Craziest election cycle

What a hell of a year to go on a hiatus. Yeah, this is all old news now, but screw it. I'm putting it to words so I can read about it when I get dementia myself.

Trump's power move: Weaving bullshit (left, right, A, B, right left, B, A, start, select, recurse) - dodges any attack, verbal or in bullet form; Harris's power move: Word salad (12 button sequence that changes at random every 28 seconds) - confuses the opponent to exasperation; Biden: Toasty! // All three candidate photos by Gage Skidmore (Trump, Harris, Biden); Poorly done remix by myself

This has been the absolute craziest election cycle ever.

Joe Biden continued to be the nominee for the Democratic Party with no cognitive presence through the spring. Not that you could tell if you only watched the news circuit on CNN or MSNBC.

Ron Desantis and Nikki Haley bitterly fought each other for the Republican nomination while the obvious frontrunner, Donald Trump, stayed out of the race. Ron Desantis was mocked for his shoes and oddly had strong convictions of having no convictions, or at least waffling convictions, about the Russia-Ukraine war. Nikki Haley was somehow worse, a blank slate for the war hawks that autographed bombs, and was so brainless that she couldn't even offer up a guess as to what the cause of the Civil War was. Vivek Ramaswamy was a refreshing break from the insanity but seemed to be stuck on defending Trump, which, in all honesty, was a pretty brilliant maneuver to play the long game. Donald Trump was completely absent in all of the foreplay, a blatant signal to contenders that it was already his.

The extravagant horse and pony show was so obviously inconsequential that it was quite comical. The comedy routine reached a crescendo when Nikki Haley was roundly rebuked in Nevada as she lost a primary vote to "None of the above". My boy, NOTA won one!

Then in June, something happened that surprised exactly nobody, except maybe Nikki Haley. Donald Trump was nominated to be the GOP candidate for president.

Libertarians force action

Something actually interesting and impactful was the Libertarian National Convention. The Chair, Angela McArdle, invited both Joe Biden and Donald Trump to the convention to speak, as well as RFK, Jr. and Vivek Ramaswamy. Joe Biden was the only one of those four to decline.

I first learned of the attempt to get Donald Trump to the convention back around February or so from a friend high up in the chain of command. I thought it was a joke when I was told this. Then it was announced. My initial gut reaction was "wtf, why." Then thinking about it a bit more, I began to realize the genius of it all. 

Having the big candidates come to us to try and obtain our vote was a huge power play. It is an admission from other candidates that they need our votes and we can make demands. It was also a YUGE publicity boost. The most tremendous boost ever. There has never been a boost as tremendous as this one.

Seizing on the moment, the libertarian crowd decided to go after something very dear to our hearts and something very easy for Trump to do: Free Ross Ulbricht, the man who was given two life sentences (plus 40 for good measure, I guess in case he survives the first two lives) in jail for the crime of creating a website (for those too trusting of government propaganda, NO, he was not convicted of murder for hire schemes). During Trump's speech, he issued his promise to do so and the crowd erupted in cheers. Also during the speech, Donald Trump invited the libertarians to vote with him, which was roundly booed. While restrained the rest of the time, that elicited the one Trumpian moment, as he said that we can just keep our 3% every year. Which was honestly, a funny, and very Trumpian roast (Yeah, we don't get 3% every year. I'd take him up on that offer.). More consequential for the nation than freeing Ross Ulbricht, a promise was made to put a libertarian in his cabinet.

I was less than enthused about the chances of promises being kept, but it was a gesture and it was the first time anybody of relevance in a major political showdown reached out in an attempt to curry favor with us.

Donald Trump the felon

What headlines that would make, the deep state figured.

Yeah, it sure would.

Unfortunately for them, it seems like most of the public saw through the charade.

The first clue was the timing. All of the allegations were well-known for years. And yet they waited until a major election year to bring charges. Hm. Okay, that by itself is suspicious, but isn't proof.

Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney, alleged that Donald Trump interfered with the 2016 presidential election (yeah, that election eight years ago) by hiding information that may have been damaging to him in the eyes of voters. 

So...you mean what every politician does in every single election?

The official charge was falsifying business records and raising questions about whether it was a campaign finance violation, which is notorious to political treasurers across the country for being onerous, vague, and selectively prosecuted.

The action itself of paying Stormy Daniels was not a crime, nor was it argued by Bragg, but pursued 34 misdemeanor charges for misrepresenting the flow of money in records. That is, 34 counts based on the one alleged action, an obvious stacking ploy designed to maximally and capriciously punish a target.

