Media bias – RESOLVE

Trump did it

The Left has furiously managed the decline of our nation, domestically and globally, for the better part of 15 years. The consequences are coming to the fore. In order to distract from the carnage now so visible in the wake of three Obama terms in power, Trump and the Make America Great Again majority must be falsely and persistently accused.

By Steve Woodward

Everything is Donald Trump’s fault. Everything deemed unpleasant, unexpected, uncomfortable and unbearable. Everything.

It’s a demonstrable falsehood, of course. But it is perpetuated by a surging, media-fueled blame culture. It is the Left’s last best hope.

Covid-19. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. January 6. October 7. These are among the large-scale events for which President Trump is to blame. (He was not even in office in some cases).

But there are more. Americans are cancelling summer travel because of Trump’s tariffs, reports The Wall Street Journal (the intent of which are purposely distorted by coordinated media talking points). A high death toll after recent Kentucky tornados? That’s on Trump, squeals The Washington Post. Even pop culture is in decline, concludes The Atlantic magazine. It interviewed art critic Dean Kissick, who scolds that we’re living in “the long 2017”, which an Atlantic writer describes as “a period in which anxieties related to Donald Trump and Brexit (Brexit?) have smothered culture with moralism, navel gazing, and conformity.” (Why is it that “critics” always try to get away with making statements devoid of substance or meaning? Morals are evil?)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is Trump’s “modern day Gestapo,” says Minnesota Marxist and Gov. Tim Walz, thus Trump and Trump alone must be blamed if even one potentially lethal illegal alien is temporarily jailed with a hoard of really lethal guys after their deportation to El Salvador. The “Maryland man”, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, became collateral damage in America’s long overdue war on mass illegal immigration, a war fought on two fronts — at the U.S.-Mexico border and through active arrests and deportations. Collateral damage is the price of war.

In the Left’s war on American sovereignty under the Obama/Biden regime of 2021-24, we witnessed repeated collateral damage — raped and murdered innocent citizens such as Laken Riley, Rachel Morin and Kaitlyn Weaver. Weaver was killed in July 2024, the victim of a high-speed auto collision. The driver of the speeding car was an illegal immigrant minor, 15, who just last week was sentenced to probation (emphasis added) and community service by a Trump hating Colorado judge.

No one on the Left, not presidents, not governors, not judges, is to blame in the aftermath of these one-off tragedies. The blame culture is real enough, and the media corrupt and pervasive enough, that any assignment of blame directed at Trump/MAGA can be justified, even legitimized.

They’ll probably get around to pinning Joe Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis on Trump’s mean “Sleepy Joe” comments.

As obviously absurd as that would be, look more closely at the “doomed summer travel narrative”.

A couple told the Journal they are cancelling a bucket-list trip to France owed to Trump’s tariff re-balancing strategy. (The Left calls it a trade war, which is accurate if the context is that war is what other countries have waged against the United States for decades).

“We’ve been talking about Paris as long as we’ve been together, which is 54 years,” said Don Pratt, 75.

The Journal reports, “The couple sketched out a two-week itinerary that included England and Scotland, where his ancestors lived centuries ago. ‘Then the tariffs sort of got everybody around the world mad at us’,” Pratt said. “He worried about a chilly greeting if he showed up hoping to meet long-lost relatives. So instead, they recently booked a trip to take their adult son and his family to Walt Disney World … ”

This is a truly sorry side effect of Trump Derangement Syndrome. These mentally warped seniors traded reunions with relatives, memories of fabulous landmarks, and world-class cheese and wine for woke Disney drag queens and long lines of poorly dressed Americans swilling 32-ounce sodas. Are they devoid of any hint of national pride that once was presumed to be wired into the DNA of American citizens? Apparently, yes. They’re fine with high tariffs imposed by the French on products inbound from the U.S. and never contemplate why, for example, you’ll rarely see a Chevrolet Suburban navigating Parisian thoroughfare, or an award-winning Napa Cabernet Sauvignon on a Lyon wine list. The trip to visit the relatives would have been worth it just to explain how fair trade actually works.

Meanwhile, it’s tornado and hurricane season, and while many Americans delight at tracking and “modeling” potentially deadly systems and where they might be headed, media fear mongers are salivating, anxious to fire up the climate change narrative machine. Naturally, Trump’s fingerprints will be everywhere in the aftermath of high winds and surging water. (In stark contrast, the Left’s media slaves never raised similar concerns about Biden or North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper when thousands of the state’s citizens were abandoned after Hurricane Helene last September, and the devastation continues to roll off the back of Josh Stein, North Carolina’s latest Democrat governor.)

