The assassination of Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025, marked a horrifying inflection point in the growing debate over how digital platforms amplify rage and destabilize politics. As someone who had already stepped back from social media after Trump’s re-election, watching these events unfold from a distance only confirmed my decision. My feeds had become pits of despair, grievances, and overall negativity that didn’t do well for my mental health. While I understand the need to shine a light on the atrocities of Trump and his government, the constant barrage was too much. So I mostly opted out, save for the occasional promotion of my writing.

Kirk’s death feels like the inevitable conclusion of systems we’ve built—systems that reward outrage, amplify division, and transform human beings into content machines optimized for engagement at any cost.

The Mechanics of Disconnection

As it turns out, my behavior isn’t out of the ordinary. People quit social media for various reasons, often situational—seeking balance in an increasingly overwhelming digital landscape. As a participant explained in a research project about social media disconnection:

It was just a build-up of stress and also a huge urge to change things in life. Like, ‘It just can’t go on like this.’ And that made me change a number of things. So I started to do more sports and eat differently, have more social contacts and stop using online media. And instead of sitting behind my phone for two hours in the evening, I read a book and did some work, went to work out, I went to a birthday or a barbecue. I was much more engaged in other things. It just gave me energy. And then I thought, ‘This is good. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. I have to maintain this.’

Sometimes the realization is more visceral—that on these platforms, we are the product. As Jef van de Graaf provocatively puts it:

Every post we make, every friend we invited, every little notification dragging us back into the feed serves one purpose: to extract money from us—and give nothing back but dopamine addiction and mental illness.

While his language is deliberately inflammatory, the sentiment resonates with many who’ve watched their relationship with these platforms sour. As he cautions:

Remember: social media exists because we feed it our lives. We trade our privacy and sanity so VCs and founders can get rich and live like greedy fucking kings.

The Architecture of Rage

The internet was built to connect people and ideas. Even the early iterations of Facebook and Twitter were relatively harmless because the timelines were chronological. But then the makers—product managers, designers, and engineers—of social media platforms began to optimize for engagement and visit duration. Was the birth of the social media algorithm the original sin?

Kevin Roose and Casey Newton explored this question in their Hard Fork episode following Kirk’s assassination, discussing how platforms have evolved to optimize for what they call “borderline content”—material that comes right up to the line of breaking a platform’s policy without quite going over. As Newton observed about Kirk himself:

He excelled at making what some of the platform nerds that I write about would call borderline content. So basically, saying things that come right up to the line of breaking a platform’s policy without quite going over… It turns out that the most compelling thing you can do on social media is to almost break a policy.

Kirk mastered this technique—speculating that vaccines killed millions, calling the Civil Rights Act a mistake, flirting with anti-Semitic tropes while maintaining plausible deniability. He understood the algorithm’s hunger for controversy, and fed it relentlessly. And then, in a horrible irony, he was killed by someone who had likely been radicalized by the very same algorithmic forces he’d helped unleash.

As Roose reflected:

We as a culture are optimizing for rage now. You see it on the social platforms. You see it from politicians calling for revenge for the assassination of Charlie Kirk. You even see it in these individual cases of people getting extremely mad at the person who made a joke about Charlie Kirk that was edgy and tasteless, and going to report them to their employer and get them fired. It’s all this sort of spectacle of rage, this culture of destroying and owning and humiliating.

The Unraveling of Digital Society

Social media and smartphones have fundamentally altered how we communicate and socialize, often at the expense of face-to-face interactions. These technologies have created a market for attention that fuels fear, anger, and political conflict. The research on mental health impacts is sobering: studies found that the introduction of Facebook to college campuses led to measurable increases in depression, accounting for approximately 24 percent of the increased prevalence of severe depression among college students over two decades.

In the wake of Kirk’s assassination, what struck me most was how the platforms immediately transformed tragedy into content. Within hours, there were viral posts celebrating his death, counter-posts condemning those celebrations, organizations collecting databases of “offensive” comments, people losing their jobs, death threats flying in all directions. As Newton noted:

This kind of surveillance and doxxing is essentially a kind of video game that you can play on X. And people like to play video games. And because you’re playing with people’s real lives, it feels really edgy and cool and fun for those who are participating in this.

The human cost is remarkable—teachers, firefighters, military members fired or suspended for comments about Kirk’s death. Many received death threats. Far-right activists called for violence and revenge, doxxing anyone they accused of insufficient mourning.

Blood in the Feed

The last five years have been marked by eruptions of political violence that cannot be separated from the online world that incubated them.

• The attack on Paul Pelosi (2022). The man who broke into the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home and fractured her husband’s skull had been marinating in QAnon conspiracies and election denialism online. Extremism experts warned it was a textbook case of how stochastic terrorism—the idea that widespread demonization online can trigger unpredictable acts of violence by individuals—travels from platform rhetoric into a hammer-swinging hand.
• The Trump assassination attempt (July 2024). A young man opened fire at a rally in Pennsylvania. His social media presence was filled with antisemitic, anti-immigrant content. Within hours, extremist forums were glorifying him as a martyr and calling for more violence.
• The killing of Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband (June 2025). Their murderer left behind a manifesto echoing the language of online white supremacist and anti-abortion communities. He wasn’t a “lone wolf.” He was drawing from the same toxic well of white supremacist and anti-abortion rhetoric that floods online forums. The language of his manifesto wasn’t unique—it was copied, recycled, and amplified in the ideological swamps anyone with a Wi-Fi connection can wander into.

These headline events sit atop a broader wave: the New Orleans truck-and-shooting rampage inspired by ISIS propaganda online (January 2025), the Cybertruck bombing outside Trump’s Los Angeles hotel tied to accelerationist forums—online spaces where extremists argue that violence should be used to hasten the collapse of society (January 2025), and countless smaller assaults on election workers, minority communities, and public officials.

The pattern is depressingly clear. Platforms radicalize, amplify, and normalize the language of violence. Then, someone acts.

The Death of Authenticity

As social media became commoditized—a place to influence and promote consumption—it became less personal and more like TV. The platforms are now being overrun by AI spam and engagement-driven content that drowns out real human connection. As James O’Sullivan notes:

Platforms have little incentive to stem the tide. Synthetic accounts are cheap, tireless and lucrative because they never demand wages or unionize… Engagement is now about raw user attention – time spent, impressions, scroll velocity – and the net effect is an online world in which you are constantly being addressed but never truly spoken to.

Research confirms what users plainly see: tens of thousands of machine-written posts now flood public groups, pushing scams and chasing engagement. Whatever remains of genuine human content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks.

The result? Networks that once promised a single interface for the whole of online life are splintering. Users drift toward smaller, slower, more private spaces—group chats, Discord servers, federated microblogs, and email newsletters. A billion little gardens replacing the monolithic, rage-filled public squares that have led to a burst of political violence.

The Designer’s Reckoning

This brings us to design and our role in creating these systems. As designers, are we beginning to reckon with what we’ve wrought?

Jony Ive, reflecting on his own role in creating the smartphone, acknowledges this burden:

I think when you’re innovating, of course, there will be unintended consequences. You hope that the majority will be pleasant surprises. Certain products that I’ve been very involved with, I think there were some unintended consequences that were far from pleasant. My issue is that even though there was no intention, I think there still needs to be responsibility. And that weighs on me heavily.

