Happily Outside the Room Where It Happens

Previously on Spectre Collie, I presented my grand theory on the state of American politics in 2024, which is that nobody actually understands what the hell is going on. And more importantly: the more confidently somebody asserts that they do understand what’s going on, the more suspect they are.

With a few notable exceptions. After the past few weeks, the only people that seem trustworthy to me and insightful enough to say what’s actually going on are Harris, Walz, and Buttigieg.1 In other words: I’ve become the guy smitten with politicians and extremely distrustful of the “mainstream media,” the New York Times in particular.

In other words: what the f@$#?!2

I think the short answer is that everything has been allowed to get so weird and nonsensical that it requires a full reboot. I already thought that we were seeing a reboot of the Democratic party, but it looks like it’s turning into a total turn-the-entire-system-off-wait-30-seconds-and-turn-it-back-on-again to reset everything to the center.

And yes, obviously, it is the center. Maybe slightly left; it’s hard to tell anymore when they’re on stage at a Democratic rally saying how much they respect the Second Amendment. Everything in the Harris/Walz platform is just widely popular common sense. The only reason it’s ever interpreted anywhere as “dangerously leftist,” or even “boldly progressive,” is because corporate journalism and social media have failed us.

I didn’t realize just how bad it had gotten until I ventured back onto centralized social media (Threads and Bluesky) and started checking the news sites again. I’m used to the New York Times taking the “both-sides” approach, helping to normalize deceit and corruption, and lowering the bar for acceptable newsworthiness so much that we’re all now having to regularly hear about the most batshit fringe nonsense. But I’d always assumed it was a “cover your ass” policy to keep themselves out of trouble. I used to dismiss it as conspiratorial nonsense whenever people insisted that the Times was invested in the “horse race” and would do whatever it took to keep the race close. Now, though, I can’t think of any other rational explanation for their coverage of the Biden administration and now the Harris campaign. It has such a blatantly obvious bias, grousing that they didn’t get all the Democratic in-fighting and “blitz primary” bullshit that they’d been hoping for, that it makes the NY Times Pitchbot account seem too rational and sensible.

And just a week or two on Threads has challenged everything I thought I understood about trolls and algorithms after decades spending too much time online. Of course I’m used to seeing political posts, or posts about controversial topics — like “gay people living and not being miserable” or “trans people existing” or “Star Wars” — get overrun with bullshit comments, either from bots or from people offering so little that they might as well be bots. What I hadn’t expected was Threads’s bizarro-world Algorithmic Lockdown, where I see only the stuff I agree with, and all the racist, homophobic, transphobic, or MAGA3 comments are filtered out.

To be clear: it’s not a positive, because so little of it feels authentic. It has the flop-sweat desperation of Tik Tok, where the model isn’t “topical conversation that’s supported by advertising” but “advertising occasionally disguising itself as topical conversation.” Apparently engagement is heavily monetized on Threads? So there are tons of posts that just have “THIS” with emoji fingers pointing at somebody else’s videos. Or the “what’s your favorite?” or “only 90s kids remember” flavor of engagement bait from the early days of Twitter, but spread across multiple posts to guarantee you have to click through to read everything. And any political post is filled with one-line comments repeating the same bits about Oranges, Blue Waves, “DonOLD,” tiny hands, “Lock Him Up,” men wearing eyeliner, having sex with couches, etc.

I felt like I had a better handle on it when it was as simple as “I’m posting shitty noise to drown out an idea that I disagree with.” Or “I’m astroturfing to make it seem like these shitty ideas have more popular support.” Or in the case of the Times, “we’re so petrified at the thought of litigation that we have to treat nonsense as if it were newsworthy.” I’m left completely confused and out of my element when the curtain gets pulled back, and I see that there’s no actual ideology behind any of it. It’s Megyn Kellys4 and Kimberly Guilfoyles all the way down — people with no real conviction whatsoever, but who are simply willing to say anything it takes for the sake of money, engagement, or political power.

Suddenly, there are strongly-opinionated experts everywhere!

This is especially problematic for people like me, who just kind of assumed that all the people speaking the most confidently about politics (or any topic that I’m not particularly interested in, for that matter) were generally better-informed about the topic, even if they had objectively terrible opinions of it. Or that even if they were trying to deceive me, they at least had a discernible motivation. But these guys believe in nothing! Say what you will about the tenets of national socialism, Dude. At least it’s an ethos.

This grand reassessment also has me second-guessing the amount of leeway I’ve been giving to self-described leftists, on the assumption that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” as well as “anybody who’s willing to be so deeply, unnecessarily, unpleasant must at least have strong convictions motivating it.” The type of people who kept shoving Bernie Sanders in my face, and then when I said, “Actually I’m planning to vote for someone who actually has a chance of winning a presidential election,” they called me a fascist.

A few days ago, I was tricked into reading something on substack5 that was so startlingly repugnant and vacuous, I almost reflexively closed the browser window to avoid its infecting me like the lump of evil at the end of Time Bandits. I still haven’t read past the first few paragraphs, because I can only tolerate so much of the arrogant-but-also-disaffected tone. But the gist, as I understand it, is that none of us should be fooled for one second by this apparent wave of joy and optimism that’s almost palpable, because the stinking liberals and neolibs don’t own it and don’t deserve it. And the author, to demonstrate not only their rock-solid grasp of global politics, but also their limitless capacity for joy, describes Biden as “Genocide Joe” and the “butcher of Gaza.”

