Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Let’s hang together, shall we?

It’s Christmas week. That means drama out of Washington will subside for a couple of days. But not entirely.

President Joe Biden, largely out of sight since the election, announced he would commute the sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners on federal death row to life imprisonment. The three who remain are the worst of the worst: “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of two brothers responsible for the deadly Boston Marathon bombing in 2013; Dylann Roof, a White nationalist who massacred nine people at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018.”

The House Ethics Committee is expected to release its report Monday on former Republican congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida. CBS reports early this morning that it obtained a copy of the final draft of the 37-page report. Investigators found Gaetz “paid numerous women — including a 17-year-old girl — for sex, and to have purchased and used illegal drugs, including from his Capitol Hill office.”

“The Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” the 37-page report concludes.

Following the ABC News defamation settlement with Trump, the incoming administration is poised for war with the press and any members it deems insufficiently obeisant to his Second Coming. He smells blood:

Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman, said the president-elect plans to focus on “blatantly false and dishonest reporting, which serves no public interest and only seeks to interfere in our elections on behalf of political partisans.”

If only. Longtime readers will recall our 2019 run-in with Trump the Litigious.

I won’t sugar-coat this. The next couple of years will be rough. How rough is anyone’s guess. But a holiday party conversation with a retired FSO on Sunday brought up a perspective it will help us all to preserve.

We shared our mutual shock at the election — reelection — of the worst president in American history. Historians normally take decades to render judgment on a presidency. Trump’s place as worst of the worst, he noted, is already secure. Trump selecting Kimberly Guilfoyle and Charles Kushner, Jared Kushner’s ex-con father, as ambassadors to Greece and France was particularly irksome, a thumb in the eye to our NATO allies as well as to the U.S. diplomatic corps.

When I remarked that I know people who have left the country already, the career public servant was adamant. He’s not going anywhere. For friends asking how bad it can get, he offers instead not predictions but “glimmers.” Of hope.

At such gatherings, I tell people I write each day for a website out of Los Angeles. As morning guy, I have a three-hour news jump on Digby. I don’t prepare a lot of posts the night before. Much breaking news drops about 5:30- 6 a.m. Eastern. There’s just enough time in the morning to review headlines, skim stories over coffee, and make a few observations before 9 a.m. my time. I try to offer glimmers where I find them.

Digby asked if I’d fill in while she was away over a weekend in August 2014. Cool! What a privilege. When she got home Sunday evening, I asked if I was done. Not if you don’t want to be, she said. And here I am.

Some weeks later, an editorial page editor for the Asheville Citizen-Times spotted me at a political debate. (I’d written op-eds for them.) He strode across the room wearing a broad smile, shook my hand, and said, “My friend, you have arrived.” I still feel that way. I didn’t know Jim was a Hullabaloo reader.

One thing I love about Hullabaloo’s old-school format in the age of substacks designed to monetize everyone’s online activity is no paywall.* We want readers here. Your contributions to the annual fundraiser tell us you value what we do here too. They keep the lights on.

Ten years on, it’s still a privilege to write for you. Who knew when I met Digby in 2009 that I’d be living at one of the epicenters of GOP election fuckery? In this increasingly insane world, it helps me retain my sanity, and I hope what we post helps you maintain. Thank you for hanging with us each day. Let’s try not to hang separately.

Happy Hollandaise!

* And no advertising. Some salesman wrote last week offering to “leverage” our audience and “optimize” our revenue. Thank you and goodbye.

It’s not beyond the realm of possibility

I don’t mean to give you nightmares but no matter how much we may want to ignore how close we are to something very dark, we really shouldn’t.

Mother Jones’s Pema Levy lays out what could happen if the Supreme’s follow the lead of the 5th Circuit. It’s Leonard Leo’s dream:

Imagine Obamacare is dead and millions of Americans have lost health coverage. Abortion is illegal nationwide, pills to end pregnancies are off the market, and doctors wait until the mother’s death is imminent before attempting lifesaving care. Domestic abusers freely carry guns and government attempts to stop untraceable homemade semiautomatic rifles have been quashed, rendering gun licenses and background checks useless. Environmental regulations founder as climate change worsens. With the sidelining of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Wall Street has returned to its greediest days, making bets that threaten economic stability and preying on consumers with predatory loans and hidden fees. Officials are barred from even asking social media platforms to stem disinformation or calls to violence. Police, unrestrained by federal immigration law, round up, detain, and deport suspected immigrants. Washington can no longer fulfill treaty obligations as states erect barriers along US borders, causing international chaos. And organizing a protest against any of the above may result in you being sued successfully, making free speech an expensive proposition.

