Black Pilled Panel

Supposed Experts at Pachyderm Meeting.

The Greater Omaha Pachyderm lunch group is perhaps the most informal Republican group in Nebraska, providing great access to Republican elected officials and candidates. On June 22, experts came into express concerns about the primary and upcoming general election. They provided a dystopian future of the Republican Party while bypassing their own myopic and biased viewpoints. This is not to subject them to great criticism but to state I found the discussion dismal on information and verbose on fear.

First, Jim Rose of KFAB went long on statistics but eventually stated he failed to see Scott Peterson winning the Secretary of State primary. This is part of the problem. If people become too provincial, they end up being myopic about the general world. He was so verbose about negative stats, I began to understand his confusion as he apparently became data-blind, letting the data hide actual opportunities. At times, I wondered if Rose should refrain from commenting on politics and stick with sports and economics. This crossed my mind when he referred to Brinker Harding as a “country club” Republican because Harding is not campaigning that way.

Ironically, my chance encounter with former Mayor Jean Stothert shed some light on a problem which plagued her election. I still think the rank and file law enforcement voted for Ewing as he was a former officer, but we disagreed. However, she mentioned after the election, someone asked her when the election was. This tells me the Republican Party, as well as the candidates, did not have a good get-out-the-vote strategy and was struggling with changes in the way people communicate. Instead of relying on electronic communication, volunteers are needed to go door to door merely to advise Republicans of the upcoming election.

Next speaker Jessica Flanagain was also so black pilled and buried in data, I could tell she could not see past the data. There is concern about mid-term redistricting, but Democrat-majority states are already so horrendously gerrymandered, they can barely squeak out a few congressional districts. Meanwhile, Republicans are gaining according to... Democrats. The supply-side group, Unleash Prosperity, pointed this out so clearly, and Black Republicans may be the actual winners (https://committeetounleashprosperity.com/hotlines/gop-gained-up-to-eight-house-seats-in-redistricting-wars/).

John Gage was very good, but when I asked about yellow journalism, he merely referenced misinformation on social media. However, there are horrendous smear campaigns which are merely taken as fact all across the media. In the chaotic media we face today, the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears gets contorted to a “Drug addicted Blonde squats on a house owned by a family of bears”. Such stories in corporate media thrive and are impossible to refute, and continue due to easy profitability. With a partitioned wall of communication, there is little to no crossover to alleviate the blind spots.

What is troubling for those of us relying on media is we are our own failure in appreciating the diversity and approach to it. There are still people who trust newspapers, which have deadlines, and trust radio and television which run on fixed schedules, but the real world streams 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and is in constant motion. At the same time, many do not trust any media and refuse engagement, resulting in a dark cloud or black hole on information and how they think. Overcoming this is a challenge.

Some organizations understand these problems such as Build Nebraska (https://www.buildnenow.com/) but they face limitations. My strong advice is to have broad social media presents with Facebook, X, TikTok, and Bluesky because this is the rhelm of where much information and propaganda reside. At the same time, do the foot work of door to door to see what people are saying and why. Do not rely on polls and surveys because they have their limitations. At the same time, there needs to be rapid response to bad information.

Some are concerned the Republican party is too Trump-centric but they underestimate the impact of Trump. When he was first eligible to vote, it was 1968 between Nixon and Humphrey and Nixon won by a landslide. By the time of the election, he had already earned a Bachelor of Science degree in economics at Wharton. He was 22 years old. Everyone has hear of his book Art of the Deal, but next to none have read his book Time to Get Tough. Perhaps if people merely heard of the book, they would stop judging him and start studying him.