Turning off the News
It's time to break up with the mainstream media.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Quick quiz: what do these three statements have in common?
1) Donald Trump won in a landslide.
2) Kamala Harris lost because she ran a terrible campaign.
3) The Democratic brand is toxic.
Answer? They've all been spread by the mainstream media. And they're all false.
Let's take a moment to factcheck these classics of the gaslighting genre.
1) Donald Trump won in a landslide. FALSE. As of this writing, Trump's popular vote margin over Harris is only two percent. As votes from western states continue to trickle in, his margin may be even tinier (insert Stormy Daniels joke here). This election will likely wind up being the closest since the 2000 contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
As for the Electoral College, Trump's margin there was far from a landslide by historical standards, as I showed here. What's more, only 780,000 votes separated the two candidates in all swing states combined . That's how close Kamala Harris came to being president.
Why does this matter? The fact that this election was so close means that the 2026 midterms are eminently winnable for Democrats. If, on the other hand, the media convince you that Trump won a huge mandate, you might feel hopeless. And hopelessness is not a plan.
2) Kamala Harris lost because she ran a terrible campaign. FALSE. No campaign is flawless, but Harris's came pretty close. She had to mount hers in a mere hundred days and did so brilliantly, with a masterful convention and a dominant debate performance.
So why did she lose? For starters, Harris was linked to Joe Biden, who was deeply unpopular. His approval rating was a lowly 40, which she wildly outperformed. She also had the misfortune to run in a year when incumbent parties were swept out of power around the world.
And last—but certainly not least—she made the fatal error of being a woman. That's no small data point in a nation that has yet to choose a female head of state—something that 88 other countries have somehow managed to do. Even macho Mexico just elected a woman, and—eek!—a Jewish one at that.
3) The Democratic brand is toxic. FALSE. As Democratic "strategists" (euphemism for "unemployed gasbags") bloviate on cable news about why their party lost, I'm reminded of a famous quote from the great political humorist Will Rogers: "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat."
The mainstream media have been amplifying the lazy critiques of this circular firing squad to attract clicks and viewers. But there's no evidence that the Democrats—who have a stellar bench of popular elected officials including Andy Beshear, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, and Wes Moore, to name just four—are in such dire straits.
And there was good news for Democrats this cycle. In North Carolina, for example, Democrat Josh Stein defeated MAGA Republican Mark Robinson by a thumping 15 points. If that proves anything, it's that the Black Nazi brand is toxic.
If you're like me, you're sick of being gaslighted and have decided to turn off the gaslight.
Since the election, cable news channels have seen their ratings crater. And hundreds of thousands of Washington Post readers have cancelled their subscriptions to protest the craven behavior of the paper's owner, Lex Luthor wannabe Jeff Bezos.
So you might be wondering: now that I'm over mainstream media, where do I get my news?
Answer: mainly from BBC Sounds, the app from the BBC, which delivers high quality radio reporting from all over the world, for free. It's not perfect, but it's a huge upgrade over what the for-profit American media companies have been dishing out.
For example, you could watch MSNBC's entire primetime lineup and never know that there's a continent called Africa. Tune in to the BBC and you'll learn all about the civil war in Sudan, which is affecting a huge swath of your fellow humans. Such coverage will make all those cable roundtables about whether Tim Walz was the right choice seem pretty silly.
But I wouldn't recommend consuming the news—even from an excellent source like the BBC—around the clock. I'm not a neuroscientist like George Santos, but in my experience, turning off the news is good for your mental health. And you'll have more time for things you actually enjoy. Read a novel. See a friend. Walk your dog. Which is what I'm going to do right now.
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I use an RSS reader (in my case Inoreader, but there are others). There are RSS feeds from news sources, sports, tech... anything you can think of.
This lets me skim hundreds of headlines every day, reading the maybe two dozen articles that catch my attention. I get a decent overview of what's preoccupying the media, just from the (often-conflicting) headlines, and details on stuff that I think deserves my time.
yes, retreating into an even smaller ideological protective bubble than the msm affords progressives will do wonders for their mental health and relationship with reality. Can’t wait to see how this goes
Liberals and progressives have little problem with reality, they just never imagined there would be such an insurgence of hypocritical lying rightwing conservative morons who have crafted their own reality and presented it as fact. Now it seems like all we hear from rightwing conservatives is their incessant whining, crying and screaming every time their fantasy reality is fact checked because nothing pisses off those who wallow in conspiracy theories and conservative fiction like being fact checked. You can tell because they take far more issue with the fact checking than they do with the facts.
