☕️ PRINCIPLED ☙ Tuesday, October 29, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Jeff Bezos piles op-ed onto non-endorsement; 200 more papers snub Kamala; NYT cries about Florida's sudden red shift; theater of the absurd Treasury; quiet trend offers profound hope for youth; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Only one week left. Your election-countdown roundup today includes: Amazon founder takes to the op-ed section to defend his honor and explain the far-left WaPo’s decision to ghost Kamala; two hundred more papers plus USA Today snub the chortling Veep; Times grudgingly gnaws on Florida’s red-state status and refuses to credit the real cause; wildly ironic accident plagues Treasury Secretary’s defense of the dollar; and surprising trend offers optimism for, mixed with concerns for the futures of, our young ladies and gentlemen.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥🔥 Yesterday, Amazon billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos clapped back. He published an editorial in his own newspaper titled, “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media.” The story intersected with three of C&C’s favorite subjects, so of course it leads this morning’s post. We had to know: did the man who invented same day delivery cave to the virtuous mob after all yesterday’s celebrity cancellations? Or, did the free (not free) shipping magnate bravely double down?

The e-catalog billionaire doubled down! Well, sort of. Bezos’ apologia took the form of a short, pugnacious editorial that sneakily mentioned a single candidate: President Trump. True, Trump’s name popped up in a completely neutral context. But still. There’s something psychologically significant that Bezos left Harris out altogether, in a kind of inverse Freudian slip. Or was it was intentional?

Either way, it was a perfect metaphor for the WaPo’s non-endorsement snub.

In case you, like me, wondered whether the media is aware that during the pandemic it nuked whatever shredded credibility it had left, we can thank Jeff Bezos for clearing that up. It turns out that they do know. And Bezos blamed that, the rotten cavity where eviscerated media’s credibility used to live, for the paper’s decision not to endorse any president this cycle.

Everyone — readers and non-readers alike — expected WaPo to endorse  Kamala “Plan B” Harris, and that, according to Bezos, is the problem.  And so Bezos, surely under assault from every conceivable direction yesterday, pushed biased media right back in his critics’ ugly faces.

I’ll let WaPo Publisher Bezos explain the media’s bias problem as he sees it, in his own words (just edited for brevity and clarity):

In the 1990s, the Washington Post achieved 80 percent household penetration in the D.C. metro area. But in this year’s Gallup poll, our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.

More and more, we talk to ourselves. Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions. The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite.

Most people believe the media is biased.

See! Media does know we hate them! They just don’t like talking about it, I guess. Well, who can blame them? Anyway, Bezos continued, linking the problem of perceived media bias directly to presidential endorsements:

Presidential endorsements create a perception of bias and non-independence. They do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None.

Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right.

I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. No quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. My views here are, in fact, principled.

His views are principled, but they are principled views informed by economic interests. Every single day, some Bezos-owned business or charity somewhere is meeting with another government official. As Bezos admitted in the editorial, “you can,” if you want to, “see this as a web of conflicting interests.”

Ha! The liberals do see it that way, and how. Welcome to the party, liberals. Live by the billionaire, die by the billionaire. Liberals fret that Bezos will break their favorite toy, a newspaper that always agrees with them, praises them, and constantly reminds them what virtuous little boys and girls they are. (Actually, it is controlling their minds and telling them what to think, but hey, they seem to like it.)

Wrapping our third C&C pet issue into one short editorial, and proving that even a broken liberal can tell correct time twice a day, Bezos made a terrific point about voting machines — apparently another Freudian slip. Did he mean to slip the voting machine issue in, only a week from the election?

On the surface, Bezos’ voting machine analogy supported a similar point about newspapers needing trust too. But look deeper:

Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

A truer word was never spoken, and Bezos’ argument should begin every conversation about electronic voting machines. It’s just as important that voters believe the machines are accurate as actually being accurate.

