The Legacy Press Is Lying To You About How They Fucked Us
There's no way the legacy press had anything to do with how the legacy press reported the election!
Democracy did not die in November of 2024 but the assholes have their knives out and it's up to us to keep them from their bloody work. Despair and surrender are what they want. Resistance is what they’ll get. Stay strong. We beat the fascists once and we’ll fucking do it again.
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It’s been over a week and the press continues to absolve itself of its responsibility for putting Trump back in power. There appear to be two narratives forming:
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris didn’t message enough on the economy
Trump spoke directly to voters’ economic pain aka “economic anxiety”1
That’s cute.
You’ll notice how the press is just absent from these narratives? They were just innocent bystanders with no agency whatsoever. Just mute witnesses to both campaigns and the public made their own choices. Don’t blame us, man!
Except…the press played a major role in how the public perceived the candidates and their messages. They made specific choices for specific reasons and those choices just coincidentally helped Donald Trump.2 A lot.
Let’s start with Biden and Harris and the economy.
They talked about it a whole lot. They talked about how low unemployment was. How wages have been rising. How inflation was finally under control. How they were going to increase housing and lower rent. How they were going to tackle price gouging. How they were going to make healthcare more affordable. How they were going to expand Medicare to caregivers. How low the price of gas is. The list goes on for quite some time.
I’ve talked about this a lot over the last year but we are in the middle of the greatest economy in over half a century. Joe Biden got us through a tough economic spot without causing a recession; a feat almost unheard of in American history.
How has the press reported on Biden’s economic wizardry for the past four years?
Here’s how it started in 2021 when things were rough:
It’s important to note that we were not, in fact, in a recession in 2021. We weren’t really in one in 2020, either. But, boy!, the New York fucking Times really wanted its readers to think we were!
Here’s 2022:
The press LOVED asking “Are we in a recession?” Loved. It. Every economist not working for Rupert Murdoch would tell you “No, you fucking idiot, we are not in a recession. Stop asking!” and the legacy press would write the same exact headline the next month anyway. At least inflation was still an issue so they could pretend a recession was 100% going to happen ANY SECOND!
And the legacy press absolutely fucking did just that:
Hey, notice the date? Just a few weeks before the 2022 “red wave” midterms! Boy, I bet that was a total fucking coincidence…3
Anyway, here’s 2023:
Inflation was long gone at this point, although price gouging was still in effect. Wages were still increasing and job growth was still strong. The press knew the chances of a recession, barring some kind of unforeseen outside shock, were nonexistent. And yet they kept asking.
Which brings us to 2024:
Economists were like, “Holy shit! We pulled off a soft landing! We got through this without a recession!” The Fed had been cutting rates for months while unemployment stayed low and wages continued to grow, outpacing inflation for several months. But somehow, the fucking legacy press COULD NOT STOP asking “Are we in a recession?”
At the same time, the legacy press had lost interest in the stock market which had been steadily reaching new highs all throughout Biden’s four years in office. It was big news when Trump reached a new high. But when Biden blew that away and kept blowing it away? Meh. Who cares?
On the flip side, we have Trump “speaking to the concerns of the average American.”
I mean, sure, he says everyone will be rich with free pizza and ice cream and all the wealth of the world will flow into their pockets.
It’s funny, though, because no one can ever seem to point to any policies during Trump’s first presidency that actually accomplished that.
Did he raise the minimum wage? No.
Did he forgive student loans? The opposite, actually. Betsy DeVos deliberately stopped the programs in place to do that. And she’ll fucking do it again the second she’s back in charge of destroying the Department of Education.
Did he invest in infrastructure? BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Google “Trump infrastructure week.”
Did he bring back American manufacturing? No, he fucking did not.
Did he decrease the cost of healthcare? Or gas? Or groceries? Did Donald Trump lower the rent?
No. He didn’t do ANY of that. He did pass a massive tax cut for billionaires, though. So that’s nice. And he started several trade wars that raised the prices of soybeans, lumber, washing machines, etc. But we’re not supposed to talk about that.
