The article <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/08/walz-pulls-out-score-another-another-one-for-racism-coupled-with-democratic-party-and-media-ineptitude/" author="Dean Baker" source="CounterPunch">Walz Pulls Out: Score Another Another One for Racism, Coupled with Democratic Party and Media Ineptitude</a> is yet another well-written lament in a long list of laments about the utter lack of resistance to the grinding propaganda machine buoying the Trump administration. I don't really care about Tim Walz. He's an empty suit. For God's sake, he was nominated as a vice-presidential candidate to the even emptier suite of Kamala Harris. That he's bowing out of a re-election campaign doesn't really interest me. That said, he's getting railroaded for something that doesn't exist. Dean writes a good article debunking this stuff but, honestly? It's a waste of time. Even the people making the accusations don't believe them. The people online who've managed to pressure Walz into resigning don't believe in them. They don't even believe that Walz stands for the things that he says he stands for, or that they say he stands for. The only thing that matters to them is that Walz seems to be in opposition to Trump and his administration, so Trump and his administration---and their army of online volunteers, who make a fortune grifting the gullible---are making an example of him. It's quite certain that no-one in the Trump administration or who is adjacent to the Trump administration cares about fraud, and certainly not on principle. Dean writes, <bq><img attachment="linda-mcmahon-with-vince-mcmahon-on-the-set-of-wwe.webp" align="right" caption="Linda and Vince McMahon">Sometimes even high levels of fraud are apparently tolerated. As I noted previously, the Inspector General of the Small Business Administration (SBA) identified <b>$200 billion of potentially fraudulent payments in the Paycheck Protection Program</b>, an emergency pandemic started in Trump’s first term. This would have been <b>more than 15 percent of the money</b> that went out the door. That massive level and percentage of fraud proved not to be career ending for Donald Trump. In fact, it was <b>not even career ending for Linda McMahon, the SBA administrator responsible for overseeing the program. Trump promoted her to Education Secretary in his current term.</b></bq> Dean points out that Linda McMahon---someone whose entire work experience before the Trump administrations was working for the WWE---didn't suffer any loss of reputation for having been in charge of an agency that lost far more money to fraud. To reiterate: that this doesn't seem to matter isn't mysterious. They like Linda because she does thinks that they like and they don't like Tim because he doesn't. That they used supposed fraud as a lever to torpedo Tim's career is <i>incidental</i>. People don't care about the large-scale fraud from which Trump and his ilk benefitted because they haven't been ordered to do so by their media silo. The media silo doesn't exist in the U.S. that cares a lick about large-scale, white-collar crime. All media tell their minions to care about penny-ante bullshit so that the <i>hoi polloi</i> continue to fight amongst themselves and not against their betters in the self-selected elite. On this, all parties agree. They know on which side their bread is buttered.