It raises a critical question: Precisely what are the voting machine makers and people pushing them doing to increase voters’ trust? Related to that: how much do you trust the machines?

Now lets talk about the comments. Hoo boy. There’s was nearly 13,000 of them when I started, and 250 more came in while I was writing this part of the post. Bezos triggered the WaPo’s liberal readers even harder than the paper’s non-endorsement announcement. They don’t give a damn what Bezos says. They don’t give two squirts about his high-minded neutrality ideals or his idealistic goals to rebuild lost trust in journalism.

They just want their far-left paper back, bias and all. (I’d quote you an example or two but you can easily imagine them.)

Bezos bought the Post back in 2013, for the inflated price of $250 million. At the time, the Washington Post was what they call “a distressed asset.” In other words, the far-left paper was going out of business. Revenue and circulation were plummeting, and, in the understated words of then-owner Donald Graham, the paper faced “a period in which the Post's future would be more secure with someone else.”

Go woke, go broke, then a billionaire snaps up your woke newspaper.

Finally, I must mention the paper’s current discount for a digital subscription: only $29 for a year. If you’d asked me ten days ago who or what could have forced me to subscribe to the Washington Post … well, I’d have been hard-pressed. Maybe terrorists. No wait, make it alien terrorists, and only if they were giving out free vaccinations and playing rap music.

Yet here we are. It was too funny to pass up.

📈📈 The non-endorsement hot tub must look pretty good right now, and baby, it’s cold outside. The Hill ran a story yesterday headlined, “Over 200 Gannett outlets not ‘endorsing in presidential or national races’.” In other words, USA Today and all its local papers are out, sayonara; more than 200 papers in all, none of them will endorse the Cackling Candidate.

Maybe it’s the latest trend? Maybe newspapers, having decided for principled reasons to leap out of the presidential endorsement racket, will stay out? Or maybe they’re just chicken, and they can see like everybody else that the Democrats selected a disposable candidate, and so they’re like, why should we stick our necks out?

So far, the LA Times, the Washington Post, and now USA Today (and its 200 local papers) have defied furious readers and refused to run a simple endorsement. It’s really something.

📈📈 The New York Times ran a highly gratifying but deceptive story that still made my morning, headlined, “Florida Stopped Being a Swing State Slowly, Then All At Once.”  Ha! The post-pandemic swing was to +1,000,000 red voters. That headline is encouraging enough, but the sub-headline added: “Once a top presidential battleground, Florida is no longer competitive.” Take that, dems.

The Times bent itself into a damp pretzel trying every way it could think of to avoid saying the real reason why Florida flipped red. To set the stage, as the Times correctly noted, just a few years back in 2018, it was pretty purple. For instance, the Democrats’ far-left (i.e., open communist), gay, black, single, male-escort connoisseur, coke-snorting candidate Andrew Gillum, was nearly elected.

DeSantis barely scraped by after a contentious recount, edging Gillum out by fewer than 30,000 out of 16.1 million votes (0.5%).

But only four years later in 2022, DeSantis won re-election by millions of votes — over +20%. The Times ignored the obvious question: what significant event happened in between 2018 and 2022, say in 2020, which made DeSantis who he is, and which painted Florida deep red? Hmm?

The word “pandemic” was mostly absent from the Times’ article, which instead floundered around whining about wonky hispanic voting trends, pining over democrat underspending and voter-registration outsourcing, and gnashing its teeth about Republican gerrymandering.

The Times won’t, but I will tell you how it happened. I was here. I was neck-deep in all of it.

Florida flipped red for one reason, and that reason’s last name is DeSantis. The federal government’s fascistic overreach set him up perfectly. The hyper-fascistic overreach from Florida’s blue counties armed DeSantis with even more ammunition. And, at some point in early summer 2020, DeSantis made the fateful decision that transformed him into one of the most well-known politicians in the world.

