How To Defend Objective Reality (And Election Day)

by Josh Berthume, Truman Security Fellow

About three weeks ago, my essay “7 Hours in November” was published, in which I argued that disinformation represented a real threat to the republic. I hypothesized that the most dangerous timespan would be from when the polls closed on the East coast to about seven hours later, when the national media determines it isn’t possible to declare a clear winner in the presidential race. It’s only been three weeks, but the Trump administration’s drive towards real authoritarianism has accelerated precipitously.

In those three weeks, the drive to open schools despite our total lack of control over the coronavirus has generated an intense stream of disinformation from official sources. The process for how COVID-19 hospitalization information is reported to the CDC was federally disrupted, following an implied threat that the National Guard could be deployed to oversee medical facilities’ data reporting. Federal law enforcement agents from multiple parts of the Department of Homeland Security are currently deployed in Portland, and more personnel from various agencies will soon be deployed to other American cities with Democratic mayors in states with Democratic governors as a de facto secret police force. So far, in Portland, these agents are illegally detaining peaceful protestors by kidnapping them with unmarked men and minivans, a nakedly political intimidation tactic which blatantly violates the 4th Amendment of the Constitution.

And, perhaps least surprising of all, Trump told Chris Wallace in a high-profile interview on Fox News Sunday that he may not accept the results of the election. “I’ll have to see,” he said, in and around strenuous declarations that the election was definitely going to be rigged.

Sometimes things that haven’t happened yet are going to be awful, but you can see them coming. These moments are markers of fate.

Sometimes, fate is a gift, one that cannot be taken from us.

Time is a river. You can’t step in the same river twice because a river is always moving and changing and becoming something else. You can never know what will meet you, a year’s worth of water later, even as you stand in exactly the same spot on a day that feels just like a day from one year ago, or five, or ten.

It is hard to know what will come to pass, and impossible to project ourselves into the future with any accuracy. We are not built to do such things, or at least we are not made to be good at it. Even if we are tortured by our own pasts and futures for one reason or another, our brains and our selves inexorably live in the present, all of our long lives building up from one fluid, contiguous, present moment to the next. As Emily Dickinson wrote, “Forever is composed of nows.”

Because the future is unknowable, we use what we know to guess at what might happen.

Not every future event is a surprise, though. Everyone has moments in their lives, big life-defining moments which they can see coming, whether they manage to prepare for them or not. I would argue that these predictable big moments make up most of how we live. Sure, totally unexpected small stuff happens occasionally. Big, spectacular, disruptive surprises are rare enough that they change us on a fundamental level; often the lack of expectation adds to their catalytic quality. But the big stuff we can predict, that we know will inevitably happen before it does, is most of what actually adds up to a life.

This should all feel familiar by now: an escalating power grab driven by the panicked fear of losing the election. There’s no moderation or toning it down. Our fears are well-founded. Every time this administration has the opportunity to make a decision, they make the worst one possible. We have no reason to think that any of this will be different, ever, or will improve even marginally by election day. There’s no logical reason to think they will act any different about voter suppression, or vote by mail, or election security than they have about anything else.

We know this. We haven’t even gotten to the part where the GOP trains 50,000 volunteer “poll monitors” to deploy on November 3, for obvious vote suppression reasons. Nor have we seen the end result of ICE being empowered to recruit and train civilians for the purpose of arresting immigrants.

And what should we expect as to the other really disturbing statement Trump made in his interview with Wallace, a reference to a forthcoming series of executive orders that will broadly violate both accepted norms and actual federal laws in trial runs of rule-by-edict? These are interpreted as being aligned with (and directly in response to) the recent Supreme Court ruling on DACA. Trump and his advisers have asserted that this opinion gives them the power to make policy by way of executive order while sidestepping legislative oversight and accountability entirely.

To be candid, we should expect the worst. We can plainly see not only what’s coming but what’s already here. An earlier draft of this essay, in this section, the one you’re reading right now, said “We know how dangerous election day could be, from weeks before, to the night of, to the weeks after.” But, honestly? It’s on, and happening faster than I thought it would, even having written the whole thing I did three weeks ago about how bad we are at believing what’s right in front of us.

