We Don't Win By Compromising Our Values For Those Assholes

Fuck. That.

Hey, everybody. So here we are. Before I get into what I want to say in this Friday’s newsletter, I want to welcome all the new subscribers who have joined since last week! Click here to learn what this place is all about and why I started it.

I hate what happened Tuesday, and like all y’all, I’m pissed and scared and heartbroken and pissed some more. I’ll get into more of my immediate reactions below, where my thoughts are, but I want to remind everybody of the elevator speech for this place (the short version anyway, the long version is in the link above):

“We are living through a world-historical temper tantrum from white conservative Christians over their loss of control, relevance, and supremacy. This weekly newsletter looks at current events through that lens, glares at it, and usually mocks it.”

My thesis when I started this newsletter six months ago was that just about every story these days can be viewed through that lens. And now Tuesday’s election is looking at me and saying, “Well, no shit!”

Independent media and voices that aren’t scared of being brutally honest, and aren’t beholden to Jeff Bezos — for example — are going to be vital in the coming years. News, commentary and analysis that will absolutely under no circumstances obey the authoritarians in advance. Also, newsletters that proudly call Donald Trump “Chickenshitler.”

So I’m humbly asking all who are able to become a paying subscriber or Founding Hero Superstar (it’s a thing!) to support what I do and help me do more of it. I’ve slashed prices a bit for the foreseeable future, so hopefully it’s accessible for more folks.

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OK, newsletter!

It turns out that when many of us said we were “nauseously optimistic” about this election, we weren’t entirely wrong. But while we were trying to focus our hope on the second word, it seems that nausea was telling us something.

Donald Trump won the election, fair and square or whatever. He will be the 47th president of the United States, and we pray not the last. We are all trying to process this, we who actually care about this country and are informed enough to understand why Trump and the people he elevates are so uniquely dangerous to this country and to humanity. We are feeling all the emotions — anger, terror, grief, exhaustion, more anger, did I mention anger? There’s some anger in there.

Over the coming weeks and months we’ll have to figure out how best to move forward, because as Timothy Snyder said the other night on MSNBC (I think it was him, but it’s all a blur, it could have been Mickey Mouse), one of the things about resisting oligarchy, authoritarianism and fascism is that there’s a lot of improvisation to it. You have to respond to things as they’re happening, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. But as Rachel Maddow said the other night (it was definitely she, I’ll link it below) history didn’t end Tuesday night. Forward is the only direction we have.

There is a next day, and a day after that, next week, next year, and so forth. And fuck if we’re going to put our lives completely on hold because of that motherfucker.

Part of that moving forward certainly includes a reckoning, asking what happened and endeavoring to make sure that A) we get to have more free and fair elections after this, and B) they don’t end up the way this one did. We have to interrogate it. We should certainly change strategies if something is definitely not working. All of that is fair, and I’ll talk a bit more about it below.

But one thing that we do not have to do, and must not do, is listen to assholes telling us to move to the right to appeal to more moderate voters, to compromise our principles and values in order to somehow magically appeal to MAGA racists, sexists and anti-LGBTQ losers.

Those critiques always come out of the woodwork at times like this. Their suggestions pretty much always just so happen to throw vulnerable people directly under the bus, and what we need to be doing right now is protecting vulnerable people.

If only we’d be a bit more anti-immigrant, they say, if only we wouldn’t be so pro-transgender people’s freedom to live their lives — if only we weren’t so goshdarn “woke”! — then all the people would come rushing back into our arms and it’d be candy canes and blowjobs forever and ever!

Fuck that.

Now, I want to make sure to draw a distinction here, because we need to be discerning when we see post mortem critiques and prognostications about What Went Wrong.

There are certainly lessons to be learned, and I’d like to suggest that they are communication lessons. So when you hear critiques it’s important to look at whether they are about strategy and communications — AKA making sure messages actually reach people, and that those messages are stronger and more effective than the hate, bullshit and snake oil the other side is selling — or whether they’re asking us to actually change what we believe.

For instance, Chris Geidner AKA the Law Dork is calling out some Democrats right now who couldn’t wait until five seconds after the election was called to blame it on trans people, and on Democrats being too nice to trans people. Because Trump ran all those anti-trans ads during football games! And the New York Times is reporting that those ads — and their tagline “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.” — WORKED, with Black and Latino men and white women!