Wait, I thought these were felonies, not misdemeanors.

Oh, yeah, it's because they had a "novel legal theory", a legal maneuver that's never been done before. The argument is that when the intent to defraud with falsified records is used to aid in another crime, it can be elevated to a felony. Except...they didn't discuss exactly what laws were violated in this "other crime" and the law does not require the other crime to be specified, or apparently, convicted or even charged of such a nondisclosed crime. During a sidebar discussion, it was said that New York State Election Law Section 17-152 was the primary crime in question. However, multiple legal experts, including Democrats, have stated that section was outdated and never used (which shows the capriciousness of law).

Despite the shaky legal foundation, it was all skewed in favor of the prosecution as the case was tried in New York, in an area that voted for Biden in the 2020 election at a clip of 80 to 95%. In a supercharged election cycle, there was no way that was going to get a fair shake. 

Ultimately, the jury voted in the prosecution's nonsensical favor and the pundits and Democrats were rewarded with being able to call Trump a felon.

But Trump got the last laugh as much of the country saw it for what it was: a politically motivated hit job.

Suppression of dementia explodes in Democrats' faces

The legacy media, leading up to the Trump-Biden debate, continued their Democratic message discipline of blatant lies, with claims of Biden being "sharp as a tack" running on repeat. For about one week prior to the presidential debate between Trump and Biden, the legacy media unleashed a new talking point: cheap fakes are deceptively making Biden look mentally frail!

That didn't age well.

At the debate, Joe Biden showed what everyone paying even a modicum of attention knew for years. He was mentally unfit to be president. He stumbled through his words, struggled to get his point across, and at one point, inexplicably said, "if...we finally beat Medicare".

After years of suppressing his mental acuity, they could no longer hide the man behind the curtain. It was no longer deniable that Joe was unfit for office.

So they made their move.

On paper, they said Biden willingly resigned from running. That he was the best president since Washington, to voluntarily give up running again (no love for my boy, Calvin Coolidge?). Yeah, if you believe that, you probably also believed he was sharp as a tack right up until that debate.

Let's review this timeline:

Thursday, June 27th: Joe Biden stumbled his way through the presidential debate. His only win was that he did not defecate on stage.

Monday, July 1st: Biden's family urged Joe to stay in the race in a clear case of elder abuse...allegedly.

Tuesday, July 2nd: A growing avalanche of Democrats began to call for Biden to step down from his candidacy for a second term.

Friday, July 5th: Joe Biden, in an interview with ABC, reassured the country that he would continue his candidacy, saying the only thing that would convince him to end his campaign was if "the Lord Almighty" told him to do so.

Friday, July 19th: Campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon said that Biden is "absolutely" staying in the race.

Sunday, July 21st (earlier): Biden's campaign aides made the rounds saying Biden was staying in the race, with email blasts released as soon as 8 minutes before finding out from Twitter that...

Sunday, July 21st (later): Joe Biden withdrew from his candidacy. One would think it would be over a press conference with the man himself. No? Was it a prerecorded speech? No? It was a letter? Seriously?? What's that? It was not even on White House stationary? It was on his personal stationery? And what...just posted to social media?? You couldn't even break up with the nation over a text message? We had an Instagram breakup?? Oh, and the signature does not appear to match any of the signatures he's used previously???

Tuesday, July 23rd (two days of complete media blackout): After making his best impression of his 2016 presidential campaign, Biden reemerged from whatever rock he was hiding under since his withdrawal letter was released, and climbed those stairs like a pro. Maybe two days isn't a long time for many things, but it's an eternity when a president drops out of the race three and a half months before the vote.

With a timeline like that, how could conspiracy theories not emerge? Maybe the signature was forged, maybe Biden authorized someone to sign for him. Maybe he was coup'd, maybe he was gamed. I tend to think that it was more likely that Pelosi and/or Obama called him up and basically told him to either resign or we will resign you, and if you object, we will just say you didn't remember resigning. Who do you think the public will believe? It seems pretty clear he was railroaded in some fashion, but we may never know what really happened.

Secret Service's spectacular failure

While all that was going down, something happened that I thought would have happened some time between 2016 and 2020. There was an attempt to assassinate Trump. And what a bizarre one it was. 