Severe tornadoes hammered parts of Kentucky on May 16, 2025. The Washington Post breathlessly reported that “Jackson, Kentucky, is four meteorologists short of what agency officials have deemed ideal staffing” and blamed that on sweeping, (overdue) audits of federal agency staffing and payrolls. Kentucky’s Lexington Herald Leader ran with an ominous headline — “Did staffing cuts at weather service affect Kentucky’s tornado response?” — but its reporter couldn’t find anyone on the scene who answered in the affirmative.

“As planned in advance, neighboring offices provided staffing support to the office in Jackson,” a spokesperson said. Read that closely. Resources, in this case human resources, were coordinated as needed under extreme circumstances. Is that not what taxpayers should expect from federally funded agencies and their field offices?

During his recent unhinged rants while “performing” in the United Kingdom, cranky, old Bruce Springsteen took blaming Trump to new depths, in once case decrying “residents” being taken “off American streets” and sent to “foreign detention centers”. These of course are dangerous illegals being returned to their countries of origin. In other words, definitely not “born in the USA”.

Springsteen finally calmed down and attempted poignancy, quoting writer James Baldwin, who observed, “In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.”

Is there enough? Where is the humanity in a nation overrun by illegal immigrants, mostly gang trained males, killing our citizens? Where is the humanity in gutting American manufacturing jobs in favor of cheap foreign labor? (Springsteen’s contemporary Billy Joel lyricized about “closing all the factories down [in Allentown]”, remember?) And where is the humanity in covering up Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis until even compliant media no longer could sustain the lie that he was mentally competent as a sitting President?

Civility or ‘the streets’?

By Steve Woodward

The Pilot is a Moore County newspaper that caters to northern Yankee and California transplants, tormented devotees of the radical Left who love our moderate central North Carolina weather and relatively affordable real estate. Pilot management even allows some of these refugees to submit opinion pieces for publication without regard for the inherent risk of alienating the churchgoing, conservative, America First Republicans who comprise the county’s majority. Presumably, the calculation is that they long ago dropped their subscriptions or never subscribed in the first place.

When the nation’s voters handed Donald J. Trump a mandate last November and elected him to be the nation’s 47th President, many local guest columnists and all of the permanent scribes descended into a period of extended mourning, then denial and, ultimately, rage. Kamala Harris was going to be the ideal puppet president to finalize the American decline that Barack Obama initiated and that Joe Biden dutifully, if unknowingly, advanced. Until voters rejected that plan.

Fortunately, one Pilot contributor rises above the spittle spewing, teeth gnashing, end-of-democracy hysteria when assessing the ascendance of MAGA 2.0. Charles Luckey (photo nearby) is a gifted writer who, despite his thinly veiled dislike of Trump and his resurgence, does not engage in the usual comparisons of Trump to Adolf Hitler, or repeat the tired “convicted felon” refrain, or challenge Trump’s allegiance to country.

In the brief thumbnail bio on Luckey at the conclusion of his writings, he is described as a “seasoned soldier”. That’s an understatement. I looked him up. Luckey retired from the U.S. Army in 2020 having given a combined 43 years of service. His titles included Chief of Security Operations in Iraq, Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Commanding General of the U.S. Army Reserve. At the time of his retirement Luckey was the Army’s oldest Green Beret.

This context is important toward understanding Luckey’s view of our nation’s state of affairs in 2025. In his March 22, 2025, column, he implores those we elect to “seek nonpartisan pathways back to statesmanship”. He observes that idealogical combatants are “doubling down on gracelessness.”

As is to be expected, the General can’t stomach Trump’s approach to ending the carnage in Ukraine (through diplomatic channels leading to Vladimir Putin). But he readily acknowledges that there is merit in Trump’s full scale assault on government bloat and waste. And on the topic of politicians behaving badly Luckey begins his column by scolding Rep. Al Green (D-TX) for his outburst amid Trump’s speech to Congress, and later admonished Biden’s pardons of family members for potentially inviting “ever more egregious abuses of official power”.

We can’t help but observe a stark contrast: Luckey’s measured barbs and cautionary notes about the decline of civility, on one hand, while, on the other, warnings delivered repeatedly by a roster of regional and national anti-MAGA flamethrowers who wonder why there is not more outrage, more resistance and, yes, more vandalized Teslas.

