Kamala

"I wonder if the Emperor Honorious, watching the Visigoths coming over the seventh hill, could truly realize that the Roman Empire was about to fall."

That's a quote from Star Trek: The Next Generation, the third best Star Trek series.  I'm going to be watching a lot of Star Trek over the next four years.  I'm going to be watching a lot of old TV shows and movies that make me feel like the world isn't falling apart around me. 

"We all survived the last time he was president, didn't we?" is an actual comment from an HVAC repairman that fixed my furnace a few days ago.  He was wearing a 45/47 hat, which prompted me to tell him that we probably weren't going to make much small talk while he worked in order to preserve civility. I wanted to tell him that a million people in the U.S. didn't survive the last Trump term, including my dad, who was a diehard MAGA fanatic and was absolutely certain that COVID-19 was no worse than a common cold and that the newly released vaccine was part of a government conspiracy to sterilize or brainwash people.  He died, alone on his couch, after refusing treatment at a hospital for the respiratory infection that was shutting down his unvaccinated lungs. 

I wanted to tell that to the repairman, but I didn't.  What good would it do?  He bought the hat.  He was invested.  A few dead dads weren't going to convince him that he had made a huge mistake in supporting Trump.  Trump has spent the last nine years convincing these people that they never have to back down. Not ever.  I certainly didn't feel safe telling him that I am a very non-passing transgender woman and not just the very odd-looking man that I appear to be.  Four years is a long way to go and I am not going to expend all of my Guatemala-ness before we even get to the inauguration. 

So, what went wrong? How did we end up here?  A month ago, the world was prepping for the inevitable election victory of Kamala Harris and four more years of Bidenomics, the slow and steady plan that kept unemployment low and inflation under control, but frustratingly persistent.  The election might be uncomfortably close, but surely there's no way enough people would vote for Trump after... well, all of it.  

Money laundering for organized crime. Trashing the U.S. economy. Failing in every way to respond to a global pandemic. Sexual assault. Accepting billions in bribes from foreign countries. Epstein. Firing the FBI director for investigating his connections to the Russian mob. Sharpie drawn hurricane maps. Working for the Russian mob. January 6th. Trying to break up NATO. The Central Park Five. Having Epstein killed in prison. The phone call to Zelenskyy.  The phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Criminal convictions. 

It's a long list and this is merely what I can easily recollect as of this writing.

Somehow, beyond all bounds of human reasoning, 75 million Americans were still motivated to vote for him to return to the office.  That means that it wasn't just the superfans that show up to the rallies.  It wasn't just the Twitter trolls.  It wasn't just the Proud Boys.  Statistically speaking, it's every other person you know.  It's every other person you see on the highway, at work, at church, at the grocery store.  That means that otherwise normal, decent people believed or felt in their hearts that Trump is, at a minimum, an adequate person to put in charge of a nuclear arsenal, the world's largest economy, and the newly granted ability to dictate every aspect of Americans' lives.  How can that possibly be true given the shockingly incomplete list I gave above?

Let's talk about filter bubbles. 

Filter bubbles, as a concept, have existed for all of man's history.  However, in our modern context, it's a relatively new term.  The internet, as the average American interacts with it, is provided through algorithms that curate content that you see and that have filtered out content that either hasn't been funded through advertising fees or conflicts with the various profiles that web services have built around each individual consumer over the last few decades.  For example, if you and I search Google for the same terms, we will get different results.  If you and I follow all the same people on Facebook or Instagram, we will get different feeds.  These differences are built around what these services know about you or what advertisers want you to know about them.  For example, if Trump pays for a bunch of ads on Facebook and you click on one of them, you're going to start getting more Trump content.  If you comment on your racist aunt's Trump posts, you're going to start getting more Trump content.  Because all of this has been deeply curated to stimulate something about you - your fears, your needs, your life experiences - it connects with your brain in a very personal way that watching television news does not.  Memes can more effectively condense an argument into a single panel image than a lengthy news article can in a thousand words. 

Oh?  This journalist who I have no idea who they are wants me to read and digest complicated issues on a website that I have to actively seek out to read and possibly pay for it and ultimately quit reading after a few sentences because I don't understand most of the terminology?  Hard pass.

But here's a picture of a frog in a MAGA hat telling me that women be crazy.  lol.  Totally sharing this.

There is an implication here that people do this because they are stupid, and that's certainly part of the problem.  However, they're also very lazy.  Most people would rather spend their time being entertained in some way, and memes give them that shortcut.  People like shortcuts when given the opportunity, and when they are staring into their personal device, with no one to judge them or their behavior, the opportunity is always there.  

So now it's time to start talking about blame.  A really bad thing happened that most of us didn't expect, so the blame has to go somewhere.  Well, the difficult answer is that there are lots of people that deserve the blame for this.  In the interest of time, I'll skip over the obvious guilty party - Trump and his team.  They did this, they are ultimately to blame for being absolutely horrible human beings and inflicting their awfulness on the rest of us.  The next most obvious object of blame is the Harris campaign.  They were entrusted with the task of protecting the people of the United States and the world at large from chaos and corruption of another Trump term.  They were supposed to protect us and they failed.  Now we all have to pay the price because of that failure.  

