The Sorensen Monologues
Base-less Strategy
To be clear, I’m talking about the party leadership here and not the candidates themselves, many of whom are doing a good job of articulating a progressive vision. Last week we learned that Washington Gov. Jay Inslee had requested a debate devoted to the issue of climate change. The DNC said no, with the bizarre excuse that a president must be able to “multitask” (with a focused debate apparently being an example of not multitasking). To make matters worse, the DNC threatened to punish candidates who did engage in such a debate. According to Inslee, “they explained that if we participated in anyone else’s climate debate, we will not be invited to future debates. This is deeply disappointing.”
I can see the argument that many Americans have been so deluged with BS from right-wing media about the climate crisis that there is some risk of alienating those voters, but I don’t think we’re going to move forward in any meaningful way by kowtowing to disinformation and self-censoring; that’s a short-sighted approach. The DNC’s plan to punish candidates who do participate in a climate debate is just beyond stupid. I thought some of the animus directed at the DNC in 2016 was a bit conspiratorial and overblown, but now they’re practically begging the party faithful to loathe them.
My motivation here is not to create a destructive circular firing squad, but to criticize these bad ideas in the hope that the leadership will improve. It seems some strategists are only capable of perceiving the risk of alienating hypothetical swing voters, but ignore the great risk of alienating the base. You don’t win elections with milquetoast waffling. And if the planet is to survive, we’re going to have to talk about it.
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Twitter for Introverts
To my Twitter friends who tweet a lot: I’m not talking about you! I mean, not really. What inspired this cartoon is this tendency for Twitter to constantly show me tweets by certain people I don’t follow (through retweets and trending topics), while almost never showing tweets from less-active people I actually do follow. Generally speaking, I find the quiet folks in the latter group far more interesting than the first, which tends to be dominated by mediocre media people. Oftentimes the humans I find the most fascinating — like Alison Bechdel — barely tweet at all. I realize I can manage what I see through the mute button and lists, but the fact remains that Twitter algorithms rely on engagements, which create a self-reinforcing cycle that elevates high-volume opinion-spewers. (Implicit bias also plays a role in who gets retweeted, as well as a certain degree of NY-DC media insularity.)
Twitter is, unfortunately, the space where professional visibility happens nowadays. I can’t change that, but at least I can fantasize about a different kind of public commons where quiet people RULE.
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Fake Facebook Videos Throughout History
As most people have heard, a slowed-down video of Nancy Pelosi that made her appear drunk or mentally troubled went viral recently. The White House, in what appears to have been a coordinated effort, promulgated the smear that Pelosi was losing her marbles. Facebook refused to remove the video, claiming they’d reduced its distribution, but according to the Root it was still getting comments from confused viewers, and failed to have any fact-checker warnings.
This goes beyond merely inaccurate spin or false “reporting.” Seeing is believing, and manipulated video is about bending reality itself. While the Pelosi video alteration was relatively low-tech, the technology of “deep fakes” — digitally-constructed fake video — is improving, and almost certainly will pose grave Orwellian challenges in the future. Samantha Bee did a good segment on deep fakes for the “Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner” special. It’s worth watching if you want to learn more.
A number of well-meaning people have suggested that it’s not Facebook’s job to remove such content, and who’s to say what is true or false, and there is no absolute rule that would apply to everything, so therefore we can do nothing. This just shows how much norms have been eviscerated. Facebook is a media company profiting off of news delivery. This is a high-profile case of disinformation and character assassination with major political import. You do what any ethical news outlet would do. You apply basic journalistic principles and remove it! Facebook removes plenty of content all the time (let’s just say it has a complicated relationship with the female breast), so it’s not like they don’t interfere already.
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Fantasy Joe Biden
OK, so I did give in to the temptation to make a Game of Thrones reference. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the show, Arya Stark has shape-shifting capabilities and, to put it gently, does not suffer fools. I like the idea of Arya taking over Biden for a while. The thing is, I didn’t want to imply that she’d killed Biden, so I had to explain that somehow, and, well, if you look at photos, the man clearly has had some work done. I don’t actually hate Biden, but I do think he’s the wrong candidate for this moment, and his propensity for saying gratuitously stupid things (such as having no empathy for an entire generation saddled with crushing student loan debt in a time of record inequality while facing insane housing costs and apocalyptic climate change) is worrisome. I get that some voters like happy talk about working together with Republicans, but I don’t think this sets us up well for standing up to the revolutionary assault on democracy currently being waged by the GOP.
If Biden becomes the nominee, there will be a time to rally around him — but right now I think it’s useful to examine the candidates’ shortcomings. I criticize not to destroy, but in the hopes that his campaign will do better. Otherwise, this country is toast.
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End Of The Roe
Several states are now passing radical anti-abortion laws, with the express goal of taking the fight all the way to a sympathetically pre-modern Supreme Court. Alabama is on the verge of enacting a near-total ban with no exceptions for rape and incest. Yesterday, SCOTUS issued an ominous ruling against stare decisis that many legal experts are saying lays the groundwork for overturning Roe.