These are not mere hypotheticals. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals—transformed by appointees of former President Donald Trump—has issued decisions greenlighting every one of these eventualities. While some were put on ice by the Supreme Court, others remain in effect in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the three states the circuit covers. In those states, women have no right to end pregnancies that threaten their health, the enforcement powers of dozens of federal agencies are in doubt, and protest organizers are vulnerable to legal retribution. Other 5th Circuit decisions, from a ruling hamstringing the SEC and similar agencies to one legalizing bump stocks—the device that enabled a lone shooter in Las Vegas to kill 60 people and injure more than 500 in just 10 minutes—are now the law of the land. This is neither the outer bounds of what this radical court will do, nor the end of its impact on all Americans. It is the beginning.

These are far right radicals intent upon transforming America into a Christian nationalist, far right, oligarchy. Can we be at all sure that the Supreme Court majority won’t sign off on any or all of those things? I certainly have no confidence in that assumption. Counting on some combination of Federalist Society members Kavanaugh, Barrett and Roberts to band together to stop it just doesn’t seem all that likely to me.

Here’s a reminder of the Federalist Society’s evolution which started as a campus debating society and quickly grew into the most influential group in the American judiciary:

Beginning with Ronald Reagan, the Federalist Society has developed extensive connections with every Republican administration. The organisation and the GOP have created a pipeline to the judiciary, making Federalist Society membership almost a prerequisite to gaining a judicial appointment during periods of Republican control. All six of the Republican-appointed justices currently on the Supreme Court are affiliated with the society, as were nearly all of the federal judges appointed by Trump.

Leonard Leo, the society’s executive vice president, has been perhaps the single most influential person responsible for building the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, having played major roles in the confirmation of all six conservative justices. Leo personally drafted lists of acceptable nominees for each of Trump’s three Supreme Court picks, and he helped both presidents Trump and George W Bush strategise about how to get their picks confirmed. Leo’s control over the Republican nomination process has been so extensive that the Trump White House was said to have “outsourced” the process to Leo.

[…]

When it suits the conservative agenda, the Federalist Society and its disciples hamstring the power of states, such as the Supreme Court’s decision last week to strike down New York’s open-carry gun regulations. At other times, however, they act as strong advocates for states’ rights. We have just seen this in their latest decision on the issue of abortion, where they moved the power back to the states at the cost of practically erasing women’s right to abortion.

Rather than an independent proponent of a coherent and overarching set of political principles, the Federalist Society’s so-called commitment to “textualism” largely serves as an enforcement arm of other conservative interests, using the judiciary to push through the agendas of the NRA, the Religious Right and other wings of the current Republican coalition.

But hey, maybe we’ll get lucky and the high court will refuse to hear some of these cases or take a middle ground that won’t be so bad.

Are you feeling lucky?

Everyone knows who is actually running this show. pic.twitter.com/rssBXAXfKJ

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) December 22, 2024

Everyone’s been saying that Elon’s really in charge. And it stands to reason. Poor Trump is obviously past his prime. He’s 78 and fading fast. It happens.

But he’s not happy about it:

Trump: The new one is President Trump has ceded the presidency to Elon Musk. No, that's not happening. pic.twitter.com/wTeDA06muo

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 22, 2024

Trump: [Elon Musk] is not going to be president. That I can tell you. I’m safe. You know why? He can’t be. He wasn’t born in this country pic.twitter.com/YpgcGZ0jF4

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 22, 2024

He’s rattled. And I don’t think he got quite the crowd reaction he was expecting…

Trump most definitely does not like having smart people around him and he certainly doesn’t like having someone who take the spotlight as Musk does. It’s bothering him. But I don’t know if he can get rid of him. He’s scared of Musk’s money and the fact that Musk is now a MAGA leader means he is a competitor. He showed that this week with the wrecking ball he took to the continuing resolution that Trump had signed off on.

And yes, he did sign off on it, despite what the Trumpers are saying. The Washington Post has a good tick-tock on how it all fell apart (gift link):

Several people close to Johnson say the speaker talked frequently with the president-elect and kept him abreast of ongoing negotiations. But another Trump adviser described him as blindsided by the bill’s contents and furious. The first adviser said the president-elect was with Musk at the time, and Trump told NBC he encouraged Musk to post messages condemning the bill.

“I told him that if he agrees with me, that he could put out a statement,” Trump said.

