The biggest challenge is keeping focus. We are living in a time governed not so much by “debates” and “polarisation” as the outright denial of fact. Large parts of society are not so much “divided” as tearing themselves free from reality. The hardest thing is how to address that.
I have been thinking about this article a lot recently. It was praised for its nuance and balance but it omitted the huge issue for many around the race report - the report’s deliberate distortion of sources, often to the horror of those who were claimed as contributors.
This is something I see constantly in British political discourse: the avoidance of huge and horrifying realities in the search for reassuring nuance. But a Government that lies to the electorate in the vast majority of its Facebook ads doesn’t want nuance. It wants domination.
That narrative of “black lives matter is racist against white people” has really taken such deep roots in the UK. Just a few months from a video of a black person getting choked to death by a police officer, and now you’re “woke” just for caring about that.
When people say “stop being so woke”, they sometimes mean “stop being so self-righteous”. *Most* of the time, though, they mean “stop having integrity”: because they don’t have integrity and they’re too cowardly to get it, so they have to market their own failures as bravery.
The world would get a lot better a lot faster if people stopped using the word “woke” as a defence mechanism and simply admitted “I’m simply too exhausted and terrified to care about anything other than the basic needs of me and my immediate social circle”.
I worry that the debate culture in which so many journalists were raised - where a smart line or argument demolishes the opposition’s case - has made them uniquely vulnerable to this political moment. You can’t beat these people in debate. The platform itself is their victory.
When it comes to anti-democratic actors, sunlight is rarely if ever disinfectant. Sunlight is what they crave. Debate didn’t reduce the effectiveness of online extremists. Removing their platforms did. But of course the biggest profits come from politics as spectacle.
"[Trump] cares about three things: money, power, and immunity from prosecution. If you threaten any of those things, you have leverage. But people would rather talk about how he wrote "covfefe" in a tweet." the.ink/p/sarah-kendzi…
They kept insisting [Trump] was making errors, and that's why he let the virus spread. I saw the situation and said...he wants to kill people and make money off the crisis. He is absolutely willing to let Americans die; he gets off on it. And I was right. the.ink/p/sarah-kendzi…