Chained to the World, and We All Gotta Pull
“It is said that the present is pregnant with the future.”
― Voltaire
My friends Al and Angelica Artero told me once that in the future there will be a new branch of archeology. You see, instead of digging in the dirt and using their little brushes to uncover the bones and artifacts of the past, there will be a new type of archeologist who will search through data in our hard drives and the cloud. These future scientific heroes will sift through our digital history, all our social media posts, all our Tweets or Xs or whatever they’re called, all our MySpace posts, Reddit boards, and chat groups, and they will be searching for reason.
I like this very much because I know that people living in the next century will look back and see us all as mad. My intent with “Dispatches from the Apocalypse” is to let our distant ancestors know that there were some of us living through this wacky shit who understood how mad our times really were. I think so many of us live with a sort of metaphorical myopia. We live so close to so many of our problems that we can’t see the forest for the trees. Case in point: the Republican front runner wins the Iowa primary on Monday Jan 15, 2024, and on Jan 16, 2024, he flies into New York for a civil case to decide how much he needs to pay E. Jean Carroll for defaming her after he sexually assaulted her. The verdict on whether or not he sexually assaulted her isn’t going to be decided. That was decided long ago. In fact, Trump already had to pay Ms. Carroll once. This case happened because after he was found guilty of sexually assaulting her, he defamed her in the media for a second time ‒this time during a CNN town hall while running for president. He did this the day after the first time he had to pay her 5 million dollars for defaming her.
Let’s talk about today: the day I’m writing this article. It’s Wednesday, January 24th, and yesterday Trump won the New Hampshire primary with 54% of Republican votes. Tomorrow in Georgia there’s a motion in his racketeering case, and on Friday the Washington DC Circuit Court is expected to make a ruling on Trump’s claim that all presidents should have absolute immunity for life. I know to you, future digital archeologist, whether or not the leader of the free world should be allowed to assassinate his political rivals with US Special Forces groups seems like a no-brainer, but here in 2024, for 47% of American voters it’s a real nugget scratcher. One side says that the highest office in the land should lead by example and with integrity, and the other says they don’t want to be thrown in jail just because they commit a war crime or two. Watching it in the news, you’d think this is a tougher decision to untangle than the Gordian Knot.
So, if the future digital archeologists do dust off the Dispatches from the Apocalypse, I’d imagine they’d do so to answer a simple question. It would be something like, “How the hell did so many people fall under Trump’s spell?” Well, that question is more complicated than you’d think. It goes back long before Trump even thought about running for office. I can’t tell you where it began, but I do remember when Rush Limbaugh was asked to speak to the freshman class of the GOP House of Representatives. He showed them how useful a tool it is to validate the hate and anger in the hearts of their constituents. He taught them and every GOP Representative afterward that compromise is weakness. He told them that you didn’t have to be right as long as you were loud.
But our problems didn’t just come from extreme conservative media hosts. If someone really wants to learn about the issues that affect them politically, they jump on the internet. The problem there is that all the well-written articles by intelligent people with journalistic ethics are cut off by paywalls, and all the insane, badly written, paranoid conspiracies are not only free to read about, but there are literally hundreds of thousands of videos out there by amateurs with little or no credentials and absolutely no journalistic ethics, no ethics at all really. These content creators are driven by a motivation to get clicks because clicks equal money. Not only that, but the platforms have an algorithm that will send them to another equally or even worse video that many times sends the viewer down a rabbit hole. In many cases the people are even radicalized.
Here is one example: early on a Sunday morning, December 4, 2016, a twenty-eight year old factory worker and part time volunteer firefighter left his two daughters at home to drive 350 miles from a small town in South Carolina to Washington D.C. with an assault rifle. He intended to free young women before Hilary Clinton killed and ate them. He believed they were being held in a popular pizza place. Edgar “Maddison” Welch, after being sentenced to four years in prison, told a New York Times reporter that he wasn’t one to believe in conspiracy theories. He said that he had heard something about the Democrats running a child slavery ring by word of mouth. He didn’t know much about it until he finally got the internet hooked up at his house. Then he was able to “research” the problem on 4 Chan, Reddit, and Infowars.
And when we’re not out brainwashing ourselves with confirmation bias, many people fall into the trap set by what is now called infotainment. People with the intent of making millions of dollars and getting famous create shows that traffic in controversy. Then when they are sued or put under investigation, they tell the courts that they are simply entertainers. Tucker Carlson was sued multiple times for telling blatant lies before he was fired. His lawyers defended him by saying that a reasonable person would listen to what he said and decide that it wasn’t true. Amazingly, a U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil agreed saying, “The ‘general tenor’ of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’”
Ignorance isn’t bliss. The real bliss comes from using the ignorance of others to prove something you really want to be true. And even though at least half of us know that talking heads like Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, and others are full of shit, there’s nothing we can do to silence them or people who emulate them.
Don’t worry, future digital archeologist. I understand your confusion. I remember when the second most corrupt president in my lifetime died. Richard Nixon passed in April of 1994 (just months before Rush Limbaugh spoke to Congress), and all the news shows went over the blatant corruption of his administration. The Boomer generation had a near universal contempt for him, and not one person would admit to voting for him even though he won 60.7% of the national vote and 49 states. I suspect that when Trump is finally sentenced to jail time, millions of personal narratives will suddenly change as well. My hope is that when the future looks back at this time, they will be shaking their heads and laughing about how silly we were to let someone like him even think about running for the highest office in the land. I hope they laugh while they pretend to wipe the sweat from their brows and say, “That was close.”
Sean Davis 