News Brief: Elite Media, Dems Blame 'Woke', 'Headwinds'––Everyone But Themselves––for Trump Win, AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Citations Needed

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Episode: News Brief: Elite Media, Dems Blame 'Woke', 'Headwinds'––Everyone But Themselves––for Trump Win,"

Author: Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson
Duration: 00:32:51

Episode Shownotes

In this pubic News Brief, we detail the usual scapegoats for party, pundit, and press failure to stem the tide of ascendant fascism.

Summary

In this episode, hosts Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson analyze the tendency of elite media, pundits, and the Democratic Party to scapegoat external factors like 'wokeness' and economic 'headwinds' for electoral failures, specifically following Kamala Harris's campaign. They critique this blame deflection, urging a need for self-reflection and accountability regarding the party's own shortcomings, such as a lack of progressive policies and real engagement with voter concerns. This recurring dynamic in political discourse highlights the dangers of ignoring deeper systemic issues while reinforcing a corporate-driven strategy that neglects the working class.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (News Brief: Elite Media, Dems Blame 'Woke', 'Headwinds'––Everyone But Themselves––for Trump Win,") to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:04 Speaker_01
Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi. I'm Adam Johnson. You can follow the show on Twitter at Citations Pod, Facebook, Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through patreon.com slash citations needed podcast.

00:00:17 Speaker_01
All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100% listener funded. We do these news briefs in between our regularly scheduled full length episodes of Citations Needed. And today, Adam,

00:00:30 Speaker_01
We are going to discuss the media's post-mortem Wednesday morning quarterbacking of the presidential election that on November 5th, 2024, saw the re-election of Donald Trump to

00:00:48 Speaker_01
the presidency of the United States, and perhaps expectedly, although frustratingly, we have seen the media in their post-mortem analysis of what went wrong with the Kamala Harris campaign and why we are here as a country.

00:01:04 Speaker_01
have done everything to offset the blame from, say, themselves or the consultancy class that runs the Democratic Party national campaigns, certainly national campaigns in addition to statewide races.

00:01:17 Speaker_01
But certainly at the federal level, everyone is blamed except for, say, the people in charge of the campaigns or the candidate herself or the administration that she is a part of.

00:01:30 Speaker_01
And instead, there is an analysis of, if I can do a little bit of Kurt Angle here, the three I's inflation, immigration and identity. And we can get into some of those and how they show up. But also,

00:01:45 Speaker_01
we are seeing so much blame on quote-unquote progressive policies and certainly the left as being the reason why the Harris campaign suffered this historic loss against a historically bad opponent, someone who we have already had experience with at the presidential level and know is a absolute national nightmare and yet

00:02:11 Speaker_01
this campaign, this Harris campaign, lost in a bloodbath fashion. And so what we are seeing from the analysis post-election, Adam, is yet again the same finger-pointing away from their own culpability by the political class and the media.

00:02:29 Speaker_02
Yeah, in many ways it is a replay of 2016 where our politicians cannot fail. They can only be failed by us, the voters, but the name of the game is to offset blame. This is crisis PR management 101.

00:02:40 Speaker_02
You've been found with a dead body in your home and you need to get off. You need to get off on manslaughter, which is to say incompetence or factors outside of your control, which makes sense.

00:02:50 Speaker_02
Because again, if I raised $1.8 billion and failed to do the single thing I was tasked with doing, which is defeating Trump, again, historically unpopular candidate,

00:02:58 Speaker_02
who has unfavorables higher than gonorrhea, I too would be looking for scapegoats that weren't me.

00:03:03 Speaker_02
Because again, there is a permanent class that runs the party of highly paid consultants, big corporate donors, or rather big billionaire donors, and the corporate consultant milieu they operate in, and they have certain ideological narrow parameters that they operate in, broadly seen as what we call the kind of Reagan-Clinton neoliberal order.

00:03:20 Speaker_02
This is obviously a generalization, but it's generally true. That is who runs the party. This is the milieu they operate in. The super PAC campaign messaging was run by Anita Dunn with polling from David Shore.

00:03:31 Speaker_02
Anita Dunn, for example, has councilor among her clients, Walmart, L'Oreal. She runs a public relations firm.

00:03:39 Speaker_02
When Ronan Farrow reached out to Harvey Weinstein for comment in 2017, after he was about to drop his expose, the first person he called was Anita Dunn. That's what she does. She does crisis management.