But two people familiar with the situation say that Trump and Johnson were on a call Wednesday morning where the president-elect did not express displeasure with the proposal.

I think we know what really happened. Johnson kept Trump appraised every step of the way because of course he did. Trump lied about telling Musk to post those messages. He would have been right there with him if it was a strategy. No, he was on the golf course or still in bed when it was going on and only after he saw the huge brouhaha caused by Musk’s tweeting did he get in on the action.

He knows he’s weak. And he knows Musk is making him look weak. But he may be stuck with him. It will be interesting to see how this unfolds.

The Bulwark’s Tim Miller went to the TPUSA pre-Christmas “Gathering of the MAGAlos” as he does every year. He’s very brave:

I was standing beside the step-and-repeat at James O’Keefe’s annual AmFest afterparty nursing a bourbon and coke when out of the corner-of-my-eye emerged a face that was mostly familiar, minus the signature sepia blur. The face was approaching fast. Wide TV anchor smile. Caked on make-up. Main-character energy.

I quickly realized I was in its sights.

Immediately I’m greeted with the familiar booming, midwestern-announcer voice. Knowing that I was on enemy turf I attempted a pleasant return greeting, hoping to disarm and signal that I came in peace.

“DON’T TOUCH ME,” Kari Lake screams in my face, I assume in reference to a bit of discomfort with mid-interview physical contact that I had expressed in our last encounter. “YOU ARE A PIECE OF SHIT.”

The face briefly collects itself and appears to look back and see if her husband was taping the exchange. One of the many observers of the scene—and let me tell you, it was a SCENE—later told me that they thought Cameraman Lake had missed the approach, possibly the cause of Kari’s decision to double back for more.

She turns back around.

“You are a piece of shit!” she repeats over, and over, and over, and over, and over, staring up at me with increasing rage in her eyes and at times pinching my arm like an angry grandmother.1 Lake goes on to make a series of other accusations about my integrity. Among them: That I don’t care about “fentanyl mothers,” that I am a “fake news” “liar,” and that I was hiding my signature pearl necklace underneath a button up shirt. (On this last count, at least, I can conclusively say that she was incorrect. )

The attack subsided when an unlikely peace-maker emerged from the growing crowd of onlookers: The right-wing conspiracist Laura Loomer, who you may recall as the Trump hanger-on who briefly became a lightning rod during the 2024 campaign. Loomer made her way through the crowd of onlookers, stood next to Lake and echoed her assessment that I was a lying POS, but in a tone that was more appropriate for a public gathering. Loomer’s calm-disdain-mixed-with-curiosity about my presence seemed to cause Lake’s manic rage to peter out.

Throughout Kari’s tirade, I think I mostly smiled awkwardly. Though who can say. Unless she releases the video, I can’t be sure what I looked like. I remember looking around at my surroundings with low-grade anxiety and trying to assess whether this was real life or if I had mistakenly taken a hallucinogenic gummy. A few times I attempted to congratulate Lake on her new role as the nominee to be the director of the Voice Of America. At first I was trying to de-escalate, but eventually I confess that I was mocking her.

The rest is just as good. And he notes something that I’ve been sort of seeing on social media:

The Lake exchange, while frivolous and a quite a bit cray, was telling. Her behavior was the most unhinged—by far—of anyone I encountered. But it reflected the broader vibe I got from the attendees: People just didn’t seem as happy and fulfilled as I expected.

They just can’t be happy. That goes against their entire ethos. They just have to be mad or they don’t feel alive. (I wrote about this phenomenon after Trump won in 2016.)

The best they can come up with is:

They just don’t know what to do when they win:

Then there were the speeches from the main stage, where the crowd reaction was tepid compared to last year. You could sense the speakers searching for material that would generate some heat. Many settled on talking about how this year proved that God was on Trump’s side and that His hand had emerged from the heavens to protect him on that field in Butler. (This bit was well received.)

But in years past the real juice had come from defining foes. The crowd would get rabid as speakers railed against the deep state, and the election thieves, and Dementia Joe. Kamabla. The Never Trumpers. Kevin McCarthy. The Establishment RINO Cucks. The Muslims. The Killer Migrants. The Trans people who worked in the Biden Administration. Etc. Etc.

The problem for speaker’s this year is that most of their enemies have been defeated and are down bad. And sure, some of us got kicked around a bit on stage to standard applause. But the rabidity was missing. Turns out that it’s hard to get it up for kicking the wounded donkey.

They are tired of winning, I guess. The libs have been owned so they just don’t have any reason for being.

