Posted on | April 27, 2026 | No Comments
In 2011, explaining his abandonment of “brain-dead” liberalism, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet published The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. It was there that he expressed what has become known as The Mamet Principle: “In order to continue advancing their illogical arguments, modern liberals have to pretend not to know things.” We see this all the time in the make-believe play-acting of TV personalities like Jake Tapper, who did a perfect imitation of Claude Rains in Casablanca in describing how he was shocked — shocked! — by the revelation that Joe Biden was senile.
As a journalist, one of my biggest gripes is that TV news has given people a mistaken idea about what journalism actually is. Writing a 700-word news article is a full day’s work for the reporter who has to rely on his own notes of conversations with sources. To be an actual reporter — as opposed to a TV talking head — means spending a lot of time on the phone, trying to get people to tell the truth when it would better suit them to keep the truth out of the newspaper. By contrast, if you understand what TV news actually is, you realize that the anchorman is paid for his ability to convey the proper emotion about what he’s telling you.
As Mamet remarked, newscasters are hired “not for their probity or for their intelligence, but for their ‘believability,’” and that is how Barack Obama became president — he had that same kind of superficial “believability” that characterizes a successful TV news anchor.
This brings us to Obama’s disingenuous (unsolicited and unnecessary) comment about Cole Allen’s botched assassination attempt Saturday night at the annual White House Correspondents dinner. By the time he pushed the “publish” button on that tweet, we did indeed “have the details about the motives” of the gunman. Allen’s social-media archives and his written “manifesto” made clear that Allen was a Democrat, inspired by the same vicious lies about Trump that Democrats and their media allies have been promoting for the past decade.
“His beliefs mirrored mainstream Democrat talking points” — in other words, he was radicalized not by some obscure fringe website, but by what every Democrat with access to a microphone or a camera has been saying publicly ever since Trump beat Hillary nearly 10 years ago.
Barack Obama’s intent was to conceal and obscure this truth, to assert that Democrats are against political violence, no matter how often we have seen them incite, defend, justify and participate in such violence (e.g., the “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots of 2020). As David Mamet said, Obama must “pretend not to know things” (and encourage others to join him in that pretense) or else the very existence of the Democratic Party might be jeopardized, because everybody would realize what a colossal scam it is (as all honest and intelligent people already do).
For the record he’s not that stupid, of course, be he revels in the comfort of knowing his constituents are. https://t.co/AJqM5KfOKp
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) April 27, 2026
