Don't make me write about politics
but goddamnit I'm going to write about how we write about politics
Something odd happened during the last Trump administration. People were so distressed by the surprise of the election results that they started looking anywhere to find an explanation for how this had happened, and the place they went looking was often Twitter.
On Twitter, people like Seth Abramson, a poet and lawyer with no foreign policy, investigative journalism or historical expertise, could become a “metajournalist” by stringing together various unsourced tweets and actual reporting, amass hundreds of thousands of followers, and write multiple books based on… Twitter threads. People like Sarah Kenzidor, who tweeted about being captured by a black ops organization on her way to MSNBC1, could also tweet all caps threads saying “I TOLD YOU SO” and get a book deal out of it. People like Eric Garland, a self described “futurist,” typed out (again with the all caps) “IT’S TIME FOR SOME GAME THEORY” and proceeded to write a 127 post thread about espionage that went viral. The editor of Mother Jones called it “a Federalist paper for 2016.” The Resistance Grifters are many in number and few in the ability to write a coherent narrative with actual points.
Progressives lost their actual shit in 2016, and it’s happening again in 2025. I am regularly getting newsletters from people describing themselves lying on the floor and weeping at the news, or circulating unsourced rumors about politicians, or citing TikTok videos touting conspiracy theories. These people are mostly white and affluent, straight and gainfully employed in industries that aren’t threatening to bottom out. In other words, the least likely person to be fired, deported, told they can’t use a particular bathroom or dismissed as a diversity hire is now dictating to everyone that everything is collapsing, there’s no hope, etcetera.
As a cancer patient, I have certainly laid on a floor or two and cried. But I am here to gently but firmly say two things:
One: stop listening to self appointed social media experts. Just stop it. You know better.
Two: get your shit together and stop telling people everything is fucked. You know what effect this has on your readers? It demoralizes them into a state of paralysis. And if you’ve ever had a major depressive episode (and who hasn’t) you then have to figure out a way to crawl out of that state of paralysis mostly on your own. To have people regularly telling us that everything is doomed is the equivalent of handing a depressed person a pack of razor blades, putting on a Leonard Cohen album, and leaving the room.
This kind of writing, however, is great for the clicks. It gets lots of likes. It gets a ton of engagement. Which is exactly why we all need to stop engaging with it. We all managed to get off Twitter2. Now we can make choices about who we read — who has actual expertise, informed opinions, who spends time doing actual investigative work — and who we don’t.
The solution to despair is not listening to doom-eager false prophets who want to drag you down while they take your money. The solution is pragmatic. Find your people. Volunteer. Teach. Donate. Make calls. Join a union. Show up. Leave the house. Stop reading this, and get off the internet.
Last Nightmare, Vivache, West Oakland, 2019
The new version of Twitter doesn’t let you search for tweets unless you have an account, but I actually saw this with my own eyes.
And if you haven’t, GET AWAY. Same thing with Instagram and Facebook. You don’t need them. You really don’t.