We need an upending—and we're not getting one unless we do it ourselves

This is going to be a bit scattershot because things are still shaking out and we don't know, for sure, what percentage of voters thought X or believed Y, but there are some central themes developing and we're all going to want to tease them out together if we want a real plan going forward, and not just the performative nonsense largely being served to us by, yep, the same political classes that fought so hard to normalize sedition and politically-motivated crime sprees.

First off, there's probably a hundred clips out there already that look something like this:

Now, hold up a minute. We don't know this specific person. We can't come to any conclusions about this specific person. All we know is that she's claiming she voted in direct opposition to her own supposed interests, based on the thinnest of veneers offered up by Sedition Crime Boy's Traveling Circus, and that in a hundred other clips we're hearing voters say similar things: Oh, Trump was better for the economy (extremely not true!) Oh, Trump is only going to deport the "bad" immigrants (the people who wrote the plan have vowed to deport American children!) Oh, Trump will put an end Israel's vicious campaigns of famine and civilian bombings (Trump has expressed his enthusiastic support for the far-far-right Israeli government's actions.)

There is no shared truth that voters can use to evaluate their next path forward. There is little truth at all, in current information spheres, only dueling propaganda efforts; as I've said many times before, the self-serving decision of political "reporters" and their editors to declare that the real news of each news day is what some paid, partisan, and professional crap-spewer said, titter titter let's all have a panel discussion and talk about it, rather than either (1) whether it's factually true or flagrantly a lie, and (2) the actual issue the crap-spewer has ejected his payload in an attempt to obfuscate.

Lead in water? A "political" issue. Climate change? A "political" issue. Whether or not the American public should be required sacrifice 5,000 live babies per month to Elon Musk so that he can use them as rocket fuel? A "political" issue. There's no good or bad, no true or false, only opportunities for the laziest and highest-paid trolls in America to pop in front of a reporter and lie, at which point their lies will be graded by a team of panelists who will judge whether it's likely to be an effective lie or an ineffective one, based on past lie patterns, and discuss whether the liar's partisan opponents will be able to "diffuse" the new issue that Some Incredible Turd just dropped in the nation's lap.

The "free press" has not been free, not ever, in America. Ink costs money and money requires patrons; when your patrons are stock traders, who insist that you abandon all morality and live instead to line their pockets every hour, every day, for eternity, the "news" will be whatever gets the most eyeballs for the least money. And that means that every last news program, eventually, will become a panel discussion.

The voter clip above and its many near-duplicates are indicative of two things. One, which we already knew, was that most Americans don't read or watch any news that's not just a headline or "person says thing" clip. They have lives, and the great American dream now requires them to work for most of their waking hours while squeezing whatever cheap joy they can get from the remainder. It's not fair to ask them to plant themselves in front of a desk and "study" the issues, damn it—that is what journalists are supposed to be doing on our behalf. They are supposed to be telling us the true facts in their headlines, not acting as funnels for falsehoods.

The moment any media outlet decides to frame any news issue as "political," the issue goes away and the coverage becomes whatever that media outlet's equivalent of "two rich men in suits, slapping each other with small fish forever" happens to be. It is a grotesque failure, a dereliction of the one duty journalism supposedly has, and in prioritizing the propaganda of liars it will inevitably lead to democratic decay and the rise of authoritarian power.

So, you know, thanks a bunch for that, assholes.

The second thing the clip is indicative of: The Americans who aren't getting their news from news sources also aren't getting it from anywhere else. In clip after clip, we see voters parroting partisan lies pushed forward by partisan liars. The truth isn't getting to them, but the falsehoods? They're swimming in them. Why?

We all know why. It's because the rest of the American communications apparatus is also set up to promote false information over true. I've written a whole damn mini-thesis on it:

Internet Kessler Syndrome: Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the open internet?

As purpose-built disinformation engines become nearly free to create and run, the production of researched and factual content remains expensive. The result could well be an internet so clogged with ‘debris’ that it loses everything that once made it useful.

Uncharted BlueHunter Lazzaro

The collapse of the ability to find factual information from any online source is happening before our eyes, and it's happening because promoting disinformation online is extremely cheap, per eyeball, and will be getting even more socially effective with every new ChatGPT update. Facebook? A sewer. Threads? Completely useless; it's moderated almost solely by script. X is a white supremacist news center in which factual information will be punished by the possibly-drug-addicted owner himself.

