Blinders Taken off at NYT, WaPo on Democrats — and Durham

CLAY: Big story as we begin today’s show is the Democrat response to the ass kicking that they got on Tuesday’s election. We asked the question, “What would Democrats do?” and we still don’t know a hundred percent the answer, but it seems to be the case that they have decided to go in the direction of even more left-wing insanity.

As we speak, Nancy Pelosi is trying to corral the House Democrats to pass not one, but two multitrillion-dollar bills. The first would be the Biden budget. Now, we’ll unpack why that isn’t necessarily very definitive right now because the Senate has not passed that. But the other is the infrastructure bill, which has been sitting in the House since August. There are many different angles here.

The New York Times this morning, Buck, had an editorial — I couldn’t believe it when I was reading it this morning — ridiculing Democrats for being too left wing. It’s one of the most crazy things I’ve read on the New York Times editorial page in terms of a surprise.

Because the New York Times editorial page has consistently been the cheerleader for the most far-left-wing agenda imaginable in opposition to the Trump administration, more so than any part of the media and now in the wake of Tuesday’s results, they are telling Democrats that they need to be more moderate, that they need to pause, that they need to not try to as much, which honestly, Buck, it sounded a little bit like our show.

BUCK: I know!

CLAY: I was like, “Are you kidding?” Did you read that?

BUCK: Yeah, yeah.

CLAY: Were you surprised as much as I was?

BUCK: I saw the op-ed. I love it because, Clay, first of all, you know, we say these things. We come on this show after a day like that. We’re telling folks things. We come from a conservative perspective, right, and a lot of our audience — not all, but a lot of our audience — is obviously gonna share that. But here’s the New York Times, in a sense the ideological opposition — I won’t quite say “enemy.”

But the ideological opponents we have across the chessboard are saying, “Yeah, what Clay and Buck have been telling you guys is true, Democrats. What those guys are saying about what a massive slap in the face this is for progressive Democrats who believe that they can go super woke and not go broke, that’s the problem here. You have to address this or you’re going in for a midterm that will essentially neuter the Biden administration agenda.”

There will be nothing they can do if they lose control of even one of the House or the Senate, and so that’s why, Clay, I almost feel like maybe we should try to start some kind of mission in the other direction here. We try to tell everybody, “No, no, progressives! You’re right. Double down on your leftism. Get even contemporaries.

“Listen to AOC. She will take you on the path to victory. Say really vicious, stupid things about how racist all the parents were in Virginia who didn’t like what was going on in their school system.” I’m thinking that reverse psychology, Clay, might have to come into effect here, ’cause in this New York Times piece, they said, “Tuesday’s election result trend lines were a political nightmare for the Democratic Party, and no Democrat who cares about winning elections in 2022 and the presidential race in 2024 should see them as anything less.” Almost more hard-core than we were after this. That’s how scared they are.

CLAY: It blew my mind, and then also you have the blue checks even coming around. Did you see the Washington Post Jonathan Swan, who is at Axios, tweeted out the Washington Post article about the arrest in the Durham probe, and he said the charges are that not only did Clinton and Democrats fund the Steele dossier, but a longtime Clinton Democratic operative was one of the sources for the rumors about Trump.

Doesn’t get much worse. Direct link to the Washington Post. Yeah, we’ve been saying this for years. But it’s like suddenly people have had the blinds taken off their eyes. I’m not gonna lie. When I read that New York Times editorial and then when I saw the Washington Post covering this Durham arrest legitimately, I wondered to some extent.

We asked what the impact was going to be from the Virginia election on Democrats. I’m curious, Buck. Should we have asked what the election results were going to be on the media? Because did the election results show the media more how out of their touch coverage was than it did Democrats? Is that a crazy question to ask?

BUCK: Here’s the problem with the media. They never learn. They never learn. They’re actually more ideologically committed than most of their readership at the New York Times, the Washington Post. The people who work behind the scenes, producers at CNN and MSNBC… I actually know some of these people. I even know a couple of secret conservatives at those places, by the way, which is why I have such good sourcing on what’s going on in some of these institutions, Clay.

But the libs that work at these places are even more committed to the cause than many of their audience members, so they’ll always find a way to justify their behavior on the election result, and what it means going forward for them. I think what the media’s gonna have to do now, in their minds, in their minds… What I would like them to do is stop being such horrific liars who have no integrity.

What they’re going to do is find means of attack while also now pretending that there was has been moderation within the Democrat Party in places and in ways that they think are helpful to the electoral prospects going into the midterms so they’ll be like, “Oh, yeah. We’ve seen the triangulation, the moderation.” Even if it doesn’t happen, they’re going to try to create a perception among enough people, among whatever independents they can reach that that has occurred because then it puts Democrats in a better place to win elections.

