I Don't Think So, Tim

J.D. Vance ran circles around sad sack Tim Walz and the entire left wing media machine.

You can call me a conspiracy theorist all you’d like, but I can’t help but believe that the odds are just constantly stacked against Republicans, which is what makes J.D. Vance’s performance at the Vice Presidential debate on Tuesday a six sigma outlier, instead of just a ‘good job’.

Maybe it’s me getting older, but it’s difficult for me to see how, if Republicans are given an even playing field to disseminate their policies and positions, they won’t come out on top at least 6 times out of 10. Yet here we are in this country — deadlocked almost every election.

To me, things like personal responsibility, liberty, less regulation, lower taxes, peace through strength, secure borders, law and order, feverish protection of constitutional rights, and small government simply make the most sense. Perhaps it was how I was raised, or perhaps it’s due to the unique experiences I’ve endured over the course of my life. I’m not foolish enough to think that everybody feels the same way I do, but I’d like to think I’m smart enough to think that the more freedom people are given, the more they have a chance to take their lives in the direction that best suits them.

The GOP offers up freedom tangibly, through less government in people’s lives and fewer Federal regulations. Democrats purport to offer up freedom by mandating the policies they like the best, crowing them the ‘fair’ way forward, telling everybody that disagrees with them that they can’t be critical of them, and assuming everyone will benefit from the broad brush they paint with while they make speeches laden with the words freedom and Democracy.

Minding your own business — a recent staple of Tim Walz’s campaign speeches despite running with a pro-censorship candidate — seems simple enough. You don’t tell me how to live, and I won’t tell you how to live.

But Republican pro-freedom, smaller-government policies never seem to be the obvious choice for half the country. Why is that?

Some of the country is just naturally averse to taking responsibility for their own actions and making their own decisions—these people don’t mind having the government do their thinking for them. I understand that. And you have other people that ignore the majority of the Republican platform because they don’t agree with certain issues contained therein. For example, if being pro-choice is your number one priority, you’re likely to vote down that ticket, regardless of what collateral damage comes with it. I understand that too. And look, it’s easy for me to separate the candidate from the policies I’m voting for, but some people can’t do that. Some people simply hate Donald Trump so much that they wouldn’t vote for him even if he were running on the Democratic side of the aisle. I understand that, too.

But if I were drunk at an airport bar at three in the morning and had to do a back-of-the-cocktail-napkin analysis on where these concessions would leave us in terms of dividing up the country, I’d still expect to see at least 60% of the country siding with policies that favor conservative positions. Think about all of the moderate Democrats you know in your life: I have tons of friends who vote Democratic and are law-abiding, productive, civilized members of society, successful in business, and happy in their lives. Why would those people, so efficient elsewhere in their lives, become so inefficient when having to choose a slate of policy prescriptions?

Some of it, I can attribute to them not having an understanding of the issues. Many young people who don’t know how the world works are Democrats. Hell, I was a Democrat until I was about 25 years old, when I discovered libertarianism. Some people never leave that echo chamber from their youth, however — they don’t have the capacity necessary to do so, it leaves their ego bruised, or they simply don’t want to be a part of the party that’s ‘unpopular’ amongst their friends.

Others don’t have the open mindedness necessary to make such grand changes. How many fully grown Democrats have really taken the time to try and listen to Peter Schiff instead of Paul Krugman on economics? How many have tried to take an objective look at Vladimir Putin’s reasons for invading Ukraine? How many dug through the early data on Covid, and treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine on their own instead of simply listening to commandments handed down from Dr. Fauci?

Now, cast those well-meaning Democrats aside, too—maybe that gets us to about 50% of the country leaning right and 45% leaning left. The other 5% make up the pool of independent voters and thinkers that are the target of both parties every single election day. I call this group the “winning margin of error.” For me, it’s difficult to understand how a group of open-minded, critically-thinking individuals would lean left nowadays under any circumstances. But that’s where the very last ingredient in the uneven playing field recipe comes in: the media.

With the exception of Fox News, most of the mainstream media has done a great job over the last few election cycles openly tipping their hand as Democratic operatives. Any rational, open-minded individual who watches how interviews are conducted when the same journalist—say, Dana Bash on CNN—interviews candidates from both sides of the aisle can clearly see the Democrats get favorable treatment.

“Would you like to ask me questions and let me answer them or debate me on these topics? I noticed when you had Kamala Harris and Tim Walz you gave them multiple choice answers to the questions you asked.” — J.D. Vance to Dana Bash

To date, this bias has just been one of the assumed layers of bedrock underneath the entire political circus that takes place every four years. No one has really done anything about it, no one has bothered to call it out, and people haven’t necessarily had their eyes opened to it.

Enter the era of Donald Trump, who not only has publicly stated the obvious about the media being biased but has lived with the consequences of it while, at the same time, still not shying away from journalists and consistently taking questions, essentially putting himself on the front line of the war between media bias and Republicans. This hasn’t just opened the eyes of independent voters to how in-the-tank the media is for Democrats; it has also put resounding emphasis on the media’s clear efforts to change the narrative the way they want, turning them into caricatures of themselves as they try to implement an age-old playbook that is no longer working.

