Where Are You Getting Your Information?

December 28, 2024

See there? Floating facedown in the swimming pool?

Yup. That’s my country.

You’re probably wondering how we got to this point.

So am I.

Let’s back up a bit.

In early 2020, I started writing a post that never got finished or published about the Democratic primary going on at the time. There were many decent candidates with ambitious and popular ideas. But we were lowkey shamed for supporting any of that, that in order to oust the Orange Thing we had to play it safe and go boring and steady, and that was Joe Biden and not Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

It seemed to me a losing strategy, so typical of the party. After all, the Orange Thing had an excited base that got him elected. So did Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton did not have one as much, and that plus a lot of baggage she has led to her upset loss in 2016. And Joe Biden? Not very interesting or exciting at all. Plus, with Covid showing up by this point, couldn’t host big rallies anyway.

So because he was so deemed “electable”, Biden got the nomination, so that was the choice.

Lo and behold, after lots of counting the following November, Biden narrowly won Pennsylvania the Saturday after Election Day and was declared the winner, freeing us from the Orange Thing at long last, prompting dancing in the streets in cities around the nation. He was boring as can be, but it was an unusual time and situation where that was the winning trait against the shitshow that was his tangerine-hued opponent.

Perhaps then 2016 was just a mistake, a miscalculation, an anomaly. The Orange Thing was so actively repulsive there was no way he could win, and Clinton seemed so clearly more qualified, that she was a lock. Then, well, you know…

When he was out after the 2020 election, as we know, the Orange Thing denied the loss, declared fraud, and sent his rabid followers to attack the Capitol, leading to his second impeachment just a little over a year after the first. This failed, so he wasn’t blocked from running for president again.

Which he did. He sailed through the primaries, well on his way to pulling a Grover Cleveland given Biden’s abysmal approval ratings, with little opposition from Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley who promptly turned around and kissed his ass and thanked him for his disparaging nicknames for them.

Biden was seeming, well, old, but still doing his job. Then the June debate happened, and he was seeming really old. Nancy Pelosi, who’s even older but in Congress so it doesn’t matter, ran some behind the scenes maneuvering urging him out of reelection. And in July, the switch happened, and now the candidate was the younger, sharper, popular Kamala Harris. A campaign that felt irredeemably dead on its feet sprang to life, as hope came through that we had a capable, exciting candidate, to move past the Biden shortcomings and bring us something new. The Orange Thing didn’t stand a chance.

She walloped him in the debate. The convention was vibrant. Her campaign tore through the battleground states, making her case, knocking on doors, running shit tons of ads about how she’ll improve the economy and take on greed. She was likable. Her rallies packed arenas. She appeared on SNL.

Unlike Clinton’s and Biden’s runs, she hit all the right notes. A candidate the voters were enthusiastic about, who could energize the base and swing voters alike. She was a break from the mold, from the old guard. A breath of fresh air.

The Orange Thing, meanwhile, was rambling incoherently about pet-eating Haitians and Arnold Palmer’s penis at his poorly-attended rallies, with his get-out-the-vote efforts amounting to Elon Musk’s legally-questionable scheme of offering large sums of money to people who claim to support (his own interpretations of) the first and second amendments. And he is, after all, only three years younger than the too-old-to-be-president Joe Biden.

The polls inexplicably showed them tied, with her having a slight but statistically insignificant lead. And one renowned-for-accuracy one even had her winning Iowa? Incredible!

So it seems all the pieces are more or less together for this one to go well…

And then it didn’t. At all.

We just can’t have nice things, I guess.

What in the holy fuck happened?

Oof, I shouldn’t have asked that. If the election results were the initial quake, then comes the aftershock that is… the post-mortem.

Where did we go wrong? Were we too progressive or not progressive enough? Did we pay enough attention to the “working class”? Was she too anti-Israel or too pro-Israel? Did Biden wait too long to drop out? Was campaigning with Liz Cheney a good or bad idea? Did she talk about the economy enough and in the right way? Was she sufficiently nice or mean to trans people?

Whatever the case, it’s an excuse for Democrats to react by eating their own, based entirely on their own wishes for the campaign and nothing at all about reality.

Whatever the case, it’s all the Democrats’ fault, something it seems both sides are agreed on.

Except, well, let’s have a look at the above paragraph again, about Orange Thing’s incoherent rambling about golfer dick and Elon “skipping like a dipshit” Musk paying people for support.

And that’s leaving out the Madison Square Garden rally, featuring racist comedians going on about black people carving watermelons for Halloween and the floating garbage island in the Atlantic called “Puerto Rico”. And the declaration of our country being for “Americans” only (their specific narrow definition, of course).

