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“We have got to stop making Mr. Trump himself our main focus; he can’t be elected again,” political guru James Carville advised his party in a New York Times op-ed. “Furthermore, it’s clear many Americans do not give a rat’s tail about Mr. Trump’s indictments.”
Eight years later, the top Democrat strategist was finally admitting what we knew all along.
“Vocally oppose the party, not the person or the extremism of his movement,” he warned. “Denouncing other Americans or their leader as miscreants is not going to win elections.”
After nearly a decade of claiming that Trump was the next Hitler and that MAGA was a dangerous movement, the rhetoric is being shelved because they never actually believed it. If they had believed it, Trump’s second victory should have redoubled their efforts instead of convincing Democrats to abandon them because there’s no longer any point.
Everything from criminal charges to endless investigations was a tool to win elections.
The best evidence of that is the lack of talk about Russia in the wake of the 2024 election. After the 2016 election, Democrats claimed that the Russians had rigged the outcome. Where is the media hype and investigations of the Russian role in the 2024 election? The State Department even announced sanctions over the Russian (and Iranian) interference in the election. You wouldn’t know it because Democrats and their media expressed little interest in the news.
On Jan 2, Politico ran an article admitting that the entire censorship regime imposed after the 2016 election was based on lies and that “Big Disinfo’s roots, forged in a partisan revolt against Trump, led to glaringly one-sided speech prescriptions.” The story quoted a researcher at the Poynter Institute, the partisan leftist group which set up the International Fact-Checking Network, admitting that, “Nobody was tricked into voting for Donald Trump.”
An article in Harvard’s Misinformation Review admitted that “the field is no closer to answering basic questions about misinformation’s real-world impacts, such as its effects on elections.”
Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that he was winding down the fact-checking regime on Facebook met with more outrage from Europeans than their Democrat counterparts in the U.S. The protests over the end of fact-checking in this country, like the interest in Trump’s legal and criminal cases, have become feeble and disinterested after the results of the 2024 election.
Fact-checking is being wrapped up because it failed to accomplish its purpose. And that purpose, as Carville put it, was preventing Trump from winning another election. That’s done.
The Democrats are moving beyond Trump because they’re thinking of the next election. They’re scrubbing what no longer works and trying to figure out what will. Eight years of political terror, censorship, investigations, raids and lawsuits that dragged in not only Trump, but his associates and appointees, along with millions of Americans, was a scheme to win an election.
Now that the elections are done, they’re admitting that it was all made up. None of it was real.
After a pandemic security state whose tactics turned out to be manufactured for political purposes and were dismantled as soon as the public rose up against them, it should come as little surprise that there was as much science in disinformation as there was in masking or six foot social distancing, and that lives were destroyed for the sake of political narrative control.
The 2016 election panic and the pandemic showed how quickly a system could be put in place, but also how quickly it could disappear, and those responsible for it simply shrug it away as a series of mistakes, misunderstandings or well-intentioned errors that we all need to move past.
That doesn’t mean the crisis is over or that they won’t come back twice as hard, only that the tactics will change. The same people who came up with Russiagate, disinformation studies and putting the media in charge of what can be allowed on Facebook, will come back with something else. And we’ll find out before too long what those things will be. But the party’s takeaway for the moment is that protests, investigations and censorship have backfired.
In the weeks and months to come, we will hear a good deal less about “democracy”, buzzwords like “authoritarianism” and “misinformation” will dribble out of the media with the same degree of unseen coordination that they dribbled in, and after exhausting the last remaining clicks from Trump’s legal trails, they too will be dumped on the rubbish heap of failed radical tactics.
Alinsky’s seventh rule was that “a tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Orange Man Bad’s greatest crime from the perspective of the Democrats was that it became a ‘drag’.
Joe Biden mumbling about democracy while surrounded by armed guards, wheezing and yelling about “Ultra-MAGA”, made the whole thing look about as old and tired as possible. No wonder that Kamala tried to reboot the campaign around the vagueness of “joy”. What had once been compelling bait to the base had become segmented into Rachel Maddow squinting at the camera while reciting random Russian names. Most Americans had stopped caring long ago.
The Democrats had disguised their worst abuses by making themselves the anti-Trump party. But the 2024 election burned out what was left of Orange Man Bad mania as a dead end.
What lies beyond Orange Man Bad? From Carville to AOC, Democrats are promising to focus on economic issues, but there is no reason to expect this to be purely a debate. The cheers for the assassination of the UnitedHealthcare CEO shows the violent range of this new program.
But it won’t stop there.
Russiagate and fake news were both artificial crises of legitimacy that emerged from the systemic shock of the 2016 election. What artificial crisis will emerge from the 2024 election? Economics is a useful political tactic for winning elections, but it cannot suffice because the leftist goal is not just to win elections, but to delegitimize the opposition and seize power.
Going forward they will need a new crisis and a new basis for seizing absolute power.
Beyond Orange Man Bad waits a new pretext for a totalitarian state, and while they won’t believe in it, no more than they believed in masks or Russian election interference, it will appear quickly, along with a whole new political vocabulary, and a whole new coup against America.