Transgender athletes dominating little girls’ sports teams! Kamala giving free transgender surgeries to your kids! Kamala giving free transgender surgeries to illegal immigrant criminals, in jail! Literally every right-wing bullshit framing imaginable! AIYEEEEEEEEEE!

Look at that 30-someodd-point shift to Trump among Latino men! Look what you done!

So the answer to some is to … throw trans people under the bus?

Fuck off.

I Met The Voter They Were Trying To Reach With Those Ads

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a bit, you might remember the story of the handsome young Latino dad from El Paso, Texas, the guy I met in the line at the Omni Hotel in Atlanta the weekend of the CrowdStrike shutdown, where we were all wearily waiting in line to check in after our 15-millionth flight of the day had been canceled.

This extremely nice guy told me he didn’t like Donald Trump, not a bit, but he was likely going to vote for him. He told me he was a first-generation immigrant from Mexico, whose parents do not speak English. He told me literally none of the media does a decent job of explaining what living directly on the border is like right now. And he was extremely worried about a law Gavin Newsom had just signed in California, prohibiting school districts from creating policies making it mandatory to report to parents if a child starts using different pronouns, or otherwise comes out as trans or non-binary (or gay or lesbian or bisexual) at school.

He was exercised about this. He also wanted me to know a thousand times that he wasn’t anti-gay or anti-trans. But what I could hear was that 100 percent of the media he was consuming was lying to him about literally all of this, it was all right-wing bullshit, and he had absorbed every bit of it. He was hearing no other voices.

This, gentle readers, is a communication issue. There was no way I was fixing it at 1:00 a.m. on a Friday night on the most hellacious weekend of travel in recent memory. But I recognized the problem.

Our Messages Aren’t Reaching Certain People At All

Here’s a tweet that struck me the past couple days:

Let’s be clear here: if that’s the media you’re consuming — Vox examines the “Gen Z bro media diet” here, it’s good — then you don’t have an accurate picture of anything about Democrats, or liberals, or progressives, or LGBTQ+ people, or abortion rights, or how tariffs work, or what the unemployment rate is, or context of our recovery from Covid vs. the rest of the world, or even an accurate remembrance of the fact that those goddamned stimulus checks weren’t Donald Trump’s fucking idea in the first place, but he sure as hell was savvy enough to make sure his signature was displayed on them.

If your media diet is Fox News and Joe Rogan and some weird shit on YouTube and TikTok and your friend Ed who says he knows a guy who knows a guy whose pastor says they’re chopping off penises at the middle school to rig the state volleyball championship, then you are less than a low-information voter. You know nothing. (Remember those media surveys that found that consumers of Fox News were less informed than voters who watched no news at all?)

That, I would suggest is one of the most important lessons of this election. That until Democrats actually decide to compete in the spaces where these voters actually are, then many folks aren’t going to know that Republican scaremongering about trans surgeries in the school nurse’s office and trans women invading sports and kids demanding to identify as “furries” and use litterboxes at school are lies.

Are they going to learn how tariffs actually work because they accidentally flipped on MSNBC and saw Lawrence O’Donnell, who incidentally does an excellent job of explaining that? They are not. Could we perhaps get a pro wrestler or that father-son duo that yells “Boom!” on TikTok to explain it?

Republicans are currently waaaaaay ahead of us in the data game, and in the targeting game, and in actually making sure their messages are hitting the right people, and hard. They have a coordinated media ecosystem, from Fox News to other right-wing TV to idiot podcasters and Kremlin-funded influencers to TikTok, to Spanish-language radio and other media, and it is nigh remarkable how much you can get every wang of that right-wing ecosystem speaking the exact same talking points verbatim within 15 minutes of something happening.

So yes, let’s get the best people on fixing that! Good Lord!

And let’s have Democratic politicians get in the habit, as Andrew Lawrence of Media Matters suggested tonight, of learning to work the media refs the way Republicans do,

One of Andrew’s followers replied, “Trump said you’re not black. What is your response?” The appropriate response is fuck off, and what is wrong with you?

And finally yes yes yes yes yes, let this be the year Democrats finally get serious about trying to figure who Latino voters really are and how to talk to them. This article in Vox about Ruben Gallego — who’s about to be the senator from Arizona — is a good place to start. Read articles by Paola Ramos, and her excellent new book. This Atlantic article was an insightful read, as I remember, when I read it last year.