Now, enter JD Vance. He took the stage earlier this week at the vice-presidential debate coming off the heels of two straight months of positive coverage by the media of Kamala Harris, despite her obvious inability to articulate a single policy prescription or stance. Harris has been endorsed by outlets like The New York Times editorial board, innumerable Hollywood entertainment figures, and her party, despite lacking substance on almost all issues. Instead of being pressed on the fact that she is promising to “move on” from all the policies she has overseen to begin with, she was essentially gifted a two-month-long public relations campaign with a retail value probably well into the tens of billions of dollars by all major news networks, with the exception of Fox News.

Vance’s Vice Presidential debate came after what can only be described as a three-on-one Presidential debate: Donald Trump on one side, with two debate moderators and Kamala Harris on the other. It was evident then that Republicans are up against “the machine” — the media’s last bit of influence needed to move that “winning margin of error” in favor of the left.

But last night’s debate exposed both the power and the freshness of truth and humility in fighting the media’s bias and influence. Vance navigated complex issues and a vast array of policy questions with sincere, well-thought-out, articulate, and nuanced answers.

“I don’t think so, Tim.”

Backed by common-sense policies, this would normally be enough to declare an evening a success — but Republicans have the added handicap of having “the machine” against them. Last night’s debate moderators, like the one’s during Trump’s debate, chimed in as if they were debate participants, instead of objective moderators.

Why do this? Because in the past, when moderators “fact-check” candidates—stapling smug remarks to their own version of reality and interjecting them in the middle of a debate between two people that have nothing to do with them—it’s sometimes enough to jar a candidate off course or rewrite the record of what one candidate said.

But last night, for probably the first time in history, the opposite happened: not only did Vance deftly maneuver the “fact-check,” keeping his cool and calmly explaining the details that listeners needed to hear, he did so in a manner that made the moderators look ridiculous.

And I don’t think it was a coincidence that there was no additional fact-checking throughout the rest of the debate.

People on the left are going to vote for Kamala Harris no matter what, but people in the middle and independent voters undoubtedly saw what happened to Donald Trump at the last debate. An objective viewer likely had a very difficult time watching how David Muir acted and not recognizing that he was dripping with bias.

And so, after that performance, these critically-thinking crucial voters were on notice going into last night’s debate. And what did they see? The exact same thing from two additional moderators—the only difference being that it’s a dirty trick they’ve already seen this election cycle, so it looked even dirtier this time around. Once again, Megyn Kelly captured it perfectly:

Now, when you layer on top of it the fact that CBS specifically agreed not to fact-check during the debate and then immediately broke its own agreement with the candidates in the middle of a live debate—where they know nobody can do anything about it—it goes to show you just how underhanded and slimy the tactics truly are.

But the beautiful thing about last night was that everybody was flustered except JD Vance. The moderators were beside themselves with the barrage of facts he was able to draw from all night and explain in a reasoned and calm fashion. Tim Walz went from being visibly nervous to humiliating himself by admitting that he lied, to nodding along and agreeing with Vance while he was explaining his policy prescriptions, to simply not being able to defend his running mate on her record.

In the parlance of this blog, the usual bullshit simply didn’t work on Vance.

He delivered the common-sense policies of the Republican Party with the humility and normalcy that the media has sworn up and down consistently have no place in the Republican Party. When the media calls Trump supporters “deplorables” or when some dildo academic on MSNBC says they’re “despicable”, the media is trying to paint a picture of all Republicans as unhinged lunatics.

Not only did JD Vance prove that isn’t the case last night, he did so while deftly maneuvering the entire debate from inside the belly of the media beast.

I said last night on Twitter that Vance reminded me of Lennox Lewis during his fight with Mike Tyson. Everybody wanted Tyson to win because he had always been the champ and the legacy people’s favorite, but it became clear quickly into the fight that Lennox was better conditioned and simply a different class of fighter.

Lewis beat Tyson and was respectful in doing so, turning the page in the history books and setting up a marked pivot for both his career and Tyson’s.

Vance may have just reached a similar pivot point. Not only was he polite by not personally attacking Walz — instead going after Harris and letting Walz self-immolate— he may have very well changed the perception of so many of those crucial “winning margin of error” votes by proving the media’s portrait of Republican’s wrong.

For those that don’t read my column regularly, after Trump decided he wasn’t going to do another debate, I wrote that this would be a fantastic strategy because Vance would do a great job during his debate, and the party could head into the election on a high note. I wrote:

…the next debate will be the vice presidential debate, and JD Vance is far more articulate in explaining policy positions than Donald Trump is. If policy is going to rule the day, I’m certain Vance will out-joust Tim Walz.

Not having another presidential debate shows the Republicans’ confidence in JD Vance, and frankly, I think he’s going to do a significantly better job than Trump did. It’ll make the vice presidential debate the official sendoff for both sides heading into the general election.

Tim Walz can brush up on how best to spin his way through sounding like his administration actually has policy ideas, but I’m not sure there’s anything he can do to keep pace with Vance in a debate.

And boy was I right.

Kamala Harris has spent her entire campaign arguing that winning the election would be “a new way forward.” But what JD Vance did on national television in front of tens of millions of people was actually solidify himself as the real “new way forward”—hopefully not just for the Republican Party, but also for the country.

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