Tonight's Debate Is A Trial By Fire...For The Press
The press is quickly running out of chances to salvage the tattered remains of its credibility.
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Tonight’s the big debate between a smart, successful, accomplished woman of mixed heritage and a treasonous elderly convicted felon/sexual predator/pedophile/pathological liar/fascist with a rather low IQ who staged a coup and is currently plotting a second one while also suffering from severe cognitive collapse along with several even more severe personality disorders.
Tonight, Trump will get on the debate stage and throw shit at Harris, trying to pull her down into the mud with him. He will do this because it’s the only play he has and, honestly, the only thing he knows how to do.
He cannot boast of his accomplishments because he has none. He cannot talk about policy because he doesn’t understand it and there’s no teleprompter to tell him what to say. He can’t make a positive case for himself because there is no case to be made. His only move is to smear Harris and convince the public she’s as terrible as he is.
Harris’ job will be to not let herself be dragged down into the mud while also letting Trump show himself to be a small, petty wannabe tyrant. As long as she has command of the facts and lets Trump beat his tiny fists in impotent rage, she wins.
Unless, of course, the press decides that she loses no matter what.
Allow me to remind you what it looked like the last time Harris brushed aside Trump’s racist stupidity:
That is not the reporting of a press calling balls and strikes. That is the reporting of a press determined to reach a preordained outcome.
Politico was dragged mercilessly for this. So much so they changed the headline twice. It didn’t help. We all saw what they tried to do. Trump spewed ugly racism and Politico tried to make it Harris’ problem. They were not the only news outlet to engage in this behavior.
This brings us back to tonight.
Tonight, the press will do one of two things: They will either report on what actually happened on stage or they will put their entire ass on the scale to help Trump the same way they’ve been doing for the last decade. Said help going beyond fawning nonstop coverage to literal “sanewashing” of Trump’s incoherent babbling idiocy. The press has also engaged in outright deception to mislead the public. No, NYT, I have not forgotten you had a front-page story leading people to believe Joe Biden had Parkinson’s when you fucking knew for a fact that he didn’t.
Tonight’s debate will be one of the mainstream media’s last opportunities to not fuck us over. One of their last opportunities to do their fucking jobs. Their REAL jobs. Journalism, not cradling the balls of creepy oligarch perverts and fascist weirdos.
Harris could have a shitty night, sure. She probably won’t. Either way, if I see one fucking article Wednesday morning even fucking hinting that a candidate for the most difficult job in the history of the human species was “overprepared,” there is no hope left for these people.
If the mainstream press needs Trump’s chaos and corruption and evil more than they need democracy, we do not need the mainstream press. They will have failed in their core mission to protect democracy, putting awards, book deals, and revenue above all.
I don’t know what the free press looks like after this, but the mainstream press is not it if they continue down the path of cheerleading fascism because it’s more lucrative. Tonight will go a long way to telling us how far down that path they’ve gone and if they have any chance of turning back.
There are 55 days until the 2024 election. Vote blue like your life depends on it. This is America. No kings. No weirdos. Vote Harris and Walz.
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"Tonight’s the big debate between a smart, successful, accomplished woman of mixed heritage and a treasonous elderly convicted felon/sexual predator/pedophile/pathological liar/fascist with a rather low IQ who staged a coup and is currently plotting a second one while also suffering from severe cognitive collapse along with several even more severe personality disorders." If an author came up with a scenario based on the above facts, we might even think that it was too over-the-top! Add to that the newly hatched and revealed World Liberty Fnancial crypto scheme/scam that tfg and his corrupt family are apparently now involved in (see Judd at Popular Information on Substack), and we are beyond the twilight zone.
Absolutely right! I’m sick and tired of them trying to make us believe that Trump is a normal candidate. He’s not! He tried to overthrow our government the last election and will do it again in a heartbeat.