What Now?

Samir Mehta | November 25, 2024
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Erik Bates | November 26, 2024
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Steve West | November 26, 2024
As a former Republican, it saddens me to see what the party has devolved into. I refuse to be a part of it and went so far as to change my party affiliation. I happily voted for both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The Great Experiment must not die with Donald Trump, his enablers, sycophants, clones, and brainwashed followers. It's going to get worse before it gets better but as voters responded in 2020, I'm counting on the same response in four years. I cannot predict what happens four years after that...

Evie Totty | November 26, 2024
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Scott Hardie | November 29, 2024
Count me among the folks disconnecting. I have cancelled my New York Times subscription and all of my subscriptions to YouTube channels and TV shows that discuss current events. Some of those were easy choices (as much as I appreciate Adam Conover's insights, his channel increasingly felt like someone yelling in my face about how terrible Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are), but other cancellations were painful (Last Week Tonight is the best & smartest show on TV and missing its weekly jolt of laughter & tears breaks my heart a little).

Staying connected is torture. All of Trump's moves since the election signal that he intends to follow through with the batshittiest ideas that he proposed in his campaign. Contemplating how fucked we seem to be -- economically, culturally, and spiritually -- makes me want to throw up. I don't see the benefit, to me or to society, of putting myself through that daily agony.

To those who argue that disconnecting allows Trump and other maleficent actors to get away with their evil more easily, I say: What's stopping them? How is my being aware of their evil a bulwark against it in any way whatsoever? I have zero power to stop them. They are shameless and act in broad daylight.

To those who argue that we should not put our heads in the sand and that we should resist, like the author of the NY Times article shared above, I say: What do you want me to DO? I already vote and donate. I already speak my mind online. I cannot publicly protest given my disabilities. I am highly skeptical of the effect of calling or writing my representatives given the polarity of government and how red my area is. What else, specifically, do you want me to DO? Because if the answer is merely "stay informed," that's unacceptable. Staying informed currently means drinking from a fire hose of content that induces massive amounts of dread, anxiety, and frustration, with no outlet for it. I will not put myself through that for nothing.

In the last few weeks, I have seen longtime friendships end in screaming matches about this stuff because one person is not sufficiently outraged to the other's satisfaction. I have had people confess contemplation of ending their lives over how dark they expect things to get. We're going through a lot of trauma, we cannot do anything to stop it, and I don't accept for a second that checking out is an illegitimate choice.

And there's another reason for me to disconnect: My liberal media bubble got me into this mess, and it's not going to get me out. Outside of MAGA, vast numbers of centrist voters perceived Trump for the rotten self-dealing criminal that he is and voted for him anyway. What's more likely, that these tens of millions of people are somehow all morons, or that my media diet caused me to miss something essential that they didn't? The news is inherently biased towards making me feel outrage by reporting on the most scandalous events in the most clamorous way, and the liberal slant of my chosen news providers tends to frame anything conservative as inherently scandalous. That predisposes me to see big conservative wins as disasters, when logic should dictate that there is at least some wisdom in the crowd that I'm missing in the minority. When I contemplate Fox News and Newsmax viewers sitting on their couches day in and day out, absorbing this toxic slanted reporting that only makes them angrier and angrier while depriving themselves of a full picture of the world, at some point I have to wonder why I'm doing the same thing to myself with left-wing news sources. I realize that "broaden your media diet beyond left-wing sources" is a far cry from "disconnect from all news" which is what I'm actually doing, but my real point is, I can no longer trust the New York Times or John Oliver to keep me properly informed after this lopsided shitshow of an election, and I'm responding appropriately.

As for the future, who knows what will happen? Maybe the doom predicted by my media diet will fail to pass and the next four years will merely be turbulent instead of cataclysmic, or they'll even be surprisingly pleasant. The headwinds are at Trump's back in a way that they weren't with Biden; for instance, Biden was punished for inevitable post-pandemic inflation even though it happened all over the world at once. If I believe that the doomsaying on the right about a Harris presidency was unfounded, surely there is a chance that I might be similarly wrong about Trump? I've seen mountains of evidence that he is ethically corrupt and mentally deficient, and I expect him to continue to be those things, but they do not guarantee that his presidency will inevitably be catastrophic for the country. There is simply no way to know until events play out. I'm done dreading the very worst with nothing productive to do with that feeling.

Erik Bates | January 27, 2025
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Samir Mehta | January 27, 2025
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Scott Hardie | January 28, 2025
We're never going fully back to the way things were, but it won't stay quite this bad forever, either. Trump is currently enjoying his honeymoon with the political winds at his back. That will slowly change as bad news inevitably accumulates, especially if his economic policies turn out to be as counter-productive as I expect—sure, let's deport as many undocumented laborers back to Central America as we can; they only make up half of the agricultural industry's workforce at a time when high grocery prices decided the election—and as voters and journalists shift their attention to 2028. Trump's power should already be well into decline by the time Democrats likely retake Congress in 2026. It's only a question of how much harm Trump will do during the time when he enjoys total freedom like he does now, and unfortunately the answer is probably a lot.

A few news stories have found their way to me via social media and such. It's tough to pick the most bone-chilling one, but I have to give it to the reporter fired for calling Elon Musk's Nazi salute a Nazi salute, because of the way that Trump supporters quickly mobilized to get her fired within hours for stating a plainly obvious fact. When the fascists insist that you deny the reality that you see with your own eyes, history would say that you're in deep shit.

Also, Erik, I can't tell if you're being sincere or sarcastic, but presidents keep, or make a serious effort to keep, most of their promises. Widespread belief that they don't is fuel for anti-institutionalists like Trump.

Erik Bates | January 28, 2025
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Scott Hardie | January 29, 2025
Agreed. And yet, if there was ever a president who could get away with not keeping his promises, it's Trump, since he'd only be proving right his own followers' disillusionment.

The widespread belief that Trump didn't really mean all of the crazy shit that he promised (well satirized by Reductress) is, in and of itself, a very worrying sign for our society. How are we to function if we are not supposed to take at his word what our candidate for head of state promises? Think back twenty or thirty years. Voters knew that presidential candidates didn't keep all of their promises, but they expected at least a half-hearted effort to try, and more importantly, the president was supposed to keep his promises. If he didn't, it was a failure to be held against him, a mark of disgrace. Today, our national spirit is so broken that we literally don't even believe that the leading candidate means half (most?) of what he promises, we don't expect him even to try in the least, and yet we vote for him anyway. We're so fucked.

Samir Mehta | January 29, 2025
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