Good news, guys! The Wall Street Journal says we’re in a manufacturing boom.
Bad news, guys! PBS says there’s no manufacturing boom.
Both articles ran over the past month(!) — and each told a dramatically different story about the health of U.S. manufacturing. Depending on which source you believe, you’re either breaking out the champagne bottles and party hats… or investing in straight razors.
Welcome to today’s media landscape: To quote Hollywood legend William Goldman, “Nobody knows nothin’.” That’s because there’s no consensus on the truth anymore.
Not even within the mainstream media.
We’re in a post-truth world, where vibes, emotions, and storylines matter more than reality. Part of the blame is a media ecosystem that rewards journalists via clicks: It’s turned headlines into clickbait advertisements.
And as any marketer would tell you, the best advertisements aren’t the ones with the strictest fidelity to the truth. Instead, the ads that ring the most registers rely on emotional triggers — our fears, desires, hopes, and aspirations.
This has led to today’s pandering news cycle, where media outlets maximize engagement by validating their audience’s emotions 24/7. (No matter what their emotions are.) Reality has become a Choose Your Own Adventure story — with journalists giving their readers whichever ending they’d prefer.
Like Maxwell Scott said in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Today’s “truth” is mostly mythology.
Take, for instance, the phrase “October Surprise.” According to the legend — which Wikipedia reports as fact — it stems from a Republican dirty trick in the 1980 election, where members of the Reagan campaign secretly negotiated with Iran to prevent the release of U.S. hostages before Election Day.
“You know those Republicans and their dirty, stickin’ October Surprises! They’re always trying to cheat! Curses and drat!”
Only it’s not true: The phrase “October Surprise” was coined by Reagan campaign manager Williams Casey, who feared the Democrats and President Jimmy Carter were concocting a scheme to time the hostage release to maximize their electoral chances.
“October Surprise” referred to the Democrats’ dirty tricks — not the Republicans’!
And there was a legitimate reason for GOP concern: On the day of Wisconsin’s 1980 Democratic primary, President Carter teased that there was “good news” coming about the American hostages. (And it worked: Carter beat Sen. Ted Kennedy by 21 points.)
Despite the media’s narrative and/or legend-making, almost all the so-called “October Surprises” have benefited Democrats — not Republicans:
- In 1992, independent counsel Lawrence Walsh timed his indictment of former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger suspiciously close to Election Day.
- In 2000, days before the presidential election, the Democrats released GOP candidate George W. Bush’s 1976 arrest for drunk driving.
- In 2004, The New York Times waited until late October to report on the disappearance of the al Qa’qaa missing explosives in Iraq.
- In 2012, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid took to the Senate floor and (falsely) accused Mitt Romney of paying zero taxes over the last ten years. When asked about his since-debunked allegation, Sen. Reid responded, “Well, they can call it whatever they want. Romney didn’t win, did he?”
- And as recently as 2016, who could forget the October 7 release of the Access Hollywood “grab them by the p****” tape that threatened to cost Donald Trump the election?
So keep the media’s twisted legend-making narrative in mind as we analyze today’s article in The Hill: “Senate Republicans Hope Supreme Court ‘Surprise’ Could Help Save Majority.”
Senate Republicans who fear their three-seat majority could be in danger in this year’s midterm election would welcome the retirement of conservative Justice Samuel Alito as an “October surprise” that could change their political fortunes by rallying GOP-leaning voters to the polls.
GOP senators are being careful not to prod Alito, a leading conservative voice on the high court, out the door, but privately hope that a retirement announcement in the fall could shift several races in their direction.
They think this would help their party in this year’s Senate elections just as the battle over Justice Brett Kavanaugh did in the 2018 midterms.
Because, in their scorched-earth attempt to destroy Kavanaugh in 2018, the Democrats inadvertently destroyed themselves:
Republicans believe the vicious fight over Kavanaugh’s nomination in October of 2018 helped them increase their Senate majority by two seats in President Trump’s first midterm election, the same year House Republicans lost 42 seats along with control of the lower chamber.
Two embattled Democratic incumbents, Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.), held slight leads over their Republican opponents heading into the confirmation fight but wound up losing. They both later blamed the high-profile battle over Kavanaugh for impacting their races.
“Up until the Kavanaugh stuff, we really weren’t seeing that enthusiasm on the Republican side,” McCaskill told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” after the election. “There was a double-digit difference in enthusiasm between the blue side and the red side of the equation in our state until Kavanaugh.”
“And then it popped up,” she said.
It would be a high-risk strategy for the GOP because Samuel Alito is a known quantity and a reliable, dependable, conservative justice. There’s no guarantee the next nominee will be as conservative — or even survive the confirmation process. It’s impossible to 100% vet anyone; who knows what skeletons are hiding in the next nominee’s closet?
There’s also no guarantee that the move won’t backfire.
Because Kavanaugh was nominated pre-Dobbs. Part of his appeal to conservative voters was being the final vote necessary to overturn Roe v. Wade. We were so tantalizingly close — and needed Kavanaugh to secure the 5-4 majority opinion.
Post-Dobbs, will the Democrats now be more motivated? It’s not entirely clear.
But I still suspect it would work in the GOP’s favor.
And the biggest reason why is the astonishing lack of impulse control within the Democratic Party. From the senators to the media to the left-wing influencers who’ll be pontificating nonstop, the Democrats can’t resist the urge to overreach and over-attack.
In their unholy crusade to portray conservatives as extreme, they make themselves look and sound like unhinged lunatics.
Which means, whoever Trump nominates will be blasted as the worst human being who’s ever lived, a monster and a tyrant, a hater of women, and an existential threat to democracy. They’ll come after him/her with torches and pitchforks.
Plus, with the 2028 presidential campaign looming on the horizon, every aspiring Democratic candidate will be incentivized to out-hyperbolize his or her competitors. No insult will be too cruel to say; no allegation too crass to use. It’ll be a race to the bottom of the sewer.
And by comparison, Republicans will look sane, normal, and reasonable.
That’s the trouble with legends: Mythologies fade; facts endure. The former requires a strong supporting narrative and a monopoly on the truth; the latter prevails when the legend is exposed as a lie.
If the Democrats can’t avoid being ugly, then it’s very smart for the GOP to put a white-hot spotlight on their ugliness. This is a strategy worth exploring.
One Last Thing: 2026 is a critical year for America First. It began with Mayor Mamdani declaring war on “rugged individualism” and will reach a crescendo with the midterm elections. Nothing less than the fate of the America First movement teeters in the balance.
Never before have the political battle lines been so clearly defined. Win or lose, 2026 will transform our country.
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