Now that the dust is settling from the historic Nov. 5 elections, there is much to ponder. It may take awhile to understand all the results that will come from it. For now we know Trump won the Electoral College in a landslide 312-226, and the popular vote too. This was the first time a Republican running for president has won the popular vote since Bush Jr. did in 2004, and the GOP flipped the Senate and apparently held the House. It’s the biggest rightward shift in American since the 1980s Reagan years.
But how was all this possible, if Trump and his followers were “Hitler” and were also an “existential threat to our democracy”?
As one particularly snarky commentator put it, “Trump did very well with blacks and other minorities.”
When America was given the choice to send Donald Trump to prison or the White House, they overwhelmingly chose the Executive Mansion. Which begs the question: Why?
Is that half of the country “brainwashed”? Have they been deluded by “misinformation” on Twitter/X? Or, could it be Democrat voters who have been systemically misled? Is the legacy media actually a huge purveyor of “misinformation”?
At 11:35 PM on the eventful night of Nov. 5, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman posted this to Twitter/X:
“If the election outcome is as I expected, it should cause the large minority of the country who supported Kamala Harris and predicted her victory to begin to question their sources of truth. Half the country has believed that X is filled with mis- and disinformation, and that they could only therefore rely on The NY Times, MSNBC, CNN and other mainstream media for their news. And they did.
If, however, you have been active on X for the last year, you have known the truth days, weeks and often months before the facts appear in the MSM. The MSM excerpted, clipped and cut to defame Donald Trump while claiming that Joe Biden was fit as a fiddle.
“Then when Biden’s polls collapsed, Kamala Harris was anointed the candidate and her hagiography was written with glowing acclaim from the press. But this could not hold as she ducked the media and held fast to the teleprompter.
Citizen journalists with their phone cameras in hand captured the real Kamala forcing her to defend her record and her plans in more media appearances. It did not go well and the public demanded to learn more so Kamala Harris had to risk more unscripted media.
The doom loop was underway with perhaps 60 Minutes as one of the more dramatic examples, even after CBS tried to save her, most glaringly by excerpting one answer to replace a word salad response to another.
“But the citizen journalists on X quickly caught and outed this fraud and demanded a transcript. As many who supported Kamala began to realize that they have been misled, they became open to Trump as an alternative, but they didn’t want to rely on the media to understand him because they did not want to be misled again.
“They wanted to hear the candidate in his own words and that is where Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan long form podcasts came to the rescue. When Kamala was offered the same opportunities to explain herself, she rejected them. And the voting public could only draw a negative inference.
When the story of this election is written, I expect it will be as much about how half of America woke up to the reality that they have been manipulated by the media. This should lead to an abandonment by many of the MSM as their primary source of information.
It will push more people to X, to podcasts and other empirical sources, and it will lead to a more informed public. The other outcome I hope happens is the implosion of the Democratic Party. The Party lied to the American people about the cognitive health and fitness of the president. It prevented, threatened, litigated and otherwise eliminated the ability of other candidates for the primary to compete, to get on ballots, and to even participate in a debate. The Party and the administration used lawfare in an attempt to imprison, bankrupt or otherwise kill off Trump as a candidate.
These acts are collectively grave threats to our democracy. With the highest irony in order to hide these acts, the Party accused the opposition candidate of being the grave threat to democracy. The Democratic Party proved itself to be fundamentally undemocratic. It needs a complete reboot. The leadership should be thrown out and those responsible should apologize to the American people. Honest Abe said it best: ‘You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.'”
These facts are further substantiated by The Wall Street Journal who offered the following:
“Two weeks ago, Donald Trump sat down with the podcaster Joe Rogan for three hours, an episode that drew more than 45 million views on YouTube and over 25 million listens across Spotify and other platforms. On election night, Rogan was among several podcast hosts who got shout-outs in Trump’s victory celebration.
It underscored what the 2024 presidential race made clear: A new media landscape has emerged. The traditional gatekeepers of political discourse—TV networks and newspapers—are shrinking in influence as Americans turn to many more outlets for information.
The percentage of people listening to podcasts in a given month has more than tripled in a decade. In the social-media realm, more than half of TikTok’s users say they regularly get news on the platform, according to the Pew Research Center. Elon Musk’s takeover of X has had a major impact, with political content, especially right-leaning posts, blanketing new users’ feeds.
TV news remains a massive draw for Americans in the biggest moments. But younger audiences have fled, and there were signs even on election night of an overall erosion in the medium. The main three cable channels were down 32% in viewership collectively compared with 2020, to around 21 million, with CNN losing almost half its audience.”
–Scott Dreyer