His words carry new weight after Kirk’s assassination—a death enabled by platforms we designed, algorithms we optimized, engagement metrics we celebrated.

At the recent World Design Congress in London, architect Indy Johar didn’t mince words:

We need ideas and practices that change how we, as humans, relate to the world… Ignoring the climate crisis means you’re an active operator in the genocide of the future.

But we might ask: What about ignoring the crisis of human connection? What about the genocide of civil discourse? Climate activist Tori Tsui’s warning applies equally to our digital architecture saying, “The rest of us are at the mercy of what you decide to do with your imagination.”

Political violence is accelerating and people are dying because of what we did with our imagination. If responsibility weighs heavily, so too must the search for alternatives.

The Possibility of Bridges

There are glimmers of hope in potential solutions. Aviv Ovadya’s concept of “bridging-based algorithms” offers one path forward—systems that actively seek consensus across divides rather than exploiting them. As Casey Newton explains:

They show them to people across the political spectrum… and they only show the note if people who are more on the left and more on the right agree. They see a bridge between the two of you and they think, well, if Republicans and Democrats both think this is true, this is likelier to be true.

But technological solutions alone won’t save us. The participants in social media disconnection studies often report developing better relationships with technology only after taking breaks. One participant explained:

It’s more the overload that I look at it every time, but it doesn’t really satisfy me, that it no longer had any value at a certain point in time. But that you still do it. So I made a conscious choice – a while back – to stop using Facebook.

Designing in the Shadow of Violence

Rob Alderson, in his dispatch from the World Design Congress, puts together a few pieces. Johar suggests design’s role is “desire manufacturing”—not just creating products, but rewiring society to want and expect different versions of the future. As COLLINS co-founder Leland Maschmeyer argued, design is about…

What do we want to do? What do we want to become? How do we get there?’… We need to make another reality as real as possible, inspired by new context and the potential that holds.

The challenge before us isn’t just technical—it’s fundamentally about values and vision. We need to move beyond the Post-it workshops and develop what Johar calls “new competencies” that shape the future.

As I write this, having stepped back from the daily assault of algorithmic rage, I find myself thinking about the Victorian innovators Ive mentioned—companies like Cadbury’s and Fry’s that didn’t just build factories but designed entire towns, understanding that their civic responsibility extended far beyond their products. They recognized that massive societal shifts of moving people from land that they farmed, to cities they lived in for industrial manufacturing, require holistic thinking about how people live and work together.

We stand at a similar inflection point. The tools we’ve created have reshaped human connection in ways that led directly to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. A young man, radicalized online, killed a figure who had mastered the art of online radicalization. The snake devoured its tail on a college campus in Utah, and we all watched it happen in real-time, transforming even this tragedy into content.

The vast majority of Americans, as Newton reminds us, “do not want to participate in a violent cultural war with people who disagree with them.” Yet our platforms are engineered to convince us otherwise, to make civil war feel perpetually imminent, to transform every disagreement into an existential threat.

The Cost of Our Imagination

Perhaps the real design challenge lies not in creating more engaging feeds or stickier platforms, but in designing systems that honor our humanity, foster genuine connection, and help us build the bridges we so desperately need.

Because while these US incidents show how social media incubates lone attackers and small cells, they pale in comparison to Myanmar, where Facebook’s algorithms directly amplified hate speech and incitement, contributing to the deaths of thousands—estimates range from 6,700 to as high as 24,000—and the forced displacement of over 700,000 Rohingya Muslims. That catastrophe made clear: when platforms optimize only for engagement, the result isn’t connection but carnage.

This is our design failure. We built systems that reward extremism, amplify rage, and treat human suffering as engagement. The tools meant to bring us together have instead armed us against each other. And we all bear responsibility for that.

It’s time we imagined something better—before the systems we’ve created finish the job of tearing us apart.

President Trump signed an executive order creating America by Design, a national initiative to improve the usability and design of federal services, both digital and physical. The order establishes a National Design Studio inside the White House and appoints Airbnb co-founder and RISD graduate Joe Gebbia as the first Chief Design Officer. The studio’s mandate: cut duplicative design costs, standardize experiences to build trust, and raise the quality of government services. Gebbia said he aims to make the U.S. “the most beautiful, and usable, country in the digital world.”

Ironically, this follows the gutting of the US Digital Service, left like a caterpillar consumed from within by parasitic wasp larvae, when it was turned into DOGE. And as part of the cutting of thousands from the federal workforce, 18F, the pioneering digital services agency that started in 2014, was eliminated.

Ethan Marcotte, the designer who literally wrote the book on responsive design and worked at 18F, had some thoughts. He points out the announcement web page weighs in at over three megabytes. Very heavy for a government page and slow for those in the country unserved by broadband—about 26 million. On top of that, the page is full of typos and is an accessibility nightmare.

In other words, we’re left with a web page announcing a new era of design for the United States government, but it’s tremendously costly to download, and inaccessible to many. What I want to suggest is that neither of these things are accidents: they read to me as signals of intent; of how this administration intends to practice design.

The National Design Studio has a mission to turn government services into as easy as buying from the Apple Store. Marcotte’s insight is that designing for government—at scale for nearly 350 million people—is very different than designing in the private sector. Coordination among agencies can take years.

Despite what this new “studio” would suggest, designing better government services didn’t involve smearing an animated flag and a few nice fonts across a website. It involved months, if not years, of work: establishing a regular cadence of user research and stakeholder interviews; building partnerships across different teams or agencies; working to understand the often vast complexity of the policy and technical problems involved; and much, much more. Judging by their mission statement, this “studio” confuses surface-level aesthetics with the real, substantive work of design.

Here’s the kicker:

There’s a long, brutal history of design under fascism, and specifically in the way aesthetics are used to define a single national identity. Dwell had a good feature on this in June…

The executive order also brought on some saltiness from Christopher Butler, lays out the irony, or the waste.

The hubris of this appointment becomes clearer when viewed alongside the recent dismantling of 18F, the federal government’s existing design services office. Less than a year ago, Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative completely eviscerated this team, which was modeled after the UK’s Government Digital Service and comprised hundreds of design practitioners with deep expertise in government systems. Many of us likely knew someone at 18F. We knew how much value they offered the country. The people in charge didn’t understand what they did and didn’t care.

In other words, we were already doing what Gebbia claims he’ll accomplish in three years. The 18F team had years of experience navigating federal bureaucracy, understanding regulatory constraints, and working within existing governmental structures—precisely the institutional knowledge required for meaningful reform.

Butler knew Joe Gebbia, the appointed Chief Design Officer, in college and calls out his track record in government, or lack thereof.

Full disclosure: I attended college with Joe Gebbia and quickly formed negative impressions of his character that subsequent events have only reinforced.

While personal history colors perspective, the substantive concerns about this appointment stand independently: the mismatch between promised expertise and demonstrated capabilities, the destruction of existing institutional knowledge, the unrealistic timeline claims, and the predictable potential for conflicts of interest.

