Thread by @SethAbramson

I'm terrified by what's coming. I wrote a book with 5000 citations that conclusively debunks every claim by Johnson. Media won't report on it—but it *will* report Johnson's Kremlin propaganda when he drops it. And I'll have to sit by and watch helplessly. politi.co/3fXaZ8p

The same thing just happened with the bogus "peace deals" involving Israel, UAE, and Bahrain. I published a book on that topic, with 4500 citations, over a year ago. It would have perfectly contextualized these deals as shams. But media reported on the deals and ignored the book.

I can't tell you how emotionally grueling it is to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours ruthlessly researching every angle of a topic only to know the Trump disinformation machine will *effortlessly* reach *100,000 times more people* because US media will allow it to be that way.

Proof of Corruption took on many tasks with its 5000 citations. One of the biggest was examining—via major-media investigative reports—*all* the false claims Johnson is going to drop on Biden. Anyone who reads the book becomes immune to Kremlin propaganda. amazon.com/dp/1250272998?…

Thousands of journalists follow this feed. They've seen the research, read the Proof books. And they're doing *nothing* to prepare America for the Kremlin disinformation Johnson and Barr will dump on us days before the election. All they had to do was tell folks to read one book.

The conspiracy theories Johnson is pursuing are complex—and they take time and space to debunk. It is *not* something a single fact-checker will be able to do in a 7-minute cable-news segment on November 1. It takes a *book* and must be discussed *now*, not 48 hours pre-election.

Many folks turned their lives upside down to deliver accurate info during Trump's first term—and often it took long-form writing, not 7-minute cable news punditry. If Trump wins, many will go back to their lives. It's not clear media can/will change its ways to pick up the slack.

Trump and his minions have declared an info war on America—and they are winning it. America is fighting back with 7-minute talking-head segments and tapes of spring 2020 conversations in which things we already knew are "revealed" as "breaking news." We are *losing* the info war.

I teach communications. One thing anyone in communications will tell you is that in the midst of an info war *everyone* must change how they create, distribute, consume, and synthesize information—the old methods cannot be maintained. They must be dynamically and quickly adapted.

Trump's presidency is a "metamodern" political scandal overlaid by Goebbels "Big Lie" technique, meaning 1) all the key events in the scandal occur publicly so that the public won't think they could possibly be "wrong," 2) the Big Lie to not believe what you see/hear is repeated.

Media should've stopped airing Trump or his agents. Their words—only when consequential rather than merely rhetorical—should've been reported in text graphics bookended by fact-checks. Media should've pushed books containing long-form truth—quick-hit factchecking is insufficient.

Instead, it's almost impossible to detect any change in media conduct. Trump is put on-air live. His agents are put on-air live. People known to be liars are interviewed. 7-minute segments continue to be the norm. Fact-checkers are must *rapidly* spit out *quick-hit* fact-checks.

In the midst of it all a journalist who made his name 50 years ago is trotted out to tell us this is *just* like the Watergate years—a tape can fix everything! No matter that the tape was sat on, that the man who got it was interviewing known liars, that we already knew the lies.

Advice: turn off any program that features talking heads doing quick-hit analyses of complex issues. Ignore books that are just gossip/scandal rather than revealing crime/systemic corruption. Turn off any program in which Trump or his liars are being allowed to lie in real time.

Now is the time for long-form podcasts, long-form books, fact-checking sites that aren't time- or space-limited (e.g., columns, blogs, podcasts, fact-checking archives, long-form explainers). Pay attention only to the actions of newsmakers, not their rhetoric. But that's not all.

We must also *accept* what no corporate media platform can (because it fears losing conservative viewers): the Republican Party at *this* moment (I am not saying always in the past or always in the future) is *committed* to spreading Kremlin and domestic disinformation to voters.

*No* info coming from GOP sources can be trusted in real time unless it has been vetted—long-form—by an independent party beforehand. There *should* be no articles reporting on what Republicans in D.C. are doing or saying unless they include *zero* falsehoods or disinformation.

What this means is that the old "sandwich" technique of reporting out lies and disinformation as long as you bookend them with the truth *must be ended*—journalists can't and mustn't report disinformation in *any* format, *however* cleverly it is "book-ended" via old techniques.