The Washington Post sounds an alarm about the erosion of press freedom. They outline all the cases that are pending and the collapse of the ABC case, all of which sounds pretty bad when you see it all together. They seem to be serious.

It is hardly unusual for a president to clash with the press. Richard M. Nixon kept journalists on his enemies list, while his vice president, Spiro Agnew, dubbed them “nattering nabobs of negativism.” Bill Clinton griped about coverage of his White House sex scandal, and Barack Obama’s administration brought a record number of prosecutions against journalists’ sources for leaking government information.

But legal experts say Trump has taken attacks on the press to an entirely new level, softening the ground for an erosion of robust press freedom.

“The Fake News Media should pay a big price for what they have done to our once great Country,” Trump posted on Truth Social in September in an attack on NBC News.

Experts in polarization said that Trump’s posture toward the press has eroded trust in the Fourth Estate. From the Oval Office, he can do even more.

“My concern is what he does when he has the power of the U.S. government in his hands,” said Liliana Hall Mason, a political science professor at the University of Maryland. “It looks to me like all the guardrails have been removed, and we are in for a presidency unlike any we’ve experienced before.””

One of the articles I read about the ABC case (which I can’t seem to find now unfortunately) said that the corporate legal suits were very nervous about the Florida judge who was hearing the case. Apparently, they interpreted her earlier rulings to be a little bit eccentric and not in a good way. I got the sense they thought there was a little Aileen Cannon energy.

Whether that’s just rationalization, I don’t know. it’s very possible the cave was just another gesture to the Dear Leader from Disney, which was already feeling a little bit vulnerable after the DeSantis business. But reading it did remind me that that with judge shopping being so prevalent and so many hardcore right wing judges on the bench from Trump’s first term, it might be smart to recognize that all the assurance we hear from the various legal beagles that the suits or indictments can’t possibly be found to have merit in the courts may not be taking that into account. With Clarence Thomas talking about overturning NY Times v. Sullivan defamation case, who knows what might happen? The courts are a very weak guardrail at the moment.

Someone got an earful from someone last night…

I’m guessing someone told him about the fees and he got all excited and happy that he has something new to complain about. But he obviously subbed out this tweet to a donor or adviser because it’s far too coherent. I think what the important Heather said was correct:

In the old days I would have said Steve Bannon but I’m not sure who it is today. One thing we can be sure of is that Trump isn’t reading anything. Unless it’s the Classic Comics version of the McKinley era.

It sure seems as though Trump is on an expansionist tear these days. Personally I expect that the pending Mexico invasion is the most likely but who knows? Maybe someone should tell him to colonize Alaska. He almost certainly doesn’t know it’s already a state.

Update —

Of course. It’s revenge:

And vampire squids

Some friends and stilletto-sharp thinkers lately are busy discussing the meaning and implications of Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification.” ICYMI, Macquarie Dictionary declared it the word of the year, defined as: “The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

As Doctorow explained a couple of years back:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Dave Roberts (a.k.a. Dr. Volts) spoke with Doctorow a couple of weeks ago on how enshittification is impacting the right to repair, monopoly power, and the clean energy economy:

But you know, products you pay for get rampantly enshittified — like, you know, John Deere tractors and iPhones and EVs, these are not free. And paying for the product does not make you not the product. Right? It’s, you know, payment is not like a consumer loyalty program where if you pay, suddenly the venal, callow tech-boss suddenly thinks you’re worthy of dignity and respect and stops screwing you. Tech bosses screw you if they can. And right now, we are at a point where they can. So, in this second phase, things are made worse for these platform’s business customers as well.

If you are in the mood to chew through your cheek about that this morning, read “Never Forgive Them,” the Sunday-length installment on enshittification and the Rot Economy at Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At. Doctorow will at the end of his interview at least provide an escape hatch to computer users enslaved by Microsoft or Apple and for-profit online platforms.

I spent a career in consulting work for national and international clients whose products you likely own and use. I’d bet money I’ve been on the inside of more factories than 99 percent of you where they make everything from clothes to paper to tires to plastic to biotech medicines to the white-powder Ms on your M&M’S®. Nevertheless, I am a bad capitalist. I don’t object to capitalism, per se. I just object to the enshittified version that, as Matt Taibbi once wrote, behaves today like “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Now that oligarch-branded capitalism has a stranglehold on our freedoms. It is strangling values like fairness and privacy like an infant in a crib, and enshittifying your experience of being an American.