Government design reform is important work that requires deep expertise, institutional knowledge, and genuine commitment to public service. It deserves leaders with proven track records in complex systems design, not entrepreneurs whose primary experience involves circumventing existing regulations for private gain.

If anything this yet another illustration of this administration’s incompetence.

For my mental health, I’ve been purposely avoiding the news since the 2024 presidential election. I mean, I haven’t been trying hard, but I’m certainly no longer the political news junkie I was leading up to November 5. However, I get exposed via two vectors: headlines in the New York Times app on my way to the Wordle and Connections, and on social media, specifically Threads and Bluesky. So, I’m not entirely oblivious.

As I slowly dip my toe into the news cycle, I have been reading and listening to a few long-form pieces. The first is the story of how Hitler destroyed the German democracy legally using the constitution in just 53 days.

Historian Timothy W. Ryback, writing for The Atlantic:

By January 1933, the fallibilities of the Weimar Republic—whose 181-article constitution framed the structures and processes for its 18 federated states—were as obvious as they were abundant. Having spent a decade in opposition politics, Hitler knew firsthand how easily an ambitious political agenda could be scuttled. He had been co-opting or crushing right-wing competitors and paralyzing legislative processes for years, and for the previous eight months, he had played obstructionist politics, helping to bring down three chancellors and twice forcing the president to dissolve the Reichstag and call for new elections. When he became chancellor himself, Hitler wanted to prevent others from doing unto him what he had done unto them.

That sets the scene. Rereading the article today, at the start of February, and at the end of Trump’s first two weeks in his second term, I find the similarities striking.

Ryback:

Hitler opened the meeting by boasting that millions of Germans had welcomed his chancellorship with “jubilation,” then outlined his plans for expunging key government officials and filling their positions with loyalists.

Trump won the 2024 election by just 1.5% in the popular vote. It is the “fifth smallest margin of victory in the thirty-two presidential races held since 1900,” according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Within days of taking office, Trump is already remaking the Justice Department to his liking and installing loyalists.

Hitler appointed Hermann Göring to his cabinet and made him Prussia’s acting state interior minister.

“I cannot rely on police to go after the red mob if they have to worry about facing disciplinary action when they are simply doing their job,” Göring explained. He accorded them his personal backing to shoot with impunity. “When they shoot, it is me shooting,” Göring said. “When someone is lying there dead, it is I who shot them.”

Then, later in March, Hitler wiped the slates of his National Socialist supporters clean:

…an Article 48 decree was issued amnestying National Socialists convicted of crimes, including murder, perpetrated “in the battle for national renewal.” Men convicted of treason were now national heroes.

Upon taking office, Trump signed an executive order granting pardons and commutations for the January 6th rioters and murderers.

The similarities are uncanny.

A large part of what made Hitler’s dismantling of the Weimar Republic possible was because of the German Reichstag—their legislature. In a high-turnout election, Hitler’s Nazi party received 44 percent of the vote.

Although the National Socialists fell short of Hitler’s promised 51 percent, managing only 44 percent of the electorate—despite massive suppression, the Social Democrats lost just a single Reichstag seat—the banning of the Communist Party positioned Hitler to form a coalition with the two-thirds Reichstag majority necessary to pass the empowering law.

They took this as a mandate to storm government offices across the country, causing their political opponents to flee.

While Trump and his cronies haven’t exactly dissolved our Congress yet, it has already happened on the Republican side in a radical MAGA makeover.

Many Republican politicians have been primaried to their right and have lost. And now, with the wealthiest person in the world, Elon Musk, on Trump’s side, he has vowed to fund a primary challenge against any Republican who dares defy Trump’s agenda.

I appreciate the thoughtfulness of Ezra Klein’s columns and podcasts. In a recent episode of his show, he dissects the first few days of the new administration. On the emerging oligarchy:

The thing that has most got me thinking about oligarchy is Elon Musk, who in putting his money and his money is astonishing in its size and his attentional power because he used that money to take control of X. Yes. The means of communication. The means of communication in putting that in service of Trump to a very large degree. And then being at the Trump rallies, he has become clearly the most influential other figure in the Trump administration. The deal has not just been that maybe Trump listens to him a bit on policy, it’s that he becomes a kind of co-ruler.

In his closing for that episode, Klein leaves us with a very pessimistic diagnosis:

in many ways, Donald Trump was saved in his first term by all the people who did not allow him to do things that he otherwise wanted to do, like shoot missiles into Mexico or unleash the National Guard to begin shooting on protesters en masse. Now he is unleashed, and not just to make policy or make foreign policy decisions, but to enrich himself. And understanding a popular vote victory of a point and a half, where you end up with the smallest House majority since the Great Depression, where you lose half of the Senate races in battleground states, and where not a single governor’s mansion changes hands as a kind of victory that is blessed by God for unsparing ambition and greatness, that’s the kind of mismatch between public mood and presidential energy that can, I guess it could create greatness. It seems also like it can create catastrophe.

I, for one, will be hopeful but realistic that America will end up in catastrophe and our fears of democracy dying will come to fruition.

P.S. I didn’t have a good spot to include Ezra Klein’s January 28, 2025 episode, but it’s a very good listen to understand where the larger MAGA movement is headed.

I was floored. Under immense pressure, under the highest of expectations, Kamala outperformed, delivering way beyond what anyone anticipated. Her biography is what makes her relatable. It illustrates her values. And her story is the American story.

When she talked about her immigrant parents, I thought about mine. My dad was a cook and a taxicab driver. My mother worked as a waitress. My sister and I grew up squarely in the middle class, in a rented flat in the San Francisco working class neighborhood of North Beach (yes, back in the 1970s and ’80s it was working class). Our school, though a private parochial one, was also attended by students from around the neighborhood, also mostly kids of immigrants. Education was a top value in our immigrant families and they made sacrifices to pay for our schooling.

Because my mother and father worked so hard, my parents taught my sister and me the importance of dedication and self-determination. Money was always a worry in our household. It was an unspoken presence permeating all decisions. We definitely grew up with a scarcity mindset.

But our parents, especially my dad, taught us the art of the possible. There wasn’t a problem he was unwilling to figure out. He was a jack of all trades who knew how to cook anything, repair anything, and do anything. Though he died when my sister and I were teenagers, his curiosity remained in us, and we knew we could pursue any career we wanted.

With the unwavering support of our mother, we were the first ones in our extended family to go to college, coming out the other end to pursue white collar, professional careers. And creative ones at that. We became entrepreneurs, starting small businesses that created jobs.

Kamala Harris’s story and my story are not dissimilar. They’re echoes, variations on the American story of immigrants coming to seek a better life in the greatest country in the world. So that they may give a better life for their children and their children’s children.

The American story changes the further you get away from your original immigrant ancestors — yes, unless your ancestors are indigenous, we’re all descendants of immigrants. But it is still about opportunity; it is still about the art of the possible; it is still about freedom. It is about everyone having a chance.

Kamala ended her speech with “And together, let us write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.” It resonated with me and made me emotional. Because she captured exactly what it means to me to be an American and to love this country where an unlikely journey like hers and mine could only happen here.

Update: A 18” x 24” screenprinted version of this poster is now available at my Etsy shop.

