A number of factors may have primed the American public to seek out, believe and share disinformation since Election Day. Trump’s monthslong allegations of impending fraud, the collective stress and anxiety caused by the pandemic, and the rare delay in learning election results all combined to create a perfect storm of disinformation.
You will notice that title of this episode ends in “low cost” vs. “cheap”. As a marketer there is a rule, if you can eliminate a word do it, but that won’t work here. Cheap sets the wrong tone for what we will discuss today, we are talking about protecting your life, your property and the lives of those you love, one doesn’t go “cheap” with such things.
Today may seem like a basic beginners show but I will bet even the seasoned prepper will gain something and if nothing else will be better able to help others get started. Prepping doesn’t have to be complex or expensive, what it must be is specific to a set of goals, today we talk about simple ways to make that happen.
The fear is that Trump and his followers will never give way, that he will remain the head of a “Trumpian government in exile”, as the historian Sean Wilentz puts it, antagonistic to the legitimate, elected government, armed with allies in Congress, sustained via social media and nourished by grievance and the romance of a lost cause: a new, virtual Confederacy.
The word is apposite because, inevitably in America, so much of all this turns on race. When Trump’s cheerleaders locate the supposed voter fraud in Philadelphia or Detroit, their listeners get the message: it’s that black cities are corrupt and, at root, that black people shouldn’t be allowed to decide who gets to be president of the United States. As Barack Obama writes in his upcoming memoir, these are “dark spirits” that have “long been lurking on the edge of the Republican party – xenophobia … paranoid conspiracy theories, an antipathy toward black and brown folks”.