00:03:48 Speaker_02
To be clear, she wasn't paid by Weinstein, she claims, and then she canned him the second the story actually dropped and the details emerged. But this is what she does. She does crisis PR.

00:03:57 Speaker_02
And these are not people with deep ties to progressive causes, to labor, to environmentalism, to anti-racist work, whatever, right? These are people who operate within the corporate world.

00:04:06 Speaker_02
And when they shit the bed and piss away $1.8 billion, they're not going to go back to some youth advocacy center in Baltimore or go back to a union hall. They're going back to Volvo and McDonald's.

00:04:20 Speaker_02
So they need to kind of protect their brand because obviously this isn't great for optics. And so they're running a similar playbook

00:04:27 Speaker_02
To that of what hillary clinton's people did because again it cannot be their fault it has to be things outside of their control and there are three emerging scapegoats are number one.

00:04:38 Speaker_02
Of course, the go-to, very popular in 2016, some vague moving target of wokeness. The Democratic brand is seen as too woke, too fussy, too pronoun obsessed, right? This kind of unfalsifiable trope.

00:04:48 Speaker_02
Number two, economic headwinds, which is the idea that there was an anti-incumbency bias, which is not really true. We'll get to why later. And number three, the voters themselves.

00:04:57 Speaker_02
This one has the benefit instead of seeming overtly racist and transphobic like number one, this one has the benefit of seeming like one is actually super hip and jaded and kind of looks

00:05:07 Speaker_02
longingly into the distance and says, America's just broken, that there's just too many voters who are just ontologically evil and racist and they can't be moved.

00:05:14 Speaker_02
These three narratives all serve one function, which is they evade responsibility from those in charge. And as we've talked about, especially with Gaza, is that there was an entire media apparatus, MSNBC, New York Times,

00:05:25 Speaker_02
Who again launders all these narratives from the candidates themselves with anonymous sources and aides who are of course are sniping at each other and covering their own asses and their own careers.

00:05:33 Speaker_02
There is a narrative of what we call feigned helplessness. Biden can't stop Israel. They don't know what's going on. What's what? I'm an intern. I just got here. The campaign, you know, we tried our hardest, but it didn't really work.

00:05:43 Speaker_02
So this feigned helplessness is going to be part of that narrative. So let's start with the first one, which is, I think, the one that was most popular.

00:05:49 Speaker_01
Yeah. So let's start with this idea of anti-wokeness as being the scapegoat for why the Harris campaign suffered this historic loss across the country. You know, losing vote share, I think, in like every county compared to four years ago.

00:06:05 Speaker_01
If I can Kornacki this for a second. But this attack slash finger pointing is summed up very well by columnist Michael Hirsch for Foreign Policy in his November 6th, the day after the election, analysis in Foreign Policy entitled Why She Lost.

00:06:25 Speaker_01
And he wrote this, assigning this blame to the Harris campaign. He said it was because of the, quote, takeover of the Democratic Party by progressive so-called woke issues.

00:06:37 Speaker_01
which was, quote, devastating to Harris's campaign, especially as Trump and the Republicans successfully painted her as an unreconstructed left winger, end quote.

00:06:48 Speaker_02
Right. And this was echoed by typically the issue is they call it, quote, unquote, trans issues. So the idea is that trans they got hit with the trans stuff. So it's clear that after 2016, trans people were also blamed for Clinton's loss.

00:07:00 Speaker_02
So this is a pretty standard playbook. In fact, everybody from Tony Blair to Michael Bloomberg to Mark Lilla to Frank Bruni to Bill Maher blamed

00:07:08 Speaker_02
quote unquote, trans bathrooms on Clinton's loss, that the idea is that these so-called cultural issues are too divisive.

00:07:14 Speaker_02
Now, nevermind that on the eve of the 2012 election, Biden said that trans rights were the civil rights issue of our time, and Obama won by 50 electoral votes. This is supposedly, again, this kind of catch-all boogeyman.

00:07:26 Speaker_02
Matticlacius listed his reasons why he thinks they lost. Again, Matticlacius' co-confederate, David Shore, who's part of the popularism crew. the kind of anti-woke messaging crew. He got the campaign he wanted. Harris never mentioned her identity.