The American public doesn't realize that it's *in* a war *now*—an information war in which it's the intended victim class. Too many in media are making noise about *not* being weapons trained on us in that war, even as they make *no systemic changes* to how they report the news.

Michael Cohen testified *live on-air* for *hours*. Yet when his book came out, journalists *begged openly* for him to talk to them. Why? Ratings. They took time from their programs that could've been devoted to *new* info and devoted it instead to someone we'd already heard from.

Cable is *still* bringing on "surrogates" (who no one needs to hear from *ever*) and "old hands" who (1) don't understand the digital age, (2) haven't done *any* relevant research on what's happening, and therefore (3) just give old cliches about "how it works." (Not anymore!)

This is a slow-motion disaster leading right to another Trump win we'll all act surprised about. Oh—how did it happen? How could this be? *We're all ensuring it happens right now*. None of us should act surprised when this goes *exactly* the way we're *letting* it go this moment.

I'm doing what I can, as is everyone—and there are millions—who turned their life upside down these last 4 years to fight in this information war. But if the same people making the same mistakes leads to a Trump win, I don't know how many of us have another 4 years of fight left.

This isn't about money/credit. I don't care about TV/radio/print. I've done those things ad nauseam for 20 years now (my bio is readily available). So borrow my book from a library; get it from a friend; read the huge part of it (20%) already online; I don't care if you *buy* it.

And there are *so many other books* worth reading, some in full and some in substantial excerpt. Substantial excerpts of Bolton's book are worth reading; Jared Yates Sexton's new book is worth reading; read MBS (by Ben Hubbard) and Dark Towers (David Enrich, about Deutsche Bank).

If you're not a reader, listen to these books on audiobook; often you can build up enough credits to get a number of audiobooks for free. Some people (like me) put an *unprecedented* amount of their books online for free. Follow their Twitter feeds. Read articles about the books.

I know how easy it is to sit in front of the TV watching talking heads rather than reading a book or listening to one. It's been the hardest habit for me to break—after carbs. I know how easy it is—I do it all the time!—to rush from "breaking news" story to "breaking news" story.

America is already unrecognizable to most of us. If Trump wins, the life we knew and the country we knew is *gone*, and not because of—Jesus—*policy* differences, but because Trump *literally* (and I'm using "literally" literally here) wants to end American democracy permanently.

Media had a moral obligation—as well as a professional (ethical) one—to *upend* how it does business to help save the country and itself (the free press).

It changed *nothing*. It took *none* of what's happening seriously except to slot the Trump era into its longstanding model.

When the Trump era started, I was a working poet who wrote political opeds and was moving toward writing graphic novels and fiction. I *became* a metajournalist because I felt this era demanded something more and different of my skill-set. I was *not* expecting to do any of this.

Every person in communications—from attorneys to journalists to professors to creative writers to editors (all roles I currently inhabit)—needed to figure out how this information war would fundamentally *transform* their lives and communications strategies. Many tried to do so.

But those *atop* the communications pyramid in American media in many cases did *nothing* but figure out how the Trump era could be made to work for the same communications strategies they'd *always* used.

Professors, creative writers, and editors were the worst in this regard.

Attorneys actually, en masse, *have* expressed their outrage—and used their expertise in ways we've never seen from attorneys before. And in journalism, there at least have been *pockets* of us trying to transform our journalistic writing, research and comms practices completely.

Journalists must be prepared to lose *every* news consumer for the sake of saying/doing what's right, true, necessary, suited to this moment. Authors and editors must be prepared to lose *every* reader. If you're not—if you're playing old games—you're on his side in the info war.

I'm now shadowbanned by Twitter. And when I tweet a thread, I lose scores of readers. When I discuss my book, I get attacked. When I give away parts of my books for free, I get criticism from other quarters. But I refuse to look back and say that I didn't do *everything* I could.

PS/ If you don't feel and sound desperate right now, you don't know what's going on.

NOTE/ I forgot to mention Tim Snyder's On Tyranny—also a great book. And more than anything, if you have the time I would order *both* 500-page halves of the bipartisan, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report (it's available on Amazon for about $28 total for the 2 books).