While Luckey urges Americans to arrive, ultimately, at a place of forgiveness, the reality all around us suggests a trend in the opposite direction. Underlying the mounting Trump/Russia/tariffs/DOGE hysteria is the still vivid memory of Trump’s brush with death last July and that rifle barrel protruding from a hedge on his West Palm Beach golf course soon thereafter. There has yet to be a satisfactory explanation as to how Trump was vulnerable to assassination and who, or what, was behind it.

And let us not delude ourselves into a belief that those threats are in the past. Even as Tesla vehicles, charging stations and dealerships are targeted around the country — with real bullets and real explosives — we see Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz publicly delighting in the decline of Tesla’s stock price and suggesting he will physically overpower conservatives if given the opportunity. (The most damaging vice presidential running mate to a ticket’s chances since Thomas Eagleton in 1972 was far less eloquent, of course. He said he would “kick asses”.)

Largely overlooked by corporate media have been a series of so-called swatting incidents in which police are called to a home on a false pretense that someone inside is about to commit murderous acts. The targets have been conservative bloggers and social media influencers, or their family members. (A “successful” swat in the minds of the deranged is a cop killed by a terrified homeowner who overreacts).

A staff member with Alex Jones’ InfoWars pro-American values digital media production company was shot and killed in Austin, Texas, earlier this month as he approached individuals attempting to burglarize his vehicle. It was ignored by most media outlets.

In February, the U.S. House minority leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), warned that Democrats are motivated to fight the MAGA agenda “in the courts” and “in the streets”. In recent days, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX; photo nearby) characterized fellow Texan, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), as an opponent who must be “knocked over the head … you go clean off on him.” This was after Crockett said she longed for a birthday present in the form of Elon Musk being “taken down”.

What is the end game? Jonathan Last, editor of The Bulwark, a Trump loathing, far Left digital media platform, has the answer. He is urging a surge of resistance to Trump that will end with conflict. He does not mince words:

“This movement should have millions of highly activated people attached to it by the end of 2025 … The goal should be a day when two million people show up in either New York or Washington and demonstrate that there is an unprecedented mass movement opposing the authoritarians … You dare Trump to do what he’s always wanted: To take the mask all the way off and use force against American citizens. … If you put two million people in the streets Trump will look weak if he doesn’t respond, but will look like a tyrant if he does.”

With due respect to Gen. Luckey, before we can restore civility, we just might need to defend the freedoms for which you fought, sir. Let Mr. Last assemble his two million-strong resistance brigade. I’m guessing a few million patriots will step into the breach so Trump doesn’t have to. He’s already taken a bullet.

Forgotten

By Steve Woodward

So-called celebrity Paris Hilton lost her Malibu, California, home amid a series of recent wildfires around greater Los Angeles. I read about it while visiting The Hollywood Reporter web site. Others enduring a similar fate, the site reports, include comedian Billy Crystal, and actors Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Ricki Lake and Mandy Moore, to name a few. Various talent agents, producers and directors also saw their homes reduced to ashes.

The Wall Street Journal reports that billionaires such as Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and shopping mall mogul Herb Simon are among owners of more than 12,000 structures incinerated by various wildfires.

Breathlessly, the Journal reminds its readers that many of southern California’s wealthy elite “are scrambling to find both short- and long-term housing.” A luxury real estate agent says the aftermath of the fires is “really frightening for these people.” Another says open houses for leased properties are “drawing 50 to 60 people at once, many in tears.”

Recently, I read the names of other Americans who’ve lost their homes and need temporary shelter. Vickie Revis. Kathy Varvel. Kristen Hicks. Richard Neeb. Jody Henderson.

I found their names in news stories posted at the Asheville Citizen Times website. They are not celebrities. They are not famous. They reside in western North Carolina. Their residences after flood waters raged through on September 27 are motel rooms, campers and mobile homes. They don’t have talent agents. They are not contacting luxury real estate agents.

“The need is so great,” says Jason Ward in Swannanoa, nearly four months after a hurricane that came ashore along Florida’s west coast roared into North Carolina’s high country. “We have people in campers. It’s a nightmare situation.” (WarRoom.org, January 15, 2025)

Between 121,000 and 132,000 homes in western NC were estimated to have been damaged by the storm. At least 104 fatalities have been confirmed. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, more widely known as a four-letter word, FEMA, long ago abandoned the region. FEMA checks have allowed many in need to live in motel rooms but those funds gradually are being cut off. With severe cold and winter conditions settling, a FEMA spokesperson matter of factly told a Citizen Times reporter that 3,500 people would lose temporary housing in motels as of January 9. With a storm in the forecast, FEMA showed its compassion by extending the deadline — by ONE DAY.