But again, be on the lookout and discern: are they asking you to get better at communicating with people and hearing them and their concerns and taking them seriously? Or are they telling you to change your values to appease somebody else’s bigotry?

Because if it’s the second thing, fuck off.

But Also?

People who tell you Democrats are all broken and all Kamala Harris’s messaging was a total failure and nothing worked can fuck off too. Because it’s just not true.

Here some facts that have been going around a lot the past 24 hours, which Chris Geidner happens to have bullet-pointed nicely, so I’ll paraphrase from him:

• “Every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share, the first time this has ever happened.“ That’s the Financial Times. It’s almost certainly a post-Covid thing. People are apparently all having this “IT’S NOT ALL FIXED YET!” panic reaction, and blaming whoever is currently in power. Democrats actually did better on that metric than others globally. (This will be hilarious if Dems end up flipping the House, which would mean the presidency and both sides of Congress all flipped, and not all in the same direcction.)

• Per numbers guy Dave Wasserman, voters swung 3.1 percent toward Trump in the battleground states. Everywhere else it was a 6.7 percent swing. So actually in the few states that our fucked up slave-state-protecting Electoral College currently says matter — AKA the places where the Harris team fought hard — she came a hell of a lot closer than in states where they didn’t. Maybe the messaging wasn’t actually bad, in context.

• Related: a lot of the Democratic Senate candidates in those swing states hung on, or they’re Ruben Gallego and Jacky Rosen, waiting for the official call. Or they had pretty darn OK election nights for Democrats in other races, like in North Carolina, with its new Democratic governor and much more down-ballot.

Maybe the answer is that, Electoral College be damned, Democrats need to fight a lot harder in every state and every media market, take nothing for granted and write nothing off.

Maybe, as Greg Sargent argues here, we all need to chill the fuck out with the handwringing and the recriminations and pull back a bit to observe the habits of the American electorate, which is sometimes just like this:

“Pull together and limit the damage Trump can do.”

Learn the lessons, and apply those lessons, but, there’s this other huge task at hand, which is …

Saving The Fucking World From Stupid Hitler

That’s the assignment. We have to fight like hell to mitigate Donald Trump’s most malevolent actions, we have to protect each other, and we have to keep ourselves healthy and mentally well — and enjoying our lives! — while we do it.

We have to make sure we have a democracy left in four years, or two, come the midterms.

We have to re-read our Timothy Snyder, and memorize his commandments about resisting tyrants, starting with the one about Do Not Obey In Advance. We have to put that book on the back of the toilet, or in our purses or manbags, to refresh ourselves when we need to.

We have to laugh, including heartily at these fascist motherfuckers. Watch Lawrence last night clowning on the question of who is actually gonna be the president, since Trump sure as shit isn’t mentally up for it. Will incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles be the actual shadow president? Did Trump effectively but not technically break the glass ceiling, by hiring her to actually do the job for him?

Oh, the jokes have only begun to be told about this incoming administration.

Read Heather Cox Richardson last night, reminding us that these human punchlines, these incompetent fools, are truly the dogs who caught the car right now, who have absolutely zero idea how they’re going to do what they say they’re going to do. They have no plan for how they’re going to deport all these people. Lawrence doesn’t even think Trump is going to actually do the tariffs, just threaten them to make business leaders kiss his ass.

We’ll see.

This clip from Rachel Maddow the other night was when I started to perk up, personally. She reminded us, as I mentioned above, that history didn’t end on Tuesday night. We have a lot to do. We have to defend our country and defend our values and keep our principles and humanity intact and stay connected to ourselves and to each other. We have to defend the people among us who are most vulnerable. Some of what is coming could be absolutely dreadful. We can also play a big part in mitigating the awfulness.

“We have stuff to do,” she said.

Maddow said at the end:

“Hope you are feeling scrappy. Hope you are tapping into your inner pirate energy. Because it is one thing to be a defender of the realm. It is another thing to be in opposition. and opposition can be a lot of things. It can be dangerous. It can also be fun.

“It would have been nice to win the election. Didn’t. OK.

“Time to save the country.”

I think I heard Molly Ivins’s spirit creeping through in those last few lines there.

We’re all in it together.

Pirate energy, ARRRRRRRRRR.

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-Evan