Gotta start somewhere, I guess, and there are a lot of worse topics to cover first.
News outlets urged Trump and Biden to have presidential debates, and now they’ve agreed to a pair of them.
My big question: Why bother?
Say whatever you want about the mental capacities of either candidate; a debate is impossible because it relies on the sides living in the same factual reality.
These sides don’t.
Trump and his followers think that the economy is in shambles—this poll says that only 13% think it is “excellent” or “good.” But the stock market is setting records (recall Trump using this metric to support his boasting about running a strong economy), the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that unemployment is below 4%, and wage growth has outpaced inflation for an entire year now.
They think that crime is horrible—a Gallup poll found that 92% of Republicans think crime is up in the last year. But it’s actually down.
If Trump and Biden debate, Trump would fire his normal vitriol and unsupported, outlandish claims about how bad the economy and crime is. His followers would see these as punches landed because they live in a fantasy world where they’re true, they’d see Biden’s factual rebuttal as a blatant lie, and they’d become more convinced that it’s the left that’s lost touch with reality.
This is all because the right wing lives in a conspiracy theory spun by their preferred media outlets that feed them the information that they want to hear with little care for how accurately it portrays reality. Fox News paid $787 million for doing it, but its viewers probably don’t know about it because the network’s reporting of it bent over backwards to treat the settlement as a good thing, never mentioned the amount, and hasn’t talked about it since:
All that a debate would do is (a) make Trump’s MAGA mob revel in what they think are “owns” of Biden and “the left,” (b) build that sense of foreboding among Biden’s supporters, as they see Trump’s tactics continue, somehow, after so much, to work among his followers and on the media, and (c) continue to disorient people who haven’t decided which candidate to back.
That last part is the main reason why I decided to create this newsletter and publish it in the ways that I’m publishing it.
The partisan schism of reality is confusing for people who haven’t been plugged into the political world for the past decade. If you’re just putting your ear to the ground or reading the news, it’s disorienting to hear one political party chanting “tough on crime” and saying that crime is out of control, while the other is discussing bail reform and how to make the criminal justice system more equitable for the accused. If crime is out of control, what the hell is the left thinking? Unfortunately, the mainstream media—the outlets that the uncommitted are most likely to hear—is still (somehow, after so much) in its “accuracy is nonpartisan” madness and can’t be counted on to correct the record by stating simply, “the Republican candidate claims that crime is up, but that is false: It is down.”
Someone needs to say it.
This is not a fact-checking newsletter, though. Given the amount of misinformation out there, that would be impossible.
Instead, this newsletter aims to see through the lines of propaganda. These are talking points that are constantly repeated, but that either have no basis in reality or that misconstrue facts to score political points. The vast majority of these are on the right because they’re the ones who have to change reality to make their policies seem reasonable. Some are left wing. This newsletter will deconstruct those as well—not to seem unbiased, but to be accurate.
The secondary reason for this newsletter is to give others on the political left in America some peace of mind. It’s not just you. Reality has been stretched and morphed to the point that living in it has become traumatic.
This article is cross-posted to Substack (for free), on Medium (free for members but paywalled for others), and on Cancelling Reality’s website. Please consider subscribing there to support the author. It’s only $1/month.