Some dude walked around an upcoming Trump speech in Pennsylvania with a rangefinder and a drone. Although the sniper, not yet in position, was spotted as suspicious by local law enforcement at 4:26, the Secret Service still allowed Trump on stage and began speaking at 6:05. Shortly after the speech began, the sniper climbed onto the roof and reached his camping spot about 130 yards from the stage, a layup for his AR-15. Minutes before the shooting, bystanders attempted to get the attention of the police, saying someone with a gun was up on the roof. About 40 seconds before the first shots, police caught first sight of the shooter. Still, Trump was not removed from the scene.

At 6:11, the first shot was fired. Trump had turned to look at the screen just at the right moment, narrowing his profile to the shooter and the bullet grazed his ear, causing blood to gush out. More shots were fired and a father, Corey Comperatore, died a hero, shielding his wife and daughters from the gunfire. Two others were struck but recovered. Within seconds, the shooter was killed by a Secret Service sniper.

In the confusion as the Secret Service began to rush Trump off stage, Trump raised his fist and yelled "Fight! Fight! Fight!", captured in an iconic photo that I thought all but assured a Trump electoral win.

The next day, shockingly, nobody was fired and nobody resigned. How was the Secret Service so incompetent that day with no immediate ramifications? Director of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, eventually resigned a week later, after her testimony to Congress, but not before making odd excuses like saying the roof was not manned because the roof was too sloped to be manned (it was pretty much a flat roof).

The shooter's motive remains a mystery, without having much of a footprint. He was a registered Republican but also donated to ActBlue, a Democratic PAC.

This brought about many conspiracies. Some on the left claimed it was staged, like, yeah, Trump would agree for a bullet to graze his ear the moment he turned his head, which if he was a few milliseconds off, would spell the end of his skull being the home to his brain. The claims that it was a deep-state attempt to prevent Trump from becoming president again is a far more likely explanation than the other conspiracy theory, but who the hell knows. All I know is that it was a bizarre ordeal.

That wasn't even the end. 

Another assassination attempt that was nearly as strange took place a few months later. The incident itself was rather "mundane", if we're grading on a curve. The Secret Service noticed a rifle barrel sticking out of the shrubs at a golf course where Trump was playing and they fired upon the shrubs, causing the gunman to flee. The gunman has a chaotic history, registered as a nonpartisan voter with donations totaling a "whopping" $140 to Democratic PACs. He has expressed support for both Trump and Biden. Then it gets weird. The gunman had numerous interactions with law enforcement. He has several felonies for stolen goods and was convicted of...hold on, let me read that again...yup...possession of a weapon of mass destruction.

Top cop nominated, defund the police movement faced with a dilemma

If you were a high-level Democratic operative, who would you choose to succeed Joe Biden?

Don't lie.

It's Kamala Harris.

Of course it has to be Kamala Harris despite her being possibly the only person more braindead than Joe Biden, a history of ethical malfeasance in her prosecutorial record, and a prior presidential run that was an abject failure. How could it not? The Democrats have been drumming the woke war drums for so long there was no way to get around it, even though everyone knew she would be a disastrous pick. A woman of color, who was the vice president, and you're going to skip over her? Your entire party's credibility would be destroyed in an instant by your own base. Kamala Harris was literally a DEI hire. You can be mad all you want, but Joe Biden literally said he would choose a woman as his running mate in 2020. That was the first qualifier listed. Not that he has great candidates and the best candidate was a woman. Just that he would pick a woman and that a number of them were qualified. And now you would deny her the shot, when traditionally the person in her role would be the top pick?

No. They boxed themselves into this hole. They wouldn't be able to stutter step or spin move their way out of that one.

So the Democrats, after making headlines with defund the police, nominated an old curmudgeon who was the author of the 1994 crime bill that drastically increased aggressive police tactics, then nominated someone who billed herself as "top cop" with a record of ruining countless black families with nonviolent drug charges. If this weren't in the realm of politics, I'd say this would be patently absurd and dismiss it as fiction.

Then Harris announced her running mate would be the bumbly Tim Walz, who created snitch lines for those who would dare violate his Covid diktats, which I guess continues the tradition of Democrats picking weak running mates (the then current president comes to mind). Walz is just one of those thoroughly unimpressive elites and it was fairly obvious he would bring nothing to the table other than to try to make Kamala look good in comparison, and I don't think he was even able to achieve that.

