Daniel Hochhalter Posts

It’s been a couple of weeks since the election. I have been silent on commenting largely out of curiosity to see how the media would respond to the election of Trump as president of the United States.

Election night had been quite a surprise. I was expecting that, by this time, ballots would be counted and recounted, lawyers would be involved, and America would still be waiting to find out who would be president.

Instead, much to everyone’s surprise, the race was called by 11:30 (mountain time). Though everyone predicted it would be a photo finish, Trump won the electoral college in a landslide as well as won the popular vote by a wide margin. Trump grew in his support among black males, Hispanics, and even white women. In addition, the Senate flipped by the GOP who also widened their margin by a few seats in the House.

Conservatives celebrated, many of the left melted down. On the right, there was relief that the nightmare of the last four years was coming to an end; on the left, they would, for some reason, packing their bags for internment camps.

Social media was quite enjoyable to watch. Many media wannabes who actually think they would be missed announced they were deleting the Twitter accounts (“Oh, please don’t! We need your sage like wisdom,” said nobody). Feminists filmed themselves shaving their heads in protests and vowed to refuse sex to all males (as though that were a bad thing). And videos showing themselves weeping were—forgive the insensitivity—were a tad melodramatic (it was kind of hard not to laugh).

Overall, however, I felt this election was as much against the media as it was against Harris and the Biden Presidency. A TV network had been quoted in the New York Magazine as saying that if Trump won, journalism, in its current form and having lost all influence, would be dead.

Thus the reason I waited to follow up. I realize they would all be licking their wounds over these last two weeks. I was also hoping that they might get enlightened with a little self-awareness. Would they realize they overplayed their hand when it came to bias? Would they see that a scant few actually listen to let alone believe them?

I have heard moments of this. For example, (I think it was on CNN) a pundit said, “This election is a referendum not just against Democrats but Republicans as well that the American people are tired of not being listened to.”

The owner of the L.A. Times canned his editorial staff and will bring the paper back to journalistic standards which include all points of view. Jeff Bazos, owner of the Washington Post and some upper levels of ABC News made similar comments as well. Word is even out that ABC News is looking to add (real) conservative voices to “The View,” which I am pretty sure will give the current hosts aneurisms.

Beyond that and a smattering of other voices, most of the media, once they caught their breath on doubling down. This election’s results, they insist, is not their faults.

It is Biden’s fault for not stepping away from reelection sooner (even though they did everything they thought possible to ignore his mental decline until the debate). Harris just did not have enough time, they insist, to communicate her non message to the nation (even though spent their every waking moments trying to communicate it on her behalf).

It’s Harris’s fault because—well, nobody liked Harris (even though they spent their remaining waking moments trying to canonize her.

Finally, sadly, they insist it’s the American people’s fault. We’re misogynists (though I would vote for Governor and Secretary of Department of Homeland Security nominee Kristi Noem for President in 2028 in a heartbeat). We’re racists (welcome , black males and Latinos to this club).

Interestingly, the one ad hominum attack I haven’t heard since election night was “Nazi.” Perhaps some of the intellectuals on the left encouraged those on their side to learn about what a Nazi really is.

Sadly, two weeks after the election, the media continues to show a severe lack in self-awareness. Currently, they are loudly whining about Trump’s cabinet picks.

Admittedly, a couple—let’s just say—intrigue me, though I am wildly thrilled about others. I am especially thrilled that some dude will not get picked solely because he wears a skirt.

Hopefully with a few national newspapers and a network or two leading the way the American media will look to reform its industry.

This early out, it still remains to be seen.

However, we Americans must continue to demand we be heard. I am saying this not only to Democrats who will use every trick to get in the way (though I find it curious as to why Democratic senators no longer want to get rid of the filibuster now that they are in the minority.. hmmm…). I am also saying this to the new Republican congress. Don’t try the old bait -and-switch.

And to media: for the love of everything, stop lying to us.

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I truly have had a lot of thoughts swirling around in my cranium since Tuesday about this hot mess of the 2024 presidential election. Those who lean right are used to being belittled, demeaned and called names: Deplorables, Garbage, Stupid, Misogynist, sexist, bigots, racists, homophobes. We’re used to it. These shots have come our way so often, they roll off our backs with little more than a shrug. They have lost any meaning and tell us that we’ve essentially won the debate.