So, consider this to be me, taking my own advice, and looking around at what’s happening, and looking at you, and saying, “Okay, now we really have to get moving.” I mean, John Yoo is back at it, advising Trump about how to circumvent federal law. DHS intelligence agencies are currently tasked with surveillance of protestors in Portland, American citizens demonstrating peacefully on American soil, a continuation of federal surveillance initiated as the Black Lives Matter protests first developed.

We’re here. A question like “What won’t they do to swing the election or steal it outright?” — a question I also asked in that earlier draft from just a few days ago — is moot. They’ll do whatever it takes.

The administration is also not exactly waiting around to see how we’ll react to things, either, which I think was a potential source of comfort for people who think the secret police gambit will backfire. Thinking it can backfire assumes that anyone at DHS is concerned with any but the narrowest lanes of public opinion, or that they would bother to worry about bad press or legal challenges. These chaos agents up and down the Trump administration are going to do their very best to warp and redefine reality. It is happening right now, with DHS leadership doing press hits last weekend claiming “anarchists” were turning Portland’s downtown corridor into some kind of warzone and using those claims to justify their extrajudicial aggression and kidnappings. The truth is, the protests were peaceful and the affected space was small, confined to an area that left the vast majority of day-to-day normal life in the city of Portland unaffected.

Then, a paramilitary cosplay force of little green men appeared and started snatching people off the streets. They instigated violent conflict against non-violent protestors and now the crowds have grown: thousands of people are now out in the streets at night, a city’s autoimmune response to an unwelcome invader.

The coverage has grown, as well. The national media, having largely abandoned the ongoing and persistent peaceful BLM protests sparked in response to the murder of George Floyd, returned once the promise of spectacle and conflict was engineered by ill-deployed federal agents. A fully developing spectacle is also a goal of DHS and the Trump administration at large, so much so that they’ve already turned around political ads to capitalize on a largely imagined (or invented) conflict.

They want to create violent unrest and then show off the brutality with which they put it down, while at the same time playing the victim and using the incidents they’ve generated as justification for doing all manner of other crimes / norms destruction / rights violations. They are taking this act on the road and bringing it to other cities which haven’t asked for it, like Chicago, Oakland, and Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, and Baltimore.

It is a show of force that is clearly and only political. Trump says so, directly:

“Look at what’s going on — all run by Democrats, all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left.” Trump said.

He added: “If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”

Unless Congress puts a stop to it, we have no reason to believe they won’t do what they say they’ll do.

See? Time is funny. Three weeks ago, I thought I’d be writing the sentence I just wrote on some crisp day in October.

Things are moving faster now, and we’re even getting a preview of the messaging and narrative they’ll use when the secret police are again — or are still — violently putting down demonstrations around election day, and soon thereafter. ADS DHS Ken Cuccinelli did some press towards the end of last week in which he sought to delegitimize the protestors, saying they were anarchists attacking federal property and, by extension, attacking our democracy.

Cuccinelli saved the most revealing bit for Fox News, electing to wait through interviews with NPR and other outlets before playing the trailer for: To Crush An Uprising, coming to theaters near you right after Labor Day.

The difference between what he told Fox News and what he told everyone else was in the language used to describe the protestors, saying they weren’t protestors at all, but rather that “…they are coming to attack our democracy at its base. They don’t respect elections, they don’t respect the law, and they want to tear it all down, and [Portland] Mayor Wheeler is right there with them.”

Why would he even mention elections when these protests have absolutely nothing to do with elections?

Because that’s the big idea, the narrative frame and story they will tell to justify hanging onto power, even if it means stealing the election outright. The administration will use this story (read: propaganda) to justify all kinds of brutality against anyone that takes to the streets to protest what they’ve done.

What can we do? We stand in the river of time, it slides around us, and we try, as ever, to project ourselves a day, a week, or a year into the future. What can we do to neutralize this insane disinformation effort and make the case for objective reality?

First: Talk to your people. Know what’s going on and try to help your friends and relatives and neighbors who might be buying into disinformation campaigns about COVID or Antifa or vote-by-mail to see the truth. Here’s a way to get into that conversation, provided helpfully by John Oliver and his crew over at Last Week Tonight to specifically address coronavirus conspiracy theories. (But this is a good start for talking about disinformation at all with someone you care about!)