The propaganda campaign blasted off as soon as she was nominated, with "Joy" being the central theme. It's laughable how empty that slogan was...until you realize that's all they really had to work with. What are they going to do, run on the major issues? Immigration? No, public opinion has shifted fully against her on that one. Ending the woke insanity? Don't make me laugh. Abortion? Well, they might have a little something there. Inflation? Even if they understood economics (which they don't) and showed how Trump printed massive amounts of money in 2020, leading to the current price inflation, it can only backfire since the Biden administration did the same thing. And given how she was completely unable to distance herself from anything Biden had done...well...Joy(tm) it is.

Laughably, somewhere in the middle of the campaign, they tried to position themselves as the freedom candidates. Really. The party that pushed for Covid lockdowns. The party that pushed for an apartheid state of vaxxed and unvaxxed. The party that has been pushing for the chilling of free speech. The candidate who was an overzealous prosecutor. Freedom. That word does not mean what they think it means.

It was a bit surprising how well it started and how long it took for the initial momentum to die down, even understanding how high the propaganda machine would rev. This is someone who, when she talks, makes Joe Biden seem halfway cogent. Even her debate against Trump was much better than I would have thought, from a tactical perspective. Her strategic team prepared her brilliantly. When the topic came to immigration, a sure loser topic for Kamala, she made fun of Trump's crowd sizes at rallies. Oh, no. Don't you dare talk about The Donald's size of anything. Of course, with Trump's ego, he couldn't resist but spend his time to retaliate instead of attacking Kamala on her immigration record. In the end, Trump fumbled around with what little time he had left talking about immigrants eating the dogs, which made him sound like a crazy person, even by his standards.

Libertarian Party candidate

It would be remiss of me to not talk about the Libertarian Party candidate, as much as I don't want to. The major candidates were Michael Rectenwald and Chase Oliver. Michael Rectenwald was the Mises Caucus's pick, after Dave Smith decided not to run due to family issues. He was a former Marxist professor who became libertarian after realizing what he used to believe was, well, childish. Chase Oliver ran for US Senate a few years prior and received a vote total that exceeded the margin between the duopoly. After multiple rounds of voting, it came down to Rectenwald and Oliver, as expected. From what I was told, Mike ter Matt, another candidate, approached the Rectenwald team and said yeah, Chase Oliver cannot be the nominee and he would throw his weight behind Rectenwald. But later, ter Matt surprised the Rectenwald campaign and did a backroom deal with Chase Oliver, to throw his support behind Oliver if Oliver would support ter Matt as vice president.

Chase Oliver ended up winning the nomination, after a final round of him versus NOTA.

And Oliver was never heard from again.

Okay, I jest. Kind of.

He was pretty invisible for the rest of the campaign. Early on, he did an interview with Reason and John Stossel. Then he went on Reason's podcast Just Asking Questions with Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller, in which he did terribly in attempting to reconcile his views with Liz's questions about trans procedures for children. There was very little real interaction with non-libertarian publications outside some small local news shows and later, an article on Rolling Stone magazine.

Chase Oliver doing an impression of an Asian girl getting her picture taken. // photo by Gage Skidmore

He was invited on to Dave Smith's podcast Part of the Problem, which gets hundreds of thousands of views and Tim Pool's podcast which is a massive show and would talk to people outside the libertarian orbit. Oh, no, I said he was invited, not that he actually went on them. He inexplicably gave both of them the cold shoulder.

Dave Smith surmised that he was given the cold shoulder because his crowd wouldn't be receptive to him anyway and that maybe it was a good calculation. I disagree. If Oliver didn't have the confidence to convince people who already agreed with him on quite a bit, then he has no hope to convince anybody. If he thinks the Mises Caucus crowd is misinformed about his positions or that they're wrong, then clear the air and make the argument. To simply not engage is just weak. I mean...it's not like his calendar was particularly full.

His campaign, if you can call it that, limped along, month by month. I heard stories about how someone contacted Oliver's campaign manager, eager to help phone or text bank, asking for a script, to which the campaign manager replied, "What script?" Oy. He traveled to Northern California once, as far as I know, for a fundraiser. I was given a half-week notice, for a fundraiser on a Tuesday evening. Yeah, I need more than a half-week notice for a weeknight.

Several state chapters of the Libertarian Party controlled by the Mises Caucus refused to support Oliver with several even attempting to refuse to submit campaign papers for Oliver to put him on the ballot (though I believe all were ultimately submitted for him, giving him ballot access in all states except for those like New York that blatantly shut out third parties...cuz democracy?). I thought this was a huge mistake on the Mises Caucus's part. We already know Oliver would do poorly in the vote totals. Really, no matter who it was, would get low vote totals, just given the nature of the race. Just let Oliver run the nonexistent campaign that he was going to and then in the end, there is no excuse. Kind of like not issuing sanctions against socialist countries. They're going to fail. Just let them fail and have no excuses.

