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Rachel Maddow’s admission about the vice president-elect presented a backhanded dig at the American people’s choice when asked what she got “wrong” in 2024.

As a corporate media mea culpa continued over the disregard and deflection of concerns surrounding President Joe Biden’s mental acuity, Semafor sought insider perspectives on what the news got wrong throughout the year. Amid the subjective samplings that touched on artificial intelligence, Taylor Swift, and social media, the MSNBC host clung to the “weird” narrative regarding Vice President-elect J.D. Vance.

“I thought people would be more unnerved by JD Vance,” Maddow said in a seeming slight on the electoral success of President-elect Donald Trump’s ticket. “Less the cat lady thing and more the ‘Americans [are] going to have to get over their dictator phobia’ Mencius Moldbug thing.”

Her reference to blogger Curtis Yarvin’s pseudonym followed a lengthy segment on her program before the election where she recapped a 2021 conversation between the then-Ohio Senate candidate and podcaster Jack Murphy that had touched on rooting out the administrative state while mentioning Moldbug’s writings.

Among those who frequently drew unwarranted connections between Trump and nefarious characters, including fascist dictators, Maddow has faced backlash from her former mentor, Keith Olbermann, who ripped into the primetime host after she inked a new deal with MSNBC for $25 million.

“She just re-signed for $25m. If you think she’d do anything for principle,” wrote the commentator, “I’ll light a candle for you.”

The extent to which Maddow had gone to prop up the idea that Vance was “weird” included an unhinged inference regarding J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings.

Like consideration of Yarvin’s blog, Vance was said to share an appreciation of “The Lord of the Rings” with billionaire Peter Thiel, prompting Maddow to argue, “Like Mr. Thiel who named his companies after things in the ‘Lord of the Rings’ series of J.R.R. Tolkien books — ‘Lord of the Rings’ is sort of a favorite cosmos for naming things and cultural references for a lot of far-right and alt-right figures within Europe and the United States.”

“Peter Thiel names all of his things after Tolkein figures and places like his company Palantir for example,” Maddow went on. “Like his mentor, like Peter Thiel who had given him all his jobs in the world, Mr. Vance also, when he founded his own venture capital firm, with help from Peter Thiel, named it after a ‘Lord of the Rings’ thing and called it Narya — N-A-Y-R-A, which you can remember because it’s ‘Aryan’ but you move the ‘n’ to the front.”

Other admissions included in Semafor’s rundown found Mark Cuban stating bluntly, “I was wrong about the election outcome,” while CNN’s Kaitlan Collins suggested, “2024 served as the ultimate reminder to never assume what the news is going to be. We were surprised at almost every turn of this election — and as a reporter, you should always operate with an open mind. It’s easy, but risky, to think you know where a story is going. This year reminded us that we don’t.”

Kevin Haggerty
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