Second: Vote, obviously, and help your candidates with direct voter contact and GOTV. All of that will look quite different this time, but the digital tools springing up for use by campaigns to replace door knocking and block walking during the global pandemic are likely to give many volunteers safe and convenient ways to help out to a degree that was previously unavailable.

This also provides the opportunity to directly participate in having the ongoing conversation about how voting will work and when your local elections officials expect to have results fully reported. (You can have this conversation one-on-one during voter contact, and you can also have this conversation with campaigns and local party organizations, pushing them to be ready for reality and to communicate about it to their local communities and constituencies, as well. One of the most destructive elements of caucus night in Iowa was that the press wasn’t sure who to talk to, and the organizations running the caucus didn’t know what to say, or how to explain what was going on. Local and state parties can get ahead of this game now by making a plan for how to communicate what’s happening during early vote, on election day, and in the days and weeks after.

Third: If you know someone in media, lobby them directly and fiercely to tell the story of election day — how it will work, what will happen with vote by mail, what election night will likely reveal and what the days and weeks after election day will look like, as well as what they will require from us as citizens in a participatory democracy. You might be in a position to help out by writing an op-ed or doing an interview in which you talk at length about how election day will work, or you might be in a position to direct or plan a media outlet’s coverage of the election. I’ve got some extra advice for you, which I hope you can accept in the spirit in which it is offered.

An Ounce of Prevention

The media’s work in this regard literally cannot start soon enough, and there’s definitely a point beyond which it will be too late to make a difference. The most important thing media outlets of all kinds can do right now is to tell The Story of Election Day 2020. By proactively managing expectations, an informed public will be less likely to be misled or panicked by a marked increase in noise, disinformation, and chaos focused around November 3, much of which will be generated with express intent of suppressing voters and casting doubt on the results of the election.

This storytelling is the act of building a resilient audience. It is the work required to develop, grow, and reinforce an audience inclined to believe an accurate depiction of reality. It will build the understanding and belief that the election won’t be won or lost on election day, and that results may take days or weeks to tabulate, and that the pandemic, vote by mail, and many other factors will not only alter election night reporting, but also the experience most voters will have during the act of voting itself.

A public education campaign of this nature robs agents of chaos of a critical tool: time-sensitive uncertainty, in which compacted unknowns create a reactionary spiral within a densely networked population. By ensuring that people know what to expect, it becomes much more difficult to surprise them or to make division plays against their uncertainties or their shared sense of existential dread.

The impulse for this exists. We do not have to create it or even make the case for the general idea. The press has grown less and less tolerant of outright lies from the administration and its enablers as their disinformation campaigns have grown in number, becoming more disparate and shrill. By preempting the final leg of a coordinated effort to warp reality, the intended effect of that effort could be blunted or neutralized entirely.

This kind of public education campaign also has the significant benefit of being fundamentally non-partisan. A free and fair election is in the interest of everyone, regardless of party affiliation, right? So, even the spare few journalists at Fox who occasionally show a flash of ethics or morality — Wallace prime among them — could do a true and possibly even partially redemptive service to their viewers by explaining the nation’s voting process at length prior to the election: starting soon after Labor Day, and narrating the process as it plays out during early vote, on November 3rd, and in the days thereafter.

A Powerful, Elegant Weapon

Shining a light on how this year will be different can also serve as a public good by exposing and perhaps heading off attempts to suppress voters. This suppression could happen by logistical means (like reducing the number of polling locations in traditionally non-white or non-rich areas) or mechanical means (the purging of voter rolls) or even literally mechanical means (a reduction in available or deployed voting machines).

A coordinated media effort to engage in consistent, big-picture storytelling about how the election will work, both nationally and in specific geographies, and then interrogating those processes at length with local and state election administrators and elected officials is crucial. The end result of such an effort can only be a chilling effect on bad behavior. Since we, as a population, lack the institutional tools and political will required to investigate, prosecute, and punish voter suppression after it occurs, our only real option is to try and prevent it from happening in the first place.

The press is the most effective force for doing this. Telling the story of the electoral process in the year 2020 will be, no matter what, good for democracy. That it may also increase public trust in the media while disrupting a lawless, coordinated attempt to steal elections and suppress votes is a swell bonus.