Angela McArdle, the national chair of the Libertarian Party, made a great tactical move, given the position she was in, for her ends to "support" Oliver as a weapon to bludgeon (then) Joe Biden with in blue and swing states. Get people to support Oliver in those states to drain the support of the Democratic Party to swing votes in favor of Trump due to his promises to libertarians. 

In the end, Oliver was destroyed. I was surmising that he would definitely get less than one percent and maybe more than half a percent, but not by much. He ended up with 0.42 percent of the vote, far less than Jo Jorgensen's 1.2 percent in 2020 and Gary Johnson's 3.3 percent in 2016. And less than even my lowball estimate.

Don't get me wrong. Oliver would have made a far better president than Trump or Harris. But that was never in the cards. His job was to spread the message of liberty using the position as his platform. Considering that, his run could only be considered an abject failure. With Johnson, we achieved high vote totals. With Jorgensen, Spike Cohen's visibility was greatly amplified. With Oliver...we got nothin'.

As an aside, because I found this to be so ridiculous, every four years, Reason releases a column by their staff members and who they are voting for. Most are fairly reasonable, voting for the Libertarian candidate or not voting at all. There were a few Kamala votes in there, which, from a libertarian perspective...why?? There seems to be no compelling argument for this at all unless you're a single-issue voter on abortion or immigration. But there was one particular staffer, Robert Poole, who bizarrely stated he would...write in Nikki Haley. What?!? Nikkey Haley is possibly the one person worse than both Trump and Kamala. And to write someone in is never a method of a vote for the lesser of two evils. It's a signal of a full endorsement. What a disgrace that was. Credit to him for admitting it, I guess?

Complete realignment of endorsements

Up is down, left is right, cats living with dogs, Priuses actually accelerating to the speed limit.

The Kamala team received their share of celebrity endorsements, as usual for Democrats, but it seemed somewhat supercharged this cycle. She received the typical slate, Bruce Springsteen, George Clooney (who was rumored to have played a significant part in Biden's cancellation in concert with Barack Obama). A big newcomer was Taylor Swift, which seemed to rattle some cages on the right. Beyonce was another big name, who showed up at a rally that advertised a Beyonce performance, with many in attendance departing after it was clear Beyonce wasn't going to do much more than speak for a few minutes. Trump had his own celebrity endorsements, some hilariously fitting like Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock. He also had a few others like Dennis Quaid, but Trump didn't really lean of them much. None of this was particularly interesting, even if considering these endorsements are generally the intellectually shallowest endorsements possible. No, it was the political realignments that were the bombshells. 

Many of the close confidants of Trump, as the race plodded along, came from former Democrats, many of whom were straight-up pushed out of the Party. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who started his presidential run under the Democrats' banner before going independent, eventually terminated his campaign and jumped on the Trump campaign. Tulsi Gabbard, the Democratic congresswoman who ran for the Democratic nominee for president in 2020, jumped off the Democrat bandwagon and eventually endorsed Trump. Joe Rogan, who was a Bernie bro, late in the game, explicitly endorsed Trump. Perhaps the most influential was Elon Musk, hitting a rev limiter on his posts on X about Trump as well as dollars contributed. The common thread in this is that these are all strong individuals with an antiwar (maybe not quite so much with Israel) and anti-establishment streak. They were all completely pushed out of the Democratic Party / the left. Democrats attacked RFK Jr over Covid, they smeared Tulsi Gabbard as a Russian asset, lied through their teeth about Joe Rogan over Covid and trans issues, and ran a Elon Musk is crazy campaign, particularly when he started talking about taking over Twitter. Vivek Ramaswamy, of course, was also a close confidant of Trump's who burst onto the scene with a presidential nomination bid, but I'm not sure he was ever on the left or with Democrats, having had a libertarian streak in his past.

Kamala Harris, gained cross-faction supporters as well, and similar to Trump's crossover supporters, all with a certain similarity between them. Through the course of her candidacy, former members of the George W. Bush administration latched on to her side, as did Megan McCain, Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney, and Bill Kristol. The common thread here? They are all the blood-soaked monsters from the early 2000s that advocated for all of the disastrous foreign policies we have today. Though Bill Kristol had seen the writing on the wall and switched parties to the Democrats a while back, let it be known that 2024 was the official year the Democrats became the neocon party. 