That speaks to a bigger issue than any post-mortem intra-party finger pointing. For one, had it gone the other way, would the Orange Thing supporters be rethinking his behavior and the rallies? Hell no, they’d be screaming that the election was stolen from them again and staging another insurrection.

Compare to the Women’s March in 2017, which I attended, full of supporters of the candidate who lost despite winning the popular vote, numbering over a million filling the streets of downtown DC. Despite having a lot more reason to feel the election had been stolen, we managed not to ransack the Capitol.

Joe Biden was “too old” to be president, but for some reason this concern disappeared for the Orange Thing. Experts suggested economy was doing better, that Biden-Harris policies to fix things were good, but tell that to, well, just about anyone, since no one seemed to hear or know or believe that. All around the world, incumbents are losing as people are frustrated with the continuing economic repercussions of the pandemic, people more interested in showing no confidence to those they believe caused it rather than making sure those they replace them with are any better. Hell, we’ve been hearing for years now that the Orange Thing winning this election was inevitable, so self-fulfilling prophecy much?

What do you do about such an egregious double standard, such a seemingly impossible hand to be dealt? How does this even happen?

This is not to say the Harris campaign didn’t make some bad moves that absolutely merit some serious discussion and reconsidering. But it is to say none of these bad moves should have been necessarily disqualifying, least of all in comparison to the freak in the garbage truck musing about Hannibal Lecter for some reason.

At this point, I want to make a side note about the war in Gaza. I have a Palestinian Christian mom and attended a few rallies in the past year demanding a ceasefire and end to hostilities. That said, honestly, Harris was still the clear choice to me, despite her being part of the administration all but greenlighting the genocide over there. For one, there’s not a lot she really was at liberty to say if it deviated from Biden’s agenda for over there, as she is still the vice president and it’s a very sensitive geopolitical matter. And certainly the Orange Thing was only going to be worse, confirming as such with his declaration that Israel should “finish the job”, despite some of his measly claims near the end that he’s some kind of peace candidate. And if she had come out more against Israel’s actions over there, AIPAC and CUFI would have waged an all out war on her, probably already holding up Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush as examples to keep her compliant. So, furious as I am at the administration for what’s happening over there, I’m not holding it too much against her having taken that tack. That said, the campaign still made some stupid moves, such as actively shunning pro-Palestine activists from events and refusing to let Ruwa Romman speak at the DNC. And, yes, it’s very possible and even likely she really wouldn’t have done any better than Biden’s abysmal handling of things over there. And clearly mine is not a view overwhelmingly held by Arab-Americans, given how Dem votes tanked in Michigan towns like Dearborn and Hand Crank or Ham Sandwich or whatever it’s called.

But still my point stands. This was not necessarily dealbreaking, at least not single-handedly. Especially not when literally all of the far too few politicians in this country vocally and actively opposing Israel’s assault on Gaza are Democrats and zero are Republicans.

And the blame lies squarely on those who voted for the Orange Thing. You can go on all you want about campaigns and figures making wrong moves and bad statements and paying too much or little attention to whatever issue or population subset. But it was the voters who voted. They have agency. They saw what was going on or at least could have found out. A large enough number of people chose to cast their votes for him, knowing full well who he was. And they chose poorly. Let’s just feel free to say that.

They chose poorly why? Because they had poor ideas and influences.

They’re being fed a steady diet of bad information. If they got any at all. In fact, those who actually follow news and know really anything about how politics works overwhelmingly went for Harris. And the rest? Not so much.

They’re fed a steady diet of how the Orange Thing represented some sort of True America while Harris represented all that would unravel the very fabric of our lives and culture. They blame all the country’s problems from housing to healthcare on “illegal” immigrants. They’re invited to lean into the prejudices of their parents and grandparents, that this family strength and sticking with one’s own people is of utmost importance, whereas those suggesting you rethink this culture and these prejudices are out of touch or infected with some “woke mind virus”.

Social media takes a lot of the blame here. Which is annoying since social media is ideally supposed to be the strongest tool for countering bad information and manipulative tribalism, what with being able to interact with people all over the world directly, thus challenging lies and stereotypes about far flung people and places perpetuated by power-hungry leaders and racist uncles alike. But the reality is less rosy, with most social media being owned by egotistic billionaires with the power to control which ideas flourish and which are throttled as serves their needs and desires. The Skipping Dipshit bought and then mangled Twitter this way for the sole purpose of displaying that he could. And he’s doing the same to our country.