00:07:38 Speaker_02
She doubled down on border and policing. She did the supply-side Yimby rhetoric. She did everything Matt Iglesias wanted her to do. That's right. She ran a Republican campaign, but when there's a Republican still on the ballot, it doesn't work as well.

00:07:51 Speaker_02
And then he, of course, still complained, saying that this was an issue of fussy language control and that biological sex was a matter of science and not something to be debated and that the Democrats need to make that commitment to win in 2028.

00:08:03 Speaker_01
Yes, and it wasn't just Iglesias, of course, doing this. The New York Times editorial board chimed in similarly the day after the election, again, November 6th, 2024, diagnosing the Democratic Party's biggest problem and looking for a way forward.

00:08:19 Speaker_01
The Times editorial board wrote this, quote, The party must also take a hard look at why it lost the election. It took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda

00:08:30 Speaker_01
were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal supporters of their party.

00:08:35 Speaker_01
And Democrats have struggled for three elections now to settle on a persuasive message that resonates with Americans for both parties who have lost faith in the system, which pushed skeptical voters toward the more obviously disruptive figure, even though a large majority of Americans acknowledge his serious faults.

00:08:51 Speaker_02
Right. So this is the ultimate go to scapegoat that even though Harris ran a centrist campaign, even though she made Liz Cheney, the center of her campaign, did more events with her than anyone else and had Mark Cuban as her primary surrogate.

00:09:04 Speaker_02
Even though they explicitly ran a campaign to court Republicans, the fact is they didn't do it enough. So the response is, true Liz Cheneyism has not been tried.

00:09:11 Speaker_01
Right. You didn't Liz Cheney this enough. Despite campaigning with her more than anyone else, Harris had at least four major campaign stops with Cheney, also did this with Mark Cuban more than she showed up alongside

00:09:25 Speaker_01
strong supporters of her campaign, like Sean Fain, the head of UAW, the United Auto Workers, which recently won a big union victory. That was not leaned into. No, it was rather the kind of old school, neoconservative, we can be Republicans, too.

00:09:42 Speaker_02
It's MSNBC brain completely down the middle. And this is something, by the way, that that was reported on by Frank Foer at the Atlantic team Biden inner circle, the ones that didn't go to work for Harris.

00:09:52 Speaker_02
are saying that she not only leaned into Biden's economy, which was deeply unpopular, and did the voter scolding with respect to inflation, but focused entirely on January 6th stuff and democracy on the ballot, that kind of high-minded MSNBC stuff, which is fine, but it was completely untethered from any kind of economic populism.

00:10:07 Speaker_02
And in fact, Four wrote, quote, quite suddenly, the strain of populism disappeared in the campaign.

00:10:13 Speaker_02
One Biden aide told me that Harris steered away from such hard-edge messaging at the urging of her brother-in-law, Tony West, Uber's chief legal officer.

00:10:20 Speaker_02
To win the support of CEOs, Harris jettisoned a strong argument that deflected attention from one of her weakest issues. Instead, the campaign elevated Mark Cuban as one of the chief surrogates, the very sort of rich guy she had recently attacked."

00:10:31 Speaker_02
So to the extent to which there was anything populist, and look, let's be obvious here.

00:10:35 Speaker_02
The argument that Neema and I would make was that the way you win voters is to offer them things, to materially improve their lives through left economic populism, through jobs programs, Medicare for All, free college. that this is the key.

00:10:46 Speaker_02
There's not only lines of my ideology, but it's actually a way you can win votes. That's the kind of theory.

00:10:50 Speaker_01
And which, Adam, we should point out as we have, but I want to do it again. These things poll really well. And I know we have problems with polls. I know we have problems with punditry. That's kind of the point of our show.

00:11:00 Speaker_01
But we do know that these are deeply popular things. Medicare for all, wealth tax, a minimum wage. When these are on the ballot, isolated from candidates themselves, they win.

00:11:13 Speaker_01
You saw this almost everywhere this past election with, say, abortion rights and codifying those into state law, that there are states that voted in favor of abortion rights but against the Harris campaign.

00:11:31 Speaker_01
This is a campaign candidate party problem, not a policy problem.

00:11:36 Speaker_02
Well, again, this was a throw the bums out election, and they did absolutely nothing to distance yourself from Biden, which according to NPR, Harris, quote unquote, people in Harris's orbit say was a mistake.

