Your Fellow Americans Are Not Your Enemy, Misinformation Is Your Enemy

Most of the hand-wringing going on in the media is not productive, and that's our problem

Hello Friends,

I cried just as much yesterday as I did the day before, and I expect I will cry the same amount today. In these days since the presidential election, I'm finding it very difficult to eat. Yesterday afternoon I watched Jimmy Kimmel's monologue and that provoked me to tears as well, but they were more the tears of inspiration than despair, and I felt more resolved to carry on.

Everybody knows that there is something wrong with the media, but our government seems content to do nothing about it. Doing nothing in the face of aggression seems to be the default response lately.

I've seen a lot of articles where Democrats are infighting. They blame Biden for not dropping out soon enough, they blame Harris for a random comment, they blame Harris because she's a woman. I see these articles and they make me shake my head. This kind of finger pointing is unproductive. I think it's particularly offensive to blame gender when there are so many other factors that nobody is inclined to talk about.

The problem, as I see it, is that the Democrats and the media never bothered to expose to the general public just who Trump is and what he is planning. Although Trump denied any knowledge about project 2025 during the campaign, conservatives are now admitting that it is their agenda. Trump has already indicated he's going to hire the author of the plan.

The way I see it, Democrats don't have time to waste with infighting on why we lost the election. It's time to pivot and focus on what we can do to oppose project 2025. Among other things, the plan contains ideas for dismantling public education, which is of particular concern for me.

Again, it remains to be seen how much of this plan the American population will be willing to tolerate. We also need to sit back and see how much the Republicans can actually implement.

It's such a sad and terrible state of things that we're stuck with a person in the highest office in the land who is so focused on punishment. With Biden I felt comforted by the fact that he was a decent person who was trying to look out for American families. The Republicans only want to hurt us.

What we have to try and understand is why so many Americans are willing to go along with that agenda. I'm no different than the rest of you in that I've cut people out of my life for supporting the MAGA movement. But I think it's particularly painful when people you know personally are willing to vote to cause you suffering. We should forgive ourselves for having a strong and emotional reaction, but we have to keep avenues of communication open.

Divided we fall. We’re falling now. Unity comes from compromise not compliance.

To me, project 2025 feels like a foreign conceived plan designed to dismantle the Untied States from within. It's going to cause economic hardship and make us weaker. The next thing the MAGA Republicans are going to do is shift their considerable propaganda mechanism to start selling this plan.

This is what the Democrats have to oppose.

In previous elections, the generally accepted behavior is for the losing candidate to fade from the spotlight. But let's face it, Republicans have been engaged in year round campaigning for the last 10 years. Democrats can no longer afford to hold themselves to a standard that is no longer relevant.

What I'd really like to see is Kamala Harris start up a daily newsletter like Heather Cox Richardson where she explains what the Republicans are doing and helps people understand why their policies are responsible for our economic hardship.

There are so many people I talk to who believe nonsense just because that nonsense has become normalized by the media. Yesterday somebody told me that the Democrats have “forgotten” about the working class. I pushed back hard on that one citing how Democrats got the price of Insulin down, how they're always pushing to raise minimum wage, how they're always pushing for worker protections, how they brought back jobs, how they passed the infrastructure bill... the list goes on and on.

The only thing the Republicans have done is provide a tax cut to billionaires.

When you actually say something like this to somebody, they're completely unprepared to answer you. But that's exactly the problem. They haven't even heard the counter-arguments because the Democrats don't bother to get their agenda into the news.

The Republicans have two massive institutions that fortify their base year round: the media and the church. Democrats try to undo the programming of a 24/7/365 media blitz and think they'll be successful with an hour and thirty minute debate? Come on. It's not going to work.

I appreciate that Biden spent so much time in office actually working for the American people rather than preening about his accomplishments. Though few people recognize it, he created the strongest economy this country has ever seen and managed to defeat inflation without causing a recession.

But because he didn't preen about it, Harris lost on what should have been her greatest strength. All the while, the media never bothers to challenge Republicans who get on their platform and talk about how hard things are.

The constant, constant lies have an effect on people. We can’t expect our fellow Americans to “know better” when nobody defends them against the cesspool of lies.

The other thing the Democrats fail to recognize is how much influence bot accounts have on the psyche of the general public. I work on a variety of platforms and I sometimes get hundreds of comments a day. Every now and then I see comment surges where random accounts with no profile pictures and zero followers come on to start lecturing me with extreme right-wing talking points.

The Democrats need to understand that the majority of the American public doesn't get their information from news sources that maintain a standard of journalistic integrity. We don't have those anymore since all the newspapers, radio, and television stations have been bought up to form a couple propaganda conglomerates. People no longer consume news, they consume content, and they can't tell the difference.

This is why people can say things like “don't trust the experts” and be taken seriously. They're more inclined to believe the position of an anonymous social media account they've been talking to than respect the beliefs of their neighbor.

Democrats aren't immune to this either. I received plenty of fake comments that tried to make ridiculous and blatantly false accusations suggesting Harris supported “genocide.” Although this campaign might not have been sufficient to turn voters to Republicans, I think it did enough to keep them from voting for Harris.

Everybody walks around with their noses stuck in their cell phones reading lies of dubious origin. This is how the American public has been programmed to elect a would-be tyrant. At this point we all have to wonder the extent to which he's going to follow through on his threats.

These next few months are critical. Democrats can't afford to sit around promoting the nonsensical and offensive belief that Harris lost “because she's a woman.” They need to take action and come up with a counter-strategy to ensure the American public is not inundated with misinformation.

We have to be more forceful in how we challenge false beliefs that have become normalized.

The American public has been deceived. The people citing the election as “democracy at work” are overlooking the fact that we've allowed the public to be manipulated by the lies of foreign governments.

It's currently looking like smart phones, of all things, are going to be responsible for the collapse of the United States. We thought they were magnificent technological devices that gave us instant access to worlds of information. It turns out they're malicious agents that allow Putin and his cronies to constantly whisper a stream of lies and hate ideology to our friends, families and neighbors.

Let's face it, Putin has run up the score on us. He's figured out this technology and he's using it to his advantage. For the life of me, I can't understand why our intelligence services haven't figured this out. Do we really not understand that misinformation is a threat to democracy?

We can't sit on our hands, lick our wounds, and become enraged at our neighbors. This is why the Republicans always attack education, it's because they know people with critical thinking skills are less likely to be manipulated by AI chat bots. We have to recognize people without an education are vulnerable to this.

This is a crisis.

Those bots can publish millions and millions of comments, and they get into people's thoughts.

The American people have a right to know the truth about what is being proposed and what the consequences of those actions will be. Right now, more than half of the voting public has been trained not to listen to reason. We have to launch a strategy that has a hope of bringing them back.

Maybe when our society starts to crumble around us they'll recognize the problem. I just hope we find our unity before it's too late.

Note: I’m still planning on hosting a 30 minute chat for my paid subscribers this Sunday (November 11th) at 8AM central time. I’ll send a zoom link to those subscribers tomorrow. I plan on talking about how to use Medium, and teach you ways to better fight the propaganda we’re up against. I feel fortified by the idea of seeing you all. It’s at least doing something rather than just fretting and waiting for the end to come. If you want to join, just make sure you’re a paid subscriber (at any tier) by tomorrow. Thanks everyone! I appreciate you!

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