Michael C. Bender, writing for the Wall Street Journal in early September 2019:

[Trump rally regulars] describe, in different ways, a euphoric flow of emotions between themselves and the president, a sort of adrenaline-fueled, psychic cleansing that follows 90 minutes of chanting and cheering with 15,000 other like-minded Trump junkies.

“Once you start going, it’s kind of like an addiction, honestly,” said April Owens, a 49-year-old financial manager in Kingsport, Tenn., who has been to 11 rallies. “I love the energy. I wouldn’t stand in line for 26 hours to see any rock band. He’s the only person I would do this for, and I’ll be here as many times as I can.”

Sixteen months before the insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump was already in the midst of touring the southeastern US, holding rallies to support his 2020 re-election bid. During his initial run for the 2016 election, he held 323 rallies, creating a wake of fans who held onto every one of his words, whether by speech, interview, or tweet. Some diehards would even follow him across the country like deadheads following The Grateful Dead, attending dozens of rallies.

There’s no doubt that Trump is charismatic and has mesmerized a particular segment of the American populace. His approval ratings during his presidency never dropped below 34%. They admire his willingness to shake up the system and say what’s on his mind, unafraid of backlash for being politically incorrect. 

But Trump is a media-savvy Svengali who has been cultivating his public persona for decades. He went from being a frequent mention in the New York City tabloids to national notoriety when his reality show, The Apprentice, portrayed him as a take-no-prisoners, self-made billionaire business tycoon. 1  

His charm and ego carried him into the presidency in 2016, beating Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College but losing the popular vote by 2.9 million. Once he became the most powerful man on the planet, Trump’s narcissistic tendencies only grew worse. 

At the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, Heather Heyer was killed by a white supremacist who rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters. Trump reacted by saying there was “blame on both sides,” adding that he believed there were “very fine people on both sides.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan urged Trump to be the country’s moral compass. “You’re the president of the United States. You have a moral leadership obligation to get this right and not declare there is a moral equivalency here.” But Trump fed on the adoration of his fans, saying, “These people love me. These are my people. I can’t backstab the people who support me.”

Donald Trump would shore up that support up to and after the 2020 election. On November 7, 2020, three days after Election Day, Joe Biden was declared the winner by the Associated Press, Fox News, and other major networks. Trump didn’t concede and would launch a campaign calling the election rigged and that he had won, without evidence.

There was no evidence of widespread election fraud. More than 50 lawsuits alleging fraud or irregularities were dismissed by the courts—many of whom were Trump appointees. But Trump, desperate to hold onto his power, fueled by his unbridled narcissism, called on his supporters to “stop the steal” by marching to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the day the election was to be certified by the United States Congress. On December 19, 2020, “Be there, will be wild!” he tweeted.

On January 6, 2021, a mob of angry Trump supporters descended onto the US Capitol after being riled up by a speech by President Donald Trump. They stormed the building, overwhelming the Capitol Police, injuring many of them, and causing lawmakers to flee for their lives. 

The FBI estimates that as many as 2,000 people were involved in the attack. More than 850 people have been charged so far. Many told authorities that Donald Trump told them to go to Washington, DC that day, march on the Capitol, and disrupt the certification ceremony.

Donald Trump is now the subject of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, and is likely under criminal investigation by the Department of Justice.

In Bellville, Texas, about an hour northwest of Houston, a shrine to Donald Trump was erected in 2020, months before the November election and the attack on the Capitol in January. A burger joint named Trump Burger sits next to a Cricket Wireless store and across from a triangular dirt lot. Among the open-flame grill and buns branded “TRUMP,” are photos of the smiling former president and T-shirts that say “Jesus is my savior. Donald Trump is my president.” The restaurant’s owner, a second-generation Lebanese-American, loves Trump’s economic policies while he was president. Moreover, he admires Trump’s businessman reputation since he is a business owner himself. Blue “Trump 2024” flags adorn most walls of the restaurant. Even tiny “Trump 2024” flags on toothpicks hold burgers together. 

In her closing statement during the Select Committee’s July 21 hearing, Republican Representative Liz Cheney said, “And every American must consider this. Can a President who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of January 6th ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?”

The followers of Donald Trump see him as a god. They decorate their homes and businesses with his likeness. They wait hours in line and gather to hear his sermons. They heed his every word. But he is a false god. His supporters may not realize or are willfully ignorant of Trump’s narcissism. He has been a menace to American democracy not because of his ideology, for he has none. Instead, he has brought our democratic experiment to the brink because of his lust for approval.

Trump will likely make another run to become president again. To save our country, we cannot allow that to happen, for he is who our Founders warned us about.

Alexander Hamilton, in a note to George Washington, dated August 18, 1792:

When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.

I collaborated with Roberto Vescovi again, who modeled the Putin bust I used in the “Putin: False” poster. Mr. Vescovi sculpted the Trump bust. The final scene was composed in Cinema 4D and rendered using Redshift. The poster was assembled in Photoshop. 

References

Bender, Michael C. “‘It’s Kind of Like an Addiction’: On the Road With Trump’s Rally Diehards.” Wall Street Journal, September 6, 2019.

“1980s: How Donald Trump Created Donald Trump.” NBC News, July 6, 2016.

Lempinen, Edward. “Despite drift toward authoritarianism, Trump voters stay loyal. Why?.” Berkeley News, December 7, 2020.

McAdams, Dan P. “A Theory for Why Trump’s Base Won’t Budge.” The Atlantic, December 2, 2019. 

“2016 United States presidential election.” Wikipedia, August 6, 2022.

“Timeline of the 2020 United States presidential election (November 2020–January 2021).” Wikipedia, August 2, 2022.

Clark, Doug Bock, Alexandra Berzon, Kirsten Berg. “Building the “Big Lie”: Inside the Creation of Trump’s Stolen Election Myth.” ProPublica, April 26, 2022.

Sherman, Amy. “A timeline of what Trump said before Jan. 6 Capitol riot.” PolitiFact, January 22, 2021.

1 Never mind that he received a lot of help from his father, bankrupted six of his companies, and didn’t pay small business owners.

Update: A 18” x 24” screen-printed version of this poster is now available at my Etsy shop. It’s four colors: red, blue, black, and gold; and printed on thick 100 lb French Paper Co. cover stock. Proceeds will be donated to help Ukraine.

“…I want a man like Putin
One like Putin, full of strength
One like Putin, who won’t be a drunk
One like Putin, who wouldn’t hurt me
One like Putin, who won’t run away!”

— Lyrics from a popular Russian pop song, “One Like Putin,” from 2010.

Vladimir Putin has long been regarded as a divine hero in Russia. Propagandist imagery such as him riding shirtless on horseback, shooting a tiger with a tranquilizing dart to save a group of journalists, racing in an F1 car on a track, or defeating an opponent in martial arts, help cultivate an image of Putin as a strong, masculine savior—the only one who could lead Russia against the West. These and many more staged acts of supposed strength and bravery have turned him into a sex symbol in the country for women and a man’s man for men.

Evoking the biblical story of the Golden Calf, this poster calls out the worship of Vladimir Putin as a false idol or god. He is not the righteous leader many Russians believe him to be. Instead, he is a vengeful, scheming autocrat who assassinates those he perceives have wronged him or Mother Russia. And he wages wars with sovereign nations under the guise of anti-Naziism. 

