News Media, Celebrities Lose Their Minds

The people have spoken — and loudly. The 2024 election was a landslide, with a Republican winning the popular vote — for the first time in 20 years, which should shut up all those talking heads looking to abolish the Electoral College.

Donald J. Trump, 45 & 47, put on a masterclass on how to campaign — some 900 rallies in four years, speeches that rarely stopped after one hour, brilliant marketing trolls of his stint at McDonald’s and as a garbage man. For his efforts, for this sweeping redemption, with a GOP Senate and maybe House, he has been rewarded with a massive mandate to reverse the Biden-Harris policies of an open border, an economy on the cusp of a depression, a world on the precipice of WW3. And, as it was one of his biggest applause lines, a promise to get men out of women’s sports.

The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart spoke for many in the regime media when he said he was “mystified” that Donald Trump had gained ground from his 2020 showing. How could this be, Capehart wondered on an election night PBS panel. “Who are we as a country?” he wailed. “I'm not sure I like it!”

Encouraged by the media’s fatal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, Colorado and Maine tried to keep Trump off the ballot, an assault on democracy stopped by a unanimous Supreme Court. Prosecutors indicted him on 91 phony charges that were fanned and fueled by a media frenzy. Hearing the noise, two radical Left activists — likely devotees of MSNBC and CNN — tried to assassinate him.

And when Trump had the audacity to gather his supporters for a triumphant rally in Madison Square Garden rally, the media called him Hitler. To do this, they had to drag out a 1939 pro-Nazi rally at MSG, and ignore the fact that Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both had their DNC conventions there. Plus Beyonce sang there once.

In short, they left journalism for propaganda, and expected to sway the electorate with their overheated, hysterical (hello ladies of The View!) meltdowns of all things Trump.

Then a funny thing happened.

The more they screeched, the more the country tuned them out. The more slurs they used against the supporters of Trump’s Make American Great Again movement — deplorables, fascists, Nazis, Hitler, homophobics, racists — the more the public ignored them. Ratings and subscriptions plummeted, along with their credibility.

Whenever they lied, they fueled a new conservative media landscape, aided by Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, that may soon rival the dying regime media. In a last gasp at holding power, this week the NYT, a once-credible newspaper, pressured YouTube to censor 30 top-name conservative voices. I watched many a Trump rally this year, either on Right Side Broadcasting Network or on YouTube. Owned by Google, YouTube could sense the political winds, could see its bottom-line advertising dollars, and refused to silence this new conservative mediascape.

This fertile terrain has produced from its earth a new generation of leaders — Charlie Kirk, Vivek Ramaswamy — who are not afraid to take on the regime media and woke liberals — and often win. In his victory speech, Trump credited Vice President-Elect J.D. Vance with his particular aptitude for sparring with the once-mighty media stars. “He’s a feisty guy!” said Trump. “I told him to go into enemy media territory and he just obliterates them.” Who can ever forget his exchange with Martha Raddatz?

Breitbart’s John Nolte intuitively understood the gravity of the media earthquake that was the 2024 election. The road to the White House no longer runs through Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, he said. Now it runs through Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and X.

It also does not run through Hollywood.

Kamala Harris ran a celebrity campaign. She invited stars to attract crowds that would not otherwise attend. At a rally in Houston, Beyonce appeared to endorse Harris, but not to sing, prompting boos from the audience. At a rally in Milwaukee, Kamala invited a rapper named GloRilla, whose profanity-laden, smutty performance was widely mocked. And in the last week of her campaign, she ditched a campaign event in Michigan — where Arab-Americans rallied to Trump — to fly to NY to perform in a skit for Saturday Night Live. This was her audience, the elites.

But the other dirty little secret of this election was that the influence of celebrities — including the political ones — has crashed, along with their immoral values.

Shamefully, ex-President Barack Obama said in his closing argument that Trump was anti-Semitic, that he had called Ku Klux Klan marchers in Charlottesville “fine people,” a long-since discredited line, that the race would be decided by a handful of votes. All lies. He must have known he was to be robbed of his fourth term — by a serious miscalculation to take Joe Biden out of the race and install an inexperienced, unthoughtful Kamala Harris at the top of the Dem ticket. Thanks Nancy Pelosi!

Oprah Winfrey said that if Kamala Harris lost, her supporters would never be allowed to vote again, ever. And that was a lie too.

One of the memorable sights of Election Night: CNN’s Jake Tapper at an interactive map on live TV. He asked his colleague to program the map to show the counties in 2024 where Harris outperformed Biden in 2020. The answer: not a single one. “Not a single one?” he kept asking.

Sundance, author of the popular The Last Refuge: Ragtag Bunch of Conservative Misfits, thinks that Harris didn’t under-perform. It’s just that in 2024 there were 18 million fewer votes — which he thinks represent the stolen election in 2020. Here is his graph.

No wonder Jill Biden wore a bright red pantsuit to the voting polls the other day. And that Joe donned a MAGA hat on 9/11. How angry they must be.

Someone said recently that any country led by celebrities and athletes is doomed. And many on X this morning were offering the celebrities free airplane tickets to make good on their promises to leave the country if Trump were elected. There is something poignant about the case of Taylor Swift, who gave Kamala Harris an endorsement, only to lose followers. Many of them joined Swifties for Trump.

Now she and her boyfriend Travis Kelce will be moving to Canada. Or so they said.

Of course some of them are suffering such severe cases of TDS they had pledged to harm themselves — Rob Reiner threatened to light himself on fire, Bett Midler said she might drink Drano — and for these lost souls all we can do is pray. It’s mystifying to me why they thought this was such a powerful threat — that we love them so much we would be heartbroken if they left the country. Really Tom Hanks?

But maybe the rest of them can glean a lesson from superstar Pharrell Williams. Pressed by a “journalist” for The Hollywood Reporter to offer his political views, Williams said, “I don’t do politics.” In fact, he said, whenever he sees celebrities trying to tell us who to vote for, he thinks, “Shut up. Nobody asked you.”

Maybe Trump will invite him to sing at the Inauguration.