07/11/2024
Last time in the immediate aftermath I penned a 1,000 word essay preparing friends and family in our community for how to untangle the mess of hyperbole vs realistic expectations. I can't, or maybe just won't do that again. The landscape has changed. Social media algorithms are now weighted to bury political posts quickly. And there are infinitely more variables to account for this time.
But I do have two observations I don't see being discussed nearly enough that I'd really like to plant the seeds of discussion for:
1) The number of people who are celebrating the results, who in their celebration reveal that their exuberance is based off of looking to the precedent of Trump's first term is striking. This term will be VERY LITTLE like his first term. The fact that that is apparently news to his voters is an indictment of the low-information propensity he relies on them having. To be clear, I'm not calling Trump voters stupid (that would be reductive to my aims). What I am saying is a large portion of the American electorate is so over-worked and stressed that they have little desire or capacity to spend precious free time pouring over sociopolitical nuance and connecting cause-effect chains & that after Obama won in 2008 the Republican party began prioritizing manipulation campaigns aimed at taking advantage of and weaponizing that very apathy and ignorance. What started as the Koch funded Tea Party has evolved into the MAGA force of today. If we are ever to overcome such a propaganda machine, the onus will fall to us all to sign post the changes the new extreme regime will make so that these people will be able to connect the harms to their own lives and communities in real time.
2) All day during Election Day the FBI was releasing a constant stream of press releases that culminated in over 40 bomb threats to Democrat/Black heavy precincts and multiple deep fake voter fraud videos all originating from Russia. Several voting precincts in Atlanta had to even shut down in the middle of the day to be cleared for safety. The day after the election THOUSANDS of Russian Twitter/X accounts that existed solely to create and amplify far-right misinformation suddenly disappeared since there was suddenly no need to fund the operation at least for several years. What I find frightening is that most people don't even know this happened. That's how normalized it's become. A rival enemy of our State who wants nothing more for America to fail so it could vie to take over our place as a global superpower wanted Trump to win so badly that they spent time and money planning these assaults on our election and information ecosystem. America would have never even entertained electing a President during WWII that Germany signaled it wanted us to pick. We would've never elected one during the Cold War who Russia endorsed. But here we are. Now we all get to find out why Russia thought that it was worth spending tons of effort and money to see one candidate elected over the other. I can't fathom it's for "good" reasons...
To be clear, and end this post, I don't believe any of these Russian activities had a tangible effect in deciding this election- that die was cast because the American electorate has been conditioned to think it should be immune to negative consequences for anything. Our economy bounced back from Covid and handled the ensuing global inflation problems better than every other developed nation (Sincerely, thank you Joe Biden). But it was still painful nonetheless and it's clear that much of the American electorate was always going to blame that pain on the current administration, as misguided as that may be.
(Links to referenced stories in comments)