Kamala Harris may or may not have run a "perfect" campaign, but what we've been seeing from initial exit programming and many, many, many person-on-the-street interviews is that it did not make a damn bit of difference, because there was nobody around to hear it.

So how do we get people to hear it? Well now, there's the problem.

I'd add that it's not just the collapse of ad revenues that decimated that nascent partisan, participatory media sphere. I don't think I'm standing on very shaky ground to observe that Democratic Party power brokers absolutely hate the idea, and there's very little party or Rich Partisan Donor funding on "the left" for anything that smacks even slightly of Giving The People An Actual Voice.

Oh, by God there will always be money being thrown about to boost fake grassroots efforts—very specific ones, with very specific purposes that don't stray too far into arguments like "the existence of billionaires is so hopelessly corrosive to society that our tax structures should be changed to make it impossible to hoard such wealth." You're not going to get money thrown your way for "the American system of law enforcement has become so militarized that it adds more danger than protection in some communities, and we need to adjust the mechanics back to the old model that prioritized deescalation and community partnership."

What are the lessons of the campaign? The crypto industry single-handedly took out political figures that proposed restrictions on their terrorism-funding drug-running money-laundering engines. Poof, just like that. Billionaire owners at the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post ordered their editors to pull punches, in the final days of the campaign, so that their other, more important business interests would not be singled out for retaliation if the fascist candidate won. Elon Musk was flamboyant in latching himself to Trump, and the programmatic structure of not-Twitter was modified to boost Trump's campaign and messages.

There's simply no equivalent on the Democratic side, in large part because all of those things are transparently acts of corruption and a decent movement should be looking to rout them, not mimic them. Nor would Elon Musk's style of large-scale disinformation shoveling even work, as an opposing force to his own fascist propaganda; the whole point of fascism is to dismantle truth so that a population can be steered in any desired direction by inventing new lies to tell them. Its opponents can't succeed by further polluting the information sphere—it would only reinforce the supposed unknowability of "truth."

No, combatting misinformation requires Combatting Misinformation. Empowering voters means empowering them. It sounds terribly facile, but the mechanisms of authoritarianism and democratization are not, and will never be, of the same structure.

While I do not know whether there was anything the Harris campaign could do to win, I do know that the Democratic Party apparatus as a whole has remained insular, self-serving, and almost entirely unaware of the trends around them. We have needed, for the last ten years, strategies to combat corporate-promoted political disinformation that now pollutes everything we watch and hear and read.

Instead we get this.

You don't even have to click through to know what I'm talking about. An endless stream of fundraising asks, all announcing that your five dollars is the only thing that can save democracy, and that all the world is doomed without your five dollars, and then you give five dollars and get one hundred damn more of the exact same messages, none of which acknowledge that you've been trying damn it, you really have, and maybe if the party didn't spend the entire five dollars you gave them sending you messages asking for another five dollars then maybe you wouldn't feel like so much like a damn sucker for doing it the first time.

I don't think we have enough information to assign blame to anyone or anything, when it comes to election losses. But I don't think we can claim that the Democratic Party has been anything but obtuse, when it comes to recognizing the new media environment and the urgency of combatting disinformation in the places where it's actually consequential. Nor is there any sense of consequence, as the party continually chases the last ball thrown while ignoring the new one that just appeared.

The people who are in most danger from authoritarian-minded corruption are the people who are hearing the least about it. And it's killing us.

More controversially, I'm going to say the same about the remnants of that "nascent partisan, participatory media" that Greg Greene referred to up there. We have been falling down on the job as well, when it comes to boosting voices and arguments and issues that matter to voters. That's something I've been hollering about for a good long while now, and gotten nowhere with. I'll be hollering about it in the future, too.

No, we need an upending. Our newspapers are owned by billionaires; our local television stations, by right-wing corporations that freely pump out disinformation. Local news doesn't exist, and when it does it consists mostly of a string of AP stories pushing stories that aren't "local" in the slightest. Even as the far-right screams about censorship, it's the public that's getting censored, systemically and intentionally. You want to shout racist things into a microphone? You can make a six or seven figure income doing that. Do you want to make the case that your trans daughter deserves human rights no matter what some spittle-flecked chud on the internet thinks about it? Well, it'd better not include a link to information backing up your case, because if you give one out The Algorithms will shove you waaaaay down below that video clip from Shouting Spitguy.

We need an upending, and there's no damn time left to argue with the power brokers who still insist that we do not. Enough already. We'll have to do it ourselves.