One would think the Harris campaign would be savvy enough to see this as a negative. But no. This was fully embraced by the Democrats, showing that see, even the Republicans are jumping away from Trump, completely deaf to the fact that those people were the worst people in the Republican Party. Any Democrat over 30 must remember how terrible those people were. This was not the case with the crossovers on Trump's side. RFK Jr. has his true supporters as people appreciated his Covid approach. Tulsi Gabbard has her true followers as she excoriated those who pushed the warfare state. And nobody would question that Joe Rogan has his followers. Who the hell follows Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney anymore except for a handful of defense contractor executives, AIPAC, entrenched politicians, and leaders of three letter agencies?

It's not just receiving endorsements from the worst people possible, but rather that Kamala Harris openly invited those endorsements and spent a good amount of time campaigning with Liz Cheney, which is just an unforgivable offense.

Jon Stewart, in his satirical comedy news show reboot, grilled Tim Walz as to why they're bringing in the worst people from when The Daily Show was all the rage. In his response, Walz, that buffoonish dolt, unironically displays exactly why the Harris campaign fell flat on its face. He actually said in his response that Dick and Liz Cheney give libertarians permission to vote for them. He actually thinks libertarians like Dick Cheney?? Libertarians think Dick Cheney is enemy #1! So we have, this election cycle, Donald Trump reaching out to libertarians and making promises to us on one hand. And on the other hand, we have the Democrats exhibiting absolutely zero understanding of what libertarians even believe. That merge of the Harris and Cheneys likely drove tens of thousands of libertarians from voting for Chase Oliver to voting for Donald Trump, just to oppose THAT. 

Harris circles the drain

All the way up until voting day, the media reported that the polls showed a dead heat. Meanwhile, the betting markets (which I should have joined; I always forget about actually betting on this even when I read about it) were giving Trump the odds-on favorite to win. And this was rather plainly obvious. Even in particularly blue areas, you were seeing Trump everywhere. Even in San Francisco, when our family was going to tour Alcatraz, we saw a big stand along Embarcadero waving and selling Trump merch. Same thing near where we lived, also a Blue stronghold. Such Kamala stands were screamingly absent. All of the momentum appeared to be on Trump's side, with him appearing on every podcast in existence, getting millions of views per episode. His rallies, even in places like Madison Square Garden, were massive and high energy while the protests outside were extremely thin, compared to past cycles. 

It was fairly obvious that the Kamala team knew the polls were garbage and likely internal polling showed that she was in major trouble as the deadline loomed large. Early on, she employed a Biden-Lite strategy of avoiding the public spotlight wherever she went. Even the New York Times eventually ran a piece talking about how Kamala Harris's abstinence from interviews. Anyone who knows even a little bit about Kamala Harris should know that this was a pretty good strategy. If you're her campaign manager, you don't want her anywhere near an interview. Her answers to questions are always a spacey, directionless word salad where she says the same sentence in different ways multiple times as she struggles to fill in a 20-second thought while repeating ad nauseum that she is from a middle class family. The issue is that while Biden was able to hide behind the excuse of Covid in 2020 for employing this strategy, Kamala has no such excuse.

This strategy, in the campaign's eyes, became a liability as you can only duck the media for so long as they started to crow. They booked some real softball interviews in friendly territory at places like MSNBC and The View. Her first real struggle came in the CBS 60 Minutes interview, where she was asked...some talking heads said "tough"; I'd just call them "actual"...questions. Things like asking her about her immigration record. She didn't do great and some of CBS's editing created allegations that they edited the interview to make Kamala seem better than she did. CBS eventually released the full transcript which appeared to show them heavily editing the interview to remove some of the infamous Kamala Harris word salads. She even did a 40 minute podcast called Call Her Daddy (which as far as I can tell is not a political podcast), to what seems like an anemic response, with an official clip on YouTube generating well under 1 million views over several months (I'm not sure how many views the actual interview received; I don't believe Spotify releases viewership numbers to the public). By contrast, Trump's interview with Joe Rogan hit 38 million in three days. Her major interview with a non-friendly host at Fox News was cut short as her campaign staffers waved her off to stop the interview mid-stream, despite them arriving late.

