Disinformation won

I’ll start with an apology. This column is not going to be funny or offer any marginally useful/moderately geeky insights. If you’d like your $6 back, please reach out via the email address at the bottom and I’ll Venmo you. 

Here’s the thought that keeps running through my head this morning: If George Orwell were alive today, would he be laughing or crying?

He definitely saw it coming. But I’m not sure he saw Big Brother as an orange-faced clown with dementia, cheered on by hordes of followers staring bug-eyed and slack-jawed at the collapse of society and saying, ‘Bring it on’. 

One of the basic tenets of 1984 I thought Orwell had gotten wrong was the idea that people would be gullible enough, and their brains squishy enough, to deny the most basic of realities and swear that 2 + 2 equals 5, if that’s what they were told to believe.

Surely, that was a bridge too far, I thought as a young man, reading that book. 

Well fuck me with a banjo. 

A tsunami of bullshit

Mis- and disinformation won this election by overwhelming people with lies. 

For example: I normally don’t watch cable or broadcast TV. But I was watching some NFL games this past weekend, and there were a lot of political ads in between the action. The ads for Kamala were all pretty straightforward, outlining her five-point plan if she were elected. 

The ads for the other guy were either about how Kamala wants to spend your taxpayer dollars on transgender surgery for inmates, or they blasted out a series of one- or two-word quotes from mainstream news publications either praising Agent Orange or critiquing Kamala. But that’s all they were – high-speed snippets of words without context. No idea if these quotes were real or even what they were referring to. 

I wanted to slow down the torrent of bullshit and ask questions. But it was over before I could even start. Here’s CNN’s tireless fact checker Daniel Dale on that ad:

Multiple Trump ads omit critical words from quotes by and about Vice President Kamala Harris on the subject of tax policy. One Trump ad misleadingly depicts comments about fracking from Trump’s campaign and administration as if they were comments from independent news organizations.

Another Trump ad takes an immigration-related quote from a 6-year-old news article way out of context, wrongly depicting it as a comment about the Biden-Harris administration. Another ad changes a word from the headline of an economic news story. And another ad wrongly describes a quote from the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

If you take the number of people who saw that ad (probably in the millions) and divide by the people who saw that post-broadcast fact check (at best, thousands), what you end up with is 2 + 2 = 5.

Oh, and that ad about gender-affirming care for inmates? It’s true that it is current federal policy. But that policy started in 2018. Who was president back then? I can’t remember. 

Facts are out, feelings are the only things that count

Why did Kamala lose and the forces of darkness prevail? Because they deeply believed things that weren’t actually true. These things then became true by osmosis, simply due to the strength of their convictions. 

Lie #1: The economy is in terrible shape. 

Actually, it isn’t. Unemployment is still near historical lows, the stock market at an all-time high. Gross domestic product is growing at around 3.0 percent annually. Not pop-the-champagne-corks great, but not anything remotely close to the recessions that happened during the last two Republican presidencies.

Lie #2: Crime is turning our inner cities into hellholes.

Not really. The rate of crime in the US has been on a steady downslope for years. 

Lie #3: Tens of millions of illegal immigrants are streaming over our borders. 

It’s true that tens of thousands (not millions) of migrants cross our southern borders every month. But that number has been declining. And as many of you who read this thing I do are no doubt aware, Republicans have done their best to keep those numbers up, as an election tactic.

I won’t even get into the lies about what these poor people are doing here (mostly highly physical, terribly underpaid labor) and what they’re not doing here (raping, criming, and eating household pets).

Note the difference between the outlandish lie and the sober truth. That’s the problem. Facts are boring, but lies are dramatic. They’re visceral and visual. They stick in the lower centers of the brain where, apparently, many members of the American electorate spend all of their time.

And if you bother to soberly point out where someone has been deliberately misled, more often than not they’ll simply attack the legitimacy of your sources. You can draw a straight line from Rush Limbaugh to Rupert Murdoch; obliterating faith in well-established sources of information by burying them in ‘alternative facts' has been the master plan all along. 

When democracy is laid to rest in some pauper’s graveyard, the epitaph on the tombstone should read:  “I did my own research.”

It still doesn’t add up

I wish I had good news for you. Something hopeful and uplifting to share. Tactics and strategies for surviving the next four (eight? sixteen?) years. Maybe something clever and helpful will come to me later. But right now, all I can say is I am so sorry for not listening to you, George. We never believed it would really get this bad.

How are you holding up? More importantly: How are you holding others up? Share your thoughts in the comments or email me: [email protected].