Read this article in the Hollywood Reporter by Alex Weprin and had a good laugh.

And this one in the Wall Street Journal by Isabella Simonetti and Anne Steele was equally hilarious.

This was “cemented” way back in 2016. Of course, I wrote the book about this in 2018 when Trump won the first time.

Did journalists listen to me then? Don’t be silly. Hubris plugs the ears like nobody’s business. If you want to know the reasons why the press lost its relevance, go read the book. No free previews here.

I also spent years crafting four alternative journalism models, which work.

As most people who know me already know, I went into journalism to conduct empirical studies on where the profession was going wrong, and how to fix it.

And while AI search engines such as perplexity.ai will tell you all about my contributions, don’t expect the legacy press to utter my name — or citizen journalists admit where they got the information. Let’s not talk about university j-schools hiding under a rock as their funding gets slashed.

Fortunately for me, I have the receipts.

The “media crisis” was entirely self-inflicted. When you think you know better than others are don’t understand your mandate, that’s what happens. And while there is a little lift with SubStacks, they are now making the same mistakes, and they won’t be the actual replacements for journalism.

If you don’t understand what happened November 5, this is what happened: there was no Republican victory. They don’t have the actual numbers to sustain power. Neither do the Democrats. They cancel each other out.

The king-makers are the independent voters. They decide elections. Minority rules as much as it riles. They are fickle, change alliances strategically, and are the masters of timing. Remember, they never become one of you, and you cannot manipulate them to permanently join your ranks. They know their power lies in the radical centre, and while they may for vote you, they are never voting with you. They vote with their pencils, not pens or stone tablets.

And they did not vote Republican. They voted just for Donald Trump because the Democrats got too full of themselves and became obnoxious and vindictive ideologues and alienated them because they took them for granted. UK PM Keir Starmer is learning this the hard way as we speak. Expect Trump’s parasitic hangers-on to learn the hard way, too.

This distinction is critical, and something the Republicans can’t grasp because they, too, are full of themselves, and salivating at the chance to be obnoxious and vindictive. This means when they go too far right, or they go after certain groups, the independent voters will punish them severely during the mid-terms.

Trump is not a regular kind of Republican president; so talk about JD Vance being an heir apparent is just a lot of childish wishing thinking. The independents wanted a chastened Trump back in office to fix the economy and return the country back to the centre, and they let him know in 2020 that the status quo won’t do. They gave him a lifeline in 2024, but it’s a fragile one. If Trump lets the parasites who are clinging on to him have any say, it’s over for him, and the party.

And because Trump can’t run for a third term, he can jettison this cargo, shut out the leeches feigning to be king-makers, and just make deals the way he did with Elon Musk and RFK Jr. He doesn’t need the leeches. They need him.

The Democrats would be wise to figure out this unspoken alliance because parachuting Kamala Harris was a huge mistake. She was no different than Hillary Clinton in 2016. The playbook was the same: the legacy press did not like her, then had to pretend they adored her, she had no platform with her me-centred campaign, she blew any chance of winning with her lack of savvy and over-abundance of arrogance, and then, when she lost, didn’t bother to come out of her hole for 24 hours.

This is not the method of winners.

We are not heading back to a primal era, no matter what the election results seem to indicate. The independents are giving the conservatives a two-year trial run. One step out of line, and they will be discarded in the same heap as the tone deaf journalists who cannot believe that they cannot tell people what to think or how to think about it.

If you want to know where we were since the Second World War, and where are heading now, you can read my other book. I don’t just write about journalism.

If journalists want to be relevant, they can start by reading my books.

I don’t write books about journalism anymore because I said all there was to say, and everything I said still stands. There are four viable paths journalism can take, and each of my books above spell it out in fine detail.

But to be clear: every j-school department in North America should be shut down. They are useless. Yes, you need to have new ones start from scratch from the radical centre because that’s the actual power base. The seeds of the profession’s destruction are here: too much hubris, and too little substance brought the profession down.

Journalism can’t actually be re-booted because a reboot suggests the software is fine, it just needs to start again. No, the software is lousy and defective. You need a new program entirely.

And the phrase reboot is arrogant itself: it implies the profession is flawless, which it is not.

The first step to recovery is to admit you have flaws which are bringing about your ruin that rivals will happily make worse so they can steal your paper crown and strut with it.

The analytical thinkers are eroding, but the primal thinkers are about to show the world why they were displaced way back in 1945.

As for me, I am a political atheist. I have better things to do with my life than bring pompoms to this circus to cheer for relics of yesterday who didn’t get the memo that we are in a world of tomorrow. Politics has become a venue for the justification and acceptable manifestation of jealousy and greed, and I am neither.