Where I feel the left crossed the line is when they started throwing around the term “Nazi” to describe their political opponents.

Nothing or no one in this election remotely resembled Nazism.

Throwing around that term has far greater consequences to consider.

I teach history. Have taught it for about 20 years. I read history, and I am thoroughly interested in World War II. I have tried to answer the question how one man could whip up an entire nation to follow him in committing some of the most heinous crimes in human history. How did he fool a nation?

I have read a lot on this, scores of books about the rise of Nazism in the 1920s and 30s. This reading list actually includes Hitler’s infamous and sinister Mein Kampf.

I have personally walked on Utah, Gold, and “bloody” Omaha beaches in France, visited the World War II Museum in Caen–one of the first French cities liberated by the Allies, the church in Sainte-Mare-Eglise where a soldier from the 82nd Airborne’s parachute got hung up on the steeple the night of the invasion, and Pont-du-Hoc where American soldiers had to climb a 90-foot cliff face in the face of Nazi bullets firing down upon them. I even visited a Nazi cemetery in La Cambe where hundreds of German soldiers are buried beneath black crosses.

I have visited the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., three times. And of all the horrors spoken of there, I remember most sitting in the Hall of Remembrance alongside others at the time with a series of numbers tattooed on their forearms.

Though there are people much smarter than me in this area, I know enough, and I continue to learn.

So when I hear the word “Nazi” thrown around as political rhetoric, I cringe.

Those who sling this word at anybody they don’t agree with, know little about that horrific movement.

When the term is thrown around as it has been in the last week, it minimizes and sanitizes that horror. It dishonors those who survived Auschwitz and other camps as well as those beneath the white crosses at Omaha beach.

When that term is used today to silence political opponents, it dilutes the horror of that movement.

Like the word misogynist or homophobe, it too will be overused to the point of losing its meaning.

It is time to retire that term as a rhetorical tool.

Or else we will no longer be able to recognize when it truly appears.

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I have to be honest, it has been very hard to gloat over the election results on Tuesday night.

I am glad that American journalism in its current form is dead. I am glad they have seen their absolute irrelevance first hand.

I am so glad that calling people Nazis by those who clearly don’t understand the absolute evil of that movement has been rendered an ineffective rhetorical tactic.

I am glad that, contrary to the media and the experts and the elitists, We the People are the ones in charge of this country. (A word of caution to the incoming administration and Congress: We the People are your boss too and we’re watching)

I glad that Kamala was correct when she said in her concession speech that “our darkest years are ahead of us.” For all Marxist-based, DEI, CRT ideals, they most definitely are!

I am glad the cis-white males are no longer the sole misogynist oppressor in the country. According to Al Sharpton, black males are misogynists as well (though given the results’ breakdown, so are Hispanics, black women, and white women as well.)

I am glad that some in the media talked about their industry looking within to see how they got it so wrong, although with their TDS diagnoses, that probably won’t last beyond this week.

I am glad the Election results were so decisive that there could no longer be any question that we the people do not like being spoken down to. We do not like being seen as children to be cared for. And WE DO NOT LIKE BEING CALLED NAMES because of who we vote for or our beliefs.

Finally, for the incoming president and Congress, allow me restate my earlier caution. You now control the White House and likely both houses of Congress. It is now SOLELY on you to not blow this. You won’t be able to blame the other side or the media. You already know how they will oppose you. It will be no surprise. The next four years will be all on you.

The President-Elect has formed a huge cross-cultural coalition. Your voters truly are “We the People.”

And if you note the election results, We the People are pissed.

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Tomorrow is election day.

After seeing ad after ad, after burning reams of fliers through the mail (never read), after hours of discussions and even more hours avoiding commercial TV, it is finally here.

As a teacher of history, I can honestly say I feel sorry for high school students 50 years from now for the extra homework they will receive to try to explain the 2024 election.

Bizarre would be an understatement. Clown show would probably more accurately describe it.