This cultish infatuation with Putin’s strongman qualities has extended beyond Russia’s borders to inspire the acceptance and admiration of other autocratic leaders, including Viktor Orban of Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, and Benjamin Netanyahu, former prime minister of Israel. But most chilling was the rise of Donald Trump as president of the United States.

The veneration of men as gods is incredibly dangerous to liberal democracies. 

The Putin 3D model was created in collaboration with Roberto Vescovi. The final scene was composed in Cinema 4D and rendered using Redshift. The poster was assembled in Photoshop. 

References

Oliver, John. “Putin.” Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, February 19, 2017.

Sperling, Valerie. “Putin’s macho personality cult.” (PDF) Communist and Post-Communist Studies, January 11, 2016.

Rachman, Gideon. “The international cult of Vladimir Putin.” Financial Times, January 31, 2022.

Update August 6, 2022: It’s posted in Kyiv.

Last month I reached out to fellow graphic designer Kateryna Korolevtseva who is based in Ukraine. I was searching for a local printer who would print this anti-Putin poster for me in the country. She recommended 24print in Kyiv.

I worked with the wonderful people at 24print, and they printed 30 copies of my poster and sent me some photos…

Update October 22, 2022: Limited edition screen print

To raise money for the victims of Russia’s inhumane war on Ukraine, I have screen printed a limited edition of this Putin poster. The poster was printed in Los Angeles, California on 100 lb. French Paper Co. cover stock, using four colors. The bust of Putin is printed in metallic gold with black ink for shading. It is a limited edition of 50, with each one hand numbered and signed by me. All proceeds will be donated to GlobalGiving’s Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund. The fund is being used to support Ukrainians:

• Shelter, food, and clean water for refugees
• Health and psychosocial support
• Access to education and economic assistance
• And more

Please support this effort by purchasing a poster from my Etsy shop.

Update July 14, 2023: Gold Award Winner

I am incredibly honored to have my “Putin: False” poster recognized as a Gold winner in the Graphis Poster 2024 Awards. This was a passion project after the invasion of Ukraine, and I am glad to have helped even just a little.

The leaked draft of the majority opinion of Supreme Court justices seeking to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey created a political firestorm in Washington, DC, and across the country. But, leak aside, the ruling—should it become final—is shocking. First, it reverses a 49-year precedent about the federal right to abortion. And according to legal experts, the reasoning that author Justice Samuel Alito uses could undo rights such as same-sex marriage, the right to contraception, and interracial marriage.

In a report about the leak, NPR political correspondent Mara Liasson says the leak is “…going to spark this bigger debate that we’ve been having about whether the United States is turning into a minority rule country. A majority of the justices on the court were appointed by presidents who didn’t get a majority of the popular vote. And in some cases, the conservative justices were confirmed by senators representing a minority of voters.”

On the surface, I knew she was correct, but I wanted to dive into the numbers and see for myself. Once I did, I wanted to create a visual to show it.

This data visualization is meant to show the cumulative power Republicans have been able to wield as it relates to the seating of Supreme Court justices. I’ve correlated two different but related sets of data into one view: the popular vote counts for every president who nominated a justice to the current court, and the populations represented by the senators who confirmed these justices. 

In our representative government, each state gets two senators. Both represent the total residents in their state. And as we know, the populations of all 50 states vary a lot. The senators of Wyoming, the least populous state in the Union, represent 289,000* residents each. In comparison, the senators of California represent 19.6 million* residents each, over 6,780% more! In other words, each resident of Wyoming gets an outsized voice in the US Senate.

Download the full-resolution graphic.

Methodology

I started by gathering all my data from primary sources and placed them into a spreadsheet:

• Results of the popular vote for each president with a justice on the current court
• Confirmation dates of each justice
• Roll call votes of each confirmation
• Population of each state per confirmation year

To determine the representative power for each senator’s vote, I multiplied their state’s population by 0.5 for each “Yea.” If a senator did not vote or voted “Present,” 100% of the state’s votes would be determined by the other senator because the state’s residents still needed to be represented.

Then I charted the numbers onto two sets of column graphs for every current justice of the Supreme Court.

Opinion

In a democracy, citizens need to feel that their voices are being heard, and that their votes matter. But it is disheartening when the candidate you voted for doesn’t win, even when they received a majority of the votes. And when there is an issue such as abortion rights that 70% of the country supports, and yet a minority of people can block that issue, it further proves to many that our democracy is broken and no longer works for the people. 

(View the raw data here.)

* US Census Bureau population estimate as of July 2021

Update: May 8, 2022

It was pointed out to me that George W. Bush won the popular vote in 2004, which preceded his nominations of Roberts and Alito the the Supreme Court. Indeed he did. It was my oversight because Bush did lose the popular vote to Al Gore in 2000 by 543,895, and that fact just stuck. But in Bush’s re-election bid, he beat John Kerry by three million votes. By the way, Mara Liasson makes the same mistake in the quote above. I have since corrected and updated my graphic. Apologies.

I was feeling emotionally off today and I wasn’t quite sure until I realized that the events of January 6, 2021 deeply affected me as a patriotic American. At the time, I thought it was the culmination—the last act of a power-hungry, extremist wing of our country. Donald Trump and his deliberate peddlers of lies and misinformation had incubated and unleashed this insurrectionist mob against the Capitol, against the United States.

But I was wrong. It was not the last act. It did not end. In fact, it continued to fester. One year on, as much as 21 million Americans think that Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election, and that Trump should be restored via violent means. That’s more than the population of New York state (19.3M)!

I struggle to understand what caused this, much less what the solution might be. Yes, the obvious cause was the Big Lie that Trump actually won the 2020 election. With the Republican Party constantly attacking the legitimacy of a free and fair election for months, it worked its base up into a frothy frenzy. But what caused that? Power? Maybe, but why? Why are they so hell-bent on holding onto power as to destroy our democracy?

In an effort to make sense of it all, here’s what I’ve been reading…

Jimmy Carter: I Fear for Our Democracy:

For American democracy to endure, we must demand that our leaders and candidates uphold the ideals of freedom and adhere to high standards of conduct.

Statement by President Obama on the Anniversary of the Assault on the Capitol:

Although initially rejected by many Republicans, the claims that fanned the flames of violence on January 6th have since been embraced by a sizeable portion of voters and elected officials — many of whom know better.

NPR: 6 in 10 Americans say U.S. democracy is in crisis as the ‘Big Lie’ takes root:

A new NPR/Ipsos poll finds that 64% of Americans believe U.S. democracy is “in crisis and at risk of failing.” That sentiment is felt most acutely by Republicans: Two-thirds of GOP respondents agree with the verifiably false claim that “voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020 election” — a key pillar of the “Big Lie” that the election was stolen from former President Donald Trump.

Vox: January 6 should’ve moderated the GOP. It did the opposite.:

This New Right no longer believes we’re in a neutral liberal contest between competing ideas and concepts of the good. They believe the progressive left have taken over every aspect of American society and wield an authoritarian power over what, in particular, white Christians are allowed to say and think in this country; therefore this kind of libertarian consensus — which has presided in American conservatism, especially since Reagan — which prescribes a kind of private traditionalism and a public-facing liberalism, is totally insufficient for this moment.

