The Wrongologist

The Daily Escape:

Ricketts Glen State Park, PA – 2014 photo by Zev Steinhardt

We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow on Election Day. There are a few close races that grab the headlines, like the governor’s race in Virginia. There’s also a gubernatorial election in New Jersey. In addition, two of six special elections to the House of Representatives will also take place on Tuesday.

On Tuesday night, America’s pundits will start making far too much of whatever happens at the polls.

But today, let’s talk about the anti-Biden chant,  “Let’s Go Brandon” that is sweeping Red America. The NY Post explains it. And The Post amps up the propaganda, as the article is titled: “4 versions of scathing anti-Biden rap ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ now in iTunes Top 10“.

That makes it sound like America has turned on Biden so badly that he shouldn’t even come back to the country after his Glasgow trip. Throughout the Right Wing press, conservatives are doing their best to ramp up their publicity machine, including all of their bloviators on social media pushing the ‘Brandon’ message, but it doesn’t mean much. From Bob Lefsetz: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Go to Spotify, ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ is not in the Top 50, as a matter of fact it has almost no impact at all. As of this writing the track has a grand total of 565,434 streams on Spotify….’Freaks’ by Surf Curse, has 364,314 streams A DAY! As of this writing ‘Freaks’ has 287,974,290 streams on Spotify. In other words, the right wing tried to own the libs, and nobody noticed, it had no impact, other than in the echo chamber they reside in.”

Americans could debate whether Biden is doing a good job. But, as Lefsetz says, there is no longer real political debate in America. We have silos on the left and the right, which talk over each other. And the truth doesn’t even matter, so why debate?

If the Republicans are using high tech methods to try and show us that they have a winning political narrative, we need to look beyond the headlines to the actual facts. Lefsetz reminds us:

“BTS fans signed up for tickets to Trump’s Oklahoma rally and changed the outcome, the Trump team thought there was huge demand, they even erected a secondary stage outside, but this wasn’t the case, most of the ticket requests were fake”.

That October 2020 rally’s attendance was poor, and it made Trump look bad. That was our first indication of the power of social media to swing opinion, but that isn’t what happened with the anti-Biden track on iTunes. Lefsetz:

“If someone in the music business starts quoting iTunes numbers, laugh. They’re really stretching for a metric to make their case….there’s always a number to support your case, which means savvy people investigate and dig for the truth.”

What’s going on is a tug of war between people who want facts to stand and those who want to manipulate the facts to say something else. And if you’re a casual news consumer, you might get a completely inaccurate picture of what is going on, especially in an environment where it’s extremely difficult to get people’s attention without deceptive, sensational headlines.

We all thought the internet would propagate truth, but the opposite has happened.

And yet they’re succeeding with the deception tactics. They’re creating a frenzy over Critical Race Theory and trans athletes, two of America’s most over-hyped issues, and yet Greg Youngkin, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Virginia may ride this made-up crisis to victory.

With the “Let’s Go Brandon” meme, we see again that the anti-Biden’s are avoiding truth (and hard numbers) to try and win. Their game is confusion. Government being good or bad is irrelevant to the Republicans. Their calculation is that if they block and insult and channel it all through their propaganda networks, they’ll win back power again.

Burn it all down to the ground. It’s politics as an ash heap.

Time to wake up America! We don’t want to live in the same nation with idiots who believe “Let’s go Brandon” means “Fuck Joe Biden”. We should be weary of their perpetual mendacity and stupidity.

To help you wake up, listen to Santana and Chris Stapleton do a tune that they wrote jointly, “Joy”. It’s from Santana’s new album, “Blessings & Miracles”. This is a musical collaboration that Wrongo didn’t know he needed:

Sample Lyric:

Joy, rolling like the thunder rumbles
Time to let the teardrops tumble
Listen to the hatred crumble
Now that I have joy, flying on the wings of angels
Rattling the chains untangled
I see me from a different angle
Now I have joy