You can even swing the local media into action through letters to the editor or an effort to ask questions on social media from responsive outlets — if you do it in a reasonable way, you’ll often get a reasonable response, whether from your hometown paper or your local news station or even a statewide publication or magazine, like (for instance, since I live in Texas) the Texas Tribune or Texas Monthly. Your mileage may vary, of course — if your local outlets are super partisan or an administrative mess, you may not get much of a response. But you should try, because somebody actually reads those letters to the editor!

Undoing What Election Night Always Does

Now, suppose this works. Suppose that the media dedicates real time and energy to building a narrative about what will actually happen on election day, doing so in the interest of shoring up the public’s perception of objective reality. We amplify that narrative of objective reality. Expectations are managed, people get it, and the American electorate buckles in, a resilient audience ready to understand what’s really happening, armored against disinformation and, perhaps, even moved to civic engagement and electoral participation.

This does not make it any less likely that the administration and their allies will engage in efforts to spread disinformation or cast doubt on the results of the election, especially if their efforts to suppress votes in the run up to election day are partially mitigated. The need for planning and programming election night coverage that does not depend on the horse race will be vitally important to the health and well-being of the union.

The best-case scenario is that the net effect of thirty years of coordinated propaganda is diluted, even as it is visited upon a populace that is wearier and more vulnerable than Americans have been in living memory.

To put it lightly, the last four years have been difficult. 2020 has been a real beating. We have raised our voices against injustice, but we have not been allowed to rest our heads, eyes, or hearts. We have suffered loss after loss and have not been given space or time to grieve. We are raw, and tired, and wounded. For tyrants, this exhausted state has long been the preferred condition in which to find and keep their enemies. This administration and their enablers are counting on it, just as the oppressors who have come before have depended upon it throughout human history.

By the time we get to early voting, if this public service has been delivered by the free press to a free people and we have achieved some sort of national understanding of how the day and night of the election will work, and how what comes after will unfold, it is absolutely plausible that participation in the voting process will increase, scaling along with understanding.

As a national audience, we will not only be resilient to the long-run suppression effect of disinformation. Most critically, we will also be more resistant to the urge to take the bait on election night. We’ll be more resistant to the compounding panic of uncertainty by virtue of having eliminated much of that uncertainty beforehand.

This is among the last fights still available to us: a collaborative battle against the terrible speed of disinformation. It is a pitched battle against how populations are targeted for participation in a sinister system which, if left unchecked, foments the destabilization of democracies.

The Last Firewall, Before the Next Firewall

Well-planned election night programming by news networks is the final and most powerful weapon against disinformation during those seven hours in November. Maybe it sounds silly to you, that the consistent, measured, objective description of reality on November 3 amounts to being our last line of defense, and that it could be the only thing standing between us and a truly wild and dark future.

Allow me to make the emphatic case for at least one element of that characterization: if we don’t do the storytelling about how election day will work consistently and with sufficient frequency between now and November 3, it absolutely will be the last line of defense. Without a significantly different approach to election night coverage, none of the rest of this is likely to work. We don’t have time to build something else, and no one bothered to finance or implement a Manhattan project to create a weapon against disinformation in the last four years. What else do we have?

Here’s where we really are:

● Telling the accurate story of election day before election day protects election day.

● Having a new, non-horse race, non-polls-closing plan for how to cover election night as the first part of a long process — including arriving at an understanding of how to report on and expose disinformation as it is deployed and circulated by official sources — protects election night, the critical aegis against chaos in the long dark night.

● Our collective engagement in this process — press and polity joined in our most critical battle for truth and justice yet — is what arms and armors us for the days and weeks after election day.

If we make it past November 3rd with some norms, institutions, and processes intact, the period in the days and weeks thereafter will be the most critical conflict in this weird chapter of the American story. We’ll be well-equipped to fight it because of the power of shared reality, which has been used against us so far. If we can take that power back, we can use the common lens to adjudicate objective reality rather than trying to see it through the gaslit sea of chaos in which we’ve been drowning since 2015.

It isn’t just possible, it is plausible. But we’ve got to be self-aware enough to know that the way we’ve been chasing distractions and burning news cycles was our predictable participation in a system levied against us.

We can stop that from happening if we decide to stop it. That’s all we have to do.

If we can’t, or we don’t, we may once again end up as reliable conspirators, co-writing the end of the American story.