How did we get here? Partly, I would argue, from reproductive justice being continually marginalized as “not hard news” — unlike, say, tariffs! (Incidentally, I’ve seen a couple terrible political cartoons now depicting trade war with China as an earth-scorching Game of Thrones dragon. I don’t care how much fun it is to draw dragons, I promise I will never do that to you.) Also, some of us were VERY, VERY WORRIED about the Supreme Court in 2016, predicting that this was going to happen, and it felt like those warnings were met with a collective shrug. I think many people still underestimate the dark times ahead. Seriously, working on this cartoon gave me the creeps.
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Candidate Time Machine
I’d vote for any of these candidates against Trump, of course. I do think people are overestimating Biden’s electability — there’s an enthusiasm gap there that poses a risk, and he’s said some awfully stupid stuff. You can’t say Trump is an aberration and unrepresentative of the GOP in 2019 after voter purges, Merrick Garland, acceptance of Russian interference in our elections, and countless other gross violations of democratic norms. And no, Dick Cheney is not a “decent man.”
I don’t object to trying to win over white working class guys in diners — indeed, I support the 50-state strategy espoused by Howard Dean some years ago. I do think they’ve been somewhat mythologized at the expense of other working class voters. I couldn’t help but notice who was prominently featured in this emotionally-powerful Sanders ad about the Lordstown, Ohio GM plant closure, compared to the considerably more diverse set of Lordstown workers who appeared in this NY Times article (scroll down through all the photos).
The role of Trump’s affluent and middle-class supporters has also been rendered invisible. The $70,000 figure came from this oft-quoted Nate Silver post; while rural voters do tend to support Trump, we often forget it was suburban whites who really put him over the top. Only a third of Trump supporters had incomes under $50,000; another third earned $50,000-$100,000 and the remaining third made over $100,000. How often do we hear about Trump’s huge base of six-figure earners? Other studies suggest that better indicators of Trump support are education levels and fragile masculinity.
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More Maladies of the Information Age
I figured I’d take a break from The Horrors this week, something I could certainly use, and you probably could too. In calmer years past I drew more cultural strips, which are political in their own right, even if political cartoon traditionalists don’t see it that way. I may start doing a few more of these in the months ahead.
I have personally encountered all of the problems illustrated in this cartoon, the most recent one being Game of Thrones spoiler panic. The hubbo and I broke our longstanding rule of not paying for cable TV and signed up for HBO Now with a Roku (CHEAP!) so we could watch the final season of Game of Thrones without people on Twitter ruining it for us. But I haven’t had a chance to watch the latest episode yet, and I feel like I can’t check social media until I do.
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Not Helping, Mueller Report Edition
Ugh, the dumb takes on the redacted Mueller Report are flying from every direction. Mueller himself is partly to blame, for entrusting Republicans in Congress to conduct oversight and for speaking in elliptical bureaucratese that leaves itself open to spin and gross failures of reading comprehension. The report’s damning evidence was greeted by weak messaging from the Democratic leadership, with Steny Hoyer timidly saying impeachment was “not worthwhile” and Nancy Pelosi in Belfast stating that, while on a Congressional delegation overseas, “We do not leave the country to criticize the president of the United States.” She promised to follow up on the report, but I mean, come on. Can you imagine this ho-hum response from Republicans if Democrats sought and received help from Russia to win an election? I’m not saying the Dems have to commit to impeachment (though I believe Elizabeth Warren’s response was morally just). But at least show some proper outrage and say “THIS IS APPALLING!”
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The New York Post Cover Generator
As you’ve most likely heard, Rep. Ilhan Omar gave a speech to the Council on American-Islamic Relations after the New Zealand massacre, in which she addressed Islamophobia and the tendency for all Muslims to be blamed for the actions of a few extremists. Here’s the key passage:
Because here’s the truth — here’s the truth: Far too long, we have lived with the discomfort of being a second-class citizen, and frankly, I’m tired of it, and every single Muslim in this country should be tired of it. CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties. So you can’t just say that today someone is looking at me strange, that I am going to try to make myself look pleasant. You have to say, “This person is looking at me strange. I am not comfortable with it. I am going to go talk to them and ask them why.” Because that is a right you have.
Right-wing activists latched onto the phrase “some people did something,” stripped it of its context, and dishonestly presented it as though it were Omar’s definitive statement on 9/11. The heinous New York Post cover blared “REP. ILHAN OMAR: 9/11 WAS ‘SOME PEOPLE DID SOMETHING'” — suggesting a very different sentence with a different meaning than the actual quote. As if to illustrate her very point about Islamophobia, they showed a photo of planes hitting the twin towers and accused her of lack of sympathy for the dead. Now she faces a barrage of death threats herself.
