EVERYBODY PANIC!!!
Well. It's not hard to be on social media for any amount of time and not come across some doomsday prognostication.
TRUMP WILL SWEEP BACK INTO POWER!
NO! DESANTIS WILL BE OUR NEW FASCIST OVERLORD!
THE HOUSE GOP WILL IMPEACH PRESIDENT BIDEN!!!
ABANDON ALL HOPE!!
Deep sigh.
Lookit. We just came off the most successful midterm result for a president's party in his first term in twenty years. The red wave wasn't even a puddle. "Steve" McCarthy may very well not even be Speaker, since there are at least a score of Republicans who won't vote for him. And some Republicans are holding out that they could vote for a "moderate" Democrat as Speaker.
Donald Trump made his farcical announcement of "running" for 2024. Which landed with a thud. No one cares. Not even his fluffers in the media can put lipstick on that pig. And there's a very good chance that Special Counsel Jack Smith will be hauling him before a federal court in the near term.
Ron DeSantis. Yes, he romped to re-election in Florida. But that's Florida. And there's a weird thing which happens to GOP "frontrunners": They tend to implode. Remember when Marco Rubio was supposed to be the Republican savior? A drink of water and a decade later and, well...
And back to the House: Let them try and impeach Pres. Biden. There's, again, a very good chance that some Republicans won't vote to impeach. That's how divided the caucus is. And rather than dealing with inflation or "the border crisis" or fentanyl, they'll be shown to be, again, the unserious clowns they are. Also, let them try to stop aid to Ukraine, or not raise the debt ceiling. They will lose.
But, of course, fear is currency. Panic is wealth. Certain people want us to be in perpetual fear, in constant agitation. They want us to be thinking about the worst scenario, about the hell which awaits us, and that we can do nothing—nothing except buy their books or listen to their podcasts to count down to the Apocalypse.
In case you haven't noticed, Trevor and I don't do that here. We just don't. If we did we could probably make a lot more money in donations. But we couldn't look at ourselves in the mirror if we fed you doom and despair for fun and profit.
I lay this state of affairs directly on the doorstep of the 24/7 news cycle. When most of us were growing up, we had three news windows: the afternoon local news; the national evening news; and then the 11pm local news. We didn't have rolling news networks desperate to fill hours and hours of broadcast time. And when you have that much time to fill, and need to keep people glued to their TVs, fear and loathing sell. Forget the birth of Fox News; we went off the rails with OJ in the white Bronco. Sensationalism with no other purpose sold, and here we are in 2022. Fox News' focus on immigrants or inflation is just the logical conclusion of CNN showing The Chase. (The second Ron Burgundy movie lampooned that fact of modern media, and very well, if I may say so.)
When we fear, we react without thinking. We put aside logical thought. It's fight or flight. Or, in the case of the media, staying tuned to see what can be done. Except the media offers no solutions. It offers a litany of troubles with no way to solve them. Except to keep tuning in.
DeSantis will run for president. It won't be the end of the world. It won't herald in the angels blowing trumpets. It will mean we'll have to gird our loins and fight. But you can't fight if you're in a ball of abject terror. Don't ascribe superhuman powers to our adversaries. They are not Übermenschen. They are sad little people with an outsized desire for power. They are objects of derision. Treat them as such, and crush them.
You can rest assured that Trevor and I will keep this a fear-free space. Now, relax. All we can do is what we can do. But if we all do it together, that will be more than enough.
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