Harris had entered what some termed the death spiral. Every time Harris does an interview, more people catch on that she is an empty suit, which makes her do more interviews, which just makes her lose more ground. The desperation reached a crescendo when it was revealed that her team was trying to get on Joe Rogan's podcast, especially after Trump went on Rogan and hit nearly forty million views, just on YouTube, in just three days. The attempt itself was rather laughable. Even though I doubt Rogan would be combative in the interview (that's just not his style), there was no way Kamala could survive a three-hour interview when she struggled to fill a four-minute interview with cogent thoughts. It was apparent that the Kamala team thought the same, as they demanded that the show be moved to Washington DC, only be an hour long, for there to be other people in the room, and expressed major concerns that it would not be edited. Well, that's just not the Joe Rogan Experience. Her appearance or non-appearance on the show was not the interesting part to me, as so many seem to be focused on. The interesting part was the desperation they must have felt to need to get on the show. If she had a comfortable lead or even was tied in the race, there's no way they would have risked it. 

Legacy media buries itself as Trump wins big

Continuing its blatant bias from "sharp as a tack", the legacy media wasted no time in pushing the "Joy" narrative when Kamala burst onto the scene. There was no reflection of just a few months prior, when they were talking about what candidates might fill Biden's shoes, all the talk went to people like Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer, both horrible people, but there was barely any talk about Kamala Harris despite her title of vice president, likely because they knew just how terrible a candidate she would be.

As the candidacy changed from Biden to Harris, no one in the legacy media was interested in asking the obvious questions. Why was Biden unfit to run for president but was fit enough to be president? Who actually is running the country now? How long, exactly, did Kamala know about Biden's cognitive decline? If she didn't know, are her observational skills questionable? If she did know, was she putting the country at risk for not saying anything? And that's just one topic.

The desperation seemed to grow with the Kamala campaign's desperation. When it started to become apparent that Trump was winning by a large margin (while reporting that polls were showing a dead heat), they the lies and misrepresentations just kept getting larger and larger. And the tired allegations that everyone on Trump's side is a racist/bigot/Nazi kept getting more and more ridiculous.

Trump held a rally where the (in)famous insult comic Tony Hinchcliffe did a routine during Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden. In it, he feigned concern about a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean, with the punchline being "I think it's called Puerto Rico". Think what you may of the joke (and of the Trump campaign's logistical prowess of asking the host of Kill Tony to do a routine for them), but many outlets reported or at least headlined (how many people read past the headline, really?) the incident as a "speaker" who made "racist insults" during a Trump rally. Oh, so clever, calling a comedian doing a set a "speaker", as if it was just spoken as a serious comment.

Following that rally, various Democrats compared it to a Nazi rally held at MSG in 1939. The media was all too eager to assist in the messaging, with MSNBC cutting clips from Trump's rally and the Nazi rally together to show this shocking footage to the seventy people that still watch MSNBC. Yeah, the Trump rally was so chillingly Nazi-like because almost a century ago, Nazis used the same venue. You know, one of the most famous and prolific venues in the country. The propaganda wasn't even subtle and just layered on so thick, like those scam calls that are so ridiculous it's hard to imagine anyone falling for it. In the MSNBC YouTube clip linked above, all of the top comments are just completely bashing the network for its blatant propaganda, as they should be.

Shortly before the election, Trump held a interview with Tucker Carlson and in it, said that Liz Cheney should be lined up in front of a firing squad and executed. Oh, wait, no. What he actually said was, "Let's put her with a rifle, standing there with nine barrels shooting at her," amid criticizing Liz Cheney and other neocons for sending troops into war while sitting home safe. They couldn't even effectively take the quote out of context but still ran with the misrepresentation (you don't give a person a rifle when they're being executed in a firing squad, you dummies). And don't tell me they don't understand the argument. It's the exact same argument the media and the Democrats used against the neocons during the George W. Bush years.

The voters rewarded the legacy media by voting for Trump in a landslide.

It was a rebuke at unprecedented levels that some think they'll never recover from.

Harris lost every single swing state and lost 226-312 in the electoral college. She even lost the popular vote, the first time the Democrats lost the popular vote in two decades. The Democrats lost ground to the GOP in every single state except Washington, where it was a wash. With all the haranguing about Republicans' racism against Latinos, a county in Texas, dominated by Mexican Americans and a solid blue county for nearly a century, flipped red.

Despite all the claims that Trump was racist, Trump received more black votes than any Republican for almost fifty years. Similarly, Trump won more Hispanic votes compared to any other Republican for 52 years. In an interesting shift, young voters also swung toward Trump, even as the Democrats suddenly became very interested in bringing up old age again.