We have seen the American institutions of media and government sink to their lowest levels. We have seen our trust in these institutions sink to their lowest levels, and as of today, they have done absolutely nothing to attempt to rebuild it. And no matter the outcome of tomorrow, that mistrust will likely continue for years to come.

We have witnessed what a society that has completely embraced the serpent’s temptation from the Garden of Eden looks like:

• Everyone making up their own definitions of right and wrong;

• Truth becoming wishy-washy and fluctuating out of control;

• History being rewritten before our very eyes—even history as late as the week before;

• People who have little to no understanding of what a Nazi is calling others a Nazi in an lazy effort to discredit their opponent;

• Our president, who once said “we need to tone down the heated rhetoric” calling his opponent’s supporters “garbage”;

• The White House rewriting the official transcripts of said insult to claim something different;

• Not one, but two assassination attempts of a president or former president—something in which similar acts in American history can be counted on one hand (plus maybe a finger or two on the other;

• “Experts” in the media attributing these attempts to the “overheated rhetoric” of the victim while using the same overheated rhetoric themselves;

• Media experts making no connection to their own previous contradictions and or insults (i.e., hiding the mental decline of Biden, and then questioning—with zero evidence—the cognitive abilities of their opponent;

• A presidential coup committed by his own side, forcing him out of the race and replacing him with a candidate who has exhibited the leadership skills of a knee pad;

• This same candidate, who as late as July, possessing only a 28% approval rating, suddenly having a 49% approval rating in the first week as a candidate;

• A media who threw off any attempt to appear objective to deliberately cover for the Democratic candidate’s inabilities and odd idiosyncrasies.

This is in no way an exhaustive list. But one thing is clear: we Americans had better start demanding more of these institutions.

The ultimate responsibility rests with us.

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This election, if anything, will be a referendum on an American institution.

I ran across an interesting quote the other day. In the “New York Intelligencer,” Features Editor Charlotte Klein quoted an unnamed TV executive as saying: “If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media, and we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means mainstream media is dead in its current form. And the question is what does it look like after.”

Welp, I thought, that seems a good enough reason for Trump to win.

This election—blissfully ending shortly (I hope)—will not be a party mandate. The American people will be voting on mean tweets versus an empty shell of a politician with zero leadership skills and empty promises.

No, more than the outcome, this election will be a referendum on American journalism.

I always knew journalism hated those on the right; however, in 2024, they threw off all subtly and openly campaigned on Harris’s behalf and covered for her empty campaign. When she did interview, they tossed softball questions which she still managed to botch.

After the two assassination attempts on Trump, they: 1) downplayed it; 2) quickly moved on, and 3) completely blamed him for the rhetoric.

If American journalism achieved anything, it was the complete shedding of self-awareness.

They have rewrote history (by ignoring Harris’s unpopularity as VP and even claiming she was never a “border czar”—a term they coined for her).

They claimed, without any evidence or that to the contrary, Trump’s assassins were Trump supporters.

They did backflips to cover up Biden’s mental decline—something well over half the country could easily see. Then, when it couldn’t be hidden anymore, they demanded he not run. Finally, they had the audacity to actually question Trump’s cognitive decline.

They fact-checked Vance about the claim of MI13 gangs taking over apartments in Colorado by saying it was only a few instances of this as though a “few instances” was somehow acceptable.

They’ve completely taken his quotes out of context by trying to lazily compare something Trump said to Hitler.

Recently, while criticizing Liz Cheney as a being a war hawk from her comfy place in D.C., asked rhetorically, how she would react when she had rifles “shooting at her.”

Journalists went apoplectic, claiming the Trump said Cheney should be assassinated. (One anchor, after making that claim, after a dramatic pause, “Let that sink in.”)

No one bit, and even many who hate Trump said that was totally out of context. Liberal comedian Bill Maher on his HBO tv show said, “I woke up today to the headline that Trump had called for a firing squad for Liz Cheney. And this is what I really don’t like about the media. No, he didn’t.”

2024 is the year the media overplayed their hand. This was a year they weren’t even trying to hide their bias.

They have become a parody of themselves. I can already tell you how they will respond Tuesday night depending on who wins. If Harris wins, they will say it’s a political mandate for change, they will build her up as the greatest potential as president, and they will proclaim elections have consequences. They will gloat.