The Atlantic: Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun:

Donald trump came closer than anyone thought he could to toppling a free election a year ago. He is preparing in plain view to do it again, and his position is growing stronger. Republican acolytes have identified the weak points in our electoral apparatus and are methodically exploiting them. They have set loose and now are driven by the animus of tens of millions of aggrieved Trump supporters who are prone to conspiracy thinking, embrace violence, and reject democratic defeat. Those supporters, Robert Pape’s “committed insurrectionists,” are armed and single-minded and will know what to do the next time Trump calls upon them to act.

Sometimes it takes a small push to get the creative obsessions going. Like the majority of the country, I’ve been appalled at Donald Trump’s presidency. From his administration’s cruel policies to just how awful of a man Trump has shown himself, I have been gritting my teeth for four years, waiting for him to lose his re-election bid. I was profoundly concerned about democracy in the United States and how it was being actively undermined by Trump and his band of far-right Republicans.

When Trump ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016, I made a poster and website called “Inside Trump’s Brain.” I knew back then how terrible of a president he would be, but had hoped he’d grow into the office. Boy, was I wrong.

So when Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination, I needed to do all I could to get him elected and make Trump a one-term president.

I donated. I talked to the few I knew who supported Trump. I joined Biden’s texting team. But then my friend Christopher Simmons put out a call to his network for artwork to show support for the Biden & Harris ticket. What began as a one-off for me turned into a series driven by not only the cause, but by a need to just make. I became obsessed with 3D typography and loops. The format on Instagram is about creating bite-sized animations that can catch people’s attention and make them pause their scroll for a few seconds.

Here are the pieces in the order in which they were posted. But do note that the “United We Stand” image came first. It was a collaboration with my very talented sister, Gloria. She provided the paintbrush textures and some color consulting.

This was originally published as an item in Issue 005 of the designspun email newsletter.

Great art can be born out of great unrest. Anti-government, anti-evil propaganda harnesses the frustration and despair people feel in times of crisis. Mark Fox and Angie Wang (aka Design Is Play) are following up their award-winning “Trump 24K Gold-Plated” poster with a new series of anti-Trump agitprop. The pair have launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund three posters, “Trump: Lord of the Lies” and a diptych called “White Lies Matter.”

From their Kickstarter page:

We designed Trump: Lord of the Lies to create a succinct mnemonic for Donald Trump’s corruption. Likewise, the White Lies Matter diptych crystallizes Donald Trump’s history of rhetorical flirtations with white supremacists. And after he is voted out of office, this work will add to the body of evidence that many Americans can still tell the difference between what is true, and what is false.

(Side note: I used Design Is Play’s No Trump symbol in my little anti-Trump agitprop, Inside Trump’s Brain, a single-page website to protest then-candidate Trump.)

Protest art is created all around the world. Hong Kong-based designers last year made many compelling posters. Most take the stance of solidarity in the face of an overbearing and overreaching authority. Hence images that reference the Galactic Empire from Star Wars or homages to Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.

Raw defiance gives way to a more hopeful aesthetic from Shepard Fairey’s We the People series from three years ago. Slogans such as “Defend Dignity” and “We the Resilient have been here before” adorn striking portraits of people of color. I remember seeing so many of these during the Women’s March in Los Angeles.

In The New Yorker, Nell Painter highlights a couple of anti-racist artists from the 1960s, photographer Howard L. Bingham who took many pictures of the Black Panther Party, and Emory Douglas:

More intriguing to me now is the agitprop artwork of Emory Douglas, the B.P.P. Minister of Culture, which was published in the The Black Panther newspaper and plastered around the Bay Area as posters. Week after week, Douglas’s searing wit visualized the urgency for action, such as this image of children carrying photographs, one that shows police victimizing a child…

This was originally published as an item in Issue 003 of the designspun email newsletter.

It is no secret that Twitter has enabled and emboldened Donald Trump by not restricting any of his tweets, even if they violated their terms of service. But earlier this week, they put misinformation warnings on two of his tweets about mail-in ballots. This angered the President but also got the ball rolling. Snapchat shortly followed by saying it will no longer promote Trump’s account. Against the backdrop of growing protests against the murder of George Floyd by police, some tech companies finally started to grow a conscience. But will Silicon Valley change? Mary-Hunter McDonnell, corporate activism researcher from the Wharton School of Business says, “Giving money to organizations that are out on the front lines is more helpful, but it’s also to some extent passing the buck. People are tired of that.”

As designers, we have some power over the projects we work on, and the products we create. Mike Monterio wrote in February, “At some point, you will have to explain to your children that you work, or once worked, at Facebook.”

While at Facebook, Lisa Sy designed ways to flag hate speech on the platform—using Trump’s account in the mockups. In 2016. Four years later, Facebook has not implemented such a system and continues to leave up dangerous posts from Trump, including the highly-charged “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” post.

Tobias van Schneider wrote in 2016,

The role as a designer, or even as an engineer has become more influential and powerful than ever. The work we do makes an impact and naturally brings up the discussion around ethics, responsibility and accountability.

Many of us will work on pieces that are seen by hundreds, maybe thousands. A few of us, having larger clients, or working at a tech company, might work on something used by millions, if not billions of people. We hold great responsibility.

We produce work for audiences, users. Humans who are on the other end of that screen, poster, or ad. Mike Monterio again:

You don’t work for the people who sign your checks. You work for the people who use the products of your labor. If I were to put my hope in one thing, it’s that you understand the importance of this. Your job is to look out for the people your work is affecting. That is a responsibility we cannot defer.

We’ve come to this. The K-12 Florida Christian School in Miami is selling bulletproof panels for children to insert into their backpacks. Teachers will show students how to install these ballistic shields. You know, because mass shootings and ’Merica.

We have come to this, when schools need to outfit their students with bulletproof gear just to keep their students safe. This is the endgame for the National Rifle Association of America (aka NRA). It is guns everywhere. Schools, churches, hospitals, courthouses, bars. Everywhere.

In a recent interview on Fresh Air, journalist Mike Spies said:

So what you’ve seen over the last decade is a proliferation of legislation that has been enacted that has allowed people to carry firearms in places that they’ve never been able to carry before. That includes bars, churches, college campuses, day care centers, government buildings. That’s ultimately at the core of their agenda, is to normalize gun carrying in as many places as possible until it just becomes as natural of a thing to see in society as any other accessory that people carry around.

While the NRA wants to normalize guns everywhere via concealed carry laws—and it’s working very well legistlatively at the state level—gun ownership is steadily falling.

Source: Washington Post, 2016

Source: Pew Research Center, 2017

For the 69% of us who don’t wish to arm themselves we must live in fear of gunfights breaking out wherever we are. Remember that 20 children were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. At least 12 of the people wounded or killed last Sunday in Sunderland, TX were children.

Bulletproof backpacks are a good idea. They solve a problem that’s growing increasingly frequent. A problem that we’ve let a special interest organization create because of its hardline stance against any gun control legislation. A special interest group with only 5 million members (6% of all gun owners, or 1.5% of the U.S. population) who have control of the Republican Party.

