Wednesdays I Write about Politics
Hi, folks. Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, and Happy Happy, whatever people celebrate, if they so choose.
In my first column, the Monday column about writing, I touched on the fact that “legacy media” are being sidelined, people live in closed-off news silos, receiving no alternative perspectives or information, and – most concerningly, even shockingly – many Americans no longer believe in the value of fact-checking.
Democrats lost an election in November, and disinformation played a huge role in that loss. People now inhabit discrete media ecosystems, where they only hear what others in their tribe, often geographic, often ethnic, often religious, often gendered, often socioeconomic, made up of people with shared pop culture interests and core beliefs, hear. We are now in a world where discovering new content is a matter of confirming one’s biases – what people nowadays call, with a straight face, “doing my own research.” They will listen to someone rambling on, on YouTube, playing snippets of an exchange in Congress and making fun of it at length … or they will listen to a podcast … and they will see that as a means of doing their crucial job, as adult Americans, of staying well-informed. They think that snarky, reality-challenged infotainment gives them the tools they need to make a meaningful choice in an election.
Vladimir Putin used RT to pay a bunch of “influencers” to push his disinformation talking points in the 2024 election, and promote Kremlin-friendly videos on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and X – the platform once known as Twitter, which Thom Hartmann fittingly refers to as Xitter. This was all an extension of what KGB Putin, with his Cold War psy-ops background, has been doing to our elections since 2016: tampering with them and hacking them on the cheap. Above all, he seeks to divide us: to turn Americans against each other. He pits White people against Blacks, Latinos, Asians and so on. He inflames divisions between moderate Democrats and progressive ones (though his efforts sure didn’t prevent a spectrum of Democrats in Congress from hanging together and passing great legislation during the first two years of the Biden administration, when they had a razor-thin Congressional majority), he and Trump sow fear of gay people, trans people, undocumented people, all immigrants, Muslims, Jews … those among us who are most vulnerable and easiest to scapegoat. Instead of lifting up his own people, as he would never do, Putin wants to lower quality of life in this country, to make it as fearful, limited and miserable as life under dictators like him.
Putin’s success at changing our national conversation in 2016 had me incredulous and terrified. I first stumbled onto Quora in that year, in an effort to push back, somehow, against the flood of disinformation, and to help prevent Putin’s candidate, sociopath Donald Trump, from winning the election. (Spoiler alert: I failed. And I, and people like me, failed once again this year.) Putin had his St. Petersburg troll farm churning out content in 2016, creating thousands of false accounts. And, what with these supposedly American trolls, their endless posts, and the “likes” from cyber bots that gave them prominence … You could watch American discourse online changing in real time. You heard Russian-fake-Americans promoting ridiculous false narratives. (Their English was bad in those early days – they’d write suspicious, unconvincing Boris and Natasha type posts, along the lines of: “Hillary so bad. I no vote Hillary. I loyal American in typical small town, I vote Donald Trump, then I go kill Moose and Squirrel …”) And soon, people who really did seem to be Americans on the same platforms would parrot the garbage talking points out of Russia. Actual Americans would be babbling about Uranium One, and how the revelations about Hillary from Wikileaks every week were “devastating” (they weren’t), and about how we couldn’t vote for Hillary because it might make Russia mad at us! And Russia had nuclear weapons! And they might kill us in a nuclear war! So, we had to vote for Trump!
I’d read those posts on Quora, and not feel sure, sometimes, if the person writing them was an American or not, but I’d respond, trying to sound strong, despite a sense of despair and dread at how many of those posts there were. I’d say: We have nukes, and Russia has nukes, and both sides could end all life on Earth several times over, and that’s been true since early on in the Cold War. It has never been a reason for us to surrender. We did not nervously placate the Soviets, and American patriots do not cede national sovereignty and let an enemy foreign power dictate how we vote …
Here is a song from my album Protest Songs in an Age of Trump – an album’s worth of songs that poured out of me right after the 2016 election, and that I released in early 2017. A lot of the songs are pretty hard-core bleak; this is one of the more “humorous” ones. The great Kathy Hussey is doing backup vocals for me:
We have been living in a surreal nightmare world ever since 2016 – or I have, anyhow. It is part farce and part horror movie. Things I never thought could be possible have been happening in this country. Values that I thought were core principles which we all shared have been tossed aside – sometimes, it seems, by half of the population.
Mass media is at the heart of what is changing. As KGB Putin knows, if you manipulate the narratives that people hear and believe, you often can weaken and conquer a population much more inexpensively and efficiently than if you engaged in direct warfare or economic confrontation. His rewriting of the conversation going on in the American public square has been laughably easy for him to accomplish. His trolls continue to pour out disinformation – and the false narratives that they disseminate have been internalized by the entire Republican Party.
I grew up in an America where Republicans often chastised Democrats for being too soft on Russia, too credulous and naïve, too unwilling to stand up to evil Russian enemies of democracy and denounce their corrupt, lying, oppressive ways. But in this new, surreal twilight world in which we live, KGB Putin’s mindset has become the Republican mindset. MAGA and the Kremlin are fused. It no longer matters if the person spouting disinformation on social media is a Russian or a Republican; they are interchangeable. The lies are the same. The objective – to degrade American democracy, and to erode faith in our institutions and in the notion of us as a free people governing ourselves – is the same.
So, what do we do about it? What new media can we create? How can we use existing media more effectively? Do we try to win back support for “legacy media” and the “MSM,” or do we leave them behind? Do we scramble to create our own “Joe Rogan,” as some have been suggesting we need to do, since we lost the election in November?
Tune in next Wednesday, when I will bloviate further on this subject, and suggest some ways that Democrats and progressives can use media more effectively in the future.
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I take long walks around Nashville early in the morning, when the sun is not too bright. I post pictures from my walks on Facebook, and I’ll post a few here, as well:
