Dear Friends -
As the midwest and the west coast (and soon the gulf coast) experience extreme weather, I’m narrowly focused on the GOP convention starting tomorrow night. Before I get to the GOP convention, a few follow-ups from Friday’s email:
Cruel? A few of you objected to my characterization of Trump as “cruel”... but don’t take my word for it, take his own sister’s: “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.”
Bounce? The first post-convention poll doesn’t show much bounce; but it was also the smallest audience for a televised political convention in quite some time. Of course, TV ratings don’t count online/streaming views.
But remember: forget the polling. A couple of weeks ago, the Biden campaign announced a monster ad buy; Friday they actually placed it. It is a huge amount of money in fifteen states, an indicator of which states they think are competitive...but 15 states! As Tom Matzzie points out, a battleground that big gives Biden at least five paths to an electoral college victory. At this point the campaigns are financially competitive, so Trump has the resources to compete.
Prepare for more lies: I was on a Zoom call with a couple hundred people and Joe Biden a couple months ago. He was mildly incoherent, as is his reputation (so much so that the Obama White House chided him about it in this very funny video). So I breathed a sigh of relief when he delivered a near-perfect speech. (Ben Wittes reminds us that Biden has always talked like this. I, too, like the sound of my own voice, as my wife regularly reminds me.) The mainstrea media believes the speech put to bed the Trump/GOP line of attack that he is “slow” or “senile”. But just wait until the debates; I’m sure that line of attack will resurface. Actually, it already has: Rush Limbaugh is shouting that the speech was taped to edit out any imperfections despite the fact that roughly forty reporters were there, not to mention TV camera crews and Secret Service agents.
The Three Issues: On Friday, I wrote about how the Democratic Convention had some curious omissions (Supreme Court, Census, Downballot races) in an effort to steer the Convention and news coverage away from anything polarizing. But they did focus on three issues: immigration, gun control, and climate change. In the popular zeitgeist, these are issues that are polarizing. But actually they’re not; the vast majority of Americans agree on these three issues -- it’s a small minority that control the Republican Party that find them toxic and polarizing. Another reminder of how much of a minority party the GOP has become. (Just to source it: Overwhelming majority of Americans want stricter gun control, humane immigration policy, and more aggressive protection of the environment.)
The poem: Many of you reached out to express your surprise that I didn’t comment on Biden’s choice of poetry Thursday night; some of you went so far as to accuse me of going to bed. The poem Biden chose is a deeply intimate one for me. I worked across the street from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and as I wrote in 2008, Heaney’s “Cure at Troy” is instrumental in my own recovery from that trauma. The poem is so intimate for me that it hurts a little bit to see a presidential candidate use it.
The stutter: Although most of you know I co-founded the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, you may not know I have struggled with a stutter most of my life. So the speech that moved me most -- it was almost too painful for me to watch -- was by 13-year old Brayden Harrington. Here is the moment Biden first met Brayden -- when Biden was about to decisively lose the New Hampshire primary.
The Senate: As I predicted almost four weeks ago, the South Carolina Senate race is competitive. The Cook Political Report has moved it from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican” -- a political earthquake. Expect it to narrow more -- I’m waiting for them to move it to “tossup”.
As I wrote to you on Friday, the Democrats are framing the election as a choice between empathy and cruelty. I think it’s a winning electoral strategy but a losing approach to governing. How will Trump make his case? I’ve argued that Trump's reelection message is about one thing: racism -- so expect a fair amount of that. But the last ten days have surfaced another message, one that is almost as disturbing: the QAnon conspiracy theory.
QAnon got on my radar back in 2017 when I listened to a debate among my colleagues at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center about whether newsrooms should publish articles about QAnon or ignore it. The concern was the “amplification” effect -- that even if the purpose of the article was to debunk the conspiracy, it would nevertheless amplify and validate the toxic storylines of the conspiracy.
For those of you who don’t know what QAnon is, it is hard to distill it down to a single sentence, but here it goes: Trump is protecting us from a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophile Democrats who seek to dominate America and the world. (A slightly longer description is available in the postscript.) As in any conspiracy theory, there are a lot of twists and turns as well as a giant volume of secret signs and symbols. It’s a rich narrative labyrinth where you can lose yourself for days; part of the narrative appeal is that the complexity offers clues that invite audiences to help “uncover” the “real” story. It’s as much a video game as a conspiracy theory. (Here’s a summary of a few other ways QAnon has surfaced over the last three years.)
I am willing to guarantee someone in your life is deep in QAnon, although you may not know it. They might not use the word “QAnon”, but the narrative of the conspiracy will surface in conversation. And now, evidence of QAnon’s influence on the Republican Party has grown significantly:
Marjorie Taylor Greene won her Republican congressional primary in a deep-red district in Georgia, making her (by my count) the sixth on-the-record QAnon believer to win their GOP primary this cycle. (She has recently disputed the characterization of her as a “QAnon believer” but also says QAnon is "worth listening to".) Because many of these primaries are in deep-red non-competitive Congressional districts, at least three of these candidates are likely to be Members of Congress next year.
The Texas Republican Party announced their new official slogan: We Are the Storm - get your hats & shirts here. The phrase is immediately recognizable to QAnon believers as a rallying cry to take on the “deep state” and all the nefarious crimes in which they are supposedly complicit.
QAnon came up in a presidential press conference last week. The entire exchange is worth watching, but I must quote some of it:
REPORTER: QAnon believes you are secretly saving the world from this cult of pedophiles and cannibals. Are you behind that?
TRUMP: Is that supposed to be a bad thing? We are actually. We are saving the world.
The prospect of QAnon believers in the US Congress has the capacity to truly damage the country, using the power of Congressional oversight to validate and feed the ongoing conspiracy narrative with growing force and intensity. One thing is for sure: you’re going to see a lot more of this.
Why do people believe QAnon? I’m in the middle of some research to better understand not only why people believe these kinds of outlandish conspiracy theories, but also how we might “deprogram” them. My current theory is that the world is so scary, so coming apart at the seams, that there is a craving for a worldview that will make sense of it, order it all neatly. To quote my friends and QAnon expert Cameron Hickey:
Humanity has long searched for explanations to confusing and disturbing events that match the scale of the problem. Mythology gives us a way to explain the unexplainable so that we can compartmentalize it and move on with our lives. The QAnon mythology helps us understand how a pandemic shattered our society, how our government fails to serve the people, and even how powerful wealthy people remain beautiful and youthful while the rest of us grow fatter and uglier as we decay.
There’s also a desire to validate the choice for Donald Trump. His incompetence around the pandemic is clearly driving the country to ruin, and it’s not like his incompetence was a secret. But Trump’s transgressions pail in comparison to pedophiles.
And then there is Fox News. As I’ve written before (here and here), the role of Fox News in the unwinding of America cannot be underestimated. It remains a mystery to me why Rupert Murdoch isn’t held accountable. Fox has two roles here: first, it primes people to believe outlandish theories they might read online, and second it amplifies as many of these conspiracy theories as it can get away with. Remember the birther conspiracy? Or the caravan making its way to invade our borders?
Apparently both Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs -- both Fox anchors -- are “shadow chiefs of staff” to the President of the United States. (Remind me to tell you about my dinner with Lou Dobbs a decade ago, where this subject came up.) Notably, Sean Hannity appears to mostly be in it for the money: “But Hannity’s commitment to … his own business model meant he could never say any of this publicly.” Fox -- and Hannity in particular -- explicitly promote birtherism and implicitly promote QAnon. Heaven forbid Fox News air a critique of the President; the Attorney General will call to let you know that isn’t allowed.
How did we get here? The world is screwed up and facing big problems. But instead of tackling these problems -- which are hard and will require a lot of change -- we ignore them and seek alternative narratives. Our leaders, political and otherwise, are complicit. The one institution that is supposed to keep us focused on the truth -- the news media -- is (a) almost dead at the local level; (b) incentivized towards pointless petty stuff at the national level; and (c) believes that telling an inspiring story about solutions might violate some outmoded standard of journalism. And then into this mess drops social media, where integrity is wholly absent and the technology is explicitly designed to capture as much mental attention as possible, regardless of the ethics or consequences.
We’re going to see a lot more hate and a lot more conspiracy -- or mythology. A couple weeks ago I suggested we need an effort to build out a more robust, more honest American story. The only antidote to QAnon and its companion stories is a competing narrative that is similarly empowering.
What can you do? There is one essential thing: do not despair. Instead, get to work. Despair is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s a true, dramatic cop-out. It’s the kind of behavior that got us into this misery in the first place. There is much work to be done -- you pick a place to start. If you can’t figure out where to start, email me and I’ll suggest a few, but they will all be local in your own community. Run for office; get involved in your community; start a local news website; donate to causes and political campaigns you care about; the list goes on. There aren’t enough good solutions out there yet -- you need to go build some. Despair will cloud your judgement and make everything impossible. The challenges we face are not insurmountable and we have the power to take them on. Keep your eyes clear and your heart full of courage; what we need is here.
Lots of love, nicco
PS. Gird yourself. Trump will speak every night for the next four nights; so will Kellyanne Conway. Conway’s teenage daughter announced on Twitter that she is seeking legal emancipation from her parents. She also reminded us that her father isn’t a liberal hero.
PPS. As promised: QAnon originated in the bowels of the internet where an anonymous government official (known as “Q”) with a Q-level security clearance (there is no such thing) dropped cryptic clues about future events. (A year and a half ago I purchased a best-selling self-published Amazon book full of Q’s incoherent clues for the future.) Q is supposedly part of an effort to eradicate the "deep state" from the US government. The narrative has evolved into a catch-all conspiracy cesspool linking together longstanding conspiracies about chemtrails and flouride with Hollywood celebrities, satansim, cannibalism, and (of course) pedophilia.