The Media Got Its Golden Goose Back

When Trump said the press is the enemy of the people, he was wasn’t making an accusation. He was making a promise.

Democracy did not die in November of 2024 but the monsters 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.

After taking a day to just…not, I’m back to start the long fight ahead of us. For me, that first step is, naturally, finger-pointing.

Do I blame Democrats? Not really. Kamala Harris ran a campaign that broke records. Joe Biden was dealt a pile of shit and turned it into a fucking castle of gold for us to live in.

Do I blame Hispanic men for giving into their racism and machismo bullshit? Yeah. But they were lied to. They’re going to reap what they’ve sown as they get caught up in the immigration sweeps and they’re targeted by racist cops. Aspirational whiteness is not actual whiteness and millions of Latino Trump voters are about to discover that white nationalists don’t care who they voted for, just about the color of their skin.

Do I blame Gen Z for not turning out? Yeah. Genocide Joe? Holocaust Harris? Cool. Watch what Trump lets Netanyahu do to the West Bank and Gaza Strip now. Won’t it be interesting when all of your Very Concerned leaders who organized these protests and all of the Very Concerned influencers you followed online disappear into the woodwork, never to speak of the death toll in Gaza again? You were played just like Millennials were in 2016. And by the same people.¹ Try to learn that lesson and do better.

But, really, I think the biggest lie, though, is going to be that voters punished Biden and Harris because of the economy.

Oh, the lie won’t be that they did just that. The lie will be WHY they did it. And that brings me to who I truly blame for Tuesday and all of the pain and suffering that is to come: The legacy press.

The have resented Joe Biden since before he was inaugurated. That smoldering resentment burst into a raging forest fire within weeks of Biden Being sworn in. For four years, the press lied, just bald-faced fucking lied, about the economy.

I’ve been writing about it the entire time and it was beyond anything I’ve seen since the press lied us into the Iraq War. Every week had new articles about how we were on the brink of a recession. Every jitter in the market was front page news. Every new market high was barely mentioned. When Trump broke ground on a new factory he had nothing to do with, he got a hundred reporters swooning over his genius. Biden has flooded Middle America with new factories and the press shrugged.

When the economy recovered from Covid, the press just shifted from reporting facts to reporting “vibes.” They invented the “Vibecession” so they could tell people the economy “felt” bad and then report on how people felt. This was a first in all of journalistic history.

Now, in the middle of the strongest economy in over half a century, the sitting president has been punished for a bad economy that doesn’t actually exist.

Who’s fault is that?

Oh, sure, the right-wing media has been screaming the economy is the worst it’s ever been but if the legacy press didn’t play along, that wouldn’t work. Or at least not nearly as well.

But they did play along. The legacy press was the GOP’s most willing accomplice. They crusaded against Biden on his age and then protected Trump’s mental collapse. They sanewashed him just like they’ve been doing for the last nine years. Just like they’ll continue to do unless their billionaire owners decide President JD Vance would be better for their bottom line.

Trump is good for business and Biden wasn’t. Harris wouldn’t have been good for business, either. With Trump, there will be scandal and corruption and cruelty and outrage. The headlines will write themselves. Awards will be won. Book deals will rain down like mana from heaven. So many careers will be made!

All at the expense of the American people and the democracy the press was supposed to defend.

I will never forgive these people and neither should you. Walk away from the Times and the Post and CNN and all of it. Find other outlets. The New Republic. Mother Jones. ProPublica. Media outlets based outside of the United States. As many Substacks as you’re comfortable with. Read them and support them however you can. Republicans are going to pressure the legacy press to bend the knee and they will. They already have. They cannot be trusted and, in truth, have been untrustworthy for a very long time.

When Trump said the press is the enemy of the people, he wasn’t making an accusation. He was making a promise.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year. Thank you for everything!

1. Just like that, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Nina Turner, Briahna Joy Grey and all the other Very Concerned voices on the alt-left will suddenly decide that protesting against US involvement with Israel is just silly. Count on it.