The Importance of Information
When the dust settles, I expect the people who assess elections will tell us disinformation was key in 2024. It wasn’t the economy, it was the disinformation about the economy. That disinformation successfully led voters across the country to believe they were worse off, despite October reporting in The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that we have the best economy in the world, a remarkable recovery from Covid.
There was Trump’s persistent lying. There were the highly successful disinformation campaigns by hostile foreign entities. There were billionaire newspaper owners who withheld endorsements the editorial boards wanted to give to Harris, endorsements that would have focused on the strength of her economic policies and the importance of democracy issues. There was Elon Musk, who bought Twitter and converted it from the public square to a mouthpiece for Trump.
There is data from a Reuters/Ipsos poll in October that shows just how damaging the information gap is. People who are in possession of truthful, accurate information voted overwhelmingly for Harris. In other words, if you believed violent crime in major American cities was at an all-time high—which is not true—you were far more likely to vote Republican. Voters who knew that inflation had declined over the last year and was close to historic averages were +53 Democratic votes. Perhaps most disturbingly, people who did not have truthful information about undocumented people crossing the southern border were more likely to vote Republican.
We are back to George Orwell and “1984”: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
It worked for Trump in the White House, and it worked for him on the campaign trail. He lied about schools arranging for transgender surgery without parental consent. He lied about cats and dogs being eaten. Anything that caught his fancy, however absurd, was something he would repeat lies about long after the truth had been firmly established. Of course, he’s the man who has continued to lie about the 2020 election. Donald Trump established an alternate reality for his voters to live in and then bought real estate there. The problem is fairly obvious; the solution is going to be much more elusive.
I have been thinking about this problem as much as anything since the election. History is full of examples of authoritarian governments that restricted access to information in order to control people. They burned books in Nazi Germany and suppressed dissenting authors like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in Soviet Russia. China uses a “Great Firewall” to prevent access to the internet. The issue used to be access to information. But now, it seems that’s morphing in modern American society. We have plenty of access to information, so much information—online and on social media, often distorted by algorithms that are concerned with selling something or pushing something and not with accuracy—that it’s a flood. It requires education and discernment to separate fact from fiction, and often that's lacking. That’s the problem: educating people so they can make judgments about what’s true.
Donald Trump, of course, has a solution for that problem. Project 2025 calls for abolishing the Department of Education. (And do reread that August piece on Project 2025, one of many we will have reason to revisit.)
This is one challenge, if not the key challenge, ahead of us. The cavalry isn't coming. We don't have, at least as of now, a Democratic billionaire championing the First Amendment and the free press. So we're going to have to build the accurate information airplane while we’re flying it.
We can all do something, of course, even if that means starting small with one-on-one conversations. Lots of people are going to be suffering buyer’s remorse about their votes for Trump. Some already are, as they learn what Trump’s tariffs really mean for them or that their families will not be safe from his mass deportation plans. It feels like we are at the start of a very long path, a difficult hike to get home.
But we need to get started. One person doing something is just one person. Give that person a follower and you have the start of a movement. And that’s what we need, a movement to reclaim the information ecosphere. There’s lots of interesting writing and thinking going on about this. I’d love it if you’d share your thoughts.
We’re in this together,
Joyce
Disinformation may be the key. But I also have questions about what T meant when he told people not to vote, because he had all the votes he needed. And then he basically stopped campaigning. Why? And what did he mean that they had a "little secret"? What was that? I'm not into conspiracy theories, but this is Trump we're talking about, and he cheats at absolutely everything. And he also accuses others of what he himself is doing. "They rigged it!" Oh really? Is anyone investigating this election? Because it doesn't make any sense to me. Not even with disinformation. It just doesn't add up. What I think we need to remember is there are a whole lot of us who worked hard to elect Harris/Walz. We outnumbered the other team at rallies. We knocked on doors, we made phone calls, we wrote postcards, and we kept up a steady dialogue about how important this election was. I'd like to see an investigation-- about all of that. The disinformation and the little secret, and why he told people he "already had enough votes".
Here is my issue with all the postmortems for this election that I find so difficult to read. We keep making excuses for people - they’re uninformed, they’ve been lied to, their lives are difficult and so forth and so on. So all these people go to church and fight for our morals and family values but character means nothing anymore to half of the electorate? How do we fix that?
We have elected a convicted felon, a serial adulterer, a pathological liar, a man who declared bankruptcy multiple times to keep from having to pay his subcontractors and he was found liable in a civil suit regarding sexual assault. He’s had 5 children with 3 women (just imagine if he were black!)and he routinely described his opponent as “trash” “stupid” and worse. He said Hitler did some good things and that there were good people on both sides in Charlottesville. He believed Putin over our CIA. He is a despicable human being and I hope there is special place in hell for him for bringing out, not our “better angels”, but the worst demons that have plagued this country since its birth.
I would not have cared if he had promised free child care, a $25/hour minimum wage, and reparations - I would not have voted for him. This man does not deserve to be the leader of the greatest country on earth and I only pray that we can survive him.