From Spies again:

The NRA has become essentially an organ of the Republican Party. It doesn’t do anything for Democrats. It hasn’t for a long time. And the way it spends on election bears that out. It spends essentially all of its money, and quite a lot of money, trying to keep Republicans in power, putting new ones in power.

And how powerful is the NRA? Since 1998 it has spent $203.2 million on political activities. That includes direct contributions to candidates, contributions to political parties and PACs, lobbying, and outside spending. What’s outside spending? “Efforts expressly advocating the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate.” Oh by the way, the NRA spent $30 million on Donald Trump last year.

In addition to money, the NRA can decide who wins and who loses. Here’s Spies talking about how a vindictive NRA lobbyist in Florida dealt with a lawmaker who let one of their sponsored bills die in committee:

After that happened, he was also — or as it happened, he was also in his final term as a lawmaker, and he was hoping to be appointed to, like, a circuit court in Jacksonville and was among the, you know, final three potential candidates for that position. And it seemed like he was actually the favored candidate for Governor Scott, and Marion Hammer, remembering what he did, put together a huge campaign in which many thousands of NRA members sent emails to Governor Scott telling him under no circumstances to appoint Charles McBurney to the circuit court judgeship. And very shortly after that happened, McBurney was not appointed to the circuit court judgeship. Someone else was. And it was directly — I mean, you could say directly because of what he did.

So there you have it. We’ve allowed an organization like the NRA make the United States of America a country where we need to send our children to school with bulletproof backpacks. Well fucking done.

P.S. For children in preschool, you can buy them bulletproof nap mats.

Sex

With coffee in hand, I flipped through Facebook yesterday morning. “Me too” read one post from a female friend I used to work with. Incredibly intelligent, hands-down one of the smartest women — no, people — I’d ever worked with just posted two words. I thought it was a mispost that was supposed to be a reply, a butt-post if you will. Then I saw another, and this time with an explanation. And throughout the day, my feed depressingly filled up with “Me too” posts, illustrating how common sexual harassment and assault of women are.

Of course this movement was spurred on by the bombshell investigative journalism by the New York Times and the New Yorker. Last week they broke open a story that’s eluded the media for so long: Harvey Weinstein and his serial sexual harassment and assault of women in Hollywood.

Why would a man who was successful, married, and the father of five children decide to regularly try to convince young starlets to sleep with him, give him a massage, or just flash their breasts? As I read and listened to women recounting what had happened to them, and how Weinstein actually acted, I realized just how small and backwards of a man he is. He negotiated with them. He sounded desperate. And he sounded guilty and scared immediately after committing any of those acts. Weinstein knew he wasn’t supposed to use his position of power and act like a predator. But he did anyway.

And he is not alone. Fox News Channel’s cofounder Roger Ailes, that channel’s biggest star Bill O’Reilly, Amazon Studios’ Roy Price, and disc jockey David Mueller, were all recently exposed or convicted. And it’s not limited to just the entertainment industry either; see SoFi’s CEO Mike Cagney, Binary Capital’s Justin Caldbeck, Uber’s Travis Kalanick, and many others. And of course, let’s not forget our president Donald Trump!

Men have sexually harassed or assaulted women close to me. Stories I’ve been told and my Facebook feed yesterday affirm that. There is a significant portion of men out there who, because they succumbed to their urges, have made women feel ashamed, dirty, and slimy. It’s pervasive, even in our first world country. Even in our liberal state. And even in a progressive city like San Francisco. Penis trumps brain.

Violence

I sat in my car in my driveway, listening to the remaining nine minutes of the podcast. The reporter, Jeffrey Gettleman, was recalling the horrific tale of a 20 year-old Rohingya woman named Rajuma who survived an attack on her village by the Myanmar military. She was one of the few survivors. The soldiers had shot, decapitated, and slit the throats of all the men in her village. They took her 18 month-old baby boy she was clutching to and unemotionally threw him into a fire. Then the men pushed Rajuma into a hut and proceeded to gang-rape her. Rajuma woke up to smoke and fire. Her mother dead. Her sisters and brother, all dead. Almost everyone in her village murdered. But she escaped. And eventually joined thousands of other refugees in Bangladesh.

I was heartbroken hearing that story. How could a human being do that to another human being? What could make them so savage that they could do those things to children? To babies? This vicious act was not the isolated act of a psychopathic serial killer. This was systemic, coordinated ethnic cleansing, carried out by groups of soldiers. Since August, the above scene has played out 288 times, with many thousands of Rohingya people killed.

Evolution

Schoolchildren are taught that male animals put on a show when they’re looking for a mate. Peacocks fan out their feathers. Pigeons dance around in a circle. But male mammals go further. Primates like chimpanzees will coerce females to mate with them by charging at them, ripping out their hair, or beating them.

Chimpanzees have also been observed killing other chimps who do not belong in their territory, or in an effort to expand. In fact, Jane Goodall watched one tribe of chimps, called the Kasakela, kill all six of the other tribe’s — the Kahama — adult males over four years.

As modern humans, we are many species away from our genetic ancestors. Proto-humans separated from chimpanzees seven to 10 million years ago. We developed a consciousness and a conscience. And yet our animalistic tendencies still persist. I’m not talking about core biological functions like hunger, or our fight or flight response, but acts that require thought and effort like arranging a “meeting” at the Peninsula Hotel or torching over 200 villages and killing all their inhabitants.

Values

“Hey! Stick to your side!” my daughter yelled from the back of the car. Her little brother is sticking his arm or leg past the mid-point of the row of seats. As he needles her, he’s smiling devilishly.

I’ve lost count the number of times that vignette has played out in my car over the years. Being possessive and territorial is instinctual. Children say “Mine!” all the time. But we teach them to share. We teach them that it’s good and nice to share with their friends. We also teach our children to be empathetic and help those who are less fortunate than us.

These are core human values: sharing and caring.

At least I’d like to think so.

Kayla Chadwick wrote a great piece last week, “I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People” that connected a few dots for me.

Chimpanzees may resort to sexual coercion and murdering rival tribes. But us, modern homo sapiens, should not do that. Yet we do sometimes. Our human society should be about cooperation and shared prosperity. But we don’t always adhere to that either. Instead, just like chimps, it’s each sub-group for itself.

Politics

My core human values are indeed sharing and caring. I am squarely middle-class and believe in sharing my tax dollars to help those who are less fortunate. I care for the plight of the homeless, the immigrants and refugees, Black lives, and the disenfranchised. This is the liberal platform. That all boats rise together.

But on the conservative side, the values are fundamentally different. It’s about the opportunity to prosper or fail by one’s own hand. In other words, it’s every man for himself. The fight over the Affordable Care Act illustrates this. Insurance is, by definition, pooling financial resources to share in the cost. Which, again by definition, means that healthier people’s premiums pay for sicker people’s costs. The Right’s constant drumbeat of repealing and replacing Obamacare is a demand for healthy people to pay less, and sick people to pay more. In other words, not sharing and not caring.