00:11:46 Speaker_02
Because again, the argument people say, oh, well, she can't break from Biden because he's her vice president. Again, with Gaza, that's made up. That's not a real thing. That's just a norm. You know that quote unquote norm that is unassailable?

00:11:57 Speaker_02
Maybe just don't do that. It's just something you made up. And again, if we're talking about the threat of ending American democracy, which is their rhetoric, right? Ascended fascism.

00:12:06 Speaker_02
Certainly that's more important than a fucking norm that isn't a real thing. That isn't a real constraint. There's no like, there's no federal agent that's going to come arrest her.

00:12:14 Speaker_01
When the incumbent candidate has already been pushed aside rightly because he wouldn't be able to win on his own policies, his own administrative track record. And so, you know, yet we have

00:12:27 Speaker_01
Columnist Matt Bayh from the Washington Post diagnosing this the way that one would expect. In his article again from November 6, the day after the election, entitled, Where Did Kamala Harris's Campaign Go Wrong?

00:12:41 Speaker_01
And this was part of his diagnosis, quote, Democrats have dug themselves into a hole on cultural issues and identity politics, end quote.

00:12:50 Speaker_02
Right. This is the exact same blame deflection we got from 2016. It's almost verbatim. Mark Lilla wrote almost the exact same piece in the New York Times.

00:12:58 Speaker_02
And so other electeds, again, corporate funded centrist electeds, who kind of barely won, also piled on. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts would tell the New York Times, quote, I have two little girls. I don't want them getting run over

00:13:12 Speaker_02
On a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete but as a democrat i'm supposed to be afraid to say that on quote and tom swansea new york told reporters quote democrats have to stop the fire left i don't want to discriminate against anybody but that's never a good time but i don't think biological boy should be playing in girls sports on quote so here we have.

00:13:30 Speaker_02
Trans issues as being the reason they lost because again there's no data showing us not at all it's just vibes and more importantly like trans people are such a small percentage of the population there's such an easy scapegoat like who's gonna really come out and defend them other than a handful of lgbtq you know lobbying groups that are completely sort of not really part of this discussion so again it's as a scapegoat it's it's perfect.

00:13:51 Speaker_01
Yeah, the anti-trans frenzy has been absolutely rampant in here. You know, I mean, you just quoted, Adam, two congressmen from the liberal Northeast, right? Massachusetts, New York.

00:14:05 Speaker_01
On the ballot in New York this past Tuesday was Prop 1, which does actually address, a little obliquely, trans rights, and that passed overwhelmingly.

00:14:17 Speaker_01
So you have Tom Suozzi talking about, you know, I don't want to discriminate against anyone, but, and doing the anti-trans move, when voters overwhelmingly supported the proposition that was on the ballot that would more affirm trans rights and transhumanity, there is no reason to appeal to that as a reason why across the country,

00:14:41 Speaker_01
This was a losing strategy for the Democrats and a winning one for the Republicans.

00:14:45 Speaker_02
Because when you're not offering people to materially improve their life, other than scolding them about job growth and a reduction in the rate of inflation, which isn't again, not the most immediate form of help. This is all you have.

00:14:57 Speaker_02
You don't have anything else because you're not making any meaningful changes to the way the system works. And so when people talk about the economy, I think they oftentimes conflate two things, which is the relative economy under Biden versus Trump.

00:15:07 Speaker_02
which again is so muddied up by COVID it's hard to keep track of, versus the steady state inequality, super expensive housing, super expensive health care that has gotten worse and Democrats are supposed to help with that and they simply don't.

00:15:19 Speaker_01
And so the fear rhetoric is going to be very, very powerful and both parties leaned into fear rhetoric. It's just that the Republicans were fear-mongering based on whether it was the economy or immigration or trans rights or quote-unquote crime.

00:15:36 Speaker_01
And the Harris campaign's response to that was to fear-monger about the Trump campaign, not address those issues, dispel disinformation and outright lies about all of those issues, but rather try to reclaim the mantle of freedom, try to talk about the threat to democracy, which I think is real, but also it did not work.

00:15:59 Speaker_02
Well, in February, they tried to outflank them on immigration from the right. And what did that end up doing? Nothing. It did absolutely nothing.