If Trump wins, they will challenge the results, question whether there was voter fraud or not, and discuss how journalists will be rounded up into concentration camps. They might even cry.

I hope this election makes the TV exec’s prophecy come true. I hope the media will become so close to death that they will have no choice but to question their relevance, become self-aware of what they say, and make a real effort to return to the days of Walter Cronkite.

That in and of itself will be worth a Trump win.

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Dear Pot,

Remember the COVID lockdown, when citizens were not allowed into places unless they had their proper papers in order? Remember when those people without papers were ostracized, ridiculed, fired from their jobs, and censored–generally relegated to sub citizen–for their views?

Remember during the riots, when a certain governor of Minnesota, despite state-run “fact-checkers” saying otherwise, delayed the request of Minneapolis mayor to deploy the National Guard 24 hours while the city burned–bring up interesting images of Kristalnacht?

Remember how that same governor (and his current running mate for president) recently said, “There’s no guarantee of free speech” in the name of “misinformation” which is defined by those in power? Remember when the current administration tried to create a Ministry of Truth–I mean a Department of Misinformation?

Remember the 2023 RealClearPolitics survey that said 47% of Democrats says that speech should be legal “only under certain circumstances” and that same survey said roughly one-third of Democratics said that Americans have “too much freedom?”

Remember when the current Democractic president called half of the nation’s citizens “garbage.” Others referred to these same citizens as “a basket of deplorables?” Remember how the state-run press and those on his side bent over backwards, did cartwheels, hyper-nuance it, and rewrote history to explain that–and much of everything–away?

Remember when a former president was shot and the state-run press said it was largely his fault?

My dear friend Pot, you’re a Nazi.

Sincerely,

Kettle

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Ever since Hulk Hogan ripped off his shirt during his speech at the Republican National Convention, Kamala Harris has been hemorrhaging the males of the human species from her campaign.

And as her campaign is starting to sink both nationally and in the swing states, the Democratic ticket has to swallow its disgust and reach out to the demographic the Democrats despise the most: the man.

Black men. Hispanic men. And the most toxic of all toxic masculinity, the white men.

That the political party that has consistently labeled men as toxic as well as the most dangerous domestic terrorists in the world now has to reach down into sewer of testosterone and ask for their vote is most ironic. To think that a Democrat female needs men is eyebrow raising to say the least.

Irony aside, their attempt to try to reach out to men this last week has been cringe worthy at the least.

The first attempt (not produced by the Harris campaign) was a one minute ad of “real men” standing in front of manly things and saying in deep voices that they both drink whiskey from the barrel, eat carburetors, support the right to abortion, and vote for Harris (Apparently, according to this ad, “real men” have to be bleeped out too). At the worst it was a collage of bad male actors pretending to be real men. At the best, it was satire.

As one who loves satire, I would like to give the producers the benefit of the doubt and say it’s a parody. However, I am not so sure. During an interview with the director Jacob Reed he never once claimed it as such. In fact, Reed labeled it as sketch comedy that is nonetheless true, saying hoped it would “spark a conversation” about what it means to be a real man in America. I guess if it is satire, Reed’s objective technically could be achieved. But it did make one cringe.

Next, an attempt from the Harris campaign to the reach males fell flat when Governor and current VP candidate Tim Walz thought he would invite a bunch of the media on a pheasant hunt with him. All we saw was a man dressed in a never-before-worn, sparkling hunter’s orange cap and vest struggling to load his shotgun, looking more like Elmer Fudd than a Vice Presidential candidate (that simile is not mine. The internet made this connection, and once you see photos of Walz alongside Fudd, you can’t unsee it). Now, it’s unclear whether he was trying to load the shotgun or clear a jam, but it was clear he didn’t how his gun worked.

Both of this week’s examples of trying to reach the male voter not only fell flat or was simply just embarrassing, but it also showed what happens when a group spends years trying to make caricatures of a particular demographic while demonizing them. For the last several years, the man was portrayed as an oaf on TV. He was a klutz at everything he did and dumber than a knee pad. He had been emasculated in the action genre, and whenever an attempt was made to make a male hero, it was lambasted as misogynist and male chest-pounding. Further, the male had been accused of being, with little to no actual evidence, of a domestic terrorist, a potential rapist, an abuser, and toxic all around. There are women who openly believe they don’t need men. Society has been told by the “experts” that a man’s opinion not only does not matter but that he also shouldn’t have one at all. Males are told we are “privileged” by POC experts who make a fee giving a single speech more than I make in an entire year.