Not to cast shade on my many friends on Substack (Roberts is there), but I’m rather fond of Digby’s old-school approach to delivering content for readers here. It’s free. There are no paywalls, no ads, pop-up or otherwise. Subscribing is voluntary, donating is voluntary. Nobody’s trying to extract value from your attention without your consent. What a concept?

We trust your experience here is not gradually deteriorating.
Happy Hollandaise!

Whether you’ve been bad or good

IYKYK: The South lost the Civil War but won Reconstruction, neutered the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments across the South, and maintained a rigid system of Jim Crow oppression for the next 100 years.

IYKYK: Each July 4th, we celebrate America’s war to overthrow rule by hereditary royalty and landed gentry and to create on these shores democratic self-rule … plus a little slavery to appease the South’s economic royalty.

Like the Civil War, the American Revolution now seems to have failed. Is there any doubt?

Former bartender, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, doesn’t think so. Her Instagram followers asked about American oligarchy, and one oligarch in particular from the South (Africa).

AOC: “Oh, I don’t think we’re witnessing the START of an oligarchy. I think we are fully here.”

@aoc

Answering questions over on Instagram tonight – @aoc

♬ original sound – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

AOC: “Republicans don’t know who their Daddy is.”

@aoc

Answering questions over on instagram tonight – @aoc

♬ original sound – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Democrats might have had AOC as ranking member of the House Oversight Committee next year. What happened there?

“What we are looking at here is oligarchy”

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders could teach a master class in class politics. He sees it too.

Sanders: “My friends, what we are looking at here has nothing to do with democracy. What we are looking at here is oligarchy. This is up and up government by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.”

Sanders: “What we are dealing with right now is that the billionaire class, which owns so much of our economy, which owns so much of our media, they are now moving aggressively to own our political system as well.”

Ten years ago to the day, I commented on an interview with historian Steve Fraser in which he warned about this second Gilded Age:

Bill Moyers’ guest, historian Steve Fraser, deconstructs how the second Gilded Age differs from the first. Then, people banded together and rose up to challenge their newfound serfdom. But these are “acquiescent times,” says Fraser. We live in a fable of capitalism as “a democracy of the audacious who will make it on their own, while in fact most of the people are headed in the opposite direction.”

Then on Christmas Eve in 2014, I returned to Fraser’s comments:

What Milton Friedman called capitalism in 1962 looks more like an economic cult today. Question the basic assumptions behind corporate capitalism, publicly point out its shortcomings and suggest we are overdue for an upgrade, and the Chamber of Commerce practically bursts through the door like the Spanish Inquisition to accuse you of communism and heresy. Why you … you want to punish success! It’s weirdly reflexive and a mite hysterical. What their blind fealty and knee-jerk defense of this one particular style for organizing a capitalist enterprise says about them, I’ll leave for now. It suffices to say I find it rather peculiar.

We think we invented capitalism. Yet there have been “capitalist acts between consenting adults”* since before Hammurabi. We don’t call one capitalist enterprise the world’s oldest profession for nothing. There’s a restaurant in China that has been in operation for nearly 1000 years. And pubs in England that have been in business for 900. All without being incorporated in Delaware or the Cayman Islands. (Communists?)

The fetish for the current economic model isn’t about money or ideology, but, like The Matrix, about control. For some and not for others. Working people in the first Gilded Age, says Fraser, “summoned up a kind of political will and the political imagination” to civilize capitalism,” to say to themselves, “we are not fated to live this way.”

Now, corporate capitalism is pretty successful at what it does. But then, so is kudzu, another invasive species. I used to live on the edge of a field of kudzu. In the summer, I had to cut it back with a machete each week to keep it from taking over my yard and eating my house. On those hot, summer afternoons, not once did a passing neighbor wag a finger in my face and accuse me of “punishing success.”

Corporate capitalism has become an invasive species that has taken over government of, by, and for the People. Sen. Elizabeth Warren very publicly called out one such creeping pest recently. She suggested it was time we cut it back. She’s right.

We upgrade our hardware and software every couple of years. When was the last time capitalism got a new operating system? And what might that look like?

We’d damned well better start answering those questions or the Elon Musks and Lords of Silicon Valley will answer them for us. Corporate capitalism and our teetering republic need upgrading, but nearly half the country is just fine with being ruled instead of governing themselves. What’s it going to take for that to sink in? Making our oligarchs wear powdered wigs?

Is that lump in your stocking or in your throat?

We’re not giving up if you’re not.
Happy Hollandaise!

