This year has really turned out to be intense: and we're not even one month in. First there was the abduction of Maduro, there was that whole Greenland fiasco, the murder of Renée Good, the murder of Alex Pretti. We are finally feeling the negative impact of tariffs. The job market is a complete disaster. We're still reeling from the rollback of Roe v Wade last year. The economy is probably already in a recession, but we won't ever really know because we're not tracking those numbers anymore. Last year hundreds of thousands of federal employees lost their jobs. All that data that the horribly unsuccessful so-called Department of Government Efficiency illegally accessed from the Social Security database we now have proof was being used surreptitiously. We are reeling from the effects of the Canada 'Elbows Up' boycott.

In response to U.S. tariffs and President Trump’s policies, 71% of Canadian consumers say they intend to buy fewer American products this year, according to retail data consulting firm Dunnhumby. That’s having an impact. The US economy could lose up to 0.3% of its GDP or about $90 billion in revenue in 2025 due to the international goods boycott and the decline in foreign tourism according to Goldman Sachs. - CNBC

It is absolutely brutal out there.

Before the Why Comes the How

So before we can even talk about why this is happening, we need to talk about how it is being implemented. Social media, the transition from print to web, the 24 hour news cycle – these things are all related. We went from a world where there was a handful of trusted media outlets, to an absolute avalanche of questionably-sourced blog material that more often than not, wasn't even written by a human. That's how far news coverage has fallen. I wrote about this a little bit a few years ago: for barely $10 a month, you too can spew political nonsense for profit. Bit by bit, for years now, we have been both consolidating the corporate entities that are behind all of this, while also conditioning the general public to accept obviously biased coverage on both sides of the coin. We turned an ongoing collective deliberation into an arm wrestling match. First we lost the Fairness Doctrine, and now we have the weaponization of the Equal Time Rule. Honest discussion has fallen by the wayside. Everything has a partisan edge now. So how does that play into the lives of ordinary people?

Also, think about what has happened just to the simple concept of sources. If I wanted to, I could ask chatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, to spin up a website for me, full of misleading content and fake staff writer profiles. I could have something deployed and ready to go in under an hour. So, in a sense, our topline list of sources have been frozen since 2020. It's going to be very hard to generate the kind of reputation from scratch that any of these brick and mortar outlets were able to build over the last few decades. that's precisely why private equity is buying up so many local news stations and YouTube channels. This has contributed to polarization, and selective reporting, but the slow enshittification of independent media also introduces a sense of cynicism, as it poisons the well of objective opinion. Let me explain.

There is, I think for good reason, a sense that any outlet that still has that human element, that is able to leverage teamwork, and multipolarity of opinion, and diversity of thought, will be both necessarily differentiated from corporate media as well as being objectively more correct. Bias always contributes to error. Just ask a statistician. But that means that a big shift is happening in terms of that overall equation: instead of the viewer having the ability and power to choose the outlet that they viscerally connect to, they are forced to limit their 'allowable' choices if they want to stay within the realm of truth. Many do not appreciate this adjustment. Many citizens of this country, for probably a lot of different reasons, would rather retain the power to identify with the words of a liar, than be forced to concede that truth matters. A perceived victory is worth the subjugation of an entire citizenry. So when we lower the bar for mainstream news, we just encourage everyone to double down on wherever they are already. It just gets harder to change your mind.

The short answer is cognitive dissonance. The "How" is due to cognitive dissonance. You can subjugate an entire country if you appeal to the lowest denominator, craft a populist message that validates a shadowy, misogynistic, and racist worldview, and eventually deliver a classic rug pull. By that I mean: in the early days of the orange administration, things really were panning out for white middle-class Americans. I know because my estranged eldest sister is among the Trump flock and for a time, could not say enough good things about our Drumpf enfant terrible. I'm not clear on what her messaging is at this point, we haven't spoken in years, but empirically we are not doing well as a nation. So there are no scenarios where a small business owner like herself is not feeling the pinch along with the rest of us. But that's the rub. None of this is meant to last. Simply speaking, it's up to us whether it gets better or worse. That has always been true.

Now The Why

The why is simple. It's always been the money, and the power that comes with it. When a given individual is both an egomaniac and the target of multiple investigations, scandals, whatever you want to call it: self-enrichment becomes not just a policy choice, but a matter of survival. Anyone left of center in this country is getting pummeled because the administration doesn't want to talk about Epstein, doesn't want to talk about Gaza, and doesn't want to talk about a recession, or stagflation. Let's be perfectly clear: this administration is killing people in the streets because it does not want to face the facts of its own recent history. As terrible and preventable as the stories of Keith Porter, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti are, they're still just distractions. The real story is that we have an administration that has abandoned its own connection to the truth. We now have a White House that is unironically distributing memes as a form of propagandistic warfare. Enter exhibit a.

White House shares an altered photo of arrested Minnesota protester Nekima Levy Armstrong

The same image posted earlier by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem showed Levy Armstrong looking ahead calmly during her arrest.

Source: NBCNews

Let me say that again: we now have a White House that is unapologetically using AI to alter photos of their political enemies and distributing them as if they were real. And that is the other part of the "Why." It is because they can.

After decades of poisoning the well and normalizing the idea of blind partisanship, now the makers of Project 2025 are reaping the benefits. The surprising power of cognitive dissonance is such that almost anyone who has been sucked into that cult of personality, for whatever reason, most likely cannot get out. The truth no longer feels true. This is a social sickness as much as it is a political tragedy. This is an entire generation of politically frustrated adults getting scammed in a way that has alienated them from their own communities, their own family, and their own senses of morality. The tragedy is that they've been locked in. The very identification of the current moment brings resentment, anger, and victimhood with it. the cruelty is the point. American Gestapo® members like Jonathan Good and the rest of the ICE / CBP mercenaries are not the exception; they are the role models. They are all-in on white supremacy, violence, and domination. They have not been trained as officers of the law, and their motives are questionable at best. Yet, this administration embarrasses itself in order to provide cover for their brutality.

The reason why is clear. We are in this unenviable position precisely because of the importance of the moment. We are fighting for our democracy.

Let the memories of Renée Good, Keith Porter, and Alex Pretti be a blessing.

We got some work to do.

First up: primary these traitors who called themselves Democrats, but somehow had the nerve to vote for more ICE funding. The North remembers.

Let's not forget: they have the guns, but we have the whistles. This is what democracy looks like.

And finally, as they say in Minnesota: Trump can oligargle deez nuts.