The male should just beg for forgiveness for sins done by multiple races generations before and quietly sit down.

But now the male is needed.

And Kamala needs them bad.

Now she needs the male opinion to save her struggling campaign. Now she must mobilize them, get them on her side.

However, that’s turning out to be tricky. When your party has created caricature of an entire gender, you can only reach said gender in the only way you perceive them: through ways in which you stereotyped them all along.

Thus, the silliness that is now coming out of her campaign.

What’s a man? According to the left, he fixes cars, shoots things, sits on motorcycles, leans against a rustic fences, has a beard, drinks whiskey, and cares deeply about his daughter having the right to terminate his grandchild, and occasionally throws in a potty word for emphasis.

This is the problem of dehumanizing a part of the population because there will eventually come a time when you might actually need them.

And when you appeal to them using your stereotypes of them, don’t be surprised when that attempt comes across as foolish and patronizing.

That’s why those two instances backfired so dramatically (along with the racist “White Dudes for Harris” that was attempted in August). Contrary to the Democrat’s definition, masculinity isn’t merely acts of behavior. It is of the heart. It comes deep within, a unique instinct given by our Creator. Masculinity at it’s very depth sees itself as protector against those who are toxic, twists it, and causes harm.

I am seeing a wonderful trend on social media of women encouraging men to embrace their masculinity once again and be the men and fathers God created them to be. Likely femininity, masculinity is very good in the eyes of our Creator.

The left has thrown the male gender under the bus in the name of DEI, and now they question why this group isn’t voting for them. They have lost most men until they can raise candidates who truly understand the male psyche and not mock or belittle it.

This likely won’t be for at least a generation.

Until then, men can laugh at the left’s attempt to speak to them because those attempts have no authenticity.

Now give me a whiskey, let me lean against a fence, and swear.

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I have seen an alarming tend in national politics that is alarmingly picking up steam: why is it that—largely on the left (if I am inaccurate, show me the case)—when one side fears losing an election, they try to throw the book at him or her?

The current euphemism for this is called “lawfare.” According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, lawfare is defined as “the use of legal action to cause problems for an opponent.”

During the primary elections last spring, it appeared that every time Trump won a primary, a progressive district attorney from a distant state would bring together some ambiguous laws piecemealed together to charge him.

Slowly, those cases are being methodically thrown out on appeals. The The one that suck were the 94 charges brought against him in New York over actions in which there was no victim let alone the fact that no one could directly say which law was being broken.

So Trump was charged with dozens of felonies by a DA who literally campaign on bring down Trump, heard by “a jury of peers” in New York City where people will find a cheeseburger guilty if it had an (R) after its name, before a New York City judge who court proceedings were eyebrow raising (apparently a unanimous verdict doesn’t have to mean unanimous). Honestly I almost felt the judge, feeling there was no basis for the charges but also didn’t want to be the judge famous for letting Trump of, so he made ridiculous and appealable rulings in order to make some appeals court throw it out (it is getting harder and harder to not be a conspiracy theorist these days). No one believed he would be found guilty.

And that was by design.

What the left wanted and got was a guilty verdict so Trump could be labeled a felon. I still hear that word occasionally being thrown around, bur hasn’t stuck outside of, say, MSNBC. Most Americans felt the conviction bogus. The problem is the left overplayed their lawfare strategy. The consensus among detached legal scholars seems to be that no one would be charged with these “crimes” if their name wasn’t Trump.

It seems off. And the felon label didn’t stick.

Here’s the problem with that. Americans will no longer trust the judiciary in general because of games like these. The left might win the battles in this strategy but ultimately lose the war for public trust (kind of like Public Health after covid).

Sadly, this is lawfare is occurring in Montana as I speak. Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen is currently in some kind of ethics hearing for something they claim he did wrong.

