourced, disputed by the family of the deceased vet in question).
Yeah, the media is constantly smashing the "damage Trump, hurt own credibility" button. They need to spend some years building up their political capital. The account so overdrawn they can't even damage Trump anymore, all they can do is further damage their own credibility.
I kind of agree here which is what makes this move so baffling. They know they’re not going to affect the outcome with this move, and they know that this kind of stupid reporting is only going to hurt their credibility. As it stands now, if the GOP candidate for 2028 were actually a Nazi, the credibility of the idea has been shot so badly that even if Candidate 2028 says “killing an entire ethnic group is actually a good idea,” who’s still listening? Very very people are still paying attention to the mainstream media as a source of information, and of those who are, it’s often as a sideline to looking for the same information from other sources less compromised by ideological capture. I don’t really pay attention to it. I don’t know of very many others who unironically believe anything coming out of a mainstream media outlet.
After all of the things done, and not even done well (I.e. the blatant edits of Kamala’s answers on 60 minutes), and in a biased way, I don’t see how any of these old journals can regain credibility. A “journalist” at this point is an ideological hack, unconcerned with accuracy, credibility, or neutrality. The mask is gone, and it’s almost impossible to restore the trust that they once enjoyed. For me, the only value in reading the NYT or watching mainstream news is to find out what the cathedral wants me to believe. Its value is in that area, but it’s no longer even directionally relevant or accurate.
Do they? What's the evidence that they're aware of the fact that this kind of thing would hurt their credibility? I remember as far back as 2016 during Trump's first campaign, I was among a tiny minority of Democrats complaining that there are more than enough honest ways to criticize and denigrate Trump, and that constantly reaching for hyperbole or even just lies would only hurt our ability to make any criticisms of him and other politicians in the future. We were shut down for "tone policing" or just ignored, and, sure enough, over the following 4 years of his presidency and continuing for 4 years after that, we've seen the trust in media keep going down. And the explanation for this has always been adding more epicycles about disinformation, Russian propaganda, low-information voters, and the like, instead of just owning up to the fact that when you don't speak credibly, your credibility declines in the eyes of the audience. At some point, when someone just keeps making the same obvious mistake over and over again that harms them, one has to conclude that, somehow, that mistake isn't that obvious or even understood by the person.
I also have to wonder if there's an evaporative cooling going on, where journalists who could recognize the constant self-destructive behavior of self-inflicted injuries to credibility that much of mainstream media engages in quit and did their own thing, and thus the ones remaining are only the most deluded ones.
I think there's a phenomenon where, once an industry goes left, it goes all the way left. In the 1970s something like 40% of journalists were Republicans. Today it is like 4%.
Somewhere along the line, a tipping point got crossed where it becomes almost impossible to be right of center in a newsroom due to social pressure.
We've seen the same thing happen in academia and primary school teaching as well. A tipping point is reached, the institutions become explicit left-wing organs, and they lose public trust.
It's unclear how this process can reverse. We probably need to defund and replace the institutions. X is doing a great job of doing that for journalists.
Well, I know there's some sort of "law" some political commentator coined, that says that any organization that's not explicitly right wing eventually becomes left wing. There are certainly enough examples that calling it a "law" doesn't seem obviously ridiculous.
The part I don't understand quite so well is why it happens to such an extreme extent like that 40% - 4% shift you say happened in journalism. From a purely cynical, selfish perspective, knowing the opposition better allows one to defeat them better - there's even a cliche saying, "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer," that alludes to this. So if I'm cynically running a left-wing organization in order to crush the right-wing, then I'm going to want to populate it with at least enough right-wingers that we can learn from. From a good faith perspective of wanting to make the world a better place through leftist values and policies, it's obvious that blind spots develop when you're surrounded by people with similar values and beliefs. So if I'm a bright-eyed idealist running a left-wing organization in order to improve the world, then I'm going to want to populate it with at least enough right-wingers to provide real, substantive criticism of the weaknesses and pitfalls of our values that I and people who agree with me can't recognize.
Which leads me to conclude that there are no real adults in the room, and everyone's just cynically aiming for the betterment of their own careers and status among peers, and if that results in their organization becoming ineffective or evil, then, well, hopefully that'll be after they've retired and the younger generations can deal with that.
This is the thought I had from seeing a related phenomenon in the field of entertainment, where over the past couple years, we've seen companies burn 8-10 figures in producing works like the films Indiana Jones 5 or The Marvels, TV shows Rings of Power or The Acolyte, video games Concord, Star Wars: Outlaws, or Unknown 9: Awakening. I would have expected that the cynical selfish greedy decisionmakers at the top would have put a stop to it before all that money was sunk. But, well, it's not like it's their money - it's their investors' money - and even if they were to get fired, they at least gained status among their peers by greenlighting such things. That's the best I've come up with.
Conquest's Law(s): https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/conquests-laws-john-derbyshire/
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Sure, but there's two things working against you. First is the reason that many people who genuinely want to be thin are nevertheless fat: lack of will power to not do what feels good in the moment. You may recognize fully that you need some conservatives on staff, and go out and recruit them, and nonetheless find that you simply don't have the will power to stand up for them when they (and you by proxy) are attacked by your allies, or even to grant them with a similar level of respect and authority that you would give to your allies. So, they end up leaving for less hostile environments, as would be totally expected.
The other is the principal-agent problem. You may want conservative on your staff, you may even be a conservative yourself, but if enough of your staff are willing to actually torpedo your organization and are credibly able to do so, you may find that your hand is forced and that your only options are a completely left organization or none at all. In this sense, the left engages in some union-adjacent workplace activity to effectively force a closed shop. Once you're in this situation, it's going to be very difficult to get out without replacing almost your entire staff and also countering their efforts at sabotage in the process, a difficult task even before we consider the effects of solidarity from other left media institutions.
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