Thread by @drvolts

All right I've been tweeting too much today, but one more quick 🧵 before I log off this hellsite.

Here @Noahpinion makes the argument that crime is, in fact, down. He does so by citing all sorts of official statistics from FBI etc.

noahpinion.blog/p/yes-of-cours…

Now, there are, of course, many in the MAGA base who will simply refuse to believe official statistics. ("You get to believe whatever you feel" is one of the benefits of membership.) But official statistics still carry weight with most media & most people. In other words ...

... the question of whether crime is down can -- perhaps not to the extent we'd like, but still to a substantial extent -- *be settled*. There's something approximating an official, objective answer. There's a fact of the matter.

Now, I'd like you to think about what will happen if Trump takes over, Project 2025 is implemented, & the entire federal bureaucracy (including law enforcement branches) is staffed with ideological MAGA cronies.

That will mean the end of anything like independence or expertise in the civil service. Crime statistics will be engineered to support Trump -- in his mind, and theirs, that's what the bureaucracy is *for*. The gov't is Trump's, devoted to Trump's glory.

What that means is that the question is whether crime is up or down -- what is happening with crime generally -- will *have no answer*. There will be no fact of the matter, only claims & counter-claims. Everyone will get to choose what to believe.

And you can broaden that out to economic statistics, trade statistics, GHG emissions, any & all information about the objective state of the country & the polity. It will all be pure propaganda under Trump, which will mean simply that *no one really knows* what's going on.

People lament the "post-truth" era we're living in. Misinformation. Epistemic bubbles. Algorithmic distortions. Etc. But I need people to understand that we really haven't seen anything yet. Though we take them for granted & they've seen better days ...

... we still have largely functioning information-producing institutions. We still have something approximating a handle on what's happening around us. All of that goes away under Trump -- any vestigial connection to objective reality. Then *everything* is propaganda.

I don't think people have really wrapped their heads around what a change that will be, how much worse public discourse will be, how much more difficult any kind of left politics will be. Take a peek at Russia or Turkey for a preview.

This is what keeps striking me over & over again as we wander backward into fascism, with scarcely any resistance: all the blessings we enjoy in America, the result of so much hard work that came before us, that we are taking for granted & casually frittering away.

It's very, very difficult to build what we have here and when it's degraded & destroyed it's going to be very, very difficult to build it back. I just wish everyone was taking all this more seriously.

So earnest & cringe! 😖