A few quick thoughts today before diving into the hard stuff (news) for the rest of the week. Strap in. Just a reminder that if you appreciate what you see here, please consider a paid subscription to support my work. Your money helps me to report from places like Portland, where I might end up if our president escalates his campaign of fear on the rest of us. - jg
The new house has old phone hookups everywhere. They’re hidden behind cheap plastic wall plates. I unscrew them to find the blue plastic boxes inside. The boxes are nailed to the studs sideways, so I have to rip up some drywall to get them out. Then I patch the drywall, sand, and paint.
The old phone hookups are gone. They’re not needed anymore.
Every room in the house of my new home has these old phone jacks. Removing them feels like such a concrete way of moving from one era of time to another. At one point in most of all of our lives, technology like this was necessary. For my grandparents, it was groundbreaking, world-changing. And now, it’s almost entirely gone — all in the span of about 100 years.
This has struck me as particularly noteworthy in light of the last few weeks, when it has become clearer to me than ever before than an entire generation is growing up in an era of technology that is even more revolutionary than the telephone. Maybe when the phone was invented, it was looked upon as something that would disrupt society in unthinkable and even terrible ways. I don’t know. But I do know that that question is and should be being asked about the Internet, because the last few weeks have shown us that the culture of the Internet is directly tied to the killing of Charlie Kirk and the Dallas ICE shooting.
More broadly, the Internet and its social media outrage and misinformation machinery is, in large part, responsible for what has gotten us to this dreadful point.
It used to take a lot of time and effort to access the type of information and personalities that would inspire someone to murder a political figure like Charlie Kirk, or believe in something like widespread election fraud. To access those previously far-flung realms of conspiracy, madness and isolation, one used to have to do things like frequent army surplus stores, go to gun shows in the middle of nowhere, or spend years cultivating personal relationships with anti-government militia types.
Now, you can find yourself down those rabbit holes in a matter of minutes.
I’ve been reading a book that was self-published by a relatively well-known election denial figure here in Georgia. (He’s relatively well-known to people in that community and to folks like me, whose job it is to report about this part of our society, but most Americans have surely never heard of him.) The book was written in the late 90s and lays out the author’s awakening — an awakening that took decades of doing things like listening to AM conservative talk, attending gatherings of like-minded activists, singing up for obscure print publications, etc.
Anyone interested in similar subjects now could be ensconced in this community and its belief systems much more quickly.
Many Republican members of Congress (not to mention Republican elected officials across the country) have followed this path. Sure, they had semi-reputable places like the Heritage Foundation to look to as they developed their political ideologies, but for the GOP lawmakers who are in their 50s, 60s and 70s, their political awakening came mostly thanks to people like Rush Limbaugh. Then, they had the first class of modern GOP conspiracy theorists and authoritarian-leaning politicians thanks to the likes of Newt Gingrich to look to as a model for mainstreaming a worldview that has previously been reserved for Midwest gun shows and readers of the Turner Diaries.
The Internet poured gasoline on the fire. Facebook threw a grenade into the mix.
Now, we are careening ever deeper into a political reality based primarily on conspiracy, rage, and nihilism. The nihilistic-accelerationists who have shot up America in recent weeks — from both sides of the aisle or somewhere in between — are separated only from our elected officials in their willingness to exercise their Second Amendment rights.
But if you listen to some of those Republican members of Congress and White House officials like Stephen Miller, it’s clear that many of them are willing to burn it all down as well. They believe that are beset on all sides by actual enemies who want to harm them and destroy America.
My hope is that some day, many years from now, some person will find an example of this madness while doing some mundane task. Maybe they’ll be looking for wall plates online to replace the old ones in their new home, and they’ll see an old news article about how we all lost our minds because too many people with too few critical thinking skills believed what very powerful people wanted them to believe — that immigrants were stealing their jobs, that Democrats were terrorizing the country, that elections were rigged — and think, “How odd.”
Then they’ll move right on like I did today, patching over an old telephone line that used to connect this house to the outside world, and is now buried behind the wall.
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