A couple thoughts here. First, there’s nothing wrong with what Omar said! She spoke in abstractions in the service of larger logical point about blaming the many for the actions of a few. She was basically saying “x did y, and everyone who looks like x gets blamed for it.” She didn’t need to go into the horrors of y. As Elizabeth Spiers says in her critique of the vile Post cover: “She was not talking to an audience full of children or idiots. Everyone in the room knew what happened on 9/11, and everyone knew it was unspeakably horrible.”
Second, the extremist Rupert Murdoch types creating these manufactured controversies are only part of the problem. Just as bad are people trying position themselves as “centrist” and “reasonable” by arguing that Ilhan did something wrong, but it’s not as bad as the NY Post and Fox News said, or talking about her as a “vector of controversy,” or some such holier-than-thou nonsense. These people are feeding the problem
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Blacklisted
In case you haven’t heard, the DCCC – the arm of the Democratic Party that works to elect members of the House – recently introduced a policy restricting its vendors from working with any candidate challenging a Democratic incumbent. In other words, no existing officeholder can be primaried (and if they are, the consultants who help them can’t work for the DCCC). While I understand the logic of supporting incumbents and don’t really have a problem with the party favoring them in most cases, this policy is both draconian and divisive. To quote Rep. Ayanna Pressley, “If the DCCC enacts this policy to blacklist vendors who work with challengers, we risk undermining an entire universe of potential candidates and vendors – especially women and people of color – whose ideas, energy, and innovation need a place in our party.”
The last thing the Dems need as we head into 2020 is to alienate the progressive base even further. The party is already so fragmented, I worry about how we’re going to get through the next presidential election in one piece. For more, here’s the site of the campaign against the blacklist.
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What’s in the Mueller Report?
While I still believe there’s not much to say about the Mueller Report until we actually know what’s in the Mueller Report, the response to the Barr letter has been disturbing. Barr was specifically hired to defend Trump at all costs. The man is a partisan toad with a long track record of partisan toadery; it’s what he does. The Trump administration is defined by disinformation; it’s what they do. To take anything said by a Trump official at face value, ignoring this vast context of corruption and disinformation, is simply bad journalism and poor critical thinking.
Mueller found many crimes and charged many people. We are only talking about his inability to bring indictments against top officials — which is a genuine mystery, and one that will only be resolved by the report itself. To quote TPM:
It is undisputed that the Russian government brazenly interfered in the 2016 election to support Donald Trump. In so doing, the Russians and those acting on their behalf committed a variety of federal crimes including computer hacking and conspiracy to defraud the U.S. Those crimes were committed to benefit (a) Vladimir Putin and the interests of the Russian government; and (b) Donald J. Trump. It is also undisputed that Trump and his campaign joyfully used and weaponized the information the Russians stole against Hillary Clinton. Trump personally trumpeted the Wikileaks disclosures 141 times during the campaign, and his surrogates countless more times. While Mueller’s team apparently “did not establish” (i.e., did not find enough evidence to charge criminally) that Trump personally conspired with the Russian government to commit the underlying crimes, there is no question that he was (along with Putin) the single biggest beneficiary of those criminal efforts.
Now, pro-Trump conspiracy theorists are feeling extra-emboldened to call those who have actually followed this story the real conspiracy theorists. It’s all rather depressingly Orwellian.
If Fox News Was a Single Reporter
I suppose everyone is talking about the Mueller Report now, but I don’t really have much to say until we learn what’s actually in the report. We know from public records that the Trump campaign had all sorts of dealings with Russia that any reasonable person would interpret as coordination; we do not know why Mueller was unable to bring charges. Anyone making sweeping conclusions based on the wording of the Barr letter is engaging in uninformed spin and premature bloviation. Unfortunately, this seems to be most of the media.
Speaking of which, a far more important issue we face is the crisis in journalism. I’ve had the idea for a while now that if Fox News were an individual reporter, he or she would have been denounced as an unethical fraud and exiled from the profession. But when this same lack of ethics applies to an entire network, many media insiders can’t bring themselves to apply the same standards. Anyone remember Jayson Blair, the fabulist reporter who caused a major scandal for the New York Times? You might say Fox is like that, but with a plutocratic agenda.
Fox covers for itself by sprinkling in very small amounts of real reporting alongside wackadoo disinformation campaigns, conspiracy theories, and hate speech. This leads other media professionals to erroneously defend the network in the name of “press freedom.” It creates an opening for holier-than-thou pundits to call the Dems “closed-minded” for not having a debate on the channel, when a more apt comparison would be having a debate on InfoWars. Well-meaning progressive groups play into this strategy when they celebrate the occasional Fox anchor who criticizes Trump or says something sane. Recently, former Democratic strategist Donna Brazile made the decision to join Fox as a contributor, further lending them the veneer of legitimacy. (I was going to include her at the end of the cartoon, but decided it made things too complicated.)