And that’s the problem. The press really did not talk about that at all. While Biden had a record of concrete accomplishments, Trump had a record, too. Of doing absolutely fuck all to improve the economic lives of the average American.
But did the press talk about either of those records? No.
While they actively lied to the public about what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had just spent four years doing, the legacy press got REAL hands-off when it came to Trump. Even when Trump started blathering about how tariffs were going to make us all rich, the press was like, “hey…that’s, like, not really true. whatevs.”
In the course of a month, they wrote fewer articles about how ruinous Trump’s tariffs will be than they did in three fucking days about Joe Biden’s age. But, you know, the press didn’t play a direct role in this election, right? “The people” decided all on their own.
The most galling thing about this is that starting January 21, Trump will begin bragging about the economic miracle he created. Low unemployment. Rising wages. And have you seen all of those manufacturing jobs in the Midwest?!
The legacy press will be right there, lapping it up like a dog eating its own vomit. Sometime in January or February, the stock market will suddenly be important again. Expect big headlines about new highs. That Trump, what a wizard!
The press will, naturally, forget all about their desperate fears of recession. Recession? Why are you talking about a recession? Have you SEEN Trump’s miracle economy?! This will be despite the fact that Trump is promising massive tariffs which will immediately push the economy into the red zone. And that’s before his Nazi stormtroopers begin the mass deportations that will send the economy into a tailspin.
Don’t be surprised when Trump and his party of Nazis/Neo-Confederates suggest that the only way to save the economy is to use all of the prisoners in concentration camps as slaves “unpaid labor.” Perhaps they’ll call it “working off the debt they owe to the people of the United States.” Arbeit macht frei, amirite?
I’m sure the legacy press will find a way to rationalize this as well.
Anyway! A year from now, when Trump’s erratic incompetence and the malicious cruelty of his regime have taken Biden’s economy and flushed it down the drain, one has to wonder if the press will even want to report on it. After all, it’s not fair to undermine the regime with bad news! As jobs dry up, wages decrease, and prices skyrocket, people are going to be angry.
But will talk of an impending recession really solve anything? Is that the job of the legacy press? We’re here to report the news, not make it!
And so it will go.
At some point, I am going to have to fully re-engage with the legacy press. I can’t write about them if I’m completely ignoring them. You, on the other hand, do not have to engage with them and I strongly urge you not to. There are a lot of high-quality substacks (with less of a pottymouth than mine!) for you to turn to. There’s Wired, Rolling Stone, foreign news outlets that have not been compromised by billionaires and bothsiderism, The Nation, the New Republic, ProPublica, the list is extensive and will easily fill your information diet. I will probably start compiling a list at some point and keep it on a Google doc for reference.
The legacy press has done us irreparable harm and they did it knowingly. It really is time to start treating them as part of the problem.
There are 353 days until the first Blue Wave and it starts in Virginia, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
These are dark times but I will continue to tell the stories you need to hear in a clear (and usually profane) voice. If I entertain/anger/inform you, preferably all three, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year. There’s a Black Friday sale coming. I’m not saying DON’T become a subscriber today buuuuut I feel bad and you might want to hold off a few weeks. Totally your choice.
Where the fuck have we heard THAT bullshit before?
Did I say “coincidentally? LOL. I meant “with malicious intent.”
It was not a fucking coincidence. This was the press doing everything in its power to put as many Republicans in office as possible. They were livid when the red wave crashed into a wall of furious women. Just you fucking wait until 2026, you cockgobblers.
I have been screaming this to high heaven--all I have been hearing is how to blame Kamala and wokeism, which, as a Black woman, I find chilling, as if people forget how disinformation, the legacy media, bomb threats, and an entire host of other BS contributed to her loss as well.
I have to tell you: of all the people I subscribe to you are my absolute favorite! Never stop writing and use as much salty language as possible. I just started The Nation, The New Republic and The Nineteenth. I know I should drop the NYT but there are some good columnists.