00:16:04 Speaker_02
It just, again, if I can choose between a real Republican and a Republican light, I'm just going to go with the real Republican because there's no real contrast. This, again, is why there was 10 million.

00:16:12 Speaker_02
It's going to end up being probably nine or 10 million less votes for Harris than there was Biden during an election that happened during COVID. over 100,000 less in Michigan, over 80,000 less in Pennsylvania.

00:16:21 Speaker_02
She won more in Wisconsin, but tens of thousands less in other swing states like Arizona and Nevada.

00:16:27 Speaker_02
So look, they obviously didn't really motivate people to get out probably because they were chasing a phantom, which is a Liz Cheney, never Trump Republican, which is like 45 people, half of whom work at MSNBC. These are not real constituents.

00:16:38 Speaker_02
And again, then there's a question, did they chase these votes because they had a genuine belief this is how they were going to win? Or did they chase these votes because this is just their ideology? And I believe it's pretty much just their ideology.

00:16:48 Speaker_02
I believe that they're mostly conservative. They work in the corporate world. They watch fucking Morning Joe, you know, like Clockwork Orange every fucking day for eight hours a day. And this is just the ideological stew that they operate in.

00:16:58 Speaker_01
Right, right. When you run on militarizing the border and then get exasperated when Trump sinks that as a political cult move,

00:17:08 Speaker_01
you are not making the argument for any kind of break from Republican policy or platforms, and you certainly are not doing anything that's even remotely progressive, not even to mention continuing to support a genocide in Gaza.

00:17:21 Speaker_01
I mean, all of these add up to completely abdicating any kind of space for progressive or, I mean, let alone leftist policies, but then, of course, blaming those phantom policies and that phantom constituency

00:17:38 Speaker_01
which had no hand in guiding that campaign.

00:17:42 Speaker_02
Which again, if their campaign had listened to Citation's needed news brief on this, they would have known that.

00:17:46 Speaker_01
Exactly. When he said that. That winds up being the culprit. And so in turn, you get this kind of rhetoric from Philippe Reins, former Hillary Clinton advisor on CNN's morning show, where he says this.

00:18:04 Speaker_00
But we need to take stock of why we are being held hostage to the far left. No one should be and wants to be kowtowing to the extremes of their own parties.

00:18:15 Speaker_00
That just shouldn't, to the extent that majority should rule, the majority of Democrats don't agree with the things that we are being tagged with. Now how that works- Think through a couple of those things.

00:18:26 Speaker_00
I think Democrats believe in common sense stuff more than you realize. I mean, it's not like any of us sit at home and don't talk to anyone. Most Democrats I know think there's a huge problem at the border.

00:18:38 Speaker_00
Most Democrats I know think, frankly, that males at birth shouldn't play women's sports and vice versa. Again, I'm afraid to say something wrong. the woke stuff, the PC police stuff.

00:18:51 Speaker_00
You'll see Republicans who say they're afraid to say X. I'm afraid to say X. These congressmen are afraid to say X.

00:18:58 Speaker_02
Yeah, this is someone who's a private consultant who goes in and out of the corporate world, who was a lobbyist for Global Beacon Strategies, which is basically a defense industry lobbying group with Raytheon and Lockheed Martin as their clients.

00:19:08 Speaker_02
Global Beacon Strategy also advises Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. So this is someone who is part of the very class that was responsible for them shitting the bed. He was an advisor to Harris. So again, what's he going to say?

00:19:20 Speaker_02
And they always frame it as like tough talk, being real.

00:19:22 Speaker_01
Right. I don't want to get in trouble for saying this, but we got to we got to just be honest here, man.

00:19:27 Speaker_02
Yeah. Politico and CNN all phrase this is like Democratic insider gets straight and has a tough message.

00:19:33 Speaker_02
And it's like you're just scapegoating fucking a caricature of woke people and not pointing the finger at your fucking self who advise the campaign. So, again, there may be people who are listening who think, yeah, there's some excesses of

00:19:45 Speaker_02
Political correctness that i don't like fine but be very clear that when these people.

00:19:50 Speaker_02
Are citing this is the reason i lost their doing it for one reason and one reason only which is to absolve themselves of responsibility they're gonna ratchet up the racism machine and they're gonna say oh well the electorate they're just like me.

