Democrats Have Removed Their Messenger Problem....

.....but the larger MESSAGE problem remains.....

It’s really almost too ridiculous for words. After lecturing America about ‘saving democracy’ for the last four years, the Democratic establishment that protected Joe Biden from any sort of primary challenge has successfully forced him out of the 2024 presidential race.

For about 10 seconds, there was talk of some sort of ‘hyper-primary’ in which multiple candidates would attend debate-style events so delegates could make an informed decision at the Democratic National Convention about the 2024 Democratic nominee.

But even that tiny amount of pseudo-democracy proved to be too high a bar for the Democratic party, which instead conducted a voter-free coronation of Kamala Harris — who boasts a lifetime primary delegate total of 0. The media seemingly had no problem with this development, printing fawning stories about Kamala’s ‘historic’ nomination. Indeed, they praised Joe Biden for selflessly acting for the good of the country……sometimes even while admitting it wasn’t really his decision.

Yes, the same reporters that were just running articles about how they felt ‘betrayed’ by the White House keeping Joe Biden’s condition a secret never actually bothered to ask Harris what she knew and when she knew it — which (even in a cycle full of crazy stories) is one of the most important questions of the election. If Harris is willing to lie about Biden being able to run the country, what else is she willing to lie about?

This is like a video version of a typical Reddit post — blatantly wrong to the point of outright lying, but incredibly confident about being correct anyway. This is a person who will lie straight to your face without a second thought, even if she’s contradicting what she said in previous sentence.

So (for) now we’re stuck with Harris as the presumed Democratic nominee, which to me is basically the worst timeline possible. I’ve made no bones about the fact that I think the drug war was one of the worst mistakes we’ve made as a country (perhaps only rivaled by the way we ended it in some places), and Kamala made her career by prosecuting it. (And mothers of truant children!) She stretched the legal system in ‘unique’ ways when she went after the owners of Backpage (who had donated to her political opponent). She might actually be the perfect representation of the identity-driven “anything to win” political times in which we live.

And in that vein, Harris will run the most obvious play in recent political history. She will combine the Obama strategy of ‘08/’12 (if you say something bad about him you’re a racist) with the Clinton strategy of ‘16 (if you say something bad about her you’re a sexist) to create a ‘brand new’ strategy in ‘24 — if you say something bad about her you’re racist AND sexist! (All, of course, backed up by a captured and energized media.)

And while Biden himself admitted that Harris got the VP nomination because of her sex and the color of her skin, calling Harris a “DEI hire” is basically the most hateful hate crime in the history of the world! (Which is crazy because isn’t DEI supposed to be a good thing and the source of our strength?)

And this is exactly the kind of superficial bullshit the media would love to focus on over the next 100ish days. The attitude of the Democratic party is that they’ve had a MESSENGER problem in Biden, and by changing the messenger, they will change their results. That works IF AND ONLY IF Kamala’s sex and race are the focus of the campaign.

The larger problem the Democratic party faces is its MESSAGE problem — and this will be an issue for Harris or any other Democratic candidate for president. I know a lot of SitV subscribers voted D until the Great Covid Shakeup, so it won’t be news to them when I say that Democrats almost have a ‘checklist’ of things they have to believe — and if you run afoul of these tenets, you are driven from the community. We have numerous examples from the covid era, but this list also encompasses things like ‘men can be women by wishing really hard’ and ‘closing the border is racist.’

Therein lies the problem — nearly all these Democratic policies are incredibly unpopular with actual American voters, and every new ridiculous ‘purity test’ diminishes the ranks of the faithful.

When faced with this reality, the machine does what it does best — it lies.

You might remember that in 2021, Biden tasked Kamala Harris with stemming immigration at the Southern border by “addressing the root causes” of illegal immigration. TIME is here to tell you that you remember incorrectly:

See, all of a sudden it’s EXTREMELY IMPORTANT to be VERY CAREFUL with our words and explain that ‘Border Czar’ wasn’t an actual title — that’s just something those Trumpers made up! Kamala had nothing to do with the border! And TIME isn’t alone. Axios is getting dragged for a similar story DESPITE CALLING HARRIS THE BORDER CZAR in 2021! I mean…how would people even get the idea that Harris was tasked with tackling the migrant influx on the US-Mexico border?

It’s a complete mystery!

Hell, even Saturday Night Live viewers knew what was going on! (Bonus that they ALSO make fun of Biden’s cognitive ability. In 2021.)

But today, the politicians need Americans to forget all that, so we end up with more covid-style censorship and re-writing of history on the fly (no doubt stemming from a helpful government “suggestion”).

This is incredibly worrying to me, because it shows that far from being ashamed of failed attempts to ‘create’ reality during covid, the establishment considers lying and censorship just tools in its bag of control mechanisms. Having come from the left, I never thought that I’d be watching them destroy free speech — and I’d be overjoyed if Democrats reversed that course of action. (Relying on only Republicans to uphold speech rights is an untenable situation, IMO)

Nothing I’ve seen out of these new political twists have given me any hope of that, however. Democratic voters seem to be happy now because they don’t have to pretend about Joe Biden anymore, but I think they are quickly going to remember why Harris tanked in the 2020 primaries — the more people got to know her, the less they liked her:

Math fact: 5% is 38% of 13%.

When you get past Harris and her ‘historical’ identity, all you have left are unpopular policies pushed by unpopular politicians. Democrats can trump up all the media hoopla they want, but real support is much more difficult to create:

“Now that the process has played out, from the grassroots, bottom-up.” — 🤡

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41 years ago today, the baseball world saw the greatest meltdown in history after George Brett was called out for using excessive amounts of pine tar on his bat:

Dubbed “The Pine Tar Incident”, Brett and the Royals ultimately got the last laugh when American League president Lee MacPhaill overruled the umpire’s decision (noting pine tar rules were for cosmetic reasons, not competitive ones) and ordered the game to be resumed after Brett’s homer.

The Royals held on for the 5-4 victory.