" Conservatives are not happy with all the Trump fact checking"
Conservatives are not happy with the Trump fact checking happening on the debate stage - Live Updates - POLITICO
Trump and Vance's ridiculous crusade against fact-checking debates - Los Angeles Times
Trump wages campaign against real-time fact checks - The Washington Post
Facts and reality are simply inconvenient truths to be rejected or ignored by Trump and his witless gullible 'Storm Troopers'.
It would be difficult to prove, but my take would be that in previous elections (previous to Trump) anyone who said they didnt want to be fact checked would be a longshot to be nominated let alone win the election.
The brainwashing of the American public by right wing media runs deep.
The fact checks were wrong and lies from Democrats were not challenged.
The fact that Democrats expect other to accept lies as facts tells you all you need to know about their ability to handle reality.
Imagine how witless and gullible you'd have to be to believe that the "fact checking" provided by progressive moderators was accurate or applied in good faith. I guess that's why they need an even more protective bubble. Don't have to worry about reality penetrating.
Again, high comedy to make that claim in an article that wants progressives to avoid the MSM.
If you really take a good look at the "Trump lies" list they like to put out all of the time, you will find out that many of the explanations they give simply boil down to "I don't like what he said".
The vast majority of them are opinions not based on fact.
Yeah. they can't grasp that either.
The best are the ones that are 100% accurate facts, but the fact checker still calls them misleading.
Or "needs context"
We hear that a lot on here, too.
Some facts and inconvenient truths for the Dems to process. Trump won the EC and popular votes. He won all the swing states. The Republicans won control of the WH, Senate, and the House. That's mandate enough. The inept leftists got their collective asses whipped by a diverse electorate.
Kamala got beat because she was another out of touch hard left liberal, who ran a terrible campaign trying to promote a rejected left wing agenda. She really was Biden 2.0, not very bright, with no charisma or gravitas.
The democrat brand was indeed toxic enough to cause them to lose everything....in a big way. Why do they think they will win back political power without changing their failed policies and beliefs?
winning by 2+% of the popular vote isn't a mandate, it's a warning ...
Hate and garbage voted for hate and garbage
Yep, it's a warning to the democrats that the very fine and normal people of the USA have finally seen enough of the left's lies, hate, and garbage
Exactly...
For the entire campaign, we heard Harris and leftists scream that it was time for a younger generation to take over. Now that Trump won and he is putting in a younger generation in his cabinet and other positions, they are bitching about that too.
I think that is all we are going to hear for at least the next twelve years.
Projection.
It is false actually. But journalists are frequently terrible at math. CNN commentators repeatedly said "it looks like Trump is going to win the popular vote by 5 million", sitting in front of a screen with zero California votes yet counted. (If you don't understand why that's terrible math, you probably went to journalism school.) The best part of election night was the poor girl covering Georgia for CNN who clearly couldn't work out that the "100k votes still outstanding, most from Fulton County" was not going to be enough to overtake Trump's 150k lead. Credit to Anderson Cooper for not making her feel stupid on camera.
No, this one is pretty much true. She was catastrophic at key moments and generally poor the rest of the time. We haven't seen a choke artist like this since Rick Perry ranted about Ponzi schemes. She told us all that 2/3 of Americans had died of Covid. You would think "oh, she must have just misspoken"... but then she repeated it in a second speech. She could never explain a plan. It was though she had rehearsed 5 sentences and she was only allowed to choose from one.
What are you going to do about high prices?
Well, we've been doing things, but we have more to do.
What, specifically?
We have more do to.
Yes, but what is that "more" you're talking about?
Look, I grew up in a middle class family.....
At which point absolutely everyone understood she had no plan at all.
And when asked what she would do differently, she said.... on national TV... in front of a VERY friendly interviewer..... "I can't think of anything". It was one incident of 100 where she was completely bereft of ideas and looked incapable of thinking up any.
Meh. Partially false. It's a brand that far too often rejects common sense, suppresses free speech, and weaponizes government against it's enemies. Whether it's women's swimming champions with testicles, drag queens performing for children, burning cities in "peaceful protests", threatening to make parody illegal, canceling anybody who has ever said anything funny, or kangaroo courting political enemies, they just can't get out of their own way. Wisdom is chasing them, but they are faster.
Absolutely true. So why the fuck didn't they run one of those people for president?