00:20:01 Speaker_02
Again bill mars been doing the stick for years they are the average joe is racist it's like well it's it's way more complicated than that and again if you don't offer anything and then these types of minutia become the center of the campaign but you're not offering them anything.

00:20:13 Speaker_02
But again this is someone who goes in and out of the corporate world so that's never going to be a solution is not gonna say look we need a stronger populist economic message we need to talk about unionization when you talk about twenty dollars minimum wage.

00:20:24 Speaker_02
The clients that is roster would absolutely have a meltdown if you push the twenty dollar minimum wage or free health care or free college or free child care, they're not allowed to offer that as a solution because this is the mail you the operating this is who goes in and out of these media spots at cnn msnbc,

00:20:40 Speaker_02
They will never ever blame their world and their click and they have the strongest class on earth and these right wing messages are shared.

00:20:49 Speaker_01
Again and again and have been by so called liberal and centrist media so it's not just the infection of right wing talking points is that these are then mainstream.

00:21:01 Speaker_01
through outlets like the New York Times, which has gone on an anti-trans messaging campaign for months, if not years, where you have endless articles that talk about the border crisis or the flood of immigrants and, you know, associate that with a lack of support for a so-called, you know, American white middle class or even working class.

00:21:25 Speaker_01
And you put all these together, you have this media approach that is scapegoating the exact communities, the exact policies as well, that then get blamed for these losses. And then they turn around and say, oh, no, no, no, no. It was the wokes.

00:21:41 Speaker_01
It was the campaign messaging, always completely divorced from putting any kind of blame, any kind of focus back on themselves. And so we see this, obviously, not just in the anti-wokeness finger pointing, Adam, but when it comes to the economy.

00:21:58 Speaker_02
Yeah, so there was a trope that emerged prior to the election that was originally peppered by Madaglasias. The general idea is that there were so-called quote-unquote economic headwinds, which made Harris basically her winning impossible.

00:22:10 Speaker_02
The idea is that there was an anti-incumbent storm, a kind of hurricane, a natural disaster that plagued every Western leader in the world, and that Harris was kind of up against it.

00:22:21 Speaker_02
Now, this is partly true, but is missing several points of key context, namely that several countries didn't lose as incumbents.

00:22:28 Speaker_02
Leaders in Mexico, Spain, Taiwan, among others, won their re-elections, so it's not a rule by any means, but it kind of sounds superficially appealing.

00:22:35 Speaker_01
France managed to stave off the win of an overtly fascist party.

00:22:41 Speaker_02
Right. So that's just not really true.

00:22:44 Speaker_02
And then there's the other issue, which is to the extent to which she is an incumbent, that was a choice made by the campaign when she hired his team and ran on his policies and refused to distance herself from her, which again, like with Gaza, was not something

00:22:54 Speaker_02
Anyone forced her to do there's a lot of tissue has to do that she chose to do that largely because she agrees with him this is the thing they just have conservative politics and they mostly kind of agree with biden and the center what she doesn't agree with him she's more corporate friendly than he was so this idea that like she was forced by headwinds and this was a focus of the post.

00:23:13 Speaker_02
election messaging from the campaign itself. So in statements from the Harris campaign, the Biden White House and Barack Obama, they all use the term, quote, economic headwinds.

00:23:21 Speaker_02
And the campaign said, quote, it was that were, quote, largely out of their control, unquote. It's incredibly convenient because, you know, who can marshal the forces of the wind, Adam, right? Well, that's the thing.

00:23:32 Speaker_02
And so economic headwinds as a kind of catch-all excuse comes from the corporate world. In fact, the Los Angeles Times back in March of this year wrote an article called, quote, why economic headwinds are suddenly to blame for everything, unquote.

00:23:44 Speaker_01
Writer Sam Dean basically explains this trope, writing, quote, headwinds have always blown around in business English.

00:23:52 Speaker_01
But the phrase economic headwinds serves a special purpose, a majestic waving of the hand, an abandon to the fates, an inkling of force majeure.

00:24:02 Speaker_01
It's a useful term because we can't control the wind, said Thomas C. Leonard, a historian of economics at Princeton University.

00:24:09 Speaker_01
If you're a corporation trying to sell unhappy outcomes to shareholders or regulators, it's a way of saying it's a tough environment, but more importantly, it's a tough environment beyond our control."