I’m not making any sort of “echo chamber” accusations here, and honestly I hate that shit. Some say social media users keep themselves in a bubble, interacting only with like-minded people, that this leaves them wholly unchallenged and unaware of what people outside of that circle really think. Seriously, fuck off with that. One major benefit of social media is that you even can find like-minded people you have things in common with if they are scarce in your offline life. Even so, everyone makes choices about who they keep in their inner circle. Being so selective doesn’t mean you’re insulated from differing opinions. There’s no shortage of that even if you’re by yourself. This is just a disingenuous assertion that if you’re unwilling to waste time and energy in a fruitless online debate with a racist troll then it is you and not that racist troll who is the intolerant and polarizing one. And somehow people are believing that nonsense. Of course they are. It’s mostly those on the right that accuse those on the left of it, without a shred of self-awareness.

We went and held everyone except racist trolls responsible for racist trolling, including the ludicrous claim that they only became racist trolls because the “intolerant left” forced them into it somehow, and now the racist trolls have wedged themselves into the halls of power. Orange Thing supporters nod approvingly at his hare-brained plans to deport people and brutalize peaceful protesters because, one, we keep telling them it’s not their or his responsibility not to promote this shit, and, most importantly, they think his callousness toward the most vulnerable makes him powerful, that those who support social justice and compassion are the weak ones. They see it as a choice between being the bully’s allies or the bully’s victims, so they choose the former. What they forget is that the bully’s allies always eventually become the bully’s victims.

But such is the sickness of authoritarianism, which rightwing news wholeheartedly applauds and the rest irresponsibly downplay. You’re made to believe the bully is good and righteous, that those targeted by the bully deserve it and should have acted better and should be made to stay in their proper place. That anything casting the bully in a less than stellar light is “fake news”. Such is the sickness when even apparently left-leaning news media kill their own editorial teams’ Harris endorsements before the election lest the Orange Thing win and enact revenge on them.

Those who voted for the Orange Thing are responsible for his second term. But so are those who fed those voters bad information. The information is controlled, regardless of partisan lean, by the rich and powerful, certainly no one who truly identifies with the economic struggles of most Americans, but certainly those who will gleefully exploit those struggles to amass more wealth and power for themselves. And, even with what I said above about the cards being so stacked against Democrats (thanks to that information, of course), the Harris campaign was still under the thumb of wealthy corporate interests which had a hand in her messaging which legitimitely put off struggling people who were starved for something better. But, of course, same deal with the Orange Thing’s campaign.

We do have some independent media seeking to tell the real stories (somewhat) free from corporate and billionaire control. Until they get big enough to be either destroyed or bought out by the rich and powerful. At which point more must crop up. The Skipping Dipshit ruined Twitter, but Mastodon and Bluesky have cropped up to fill the void. They aren’t flawless, of course, and before long they’ll falter. It’s exhausting. You just want to have one social media site that’s still usable that you have fifteen years of content on it already and is perhaps still your only means of contact for a lot of people, without feeling at the mercy of someone who may be dining at Mar-a-Lago right now. And you just want to check the Washington Post or CNN and expect reliable news coverage, rather than having to wonder what they are sidestepping or burying or passive-voicing.

And you just want to feel confident that, no matter who wins the election, the country and Constitution and democracy will live on, that everything will be okay.

It was 19 years ago today I launched this site, at the tail end of 2005, when blogs were in their heyday, where all the independent amateur “journalism” was happening, on multiple different websites, decentralized, with truly insightful ideas and deeply horrific takes and everything in between. Now most of this is confined to just a few megasites run by billionaires who control the content, where they demote all exterior links to nobody blogs and major established newspapers alike. Even so, it doesn’t replace real journalism, which is in fact a full time career, an all too important role of risking it all to seek out the truth and tell it to the people no matter what it may be, and achieves what someone recreationally ranting on in two skinny columns with a questionable color scheme just can’t. But the real news outlets are either dying or, again, under the thumb of billionaires who will twist it to serve their own needs. And even with the independent ones, while neglected and inconvenient stories might get told, so might the anti-vaxxer who says shampooing your hair with mustard will cure cancer gain a disturbingly large following. But maybe such is just the challenge of maintaining a society that values both facts and free speech.

If facts and free speech can survive this incoming administration.

Maybe, all this said, the election result happened because of nothing in the world but simple name recognition, in that we’ve been hearing about the Orange Thing nonstop from all outlets of all ideologies for about a decade now. Something I’m pretty sure has in and of itself been his whole goal in all this.