Happy Solstice! I thought I’d whip up a wintry mix of (literally) cool tunes to celebrate the shortest day of the year (buck up, little camper…we’ll start gaining daylight tomorrow). So for a much-needed mental health break…turn off the news, fix yourself a nice cup of hot chocolate (or kick it up a notch), dim all the lights, cozy up in front of the fireplace (real or virtual), don your favorite noise-cancelling headphones and (if I may quote from a Styx song) let the melody just drift your cares away.

California Dreamin’ – The Mamas & the Papas

A Hazy Shade of Winter– Simon & Garfunkel

Waiting for the Winter – Popguns

Theme from “Due South” – Jay Semko

Rangers at Midnight – Crack the Sky

A Winter’s Tale – Jade Warrior

Wintertime Love – The Doors

Sometimes in Winter – Blood, Sweat, & Tears

Song of the Evergreens – Chicago

Superwoman – Stevie Wonder

Snowflake – Kate Bush

Winter Wine – Caravan

Northern Lights – Renaissance

Winter in the Country – Cleaners From Venus

Ring Out, Solstice Bells – Jethro Tull

Explore more of my mixtapes (and movie reviews) in the Den of Cinema archives

— Dennis Hartley

If you’re in the mood to read something a little bit heavy tonight (I understand if you aren’t) I recommend this interesting piece by JV Last at the Bulwark. Unfortunately, they don’t offer a gift link option but I’ll give you an excerpt that I hope gets the point across:

The dream of the internet was that it would create a high-information, high-trust society. Technology was supposed to make facts and primary sources immediately available to everyone, thereby ushering in an age of rationality and data-driven decision-making.

If you lived in Bumblefuck, Missouri, the internet meant that you were no longer beholden to the limited stream of news provided by your local paper, three broadcast networks, and assorted cable news players. You’d be able to see the information with your own eyes.

Instead of relying on a small number of information gatekeepers, you now had direct access to data. So you no longer had to rely on what the media told you about, say, crime. You could pull up the FBI crime stats and look at the numbers with your own eyes.

But it hasn’t worked out that way.

The internet has made all of that data readily available to people. And it turns out that often there is too much of it and it is too complicated for normal non-experts to understand. But the bigger problem has been the sheer volume of noise that the internet gave rise to. The noise overwhelmed the information, accelerating the decline in trust in institutions. The net effect was to make the populace as a whole less tethered to facts and data—and more animated by folk stories and something like an oral tradition.

[…]

This Matt Pearce essay brought me up short because it hits on a truth so profound that I can’t believe it never occurred to me before:

The result of all of this [changing economics of media] is a growing consumer alienation from the actual sources of information, a return to a kind of folk-story society ripe for manipulation by demagogues who promise simplicity in an increasingly complex world.

This. This is it, right there.

We are now a folk-story society. The drones. The immigrants eating cats and dogs. The crime wave and “economic hardships” that haven’t been real since 2022. It’s all folklore. Stories that a post-literate people pass on to one another in the oral tradition.

I cannot recommend Pearce’s essay enough. You should read it all.

Basically, the vast majority of what we come across on the internet is bullshit.

I think is also probably correct:

Pearce’s big insight is that this new world is ripe for demagogues because they thrive in societies that run on folk stories. The demagogue’s lies spread from person to person and even if the demagogue is conclusively exposed as a liar, no one believes the exposure

If liberal society is an organism, a demagogue is a virus. The demagogue takes advantage of the freedoms afforded by liberalism to attack the host. Sometimes, if the demagogue is virulent enough, it can kill the society.

Over time, liberal societies build up antibodies to demagogues. The accumulation of such antibodies are one reason that the longer a liberal society endures, the more likely it is to survive challenges. Relatively new liberal societies are vulnerable because they have not had the time to build up antibodies. Old liberal societies are more robust. These antibodies come in many forms: laws, traditions, institutions, civil society, an independent media.

We once hoped that the technological revolutions of the information age would become another antibody; another layer of protection. But it hasn’t worked out that way. Instead, it’s clear that the current state of technology has been like a radiation dose that kills off antibodies and compromises the organism’s immune system—in this case, leaving our society more vulnerable to demagogues than it has been in generations.

The one thing I think might be a factor here that Last doesn’t mention is the power of celebrity in all this. I have to wonder if that isn’t fuelling this demagoguery as much as anything. If that’s so, there might be a way to challenge the demagogues. Celebrity comes in many different shapes and sizes.

I’ll admit that when I heard about these people taking videos of constellations and planes and freaking out because they thought they were alien drones made me think of primitives looking up at the sky and seeing god’s and monsters in those lights. We really are going backwards.