As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I recently attended an event at Politics and Prose, a bookstore in Washington, D.C. for a book agent who was discussing her own book about, well, books! Ok, it was about working as a nonfiction writer. I had to go!
It was a great experience. While I learned many things that day, the one bit of advice that stuck out to me was the idea that it is almost impossible to overshare about a book before it comes out. Put another way, it’s a good thing to give freely from an upcoming work, even if publication is still a while off.
I followed this advice in my last long form Substack post, and was pleased to see the positive feedback (thanks to everyone who liked). In that spirit of sharing, I decided to put out a bit of the preface from my manuscript in this article to reveal what this book can – and can’t! – do for readers, and what anyone who decides to crack open the book can hope to get out of it.
Let me know in the comments below what you think!
Before we jump in, it may do us all some good to set expectations. After all, if you’re reading this book, you likely have some work to do on the communications front. Then again, who doesn’t? This book, however, will not get you to win an argument against your MAGA uncle, nor will it persuade anyone you know to leave the cult, political or otherwise, to which they have devoted themselves. There are other works on literal cult deprogramming, such as those by the nation’s leading expert on the matter, to help with the latter situation, which is both dire and heartbreaking. As for talking someone out of their fervent political ideology simply by talking to them about politics, that’s probably never going to happen. If I had found out how to do that, I would have gladly shared that information freely as soon as I had attained in the hopes of sparing us all a great deal of pain and suffering.
What this book can help you to do, hopefully, is to have more productive conversations with the people in your life who have or who you suspect have begun falling down the rabbit hole and help them to keep one foot planted firmly in reality. Maybe it’s the brother who’s declared himself a “freethinker” and started talking about livestock dewormer as a treatment for COVID-19 after listening to one of the ever expanding number of obnoxious podcasts in the online manosphere. Perhaps it’s the friend who never hinted at having an ounce of hate in her heart until she started leveling outrageous accusations at immigrants or another vulnerable group, catching you entirely off guard as her personality appeared to change overnight. Or maybe still it’s a colleague who suddenly has turned their back on their mission and their peers as they started to fall for increasingly outrageous stories. For thirty years, they believed in workers’ rights, women’s rights, immigration reform, and healthcare as a basic necessity. Now, they’re too busy talking about pornographic books needing to be banned from public school libraries.
After you stop sputtering from the pure madness of it all, you start asking yourself why your friend was inspecting the local elementary school library and what on earth made them think that the place that has to sell baked goods to replace fraying children’s books could afford to maintain an anthology of Playboy magazines. Also, the internet?
So much has changed since the first draft of this book, and yet everything contained in the following pages is now more relevant than ever. There can now be no doubt: we are in an information war, and we are losing. When I write “we” here, I do not mean just Democratic candidates and operatives, nor do I mean the tens of millions of Democratic-leaning voters across the country. By “we,” I am referring to American civil society in the broadest possible sense, as well as anyone still interested in facing our current reality and eventually making it better.
If the 2016 Election seemed like a fluke (albeit a destructive one) and the 2020 Election a return to normalcy, 2024 showed us convincingly that a new authoritarianism, reliant on social networks and fueled by disinformation, is the defining feature of our era. Though often disseminated in the form of memes, vertically cut podcast clips, and increasingly outrageous soundbites that would have disqualified anyone from public life in years past, none of it is even remotely funny. Plainspokenness and crude humor are merely a veneer used to make an otherwise unpalatable and frankly unamerican message appealing to people disillusioned by our politics or even completely disengaged from the political process altogether. And it’s working.
2024 saw young men barely old enough to vote and statistically unlikely to register and cast a ballot radicalized by a chronically online bro culture that dressed up conspiracy theories, propaganda, and eye watering misogyny in sports talk and fart jokes. It wasn’t just young white bros or gamers who went for it either. Black men and even Latinos voted for an overtly racist and xenophobic form of authoritarianism in numbers that were both frightening and dismaying – though those numbers were also inflated in the breathless post-election news coverage.
Where appealing to a lost sense of masculinity through memes and pods didn’t work, blatant fear mongering did the trick. A flood of exaggerated stories and an outsized amount of commentary and content about trans athletes, men in girls’ locker rooms, and other non-issues drowned out any coverage of the substance in the closing days of the 2024 campaign. Fears of an imagined wave of emasculation formed an electorate’s political beliefs, rewiring people’s perception of American society and pushing individuals’ fears of perceived threats into such a hyperbolic state as to leave no room to process the reality unfolding offline. Actual threats to dismantle the United States federal government and to leave the American people at the mercy of a handful of delusional and hateful billionaires went unheard.
This sort of manipulation has little to do with persuading people to choose one ideology over another. In the long term, it has even less to do with championing one political candidate or party over another, although of course it certainly does have such an impact. The ultimate goal, rather, is to sow confusion and distrust, to turn people away from the leaders, institutions, friends, and family whom they once trusted, to completely exhaust an individual’s capacity for critical thinking, and to leave as many people as possible in a state of isolation, distrust, and bewilderment to the point that they do not – or cannot – fulfill the most basic obligations of citizenship in a democracy. The objective is explicitly political, but not all of the impacts are, with the overriding anxiety, suspicion, and anger caused by disinformation driving wedges not merely between people of differing political persuasions, but between friends and family members as well.
From there, the book delves into deep conversations with experts and pulls from those interviews not only important context about this moment, but actionable insights readers can take into their real life interactions. So, what do you think? I’d love to hear from you in the comments, and thank you for reading!
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