The first Trump/Harris debate was a sideshow.
With ABC party loyalists at the helm, and Kamala reciting long winded, memorized lines like she was in a Hallmark movie, Trump was unable to stay on topic, on message or really even on brand as the debate moved further and further away from him as the night went on.
It was probably around the time he mentioned illegal immigrants munching on beloved family pets/wild birds that things started to go sideways and, in my opinion, he never really regained his composure. Harris was able to escape the proverbial paper bag with relative ease, even though after last night there aren’t any remaining doubts about her inability to lead the US. She’s just not very bright, whether you see it that way or not.
All that said, yesterday was the first time I can remember such an effective implementation of what I’m going to call “Information Catch and Control”. You might call it “Fact Checking”, but you are a moron, since the presence of fact nor the act of checking the candidates (or one candidate) needed to be present during these moments. This is how Trump was knocked off his game, whatever his game is, and he never recovered.
ABC’s anchors executed their fact checking orgy on the back of the subpar, often wrong (either because journalism is dead or because of an intent to mislead the public) Big Media Reported Complex – it looked like this:
- Media outlet [x] reported that Trump said there were very fine people on both sides during Charlottesville.
- Alternate information source [a] shares the full story, and debunks the original, shared lie.
- Media outlets [x,y,z] propagate the story for months, repeating this lie and establishing it as fact for low information, low sophistication, trough-feeding, legacy-media consumers.
- Alternate information source [a] simply cannot get traction with the trough-slop enthusiasts, and so two silos develop – people who consume legacy media, and people who know the full story.
Here’s where things get interesting though:
- In a debate setting, one candidate [K] benefits from the version of the story that’s false [x], while the other [D] benefits from the version that is true [a].
- It is simply not possible for [D] to spend time during the debate: debunking [x], explaining the bias of [x], explaining how [a] is in fact a reputable and should replace legacy media, and explaining that trough-slop frequent flyers should abandon [x] in favor of [a] even though it completely upends their world view and tarnishes their candidate in the process, all while [x] loyalists “moderate” the debate from afar and add to the headwinds that [D] faces in the live setting.
The debates don’t actually change anyone’s mind about candidates, but yesterday may have just opened up a few eyes and minds when it comes to this Information Catch and Control strategy – the idea that all facts are prone to checking even if they’re false, because the only side of the story that matters is the lie shared by legacy media along the way.
I don’t really care who wins the election, though it’s clear Trump is the more capable of the two candidates, but broadly the two roads travelled by the candidates lead to the same outcome – financial ruin, handouts for party supporters, and hard assets ballooning in value while the “grass roots resistance” types are forced into captivity via rent controlled residences with very fancy cricket protein buffet options.
Good luck out there.