00:24:20 Speaker_02
Right, so the idea is that it's something that they really had no hand in. And again, this is something that sounds savvy. It kind of sounds superficially true, and it's no doubt part true. But they're not saying, well, it's like 10%.

00:24:31 Speaker_02
They're saying it's like, it's 90% that she was basically fucked from the beginning because of anti-incumbency bias. Just ignore the fact that she made a choice not to be an incumbent. That was a choice. Like, we're supporting genocide in Gaza.

00:24:41 Speaker_02
That's a fucking choice. Politicians have agency.

00:24:43 Speaker_01
And this is a choice that was actually noted in

00:24:47 Speaker_01
The New York Times itself a couple weeks before the election, as Julie Holler and Jim Narikis in FAIR have pointed out recently, an article with the headline, as Harris courts Republicans, the left grows wary and alienated, end quote, was published by the New York Times on October 24th of this year.

00:25:10 Speaker_01
It said Harris, quote, has centered her economic platform on middle class issues like small businesses and entrepreneurship rather than raising the minimum wage, a deeply held goal of many Democrats that polls well across the board.

00:25:24 Speaker_01
She has taken a harder line stance on the border than has any member of her party in the generation and has talked more prominently about owning a Glock than about combating climate change.

00:25:34 Speaker_01
She has not broken from President Biden on the war Israel is waging in Gaza, end quote.

00:25:40 Speaker_01
So this comes from the New York Times itself, from reporters Nicholas Nahamas and Erica L. Green before the election, yet we still see the post-mortem, especially from folks like the New York Times editorial board, not acknowledging this and blaming these non-existent progressive policies on whether it's the economy or immigration or identity.

00:26:03 Speaker_01
as being the real reason, not because the Harris campaign deliberately, explicitly, purposefully avoided having a progressive agenda.

00:26:14 Speaker_02
The third and final scapegoat I want to discuss is what Matt Bruni refers to as the racial whodunit, where you

00:26:22 Speaker_02
You find the subset of voters in this case increasingly latinos and white women and you sort of say they didn't show up they had a moral failing if they didn't cross some fifty percent threshold.

00:26:31 Speaker_02
And while this is true as far as it goes it doesn't really go very far it's not a very meaningful analysis because if you believe some fixed meaningful percentage of the electorate is ontologically evil and racist.

00:26:40 Speaker_02
Then what's to be done about it and the reality is that even if you sort of believe this, the way that the solution will manifest in public and it already has in pop discourse, is that politicians therefore need to pander to people's transphobia, racism and sexism.

00:26:54 Speaker_02
It's not like the federal government was going to pay for a bunch of anti-racism seminars. They're just going to tell you the winning strategy is to pander to people's id. And this is something that was popular in MSNBC.

00:27:03 Speaker_02
It's kind of popular and a lot of pop discourse when people talk about, I remember in 2016, this was extremely popular. Well, the electorate is just right wing. There's kind of nothing that can be done about it.

00:27:12 Speaker_02
And again, if this is true, A, why did you raise $1.8 billion to run a campaign when you could have used that for like state legislators or or going to Arby's. So it's not clear what I'm supposed to do with that information. It's a call for impotence.

00:27:24 Speaker_02
And the general idea is that if you do offer people robust economic populism, it's not that they're going to become better people or have some kind of moral awakening. It's that they'll still vote for you. And that's all that matters.

00:27:34 Speaker_02
You don't need people to be morally hygienic. You just need them to vote for you. And again, with Trump increasingly picking up the working class Latinos and blacks, which he gained significantly,

00:27:45 Speaker_02
In this election this kind of i think the racial who done it framework is not very useful it doesn't really tell you anything and again to the extent to which it has any value it's true it literally only exist as a blame deflecting mechanism.

00:27:58 Speaker_02
And that even raises the question then. Again, why did they go after never-Trump Republicans who were overwhelmingly racist and white?

00:28:08 Speaker_02
Rather than energizing and activating their base, they specifically accorded white, these middle-class, anti-Trump Republicans who are, again, 15 people, because that's what- Like the three people in the country who know and care who Liz Cheney is.

00:28:21 Speaker_02
They're just not overly racist, but they're probably still racist, so I'm not sure what the point of that was. It ended up 95%, 96% of Republicans ended up going for Trump anyway, so it completely was a big, big, big dud.

