Dear Friends -
Earlier this week, I was on a Zoom call with a colleague in California. It was 11am there and the window behind her was pitch-black… with smoke. A comment from LA Times reporter Chris Megerian this week has stayed with me: 2020’s slogan — "This is beyond the scope of our models." Meanwhile, the President has hired a longtime climate science denier at NOAA, where he’ll no doubt be ushering in an era of fictitious weather forecasting. I’m not joking.
Before I get to my political thoughts, I wanted to speak to all my anxious readers out there. The most consistent, most frequent feedback I get on this newsletter is that it’s “depressing”. I have in the past encouraged you, dear reader, to take action as an antidote to being depressed by the news (and this newsletter). Longtime friend and loyal reader Marci Simon shared this research from Harvard Business School on the Stockdale paradox, named for Admiral Stockdale, war hero and 1992 Vice Presidential candidate (on the ticket with Ross Perot). Stockdale offered this insight in the context of his experience as a prisoner of war:
You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
A favorite poem of mine from Wendell Berry echoes this in its closing lines:
And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
It is a fine poem about the end of summer; take a minute and read it. For more poetry, we’ve organized an hour of it on Thursday, September 24th, 2020 from 7-8pm ET with a bunch of incredible people reading their favorite poems... including Roseanne Cash and Yo-Yo Ma. RSVP here.
As we turn to reality at hand, remember what we need is here: personal courage, sound nerves, and stark beauty. That’s what the moment requires. And now, “the most brutal facts of your current reality”:
It’s all about who votes: As I said last week - almost everyone has made up their mind about this election. It’s just a matter of who votes. Now Axios agrees with me. So stop reading this email and go get some people registered to vote!
We won’t know election night: A new guide from the National Conference on State Legislature is out, detailing the different state laws around ballot-counting. Turns out that among the swing states, five of them (AZ, FL, GA, NC, TX) count mail-in ballots long before the election. But three critical ones don’t start counting until Election Day: MI, PA, WI. It promises to be more like an election week, or election month.
Trump’s message is racism: It seems like months ago, but it was less than a week ago. Trump traveled to Kenosha to weigh in on race relations. Among other things, he issued an executive order to cancel all federal trainings around race, calling them “a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue”. He is the Defender of White America. There was actually so much news about racism and Trump this week I couldn’t keep up with it.
Lest you think my warnings about the QAnon conspiracy were crazy in and of themselves, Time sent a reporter to Wisconsin where she was surprised to encounter so many apparently normal people who think Biden is leading an international pedophile ring in order to harvest the blood of children. And yes, I am quoted in the article as an “expert”, even though my wife disputes that title.
In the “it will get crazier” column, Ron Brownstein has written an interesting piece about the 2000 Bush-Gore recount in Florida: “Al Gore specifically discouraged Jesse Jackson, the veteran civil-rights leader, from organizing public protests to demand a full counting of the disputed ballots...ceding the streets to Republicans, who held raucous rallies accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election.” Betcha that won’t happen this time. Biden may preach calm, assertive energy… but not sure the streets will listen to him.
It’s not 2000 or even 2016, and it’s a totally different, unpredictable dynamic we face. The underlying racism may be the same, but the pandemic screws up all prior models for voter participation. Meanwhile the media makes the same mistakes of 2016, letting Trump string them along with scandal after scandal, distracting from the real challenges we are facing in America.
The biggest blind spot is the radically altered media landscape, and the role of disinformation and manipulation in this election. Layer on top of that the intervention of foreign governments in our online networks, and the President’s refusal to take action, and we’ve got real trouble. Lost in all the Woodward “scandal” this week was the warning bell rung by Facebook’s cybersecurity policy chief: Russia is still “actively, aggressively, and creatively trying to target the United States in the run-up to the [2020] election.”
In this fertile landscape for disinformation, Trump’s social media spending has dramatically outpaced the Democrats for over a year. At one point, Trump was spending more on Facebook ads than all the Democratic presidential primary candidates combined (it was Bloomberg’s entrance into the Democratic primary that changed this equation). This past week, Trump spent almost $10M on Facebook; Biden spent $5M. Meanwhile, the Biden campaign is dumping almost all of its money into television ads.
Unlike TV ads, Facebook is largely a black box. My Facebook isn’t the same as your Facebook, even if we generally care about the same things; a decade ago Eli Pariser coined the term “filter bubble” to explain the ways algorithms mediate our online experience. So you may have missed that 8 of the top 10 of the top-performing posts on Facebook this week were from Trump-supporting or far-right websites, including Brietbart, Franklin Graham, Blue Lives Matter, Steven Crowder, and more. That’s right: Brietbart is outperforming the NFL on Facebook.
Meanwhile, a sprawling network of Facebook pages spread disinformation and drive voters to a single source: “Over the last 90 days, the network of pages that promote Conservative Brief has generated 30.65 million engagements… That’s more engagement than the main New York Times Facebook page generated over the same period of time (26.48 million).” The very design of Facebook makes it hard to uncover and understand these kinds of networks, but once again Judd Legum’s fearless reporting has dredged up stuff that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. I really believe he is the Upton Sinclair of our era, and you should go support his one-man investigative journalism operation.
Let’s step back and take a look at the overall picture of our media diets in America:
Local news has collapsed, leaving most communities in America with a massive information void.
This void is filled by social media, where most Americans spend their time, swimming in a toxic sludge of misinformation.
The President of the United States uses the resources at his disposal to create and distribute misinformation, including this dramatic video released by the Border Patrol about undocumented immigrants and a recent postcard supposedly being sent to all American households by the US Postal Service.
The misinformation from the President is amplified by social networks and Fox, sticking to a few key narratives again and again and again. Meanwhile, mainstream news is relentlessly in pursuit of scandal after scandal, fed and manipulated by the President of the United States.
We are living at the height of panic and anxiety, from the extreme weather lashing across the country to the ongoing effects of a devastating pandemic to the long-term brutality of institutional racism. The increased anxiety has devastating effects on the brain and leads us to grasp at conspiracy theories - as evidenced by the conspiracy sweeping Western communities that the fires are set by “antifa protestors”. CNN reports these conspiracy theories have overwhelmed 911 lines.
My favorite novel is H.G. Well’s Tono-Bungay. Although now forgotten, Wells thought it was his best novel; Gilbert Murray compared Wells’ novel to Tolstoy. And even thought it was published in 1909, it is prescient:
But in these plethoric times when there is too much coarse stuff for everybody and the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbor's eye, there is no urgent demand either for personal courage, sound nerves or stark beauty, and we find ourselves by accident... Now, if only he pitch his standard low enough and keep free from pride, almost anyone can achieve a sort of excess. You can go through contemporary life fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elemental necessities of life the sweat of your deathbed.
Go on, then. Join the struggle. Ignore the polls. And remember what we need is here: personal courage, sound nerves and stark beauty.
Lots of love, nicco
PS. You really should join us on Thursday, September 24th, 2020 from 7-8pm ET for a bunch of incredible people reading their favorite poems... including Roseanne Cash and Yo-Yo Ma. RSVP here.
Today’s email owes much to Gabriel London: he’s a gentleman, a breeder of fine horses, and an excellent editor.