Did A Billionaire Tech Bro Buy And/Or Hack the Election?

 And scary takes on where the denial of reality leads-- 

From the 1500s: Pieter Bruegel’s famed Tower of Babel, depicting societies driven apart when they lost a shared language to describe reality. In the Biblical version, it was an angered God who left human beings in destructive confusion, as his punishment. Now similarly divisive work is underway, engineered by earthly creatures driven by power, vengeance, and greed. (Getty Images.)

"In essence, “news” is everything you don’t see or experience yourself. And with each passing year, a growing share of the “news” on which people base their sense of reality has come neither from personal experience; nor from “regular” news organizations, flawed as they may be; but instead from the surrounding climate of social media and other sources that have been skewed in a nihilistic, suspicious-and-hostile direction. A large part of that skewing is intentional—a supercharged version of Fox News.... Part of it just comes with the technology. And evidence suggests that in 2024 this mattered more than anything the official news media did." -James Fallows

"Words whose purpose is to portray life as it actually is: That’s a rare and even radical act in a time where so much of the language that’s thrown at us is trying to sell us something--a product, a lifestyle, a political agenda.  Language whose sole purpose is to mislead and distort, to numb us out and dumb us down--or to put it another way, the language of advertising…

What do you suppose our prospects are for living long and happy lives… if our world-view is based on lies, delusions, and fantasies?  Or take it to the macro level: What do you suppose is the life expectancy of a country that’s lost its grip on reality?  Whose national consciousness is based on lies, delusions, and fantasies? ..Without the tools for seeing and describing things as they truly are?" -Ben Fountain 

"After the election, as I started watching the blame game unfold, I received clarity from a despondent Biden staffer. He asked, ‘How do you spend a billion dollars and not win?’ The staffer missed that one of Trump's new supporters spent 44 times that much to buy Twitter and control the narrative. We have to observe that it worked." -Josh Carter 

James Fallows @ Breaking the News

"Why did people persist in thinking that Harris was short on policy; that Trump’s programs would boost the American economy, despite a widely broadcast consensus from sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists to the contrary; or that he would lower taxes for working people, though the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculated that he would increase them? Even many of Trump’s critics think his first term marked a high point for border patrol, though more unauthorized migrants have been forced to leave under Biden. (Why was Biden’s Presidency widely dismissed as desultory, when, in fact, as my colleague Nicholas Lemann recently put it, “he has passed more new domestic programs than any Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson—maybe even since Franklin Roosevelt”?) How did so many perceptions disprovable with ten seconds of Googling become fixed in the voting public’s mind? And why, even as misapprehensions were corrected, did those beliefs prevail?"

Nathan Heller on the Ambience of Information @ NY-er

The claims for hacking remain obscure but sound credible enough to me that you gotta hope some Dem officials are checking this out seriously asap. 

Duty to Warn Letter to VP Harris