Paris Hilton’s foundation raised more than $800,000 soon after the wildfires. That’s great. Not everyone who lost a home around L.A. is wealthy and self-sufficient. In the Carolina mountains, a wealth of tireless compassion is all the folks can count on.

“It’s neighbors helping neighbors,” said Jason Seidel in Marion. “The only thing we get is what we provide for ourselves.” (WarRoom.org, January 15, 2025)

Josh Stein, yet another Democrat occupying the North Carolina Governor’s mansion, actually said this during his inaugural remarks: “We must overcome the unprecedented storm that ravaged our state and everyday struggles that impact our neighbors. And we will.”

He did not say why efforts to overcome were not pursued by his predecessor, Governor Roy Cooper. On January 2, Stein announced an executive order to expedite the construction of 1,000 temporary housing units. He did not say why Cooper failed to enact a similar executive order in October, November or December.

The Hollywood Reporter describes victims of recent wildfires as “climate refugees”, an absurd attempt to blame “climate change” while ignoring the root cause of the fires — Gov. Gavin Newsom and other elected officials bowing to rigid environmentalism.

Out in California, Pacific Palisades and Malibu are bathed in brilliant sunshine that illuminates utter devastation. Celebrities and tycoons who lost homes have sought lodging in famous places like the Beverly Hills Hotel, paying thousands of dollars a night, and consoling themselves over glasses of wine in the iconic Polo Lounge.

Back in North Carolina, in Waynesville, temperatures are dropping and snow is falling. People displaced from homes by the floods are living in 50 donated campers in an a community they call their Haven on a Hill. To make a cup of coffee every morning, gas is pumped by hand out of canisters and transferred to generators that power appliances and provide modest heating.

We’ll never forget the early days after the floods. We’ll never forget the many citizens who donated emergency supplies and the pilots who formed a volunteer Air Force to deliver them into North Carolina’s western counties. But in January 2025 we must heed the call of duty again. The crisis has not ended. In fact, it has barely subsided. What to do?

Start here:
Haven On The Hill (Waynesville, NC)
Facebook account Click here
Appalachian United Initiative Click here
Valley Strong Disaster Relief Click here
Project Your Home Click here

MAGA 2.0

By Steve Woodward

Corrupt media, fellow deranged Leftists (do not ever again call them Liberals, an extinct ideological species since the Age of Obama) and fake Republicans are getting off to a rough start. They were deflecting suicidal tendencies on January 6, 2025, by revisiting the “horror” and “devastation” of January 6, 2021.

In 2025, Donald Trump’s election has been certified. The margin of victory was too big to rig. Thus, Vice President Kamala Harris was obligated to stand in the chamber of the U.S. Senate and read aloud the verdict of November 5, 2024, and the symbolism was beautiful. Harris might as well have been standing in the gallows. Her political future is best symbolized by a lifeless corpse adorned in a pant suit, dangling from a rope.

Conversely, I have vivid memories of the 6 January 2021, and cherish all of them except for the bone numbing winds that gusted across the Capitol Mall that day. I was physically in Washington on 6 January 2021. (Come and get me). But patriots show up when duty calls. Always. Our nation would not exist if brave soldiers had surrendered to severe weather across the brutal years of the Revolutionary War. Yet, today, snowflake Leftists literally hide when forecasters predict … snowflakes.

Exhibit A. Here is how Josh Stein is demonstrating leadership amid the opening days of his rein as Governor of North Carolina:

“We regret to inform you that the inaugural ceremony, block party, and Executive Mansion open house originally scheduled for this Saturday and Sunday, January 11 and 12th, will be cancelled due to inclement weather and approaching winter storms across the state.

“Governor Stein and the Committee thank you for your interest in attending the events, and they were looking forward to celebrating this weekend with you all. But as with any storm, safety has to be paramount. (Emphasis added)

Democrats, as usual, have no sense of irony. They are bailing out amid a tepid forecast that might suggest wearing an overcoat even after these many months during which they’ve asked citizens of western North Carolina to be patient after incomprehensible surges of water transformed their communities into uninhabitable swamps.

Let this sink in: Newly elected Democrats Josh Stein, Rachel Hunt (Lt. Governor), and Jeff Jackson (Attorney General) are afraid to assemble in Raleigh this Saturday to join other newly elected Council of State officers (including Republicans Dave Boliek and Luke Farley) because someone might fail to navigate a small patch of ice. But they have yet to grasp, or respond to, what life is like when your home and much of the infrastructure that supports its has been decimated by a real weather event — the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in late September 2024 that will linger well into 2025 and beyond.

