Last week, President Joe Biden gave another national speech warning Americans that "democracy is on the ballot this year." He was dead right about the election and its stakes. The majority of Republicans running for office in the midterms are "election deniers," which is the media's euphemism for flat-out enemies of democracy. They are champions of Trump's 2020 attempted coup and often promise he won't fail when he tries again in 2024. The efforts to throw out the votes and simpy install Republicans in office have already begun. Threats of violence are being used to run honest election officials out of office and to intimidate voters that MAGA deems "un-American." To make it worse, polls show that not enough Americans seem to care if our democracy collapses. Republican voters are gung-ho to end democracy, of course, but potential Democratic voters are supposedly too checked out to make it to the polls and swing voters are skeptical that the threat is real.
Despite this impending doom, however, I notice that much of my news consumption this past week has not been about the midterms at all, but about gawking at Elon Musk's comically disastrous takeover of Twitter. Did you see how, after he crowed about his love of "free speech" and "comedy," he suspended a multitude of accounts simply for making fun of him? How he fired half of Twitter's staff and then, realizing things would disintegrate without them, desperately started trying to rehire many of them? How, when legions of companies decided to "pause" advertising on Twitter rather than put their brands up next to the N-word maelstrom Musk has unleashed, Musk threw a childish tantrum accusing "activists" of conspiring against him and threatening to "name and shame" people who won't just give him money?