Essentially lying. Look at with Joe Biden. This is a perfect example. Joe Biden, we all said, was a Trojan horse candidate. He wasn’t gonna be a moderate. He wasn’t gonna govern as a moderate. That was all a fraud. But the media goes, “Oh, it’s Joe riding the choo-choo, the Amtrak, carrying his lunch pail from Scranton! You can trust good old Joe,” and the whole thing was a fraud.

But it worked well enough that this guy is the president. Put aside all the rules they broke and changed and cheated on to get him there, the point is that’s what I think they’re gonna try to find now. ‘Cause, Clay, they’re activists. They’re not journalists. The moment you take that perspective with most of the corporate media, I think all their next moves becomes very clear. Don’t think of them as journalists. Think of them as activists. What would an activist do now, given the results in Virginia, to help their team win? That’s what they’ll do.

CLAY: It is intriguing to see. You mentioned the Washington Post. We talked about the New York Times. We both did. But the New York Times, to your point on the slant in coverage, they’re almost entirely now a subscription-based service, and that’s important because they used to be an advertiser-based service from a media perspective.

So now they’re in the business almost exclusively — even though they try to pretend otherwise — of serving up red meat to the true believers, right? They are in the business of giving people who hated Donald Trump and wanted there to be an opposition party… Same thing at the Washington Post. They’ve moved from an advertising-based business to a subscription-based business and that is more of a niche than it is an overwhelming audience business.

BUCK: And that is also why you brought up — and rightly — there should be a lot more focus on the Russia collusion story, and I appreciate that you bring that in to the top of our discussion here today, Clay, because that was an enormous lie used to try to overthrow effectively from the inside of government. It was a soft coup, a coup without force, a coup without weapons — but using Department of Justice — based on lies to do investigation to try to get…

Remember they were talking about prosecuting the president’s children? They were talking about throwing members of the first family in prison, and they were gleeful about it at the time. All of it lies. The entire Russia dossier was lies. But this is the point about the media to what you’re saying. In a sense, the polarization, the ossification here, right, people just get hardened into what it is they think.

The people that subscribe to the Washington Post and New York Times, they will lose no subscribers over the revelation that the entire Russia collusion hoax that those papers pushed for years because they’re not reading those papers thinking that everything they say is true. They were reading those papers — “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — because they were anti-Trump organs. So they served the purpose even though the purpose was built on lies. That’s how they view it. That’s the reason they’re not gonna lose subscribers.

CLAY: Well, I think one of the challenges they’re gonna have is expanding their base, certainly. But in the wake of 2021… See, they could use — and this is what I’ve always said: “Trump was not the cause of the Trump election. Trump was a symptom of the Trump election,” and this is where they get lost. They wanted to make Donald Trump — and, to his credit, he fought back against it.

But they tried to make Donald Trump seem like such a disruptive emperor, authoritarian dictator, that he was the one person they had to take down, right? In the wake of 2021, I think they have a harder time explaining why a truck driver from New Jersey is able to beat the Democratic Senate majority leader, why a random guy that nobody covered in the media almost beat the sitting governor of New Jersey.

And why Youngkin — and Winsome Sears and the attorney general — why everybody swept there. Why in Seattle we ended up with a Republican winning for the first time since 1989. Why defund the police went down in flames. I think it’s hard to attach that to Donald Trump, and what you’re seeing is Donald Trump was the leader of a movement against the corporate press, against the elites in this country. But the movement is bigger than Trump, and that scares them.

BUCK: The Democrat Party got used to an “all of the above, all hands on deck” anti-Trump approach for four years — and that was everything, right? And they even would say, as journalists, “We can’t even be objective because objective means anti-Trump. ” I’m not exaggerating. They actually said this.

CLAY: That’s exactly what they said.

BUCK: Because Trump is so full of lies, “objective” means you must be anti-Trump as a journalist. They created this whole… Now, when you’re in the opposition, in a sense, unfortunately, there was some effect. Now, Trump was a great counterpuncher and did very well against the whole machine, you know, leveled against him for four years.

But now, Clay, we got Democrats in charge, and so I think at some level, too, this election in Virginia showed you, there’s a laziness within Democratic Party. They think that that the same playbook is gonna work. It was obvious it was desperate in a sense. That’s why they kept bringing up Trump in state election for a candidate who has nothing to do with Trump one way or the other, right?

He’s running his own campaign running on issues people care about, so I think that’s a part of it too. Their attack, attack, attack approach isn’t the same when gas prices are high and Biden looks like a buffoon and they’re in charge. People see this now. So the smart observers, I believe, on the Democrat side, recognize there better be a change of course here or else they’re in from very, very rough time.