I just don’t get it

For about a year everyone insisted that a group called No Labels would throw the 2024 presidential election to Donald Trump. It seemed obvious to me that the group existed solely to raise money early on, under the false premise that it would be able to impact the election, and that in the end it would have no impact on the election at all. Sure enough, No Labels is now acknowledging that it won’t even have a candidate in the 2024 presidential election.

There was also a long stretch where everyone was insisting that fringe Democratic candidate Dean Phillips would ruin President Biden’s reelection prospects. But it seemed obvious to me that Phillips would gain no traction and would end up dropping out, with no impact on Biden’s prospects. Sure enough, that’s how it played out.

You’d think that as these “doomsday hysteria” sideshows keep playing out as complete non-stories with no impact on anything, audiences would get wise to the game. Groups and candidacies like this do not exist to try to win. Nor do they exist to try to throw the election toward one major party or the other. They exist to MAKE MONEY. They goad the media into hyping them (it doesn’t matter whether the hype is positive or negative, so long as it’s hype), so the dummies out there who want to stick it to the major parties will donate accordingly. Then these groups and candidacies fall by the wayside with zero impact on the election, aside from the money they raised for themselves.

The media always knows this is going to be the outcome, but plays along with hyping these kinds of sideshows. Why? They’re good for ratings. How many additional eyeballs have MSNBC and the like gotten over the past year by “sounding the alarm” about No Labels every five minutes? There are even online political entities who seem to have been raising money solely on the promise of stopping No Labels. How do you “stop” a group that isn’t even trying to go anywhere? I don’t know, but everyone involved makes a lot of money in the process. And in terms of actual political impact, the whole thing ends up being one big non-story.

Yet audiences never do seem to catch on. Now that No Labels and Dean Phillips have turned out to have never been a story, the media is immediately shifting its hype machine toward portraying RFK Jr as the thing that’s going to doom us. They never can seem to explain why this is supposedly going to happen, given that the Biden-Trump polls look pretty much the same with or without RFK Jr in the mix. But the media ignores facts like this when it doesn’t fit the hype they want to milk for ratings.

I would even argue that the entire media and pundit class is conspiring with RFK Jr, by falsely hyping his candidacy as likely to have an impact on the outcome, when they can see the numbers and they know it’s not the case. It doesn’t matter that the media is hyping RFK Jr in negative fashion. It doesn’t matter that they’re condemning him. As long as they’re helping give him publicity, and pretending that his candidacy is somehow going to change the outcome of the election, they’re working with RFK Jr to deceive the public.

How many more times do we have to fall for this? How many more times are we going to let the media trick us into believing that this or that non-story is something that we should sit stricken in panicked fear over? How many more times do we need to see proof that these kinds of media-generated doomsday hysteria narratives never go anywhere, before we stop taking the media’s bait?

The sideshow candidacy of RFK Jr is likely to have about as much impact on the outcome of the 2024 presidential election as the irrelevant failed candidacy of Dean Phillips, or the imaginary candidacy of Joe Manchin (remember when the media pretended Manchin was going to run, and people actually fell for it?). The media knows that these non-candidacies are going to have no impact, but decides to milk our worst fears for ratings in the moment, then hopes we forget to notice later on that the media was playing us.

Let’s stop falling for these media sideshows. We’re facing serious threats and challenges when it comes to the 2024 election. None of them have anything to do with what’s being hyped by the media and pundit class. In fact the biggest threat we’re facing in 2024 is that too many of the would-be activists on our side will spend the election cycle sitting paralyzed staring at their screens in fear over imaginary storylines, instead of getting out there and doing the things like fundraising and volunteering that are required to win.