Kamala Harris ran a very inoffensive, safe, traditionally performative campaign.  She shook the hands and kissed the babies.  She kept her appearances on talk shows and podcasts limited to safe environments.  Every campaign event was nearly identical to the one before it and the one after it.  The Harris Walz yard signs were a bland two color whisper bathed in the most unassuming baby blue color.  Knowing what we know about the average voter's attention span and intellectual curiosity, this seems like a very ineffective way to campaign.  As it turns out, yeah, it definitely is.  The most glaringly obvious sign that this strategy was not connecting with anyone outside of the chronically online Democrat base, was Harris' appearance on The Breakfast Club podcast.  This was a very safe venue with a host that was known to be supportive of Harris and it was an opportunity to showcase Harris' personality with someone who could help guide her through the interview.  However, Harris kept repeating her three or four policy proposals for tax credits for new home buyers and small business owners as roundabout answers to unrelated questions.  The host, Charlemagne tha God, became increasingly frustrated that Harris would not simply participate in a traditional podcast interview with unguarded answers to relatively unchallenging questions.  At one point in the interview, he asked her directly why she was seemingly evading any deeper discussion and relying on what appeared to be her televised debate preparation.

"It's called discipline, Charlemagne."

The podcast room was silent for what seemed like an eternity.  For me, as a listener, I knew this was worse to American voters in 2024 than admitting to an affair with a staffer.  She chastised the host on his own show.  She implied he didn't understand how a winning campaign was to be run.  Every voter who hated their teachers in school, the civil servant who rejected an application for the smallest missing detail, the police officer who asked questions just to write the ticket any way, the customer service representative that reads a prompt instead of just giving you a refund - voters saw all of that in Harris in that moment.  Sadly, there were lots of those moments.  As others have said, this was a vibes election, and she was giving high school principal vibes.  Voting for Trump then becomes the rebellious, anti-establishment choice to the brain that has shut off self-reflective rationality.  Even more frustrating is the fact that all of these problems with Harris as a candidate were on display in 2020 when she ran in the primary against Joe Biden.  Her x-factor was not existent then and it was foolish to hope that she magically developed it over the last four years as vice president. 

Speaking of Biden, yeah, it's his fault too.  He told us he was not going to seek re-election 4 years ago and he broke that promise.  Right away, the Democrats were set up for failure because at that point, they are running at an integrity deficit.  Yes, I understand how that sounds when you immediately consider how this would apply to Trump, but we're not doing whataboutism here.  To low information (stupid) voters, Trump never claimed to be the choice of integrity or honesty.  Voters have accepted that as part of the brand, part of the - and I shudder to even use this word - charm.  Democrats were running on integrity and honesty and being everything that Trump isn't.  To those dum-dum voters, going off-brand is repulsive.  With Trump, you give up integrity to get excitement and action and pizzazz (yes, I totally understand that none of those are qualities that matter in a president, but again, think about the dummies).  With Biden and Harris, if you give up the integrity, what's left?  Intellectually superior arguments?  Good luck selling that in America.  

And then there's the trans issue.  

We all saw the ads.  The Trump campaign spent an obscene amount of money on ads that depicted an immigrant prisoner who was given gender affirming surgery while incarcerated, which was paid for by the taxpayers of California.  According to the ACLU, there has been only one such inmate to receive this surgery, while the Bureau of Prisons says there have been two.  If you want to do the math, that comes out to roughly $100 million in ad spending per inmate.  But it's not just about those inmates, is it?  "Kamala is for they / them.  Donald Trump is for you." That was the defining message of the 2024 presidential campaign.  The broader implication in that statement was then transmitted and repeated all over the right-wing podcast networks and Tik Toks and Fox News and all of its weird little sub-brands.  Megyn Kelly raged about "transgenderism" being "a lie."  I'm not really sure what she means by that since she never elaborated on it, but I guess her audience doesn't demand such exposition.  Ben Shapiro intensified his crusade to label all transgender issues as the product of mental illnesses and "psychological disorders."  Matt Walsh went so far as to demand that "trans ideology" be "erased from this earth."  It even crept into venues outside of right-wing influence, when the aforementioned Charlemagne tha God discussed the ad with his guests, stating, "Hell no, I don't want my taxpayer dollars going to that."  I have a gay friend who is an otherwise great ally and Democrat supporter who echoed that sentiment to me - a trans woman who he has known for years - to my face.  The pervasiveness was truly shocking.  There is nothing, and I mean nothing, that will enrage an American more than seeing someone else get something "for free."  

This ad campaign had everything: non-white immigrants, a mug shot of a very non-passing trans woman, an upgraded "welfare queen" narrative, a menacing voice-over, and a well-educated and successful biracial black woman with a cringy performative laugh.  The Future Forward PAC estimated that the ad campaign shifted the election by 2.7 percentage points.  At current vote totals, Trump's lead over Harris in the nationwide popular vote is 1.5 percentage points.  In Michigan, his lead is 1.4, Georgia is 1.8, Pennsylvania is 1.7, and Wisconsin is 0.9.  Looking at those numbers in this context is really sickening.  

"Of course I am for they / them.  THEY are the American people, and I am for each and every one of THEM."

Would it have been that hard to say that?  Would it have been that hard to say something?  Anything?  There was no response to those ads.  Nothing.  It just kept playing on talk radio, on Fox News, during football games, on Facebook, and on every streaming service with no response from the Harris team.  Instead, they pushed ahead with Beyonce and tax credits for first time home buyers and "Donald Trump is unfit to be president."

Fitness - mental, physical, or otherwise - has never been a Constitutional requirement to run for President, and so now, we will have someone in office who truly represents the average American.