Election Countdown, 17 Days to Go: Ground Truths That Matter.
Election Countdown, 17 Days to Go: Ground Truths That Matter.
In the chaos of daily news, don't lose sight of: The danger of JD Vance, the naked agitprop of Fox, and the common sense of citizens.
Two of the men at the heart of current Republican politics, back in 2000 when they were fresh-faced co-founders of PayPal. Peter Thiel (left), then 33, had lived in Austria, South Africa, and Namibia before spending high school and college in California. Elon Musk, then 29, grew up in South Africa before coming to Canada for college and then the US. Now they are two of the big money-men behind JD Vance, who was Thiel’s protege, and Donald Trump, current vehicle for their interests. (AP/ Getty.)
This post is about a few realities as we near the end.
1) This election is about JD Vance.
Here is a chain-of-being that doesn’t get enough attention:
Peter Thiel and Elon Musk were two of the co-founders of PayPal. They are the duo you see above, nearly 25 years ago.
Peter Thiel created JD Vance as a political figure. Vance met Thiel when Vance was a student at Yale Law; he went to work for Thiel’s venture-capital firm in San Francisco and made his money there (before more money, from his book); and Thiel was the crucial donor in Vance’s 2022 campaign for the Senate. Recall that Vance’s success in Ohio two years ago was the rare big GOP victory in the purported “red wave” of that year. Vance is also an isolated success among the political proteges Thiel has funded, whose prominent failures include the right-wing extremist Arizona candidate Blake Masters.
Peter Thiel has long been a quieter version of what Elon Musk is so flamboyantly now. At the 2016 Republican Convention in Cleveland, I saw him give an impassioned nominating speech for Donald Trump. Like Musk, he is the kind of supposed “free speech” absolutist who works to shut down anyone who disagrees. Thiel was notoriously the secret funder of the lawsuit that put Gawker out of business, apparently in revenge for outing Thiel as gay. Like Musk (and Trump), he is a fan of the idea that “blood” and genetics predispose certain groups to failure or success.
Musk and Thiel were forceful backers of Vance on the ticket as Trump’s running mate, as opposed to a culture-war token like Kristi Noem or a “steady” business leader like Doug Burgum. Vance was their guy; he had a future; they were already insiders with him. They prevailed.
Musk, Thiel, and Vance himself are all savvy enough to recognize that Donald Trump is falling apart mentally, and perhaps physically, as the world watches. (For instance just this evening in Pennsylvania, where he talked to the crowd about Arnold Palmer’s genitals. If the man were part of any normal family, he would already be under supervisory care.) Should he and Vance be elected, the odds are overwhelming that Vance would sooner or later end up in control—through the 25th Amendment or by natural means.
JD Vance turned 40 this past summer. He is a hundred times more vigorous than Trump, and at this point a thousand times smarter. He is incalculably more threatening.
Thus the election is in the short term about Trump. But in the long run it’s really about Vance, Musk, and Thiel.
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Peter Thiel famously wrote in 2009. Speaking for myself, I do not believe that plutocracy and democracy are compatible. That’s the head-on contest in this election.
2) Fox lets the mask drop. And so does Bret Baier.
Preposterously, Fox presents itself as a “news” organization, with membership in the White House Correspondents Association and a seat for its heckler-questioners at the daily White House press briefings. In reality it is the fulfillment of Roger Ailes’s (and Rupert Murdoch’s) vision as a reliable vehicle not simply for opinion labelled as such, from the likes of Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters, but also for 24/7 presentation of “everyone’s out to get you!!!” scare alerts to keep its Boomer-era audience alarmed.
This past week the mask dropped in two more-than-usually embarrassing moments, one for the network as a whole, and the other for its most proudly “normal” correspondent, Bret Baier.
