The Counterattack Isn't Coming

They can’t fight back, because they don’t know what happened, they don’t know what’s happening, and they don’t know what will happen. One mildly interesting counterexample at the end, but wait for it.

Watching anti-Trumper reactions to the election, I can only refer again to the “bag of sand” scene in The 40 Year-Old Virgin, where the weird new guy’s co-workers figure out he’s never been with a woman because he flails around helplessly while trying to describe the experience. Tom Nichols at poker night: Oh, yeah, man, America’s so hot, it’s like a…bag of sand. There’s an entire industry of donor-subsidized political journalists who get paid to analyze a country they’ve somehow never met. So they diagnose the national illness, and then they analyze the cause of the national illness, and then by the time they’re getting around to prescribing the political medicine….

Dude, be honest: Have you ever even been with America?

To avoid pulling apart a bunch of tedious examples, let’s just consider the representative figures of professional nevertrumper David Frum and Michael Tomasky, the career-insipid editor of the Orange Scare fan club newsletter The New Republic.

Explaining at The Atlantic what happens next, Frum warns that Trump will fill his administration with MAGA loyalists. This is very rare, of course, because most administrations fill their political ranks with people who disagree with them. But here’s a sample of what Frum says will happen as a result:

As loyalists take over regulatory agencies, filling not only political but also former civil-service jobs, American skies will become more polluted, American food more dangerous.

He’s typing his priors from a mental pulldown menu of scare phrases, completely disconnected from anything happening on earth. Scary Trump the Hitler figure will be terrifyingly libertarian like a fascist and shrink the regulatory state by appointing his anti-government loyalists, so food will become more dangerous. At the risk of relying on Steve Carell twice in one post….

David Frum have brain, brain not talk to mouth, mouth go loud noise. Remember that scene in The Shining where Shelley Duvall goes into the ballroom to read the pages of the book her husband has been writing all winter, and she realizes that he’s just been typing the same sentence over and over again? The horror of that scene is that the Shelley Duvall character realizes she’s married to David Frum.

The single most prominent discussion in the extremely clear and out front MAGA-MAHA narrative marriage has been the discussion about making food healthier: less processed, with fewer dyes and industrial fillers. The first name they’ve offered in discussions about staffing the Department of Agriculture is Joel Salatin, for crying out loud. To identify making food more dangerous as a first-round Trump agenda item is to miss the whole play. It’s like a theater critic just turned in a review saying that he loved Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf because of all the lighthearted humor and the heartwarming ending. Forget about Frum’s argument — he literally isn’t describing anything, living in the locked basement of his own empty head.

Speaking of locked basements and empty heads, Michael Tomasky. No one else understands, but rest easy, because he does:

See, the country is working incredibly well, Kamala Harris was brilliant and personable and extremely capable, and Donald Trump literally said he would murder Liz Cheney with a firing squad, but America just didn’t understand all of that. People got brainwashed and magic-card-tricked by the all-powerful right wing media, which made them misperceive reality:

The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

Then, a few paragraphs below that, Tomasky drops his “bag of sand” moment, explaining how the right-wing media works, and remember as you read this who he put inside the category in the paragraph above:

This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.

All media that isn’t relentlessly anti-Trump is right-wing media, and it’s enormously powerful, and it speaks with one voice. Evangelical radio is just like the Joe Rogan Experience. If you listen to that old stoner Bernie bro or subscribe to the Claremont Review of Books, you’re just consuming right-wing media, which is all precisely identical. Curtis Yarvin is Brit Hume is Peachy Keenan. With one voice, they all pretend that liberal elitists hate you, which is false and they just made it up.

As I’ve just said about David Brooks, the only thing high-status journalists don’t understand at all is the absolute foundational core of the present reality, the obvious things that are central and defining. Liz Cheney just campaigned with Kamala Harris, while the nephew and son of the leading saints in the Democratic political firmament just campaigned with Donald Trump. It’s a moment of shocking realignments, and the current transitional knife fight in the GOP reflects that. The American political right is most assuredly not speaking with one voice. Find some dudes in MAGA hats and ask them if John Thune should become the Senate majority leader.

Right-wing media is also organically disunified, ringed by tactically friendly left-facing figures like Glenn Greenwald, and the “Trump movement” is waiting to be defined in its current iteration, especially as it integrates (or doesn’t!) its new Gabbard/RFK wing. See this discussion of Trump as an incipient Buchananite, a populist growing paleocon skin over his battle scars. I don’t know if I buy that or not, but…interesting. “I will subscribe to your newsletter.”

While people like Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger argue against the Democratic Party’s political course but do it from a liberal starting point, and neocons square off against libertarian Paultards and paleocons and golf sweater Chamber of Commerce Republicans who enjoy getting more cheap labor across the border, Michael Tomasky identifies a political right that “speaks with one voice.” There is, he explains, a single right-wing media, and it always says the same thing. He has no idea what’s happening, so he’s a political expert who explains things for a living.

Also, in a gaslighting maneuver you’d need a brain injury to avoid noticing, Tomasky frames the crazy right-wing talking points as bizarre and fake, in a WHAT ARE THESE PEOPLE EVEN TALKING ABOUT!?!?!? headfake: “…treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.” I mean, imagine being crazy enough to buy this insane talking point about “your son coming home from school your daughter.” Lunacy! Somehow these people really believe this stuff!

Meanwhile: “A trailblazing state law prohibiting California school boards from passing resolutions that require teachers and school staff to notify parents if they believe a child is transgender isn’t likely to put an end to this polarizing issue.” Signed into law three months before the election.

So right-wing media is completely unified, speaks with one voice, and only talks about fake made-up culture war nonsense, except that it’s also fragmented, diverse, and centered on actual, current controversies. The wisdom of Michael Tomasky, ladies and gentlemen.

Having found the illness, Dr. Tomasky is ready to name the medicine: more subsidies for Michael Tomasky.

If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.

Please tell me you’re laughing out loud as you see what he’s doing. His election postmortem is that he has his hat out on a street corner. A few paragraphs from the top, Tomasky also warns that “billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left.” See, you wouldn’t be losing these elections if you’d write me a lot more checks and I had a nicer beach house. After several decades of Beltway journalism, this is how a distinguished old political editor understands the media environment: it’s all a thing that billionaires provide. Trump has a Joe Rogan, so we should get a billionaire of our own to checkbook us one of those. If someone just pays for it, then you immediately have it. Audiences don’t have to be earned; they’re just bought. “Laurene, buy us a Rogan.”

The only Democrat I’ve seen this week who has taken his head all the way out of his ass is Manhattan borough president Mark Levine, who is Obama-school progressive down to his bones:

The clarity of that. Hey guys, what if we governed well, and the places we govern were clean, safe, and pleasant to live in?

He should be shamed into silence by Monday. The anti-Trump narrative will remain loud, empty, and entirely beside the point.