The ascendency of MAGA in 2025 is not only about the return of Donald Trump to the White House and his coming role as the 47th President of the United States. It is the beginning of an era of reckoning that will demand accountability among Republicans at every level of government, from the halls of power to grass roots assemblies.

Thus, as we go forth, not only will our movement inflict pain and scrutiny on Stein and his Democrat snowflakes. This also marks the beginning of a time of reckoning for our elected Republicans, and to be clear, here is the roll call that your author will ruthlessly hold to account: RINO Sen. Thom Tillis (photo nearby). Sen. Ted Budd. Rep. Richard Hudson. NC Sen. Tom McInnis. NC Rep. Neal Jackson. The North Carolina Republican Party, specifically chair Jason Simmons. The North Carolina Supreme Court. The Moore County Board of Commissioners. The Moore County Board of Education, specifically chair Robin Calcutt and vice chair Shannon Davis. The Moore County Republican Party, specifically its divisive chair and vice chair, Tom Beddow and Bill Demastus, who have alienated untold numbers of donors and volunteers across the past four years, and who soon will be unseated.

Steve Bannon said it best. No longer is it Republicans versus Democrats. It is the Global elitist Left and compliant establishment Republicans against whom we will and must wage war on behalf of MAGA populist-nationalists.

Winter is coming for those committed to transforming the United States into a Marxist empire and, also, for weak Republicans who have merely pretended to support the overdue upheaval that ensues on January 20, 2025, at one minute after 12 noon. Enjoy shivering in the icy shadows of irrelevance.

Rogan’s heroes

“It may be that this present system, with no modifications and no experiments, can survive. Perhaps the money-making machine has some kind of built-in perpetual motion, but I do not think so. To a very considerable extent, the media of mass communications in a given country reflects the political, economic and social climate in which it grows and flourishes. That is the reason our system differs from the British and the French, and also from the Russian and the Chinese. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. And our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.” — Edward R. Murrow, October 15, 1958, speaking to the Radio and Television News Association’s annual convention

By Steve Woodward

Distilled to its essence, CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow’s speech delivered to broadcasting colleagues 66 years ago warned that television, then in its infancy, already had begun to betray its audiences and imperil its long-term viability. There is no one even remotely similar to Murrow remaining in the 21st century corporate media. Murrow cared about truth, substance and an informed population, all now obsolete.

Murrow also said this during his remarks in 1958 in Chicago: “I have decided to express my concern about what I believe to be happening to radio and television. … I have no feud, either with my employers, any sponsors, or with the professional critics of radio and television. But I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage.”

The Democrat Party’s precipitous march to the ideological Left likely began long before Murrow’s speech, around the time Woodrow Wilson ascended to the U.S. presidency in 1912 espousing “progressivism”. It ebbed and flowed in the decades ahead, revived by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

But the Democrats soon entered a period of near extinction in presidential politics, putting forth presidential aspirants named George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. Carter was the only one who actually made it to the Oval Office as president but his gain was the Democrat’s loss. His ineptitude assured Carter will be remembered among the most failed presidents.

Then, in 1992, along came William Jefferson Clinton, the youthful but obscure governor of Arkansas. It is notable that his ascension to the presidency coincided with the first cracks in network television’s absolute information dominance. Cable TV’s CNN cemented its legitimacy during riveting coverage of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. The internet was coming into its own with 10 web sites up and running (including the Raleigh News & Observer’s Nando.net, one of the first digital platforms adopted by a newspaper). There would be nearly 3,000 functional web sites by 1995. And a former disc jockey named Rush Limbaugh was conducting an experiment that would become a genre — conservative talk radio, of which he would be king for 30 years.

Deep beneath the surface, something else was happening that would influence and corrupt mainstream media in ways Murrow could not have foreseen. Public schools and institutions of higher education pulled away the veil. Educators devolved into indoctrinators committed to diminishing American exceptionalism, severing the connective tissue of Judeo-Christian values that defined its citizens, and challenging every societal boundary by seeking to normalize transgenderism, relativism (the end of delineating between right and wrong) and climate-change hysteria. Despite progress toward diminishing racial inequality made by the civil rights movement, the mantra among educators increasingly was moving toward dismissing the U.S. as irredeemably and systemically racist to its core.