-For the network, this came with Donald Trump’s appearance yesterday morning on Fox and Friends. He made the hosts squirm when, after they congratulated him on his performance at the previous night’s Al Smith dinner, he said that some Fox employees had helped him write the jokes. (Which the company later denied.) Worse came a moment later, as you can see in this clip from Media Matters, when Trump said he had to leave for an important next appointment. That was with Rupert Murdoch (!), ultimate owner and boss of Fox (!!), to tell him not to run any anti-Trump ads (!!!), in hopes that “then we’re (!!!!) going to have a victory.” 1
In the Media Matters clip you can see the four Fox hosts chuckling nervously and rushing to change the topic as Trump continued to speak this way. Even they recognized the norms of “real” news organizations he was rolling past: Going straight to the owner, rather than the editor or correspondents. Asking to block political ads he disagrees with, which is flatly against the law. And expressing this all as “we,” while the Fox people, called out, were averting their eyes. They couldn’t wait to get him off camera. (It’s worth following the people Trump embraces as we. In this case, the Fox team. The day before, we meant the January 6 rioters, and “the others” referred to the police.)
-For Bret Baier, the mask came all the way off during his interview three days ago with Kamala Harris. His overall demeanor was not so much “tough” as disrespectful. He interrupted and talked-over her more aggressively than I have ever heard from another interviewer with a male president or presidential candidate.2 (For comparison: John Micklethwait of Bloomberg let Trump ramble on at length about the unfairness of Virginia voting laws before reminding him, “The question was about Google.”) Baier harped on immigrant crime issues not the way you would if you were seeking information but as if you were the partisan opponent in a debate.
OK, this is normal for Fox. But the really embarrassing part for Baier was when he was caught out in a deception at odds with his valued “straight reporter” image.
In the blistering first segment of his MSNBC program that same evening, Lawrence O’Donnell gave chapter and verse of how Baier had knowingly bent the truth during the interview. I very highly recommend that part of his show. The essence of what O’Donnell said, and what the record show, is:
Harris correctly claimed that Trump had been using fascist (my word) talk about “the enemy within.”
Baier gave a “well, actually” rebuttal using parts of an anodyne Fox clip from Trump denying any bad intent. But Baier omitted the parts of that same clip immediately before what he showed, and other footage from Fox he was certainly aware of, in which Trump doubled down on “enemy within.”
Harris, prepared and quick and fearless, called him out on it.
In real time, this showdown gave Harris the chance for her strongest part of the interview/debate. She showed her real-time prosecutorial side, and that she wouldn’t take any shit from a man trying to shush her. Whether that swayed any Fox viewers, I cannot say.
But I know that a day later, it got worse for Baier in journalism-land, when people outside Fox started noticing the clumsy obviousness of what he had done. Twenty-four hours later he resorted to the “dog ate my homework” stance of saying that he had mixed up Trump clips “by mistake.”
Here was the exchange as it happened. Anyone with the slightest broadcast experience will see that if this had actually been a mix-up, Baier would have noticed and said something in real time. After all, he was interviewing the vice president! Instead he repeatedly doubled down, in support of a deceptive rather than “mistaken” clip.
This exchange starts after Baier shows the “I didn’t really mean it” claim by Trump:
Kamala Harris (19:32): Bret, I’m sorry, and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about the enemy within, that he has repeated when he’s speaking about the American people. That’s not what you just showed.
Bret Baier (19:45): Well, he was asked about that specific- [Baier is doubling-down here. No sign of, ‘Wait, let’s sure we have the right clip’.]
Kamala Harris (19:46): No, no, no. That’s not what you just showed, in all fairness- [In real time, she recognizes what he has done.]
Bret Baier (19:49): No, no, no. [Tripling down.]
Kamala Harris (19:49): … and respect to you.
Bret Baier (19:50): I’m telling you that was the question that we asked him. [Quadrupling down. This is what he claims later was a ‘mistake.’ He knows that what he is saying here is false. He must be assuming, as normal for Fox, that no one will come back to check.]
Kamala Harris (19:51): You didn’t show that and here’s the bottom line. He has repeated it many times and you and I both [stress from Harris in original] know that. And you and I both [stronger stress—she is calling him out] know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him.
Will this interview “matter” for Harris? Again, I don’t know. But it should matter for and about Bret Baier.
He likes us think he is different from Jesse Watters or Sean Hannity. He did just what they would have done in real time.
3) ‘Amateur’ questioners are often better than professionals.
In some areas we obviously need highly credentialed skill. You want a surgeon in charge of your operation, and a pilot landing your plane.