It was an abjectly humiliating loss for Kamala Harris, the Democrats, the neocons, Hollywood celebrities, and the legacy media. I wouldn't call it a win for libertarians, either; there's going to be pain ahead (tariffs, anyone?) and things will almost definitely get worse, though not likely as bad as Kamala's plans (nonsensical price controls on grocery stores, anyone?). But it sure is nice for the worst people to lose in such an embarrassing manner.

Immediate Aftermath

The finger-pointing started immediately among the Democrats, in all directions. Nancy Pelosi, among others, pointed fingers at Joe Biden, saying he should have dropped out earlier, despite herself earlier pushing the narrative that Biden was "very sharp". Biden himself, always overestimating himself, laughably claimed he could have beaten Trump, despite continually not being able to get through a press conference without stumbling and mumbling incoherently. The DNC chair, among many rank-and-file Democrats, was upset that the person they ran wasn't the person elected in the primary. It's hard to argue that since they continually crow about democracy, though rarely mentioning it until after the election makes it difficult to believe that they are sincere versus having sour grapes.

Many others blamed the majority of the voters, claiming that the results of the election showed the deep racism and sexism in the country. Yeah, keep beating that drum. I'm sure that what was missing was that you just needed to call half the country racists, sexists, transphobes, bigots, white supremacists, and Nazis harder. I'm still waiting on their promises to move out of the country. I mean, why wouldn't you, if Nazis just took over the country?

Interestingly, at least some people within the Democratic Party have come to terms that the whole "democracy is over if Trump wins" and "Trump is a Nazi" shtick doesn't make sense, in the light that Kamala delivered a speech post-election that amounted to "we'll get 'em next time". I'm not sure how it took them that long to figure out, but better late than never, I suppose.

Some Democrats started to talk about how they need their own Joe Rogan. They still talk as if they can effectively manufacture propaganda by copying the current podcast landscape. The whole point of Joe Rogan and why he is popular is that he is not a propaganda machine and does long form interviews. Did they not learn anything from Kamala's team trying to force Joe Rogan to do a podcast with her that was not Joe Rogan? What, she wanted to change the format because she would be so good with that format? That didn't clue them in to the fact that they are not built for this style of media? Kamala Harris does not do well in interviews that last over a few minutes, let alone three hours. It's not just that; many of their talking points do not stand up to three hours of scrutiny. They were effective and dominant in the legacy media because the DNC can email blast their talking heads to focus on three talking points, and their two-minute segments on television exclusively exhibit them yelling talking points over each other, never having the time to even scratch the surface of the topic. A three-hour examination of trans athletes in women's sports will not stand up well over three hours, especially with someone like Jamie doing real-time fact-checking. If you'll recall, even Sanjay Gupta, the CNN expert on the pandemic was destroyed by Rogan, who would be the first to admit he is not an expert in epidemiology. Get their own Joe Rogan? Please. 

Then the Kamala team had the gall to lie about how the booking attempt with Joe Rogan went down in a book. 

It was revealed after the election that the Kamala campaign really let the money fly. Initially reported at $1 billion, the New York Times later reported the campaign expenditures figure closer to $1.5 billion, with the Kamala team asking for donations to cover further debts. I'm pretty sure they spent at least half that on sending text messages just to my phone alone. But seriously, one point five billion? With a b? On a campaign that only operated (officially) from August to November?

Think about how ridiculous this whole thing is. Can anybody think of a better use of $1.5 billion than to blow it all on self-promotion for a popularity contest? How much could be done with $1.5 billion? How many housing units for homeless people could you build? How many hungry mouths could you feed? How many minutes of electricity could you buy for Al Gore's home? That said, it shouldn't be surprising, given how quickly these people get into office and burn money at much higher rates.

Time will tell, but this marks a transformative election cycle. The complete repudiation by the voters of pretty much the entire range of the establishment has been a shock to many within that echo chamber. This isn't to say that the future is all sunshine and rainbows. On the contrary, Trump's policies include some insane line items such as tariffs and mass deportations as well as poor policy on Israel. But it's better than Kamala's insane policies like her price controls on groceries that has no basis in reality, her wavering position on immigration, especially if history is any indication, is insane for the opposite reason of Trump's, and her policy on Israel is no better while being significantly worse on Ukraine. On the plus side, there is some level of libertarian influence on the Trump end while the Kamala end completely misunderstands us at best and fiercely pushes us away at worst. There will be some good out of Trump's presidency, even if on net it may be bad. We've been on a runaway freight train headed for a busted canyon bridge and it seems like we may at least be easing up on the throttle a bit.