The council (who is made up of officials who openly hate him) hearing the case are clearly making judgments designed to harm his arguments. If they rule against him—which face it, they will—they could recommend disbarring him, which they likely will. The MT supreme court could hear the appeal, but they collectively hate him. And mind you, he hasn’t done anything that literally every AG in the country, Democrat or Republican, hasn’t done, but as Joseph Stalin infamously said “show me the man I’ll show you the crime.”

The bigger problem with what is going on is that while these officials are busy patting themselves on the back for bringing down hated opponents, trust in government is hemorrhaging among the American people.

The government needs to start being honorable again to try to get that trust back. No political victory is worth the loss of that trust.

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Listening to leaders in the Democrat Party this last few weeks, I am not convinced that Trump is the biggest threat to democracy.

Yesterday, Hillary went on the Rachel Maddow show and said, “if they [social media companies] don’t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control.”

That seems a tad Orwellian.

Of course to buffer the shock of that statement, she mentions that without that control, there could be “real harm” toward “social and psychological effects” as well as “threats of violence” and, obviously, “child porn.”

The latter reason is obvious—no one with a moral conscience thinks child porn should be legal. Technically, that’s not a free speech issue—that’s a full-on felony.

However, real harm “socially and psychologically” raises a big red flag: 1) no one has a right to not be offended, and if you’re worried about being socially or psychologically harmed, get off social media; 2) who gets to decide which causes this harm?; and 3) that’s not the government’s job to decide.

Finally, “threats of violence” might seem obvious on the surface; however, this is the same group that claims “language can be violence.” Merely *saying* something that might send a fragile flower to their safe space is considered as violence. Language is violence and therefore must be censored, unless of course, that language is directed to Trump, in which literally anything could be said because—well, it’s Trump (after all, he’s a threat to democracy so therefore we must keep him out of office by any means necessary including, ironically, undemocratic ones).

Back to my point, Hillary isn’t the only one pushing this. This week, former presidential candidate and secretary of state said at the World Economic Forum that the First Amendment is a “major block” to keep people from believing the wrong things.

Then current Democractic Vice President candidate Tim Walz said “There is no guarantee on free speech on misinformation or hate, and especially around our democracy.”

Um, yeah, there kind of is.

And the Constitution recognize that right as God-given, which means no human can take it away.

In 2022, the Biden Administration’s attempted to establish a Disinformation Governance Board, and after that went up in flames once exposed, Biden appointed Kamala Harris as chief of a White House task force designed to protect “women and LGBTQI+ political leaders…and journalists” from “online harassment and abuse.” (Note: misinformation is the recent euphemism for “speech I disagree with or don’t like. It’s amazing how much misinformation turns out to be true.)

This week, the satire website The Babylon Bee sued–and got a stay against–California’s Governor Gavin Newsom over a law cracking down on satire and humor speech.

Apparently we can have a utopic society were it not for that 1st Amendment.

And that’s not all.

Obviously the left is going after the 2nd Amendment (they are, contrary to their claims, with their nonsensical “common sense solutions”—anyone with an ounce of terminology in firearms knows this). Several years ago, then District Attorney Kamala, said she has the right to go into homes to make sure guns are stored properly despite that pesky 4th Amendment. (That was a long time ago when she said that, one might object; however, in one of her few interviews, she recently stated: “my values haven’t changed.”)

Further there is whining on the left regarding the electoral college, life time terms in the Supreme Court, etc. This week, Biden is trying to use my tax dollars to forgive student loans–an act both the Supreme Court and a number of federal courts says he has no authority to do.

What is it with the left and its growing disgust with that pesky Constitution? I have actually and directly *heard* these folks say the Constitution is “outdated” and needs to be changed or discarded in order to achieve their definition of utopia.

My response typically is that individual has every right to say their nonsense. The Constitution gives them the God-given (NOT human-given) right to say that. The Constitution also protects me from forcing their dystopic vision on me.

“We the people” must decide in November which candidate will work within the boundaries of the Constitution and which will attempt to constantly find ways to work around it.

When whomever wins in November stands on the podium in January taking the Oath of Office (a constitutionally-mandated oath—Article 2, Sec. 1, Clause 8, vowing to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” I have legitimate concerns about which side would actually do it better.

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