I certainly don’t understand the massive tangle of complexity involved in negotiating a cease fire in Israel and Gaza. I do know that just because a problem is so obviously black and white — the attacks on Gaza are inexcusable and indefensible — that doesn’t mean that the solution is, too. And when the hot takes are indistinguishable from bad-faith attempts to undermine the Harris/Walz campaign, then they’re worth exactly as much. I’m skeptical that the solution to a millennia-long conflict in the middle east is going to be solved in a blog post, so the time would be a lot better spent pointing people towards how to provide humanitarian aid, or contact the representatives that are actually making the decisions.

So I’m happily tossing out everything I’ve “learned” in the last 40-plus years of trying to figure out American politics, because it doesn’t seem very useful anymore.

Instead of continuing to go further and further down the spiral of second-guessing motivations, carefully distinguishing between bad-faith propaganda and earnest but misguided opinions and confidently-asserted nonsense, and thoughtfully examining the sociopolitical ramifications of calling weird people “weird,” I’m just going to say, “Nah.”

We don’t need to keep rushing to carefully inspect every noxious turd that the GOP shits out, being so certain that we’ve thoroughly inspected and refuted every kernel of corn, that we’ve forgotten to pay any attention to the people actually trying to improve things. When the most anti-charismatic son of a bitch in the United States suggests that twenty-four years of service in the military isn’t sufficient, the correct response is not to spend two days giving detailed explanations of how it is, too. The correct response is to say “What in the hell are you talking about? That’s stupid. Shut up.”

We’ve all known for years that the MAGA gang are morally and ideologically bankrupt grifters, and still people insist on treating them as if they have ideas worth refuting. There is no substance there. They are completely devoid of juice. When they lose, it’s not going to be because we finally were able to come up with the logical argument that counters their years-long wave of noise and bullshit. It’s going to be because people finally got tired of them, and we all wanted to be free of their chaos and instead see people being kind and happy and normal again.

The past few weeks have convinced me that most of the institutions I’ve begrudgingly relied on haven’t had the motivations I always assumed. It’s not as dramatic as the full-on propaganda networks that have popped up to handle the GOP getting increasingly batshit, it’s more of a change in focus as corporations and engagement have rendered journalistic integrity unprofitable. The Times and the Post and all the various pundits treat the political process as the end goal, instead of as a means to an end. At their worst, the Democrats have fallen into the same trap, always strategizing for what’s going to play best in the next election, instead of what people actually need or want.

I think the best thing the Harris campaign has done is cut through all of that and taken it back to the basics. I like seeing very smart people who know what they’re doing. I love that they chose “Freedom” as a campaign song for at least five different reasons, and I love hearing it when she comes on stage. I love that she clearly won’t take any shit, but also comes across as sincerely kind. I love that she’s such a clear aspirational role model for so many people. I love that I’m not feeling like I have to qualify my admiration for someone as being too over-the-top; she seems like she’d be plenty good at the job, so shut up and let us celebrate competence for once! And I love that I’m not particularly worried about whether it’s “cringe” that I already ordered one of the camouflage campaign hats, and I’m looking forward to wearing it.

And again, it’s worth remembering that they’re not afraid of calling out the assholes they’re running against, but they’re also not content to just dunk on them as if that itself were some kind of victory. Too many people — people who should know better, frankly — spend all their time just refuting or “fact-checking” Trump or Vance or their propaganda networks, completely ignoring (or failing to understand) that the Harris/Walz campaign has made sure to always turn the attention away from all the things that the Trump campaign is doing wrong6 and focus it back on all the ways that a Harris administration would be better.

I’ve seen so much written and said trying to speculate on the exact campaign strategy for choosing Tim Walz as the VP — why it wasn’t Shapiro, what exactly it means to this specific demographic, what Walz represents as a counter to Trump and Vance — and it’s so clearly such a huge waste if you just shut up and listen to the man talk for even one minute. You’re either won over immediately, or you’re probably never going to get it. He just slices through years of noise and says, directly, what’s happening and what we need to do about it.

During the rally where he debuted as VP nominee, he turned to Vice President Harris and said “thank you for bringing back the joy.” You can tell that it’s genuine — at least you can if you watched his portion of the “White Dudes for Harris” fundraiser, in which his admiration for Harris’s campaign was already clear — and you can tell that it was important to him to include it. And it really is, ultimately, that simple. I’m sticking with the people who make me feel joyful and hopeful again.

1
And a smattering of independent journalists

2
Reminder: I promised my mother I’d stop using the f-word online.

3
Redundant?

4
Update: I’m just now hearing reports from Twitter that I might’ve been mistaken about Kelly, and she really is just a miserably hateful person at her core

5
And by “tricked” I of course mean “I saw a link and I clicked on it”

6
Because I mean, who has that kind of time?

1 And a smattering of independent journalists

2 Reminder: I promised my mother I’d stop using the f-word online.

3 Redundant?

4 Update: I’m just now hearing reports from Twitter that I might’ve been mistaken about Kelly, and she really is just a miserably hateful person at her core

5 And by “tricked” I of course mean “I saw a link and I clicked on it”

6 Because I mean, who has that kind of time?