The current election campaign pits the forces of backlash (“the old and angry”) against the forces of frontlash (“the new and different”), and November’s vote will be “a referendum on the existence and civic participation of Americans who are not white men,” contended Traister in a Wednesday piece for New York magazine.

Traister posited that “Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton…represent an altered power structure and changed calculations about who in this country may lead,” but warned, “While the resistance may be symptomatic of death throes, a rage at the dying of the white male light, it nonetheless presents a very real threat…Imagine Ted Cruz or Donald Trump or Marco Rubio in office with a Republican Congress and Supreme Court seats to fill. Voting: restricted. Immigration: halted. Abortion: banned. Equal pay: unprotected. Same-sex marriage: overturned.”

After airing an hour of coverage following the last Saturday night Democratic presidential debate on November 14, MSNBC skipped out on airing any post-debate analysis after Saturday’s third Democratic debate on ABC and instead played yet another episode of its weekend jail series Lockup.

In one of the more awkward and bizarre happenings you’ll see in a debate, Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate on ABC restarted without frontrunner Hillary Clinton following a commercial break and continued for over a minute until she returned to the stage. 

Debbie Wasserman Schultz may not want you to know about it, but there’s a Democratic presidential debate on Saturday evening, and Beutler believes that the candidates therein “would be doing the country a service by placing the right wing appeal to paranoia in its proper context—and then rejecting it forcefully.”

In a Friday piece, Beutler described this week’s Republican presidential debate as “an elaborate group sermon on the importance of being afraid”; opined that the GOP candidates “have made almost no attempt to argue” that their proposals “will reduce the terrorism risk, which is so small to begin with”; and asserted that Republicans’ “position on Jihadi terrorism (that no risk is too small to ignore) is practically the opposite of their position on mass shootings in general (that no risk is worth mitigating at all).”

On Friday, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC covered the new scandal brewing inside the Democratic presidential campaign with the data breach involving the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton campaigns (plus the Sanders camp suing the Democratic National Committee), but it was the CBS Evening News that sought to downplay the story by not covering the “brewing” “family feud.”