Healthcare costs for the sick can be extraordinary. A year’s course of treatment for a typical breast cancer patient is over $140,000. So if she were in a high-risk only insurance pool, her premiums would be incredibly high — upwards of $18,000 — compared to a healthier person her same age. Would a person making minimum wage or on disability ever be able to afford such insurance?

Republicans conveniently forget that Americans already share in a lot of costs that may not apply to us individually: mass transit on the other side of the country, the Library of Congress, the military, disaster relief from hurricanes. Adding healthcare — something that affects each of us — seems obvious to me.

We’re just not there yet

Perhaps we’ve been fooled by liberal idealism. We’ve been overly optimistic in our assessment of our own evolution as a species. Despite millions of years of continued brain growth and refining our societies, humans are still pulled by our primal instincts of sexual aggression, territorialism, and tribalism.

I want to believe that we can do better. I want to believe that someday, there will be peace and prosperity on Earth for 100% of us. That someday, men will no longer be pigs, and we won’t squabble and kill over a plot of land. The only way we can achieve that is by pulling the other way and moving forward. By believing and acting better, together.

P.S. This essay was not written from a point of moral superiority. The opposite is in fact true. I acknowledge that we are all imperfect, including myself. But that we can—and should—improve in our own lifetimes, and in the generations to come.

Sen. John McCain standing up for regular order by voting down an Obamacare repeal.

What we are witnessing, friends, is the beginning of the end of American democracy. With senators and representatives who used to believe in “regular order” — as Senator John McCain would say — retiring, we are electing ideologues.

I’m a liberal and believe in liberal ideals (gun control, universal healthcare, social safety net, helping the disenfranchised, etc.). However, if we continue to send to Congress, ideologues who will not compromise with the other side, we all lose. Whether we like it or not, America is made up of hundreds of millions of individuals with different experiences and values than you or me. Therefore we all won’t always agree. Which is why compromise is so incredibly important.

To believe that we must pass universal healthcare in this Congress is to believe in a fallacy. To hold out for it, is dangerous. To believe and hold out the ACA will be repealed and replaced is just as dangerous. Because then, as we are now seeing, we will have done nothing and millions of people will suffer.

At home, at the office, at school, don’t we all learn to compromise? Don’t we teach our children that they’re supposed to compromise? Why can’t we ask our representatives in Congress to do the same?

Our own echo chambers are making it harder and harder for all of us to believe in compromise and moderation. We want outrage and intractability to be the new normal. Why? Our media diets are shite. Facebook and Twitter are like ice cream and chocolate, and MSNBC and FOX News are like french fries and onion rings. We all get caught up in the mob mentality of these outlets, and we turn around and ask our representatives in government to do the same.

We forget to listen, to compromise.

And therefore, we lose American democracy.

I was working from home on Friday and happened to have the TV turned on to CNN. Therefore I watched the defeat of the House Republican’s American Health Care Act (AHCA) in real time. But I wouldn’t have if I were tuned to Fox News Channel instead. A conservative friend of mine was watching Fox News Channel that day, and was moved by its assertion that the “mainstream media” was not covering the Maryland rape case sufficiently. Our two different experiences actually illustrated this great article from the New York Times called “One Nation, Under Fox: 18 Hours With a Network That Shapes America.” It’s an excellent reminder about media bias — right or left.

After reading the article this weekend, I came to this conclusion: There are roughly 325 million people in the United States. More than ever in my life I’ve come to understand that there are then 325 million different experiences. Each of our life experiences is different. There is no way that any media outlet can cover all those stories. But those same media outlets can impose their own worldviews onto their audiences. Those individuals in the audience will either have their own worldview reinforced, or go elsewhere for that reinforcement.

My conservative friend posted a video from Fox News on Facebook. It’s a clip of Bill O’Reilly doing his own media critique about the amount of coverage this story got, comparing Fox News’ amount to that of the mainstream media networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC. According to the NY Times article, this same media critique was leveled by at least three other Fox News shows, “Fox and Friends,” “The Five,” and “America’s Newsroom.”

First of all, Fox News Channel is mainstream media, whether they’ll admit that or not. They are the most-watched news network in America. Mumford & Sons, an “alternative” music darling made $40 million last year according to Forbes. That’s almost as much as Katy Perry ($41 million). I’d argue that they’re mainstream now, no longer alternative. Likewise, in January 2017, Fox News Channel had 14 of the top 15 programs in cable news in total viewers. Therefore I’d say that the outlet is indeed “mainstream news.”

So Fox News hit this point all day long: Why isn’t mainstream news covering this horrific rape of a 14 year-old girl by two boys, one of whom is undocumented? Rapes do actually get covered. Steubenville High School (50 media links in the footnotes), Stanford (134 media links in the footnotes), Richmond High School (39 media links in the footnotes). Over 90,000 rapes were reported to the police in 2015. Unfortunately not all of them were covered in the news. If they were, we’d be learning about 246 new rape stories everyday on TV. But of course Fox wanted to give more credence to this one case by an undocumented immigrant because it fits into the conservative narrative they’re spinning — America is in danger, and the danger is being perpetrated by outsiders who are coming into this country legally or illegally. And never mind that in past coverage of high profile rape cases, Fox News actually tends to downplay the role of the assailants and will even go as far as blaming the victims. Example, Fox’s Stacey Dash said that “alcohol doesn’t get you drunk, you get yourself drunk.” Fifteen more specific examples can be found here.

Why did Fox News focus on the Maryland rape story and the London terrorist attack while almost all other outlets focused mainly on the impending vote and then pulling of the AHCA? The amount of coverage a particular story gets at any particular outlet is determined by its editors and publishers. I think we all know that media is inherently biased by those views because someone has to make the decision to dispatch reporters to cover story A or story B and then give airtime or print space to said story. Roger Ailes, who is the founder and former CEO of Fox News until July 2016 when he stepped down over allegations of sexual harassment, was formerly a Republican Party media consultant. John Moody, Executive Editor and Executive VP of Fox News, issues daily memos to the news department with instructions on exactly how to cover news stories, as well as the themes of the day. A former Fox News producer has said, “The roots of Fox News Channel’s day-to-day on-air bias are actual and direct. They come in the form of an executive memo distributed electronically each morning, addressing what stories will be covered and, often, suggesting how they should be covered.” So the agenda for the day? Cover the healthcare bill vote if it’s looking good. But run with rape and terror if it isn’t. Almost all other media outlets decided that the AHCA vote was the most important to America that day.

The amount of coverage a story gets communicates its importance. It was important to Fox News to continue their portrayal that undocumented immigrants are bad — reinforcing the right-wing worldview, but more importantly Trump’s worldview — and it was important for many other outlets to continue their criticism of Trump’s presidency (some of it more harshly than others). You could argue that it’s the job of the media to support our president and government, or you can argue that it’s their job to keep government officials honest, and the American people informed. I would agree with the latter. And so would our Founding Fathers:

The last right we shall mention regards the freedom of the press. The importance of this consists, besides the advancement of truth, science, morality, and arts in general, in its diffusion of liberal sentiments on the administration of Government, its ready communication of thoughts between subjects, and its consequential promotion of union among them, whereby oppressive officers are shamed or intimidated into more honourable and just modes of conducting affairs.