This was the precursor of a cultural shift across mass media. Newsrooms and television studios gradually became infested by graduates of these institutions, today’s editors, producers and reporters who view journalism through an activist lens. As the Democrats moved further Left, the media went with them, no longer inspired by the objective nobility of their journalistic forefathers — Murrow, Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, John Chancellor and Charles Kuralt, et al.

The election of Barack Hussein Obama in 2008 opened the floodgates of a newly emboldened state-run media, not beholden to scrutinizing the powerful but more prone than ever to fawning over Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America and enabling those in his orbit to increase their power.

The zenith of Obama’s iron boot control over a compliant and corrupt media came amid the 2012 election cycle during a debate between Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney, aka, the Candy Crowley debate. The media had spent weeks running interference for the Obama-Hillary Clinton debacle in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, when four Americans died amid a terror attack on the U.S. embassy. During an October debate moderated by CNN’s Crowley, Romney seized on the Obama administration’s refusal to acknowledge the coordinated assault as an act of terror. Crowley jumped to Obama’s defense on live television. “(Obama) did call it an act of terror,” she said. (In reality, Obama and Clinton shamelessly blamed the attack on a viral internet video beyond their control).

That debate, artfully choreographed by CNN, enabled Obama to move the race from a dead heat to a decisive victory (332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206) despite his tepid approval rating (46%), high unemployment (8.3%) and growing contempt toward ObamaCare. Of course to have used these realities against Obama would have been dismissed as “racist”, which is what the Left often said about Limbaugh and his millions of loyal listeners.

It is sadly ironic that Limbaugh passed away just as alternative media was beginning to take root in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 dismantling of Hillary Clinton’s coronation. Trump became the first president to recognize the utility of social media, going after his adversaries and corrupt media outlets with his so-called “mean tweets” using Twitter (before he was blackballed by the tech elites).

But this alternate media landscape was coming rapidly to the fore as critical thinkers (Conservatives) watched Trump Derangement Syndrome transform The Atlantic magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and, to a lesser degree, Fox News, into naked appendages of the Left. The corner was turned during pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, and the ascension of Joe Biden to the White House by precise leveraging of COVID hysteria.

The mainstream media overlords were dismissive of Steve Bannon’s War Room, and the Joe Rogans, Dinesh D’Souzas, Charlie Kirks, Sebastian Gorkas and Dan Bonginos expanding audience across the live streaming spectrum. By the time Trump launched his bid for re-election, millions of MAGA faithful were tuning into Newsmax, the Real America’s Voice network, Rumble and, more recently, the Tucker Carlson Network, where the likes of Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sat down for lengthy, granular interviews.

Trump’s campaign recognized the influence of alternative outlets, most notably Rogan’s vast audience. A three-hour interview with Rogan attracted a seismic 45 million views on You Tube, and 25 millions across Spotify and other platforms (The Wall Street Journal, November 8, 2024). Trump also did 90 minutes of live-streamed chat with a video gamer phenom named Adin Ross (at the behest of Trump’s teen son, Barron). Across all of 2024, Trump was a guest on 20 podcasts, the Journal reports. (Kamala Harris dodged Rogan altogether).

The net effect of this dramatic shift raises a question future Republican presidential candidates must ask: Why would I consent to a network controlled, prime time television debate with a Democrat ever again? Answer: You wouldn’t. You shouldn’t. Consider this stunning data point. The Journal, citing the Associated Press VoteCast survey, notes that Trump got the support of 56% of male voters ages 18 to 29. Where do these youngsters go for news and analysis? TikTok and podcasts. Period.

The TV networks are bleeding viewers and that erosion was bad news for the Harris-Biden bid for reelection. CNN’s prime time lineup does not even reach one million households (it has fallen to 792,000), and its viewers’ median age is 69. MSNBC’s 1.3 million prime time household audience has a median age of 70. These folks have likely never have heard of Rogan, Kirk and their media peers.

The Journal’s Kimberley Strassel observes that the media’s fierce defense of the Left backfired this time because “a narrative full of fantasy enabled Democrats to live in a world disconnected from the mood and worries of the country”, which were laser focused on the economy, illegal immigration and the absurdity of men competing in women’s sports.

In the aftermath of Trump’s resounding comeback win on November 5, there is something else to celebrate (and relish). Think about it. The smug network bastards who despise 80 million-plus Americans who voted for Trump/MAGA — Jake Tapper, Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, Anderson Cooper, Margaret Brennan and David Muir, along with many others — are hurtling toward complete irrelevance. It’s over.

Morrow foresaw this moment coming.

“This instrument (television) can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire,” he said in 1958. “But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box.”