00:28:31 Speaker_02
I'm in so those are kind of three deflections the point is the people in charge can be responsible the corporate capture of the consulting class in corporate media cnn msnbc.

00:28:41 Speaker_02
Can i rotate out the order the same parties you know each other they're all go they all go in and out of uber and amazon mcdonalds. We've talked about it on the show many times. The taboo, you're not really supposed to mention that.

00:28:51 Speaker_02
Everyone's a democratic strategist, whatever that means. Again, they're not allowed to call them a lobbyist.

00:28:56 Speaker_02
That naturally they're going to want to point the fingers at either abstractions like ontologically evil voters that can't really, you can't, there's no call to action. Again, it's not clear what you're supposed to do with that information.

00:29:05 Speaker_02
Or again, very vague, pink haired, woke college kid caricatures that, Are unfalsifiable because again, there's always going to be some quote unquote woke contingent. So how do you, what does it mean to kind of purge that from your party?

00:29:19 Speaker_02
Again, the campaign did not run on any of that shit, right? So I don't know what they want them to do with them only to run white men, I guess, who speak in a certain way, but that obviously seems like a recipe for racial and gender discrimination.

00:29:29 Speaker_02
So again, all this becomes the conversation because we're not talking about the fact that they are part of a failed dying zombie project. of trying to reconcile Silicon Valley and Wall Street with a politics of class discontent.

00:29:44 Speaker_02
So in the absence of a meaningful alternative, people are going to seek out the grim, dark, ideological worldview of a Trump. Again, we've been saying this for eight years, we'll continue to say this. And you know what? Maybe we're wrong.

00:29:56 Speaker_02
Maybe a Bernie Sanders type person runs in 2028 and just completely gets smoked. But we've already tried the other thing, so why not give it a fucking try?

00:30:04 Speaker_01
Like, the other thing's not working. As Jason Hickel, a former guest of the show, put it on Twitter shortly after the election results were called. He wrote this, quote, the deeper reality is that liberalism has failed. Liberalism is dead.

00:30:19 Speaker_01
And people urgently need to wake up to this fact and respond accordingly. It is a defunct ideology that cannot offer any meaningful solutions to our social and ecological crises. And it must be abandoned. He continued, quote,

00:30:31 Speaker_01
Democrats have proven over and over again that they cannot accept even basic steps like public health care, affordable housing, and a public job guarantee, things that would dramatically improve the material, social, and political conditions of the working classes.

00:30:44 Speaker_01
And they cannot accept a public finance strategy that would steer production away from fossil fuels and toward green transition to give us a shot at a livable future. Why? Because these things run against the objectives of capital accumulation.

00:30:58 Speaker_01
And for liberals, capital is sacrosanct. They will do whatever it takes to ensure elite accumulation, and it is their only consistent commitment. At home, they suppress and demonize progressive and socialist tendencies.

00:31:09 Speaker_01
Abroad, they engage in endless wars and violence to suppress input prices in the global South and prevent any possibility of sovereign economic development. End quote.

00:31:19 Speaker_01
So that, I think, encapsulates a lot of what we've been saying, sadly, tragically, unfortunately.

00:31:26 Speaker_01
And we will continue to, obviously, cover how the media covers itself and absolves itself of any culpability in making these outcomes what they deem inevitable after the fact. Hey, what was the point of all of that if it was always inevitable?

00:31:41 Speaker_01
But we will continue to do that on Citations Needed. Thank you all for continuing to listen. to share, to support the show as you do. I'm sure we will have a lot to discuss in the coming weeks, months, and years, Adam, ahead.

00:31:58 Speaker_01
But thank you all for listening to the show. You, of course, can follow it on Twitter, CitationsPod, Facebook, CitationsNeeded, if you are able and are so inclined. And we hope you are. You can become a supporter of our work.

00:32:11 Speaker_01
through patreon.com slash citations needed podcast. We are 100% listener funded, but that will do it. We'll be back soon with more full length episodes of citations needed. So stay tuned for that. But until then, thanks again for listening.

00:32:26 Speaker_01
I'm Nima Shirazi. I'm Adam Johnson. citations needed senior producer is Florence burr Adams producer is Julianne tweet and production assistant is trend a light burn newsletter by Marco Carlano.

00:32:35 Speaker_01
transcriptions are by Machner Imran the music is by granddaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We'll catch you next time.