Governor DeSantis defied lockdowns at a time when doing that meant the narrative-enforcing media would immediately savage you and try to destroy your political career. DeSantis did it anyway. He also shut down the Summer of Protest. And he fought to free people —like me— who live in Florida’s few blue counties.

The media’s effort to destroy DeSantis backfired. They just gave him more publicity. The result was that, over the next two years, Florida experienced a red tsunami of Republican in-migration unlike anything that has maybe ever happened in American history. Conservatives across the country fled to Florida in droves. Meanwhile, small herds of liberals moved out, indignantly muttering “deathsantis” to each other all the way up I-75.

These conservative pandemic gains led to Florida’s legislative supermajority, which promptly, after close observation of the 2020 election, started plugging the holes in Florida’s electoral code. Florida was already better than most, but now Florida is one of the most secure states in the country in terms of election integrity. They also resisted mandates and fought Biden every step of the way.

Florida stopped being a swing state all at once thanks both to Ron DeSantis and Joe Biden. But I’m giving DeSantis all the credit.

🔥🔥 In the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department, a few days ago, just as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, 78, was about to explain how confident she is in the dollar’s long-term status, the Department of Treasury logo fell right off the platform. It truly must be seen to be fully appreciated:

CLIP: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen surprised by ironic development (0:12).

She was so surprised! You can’t ask for a better metaphor for the profound incompetence of the Biden regime. And note the Russia Today logo in the top right corner. They are having a great laugh at our expense. Literally.

📈📈 Be encouraged! In the under-the-radar file, one month ago the New York Times quietly ran an incredibly promising story headlined, “In a First Among Christians, Young Men Are More Religious Than Young Women.” The sub-headline added, “It has the potential to reshape both politics and family life.” That is an understatement.

“We’ve never seen it before,” said Ryan Burge, associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University. Something is happening. They weren’t even trying to increase young men’s attendance:

Young women, unfortunately, are headed the exact other direction. Twenty years of wokeness has produced this, a generation of men who earn less on average than women:

On the other hand, Generation Z’s men are more likely than its women to want kids and have a family. And, late in the story, the Times noted a shocking but related statistic that: “almost three in 10 Gen Z women identify as belonging to the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community.”

That would be a problem for staying in a conservative church. What’s causing the epidemic of young women to identify as LGBTQ?

And … politics appeared to be the gist. Unstated, not explicitly, was the fact that Gen Z’s men seem to be drawn not just to any churches, but to conservative churches (like the Southern Baptists, which cropped up again and again). Whereas young women are being repelled and pushed to join woke churches.

“At this moment in Christian history,” the reported opined, “American men and women are on divergent paths.” Politically divergent, that is. Politics has finally invaded spirituality instead of the other way around.

The realignment is bigger than young people’s choice of church. This welcome spiritual trend among men appears only to be a symptom of a bigger realignment. Behold this headline from just four days ago, in the New Yorker. Young men aren’t voting the way liberals want them to, and so they are even more firmly in the woke crosshairs than they even were before:

Compare that headline to this next headline, from the far-left Florida Keys’ Islander, dated the same day:

So funny. Let’s play spot the bias! (Where’s Jeff Bezos?) When young men vote for Trump, the papers ask what’s wrong with them? But when young women vote for Kamala, it’s portrayed as a positive.

Let’s call that what it is. Propaganda. And it must be influential on young women, who don’t want to have people asking what’s wrong with them.

Do you suppose it’s been completely natural and wholly organic that America’s young women bucked the conservative trend and veered wide left? Or, could it perhaps have something to do with relentless political propaganda and faux peer pressure promising them fake happiness and feeding them terrifying pabulum about the patriarchy?

You tell me. But let’s celebrate the good news for our young men, who are getting plugged into the only thing that can help them now. And, in the long term, the ladies will probably go where the men are anyway.

Have a terrific Tuesday! And roll back here tomorrow, for more exciting and entertaining Coffee & Covid.

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