How to keep functioning and getting out of bed every morning.
And my plan for Freedom Over Fascism. Also, now on BlueSky @freedomoverfascism.
Hi Friends,
Along with all of you, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the past week. Some of it is about my fear of what’s coming, who the targets are (am I a target?), what “hard” is going to mean. There are a few things we can do at this point…mostly urging Blue state govs and legislators to refuse to follow unlawful orders. But I’m not concentrating on this because a) I might never be able to get out of bed again; and b) it’s not focused enough on what needs to change on our side.
What I’m not going to talk about: I’m not going to give any hot takes about the campaign, what it did wrong, or any particular tactics. The votes aren’t counted yet, and we still don’t know who won the House, though it’s likely to be Republican. Also, I don’t think small fixes would have made a difference. In this campaign, as in all of our country’s issues, we can’t fix systemic problems with individual solutions. A lot of that monday morning quarterbacking is self serving, and a lot of it can be a circular firing squad. No thank you.
What I do want to talk about—right now and moving forward—are three major things:
Media environment: Right now the right wing has a hermetically sealed echo chamber that relies on misinformation, straight up lies, and disinformation from foreign adversaries. We need to find a way to contend with the fact that the right wing and the center/left/left live in completely different realities. None of our best messages matter if we can’t reach anyone except ourselves, the high information, politics obsessed activists. I believe we need to rethink our media environment…learning lessons from the Rs to some extent. We need to move away from the main stream media. We won’t win this with MSNBC. We need to FUND big and small content creators to keep our side interested and engaged. We need to rethink content itself. Dmitiri Melhorn said to me that the other side feeds their constituency what they want all day every day. They give their folks ice cream, whereas we tell people to eat their broccoli. I think we need both…ice cream and delicious buttery vegetables. We need to create new kinds of content that reaches politically non-involved people with our values. Meaning we need to learn to talk about politics without talking about politics. And we need to come together to have all sorts of ideas in the mix. It can’t be separate from the party, it needs to be integrated together and funded so that creators aren’t competing for resources…they’re mutually supportive.
Crisis of Belonging—in the 2020 primary, Pete Buttigieg called our national need for community a “crisis of belonging.” We need to be talking about how to connect with each other…not just on social media, but in real life. And in that connecting, we need to be transmitting our values or celebrating shared values so that fewer people think there’s nothing in politics or society for them.
State and local government—we’ll be relying on Blue states and state and local government across the country to govern effectively and meet the people where they are…in their homes and towns…with practical and pragmatic solutions to the problems they face.
Tools for organizing—I’ll continue to talk to entrepreneurs about tools we can use for organizing year round 24/7. We can be organizing much more effectively, but we need to know what’s out there to help us.
So….what does that mean? I’m going to talk about corporate media, independent media, and new kinds of media. I’ll talk to folks with giant platforms and people with smaller platforms and try to figure out how we get creators at all levels funded, or we small fries will burn out and all there will be are the big fish like Meidas, Crooked Media, MSW, Resolute Square….and nobody else. I’m also going to try to figure out how we can create more personal and vulnerable content that doesn’t just talk about politics.
It also means that I’ll be going to the New DEAL Leaders conference next week and meeting up with pragmatic, practical, and effective state and local leaders. And I’ll talk to pro-democracy organizing tool makers to highlight more effective organizing.
And I’ll write here and focus the podcast on these issues that we can control. I’ll continue to give activists concrete actions to take, and I’ll engage with you in this community to move forward on things that we can control.
I invite each and every one of you to participate in our own resistance to MAGA and to find lasting strategies to reaching folks who politics has left behind.
I’ll also be providing something for paid subscribers—I think it will be responding to paid subscribers’ DMs immediately and possibly providing paid subscriber chats, zooms, or other benefits. I’m open to ideas, but I want to keep the bulk of the content free.
Please let me know what you think!
One of the things this means for me is that I’ll have to figure out how to support myself through the podcast or with many more paid subscribers here. If I don’t earn any money, I’ll burn out soon and be gone like the rest of the independent creators who need time to build up a large audience.
Thank you, but I say sue the bastards. Fox and Musk have gotten away with spreading disinformation because of a misunderstanding of the political speech doctrine: The First Amendment protects ‘core political speech’ above all other forms of expression. But Musk purchasing the world’s town square only to weaponize it to support his own agenda, and Fox admittedly lying to viewers nonstop to promote Trump, isn’t political speech presumptively entitled to legal protection.
Weaponized disinformation will ultimately kill the First Amendment, which the Supreme Court recognized back in 1969 when it approved the Fairness Doctrine and required accuracy in the media. Even in politics, the foundational role of protecting free speech is the promotion of free ideas, not to protect a nefarious publisher’s monopoly.
There's much to be said for the ice cream vs broccoli analogy but, in my opinion, it misses an important aspect. It's not really ice cream they're being served; ice cream is sweet. It's a steady diet of hate cream and fear cream. Negative emotions are much more engaging and motivating than positive emotions online and in other media. Add to that the fact that internet trolls have said in the past that they've tried to spread falsehoods among liberals, and they simply aren't as likely to take the bait as conservatives. So, we have a third to half (if the non-voters follow the distribution of voters) who are especially susceptible to the kinds of disinformation that gets them worked up and ready to take action. It will be much harder to confront that without, perhaps, turning into them, at least as a public facing rhetorical device. I don't know that we would want to do that. But otherwise, we just have to wait for the planned economic policy to tank the economy, in which case we'll do well with the voters next time, only to have the cycle repeat 4 or 8 years later.