We’re too well informed about the wrong things

and too ignorant of what really matters. Let's change that

Which of the following pieces of information have escaped your attention?

1. Trump behaves as if nothing can restrain him and lies constantly

2. ICE consistently violates peoples’ constitutional rights

3. Republicans in Congress have exercised little to no oversight of the president

4. Democratic leadership still follows the rules of an earlier era when both parties followed institutional norms

5. The DOJ is withholding millions of documents from the Epstein files

If you’re like most people who read Substack, you know most, or all of it. If, like most of us, you’re an inveterate doomscroller, you can cite lots of supporting details for each of the points I listed.

Like me, I’m sure you feel a bit of pride in staying well-informed. Also like me, you probably wonder at times what all this information is good for, aside from raising your blood pressure. Turns out, that’s a really good question.

When fascists are trying to cement control, our news and opinion habit can turn into a liability. In functional democracies, a well-informed electorate safeguards representative government by keeping citizens current on what their government is up to, and what we the people want to see changed. Once we know, we can work to create the change by:

• Contacting representatives

• Contributing to a political campaigns or PAC

• Calling, canvassing and postcarding voters at election time

…and of course, voting

It’s still important to keep doing those things, but we should stop imagining they’re enough to keep fascists from consolidating power. Before fascists can destroy a free press, they weaponize it. They do this by ‘flooding the zone’ with so many lies and flagrant abuses of power that staying informed means being assaulted with torrents horrible news without knowing what to do about any of it.

Our brains were not made for this, and on some level the fascists know it. They’re good at hacking the reptilian parts of our brains to mobilize haters against the ones the regime calls ‘enemies’ while overloading decent peoples’ brains with more second-hand trauma than they know what to do with. This deluge freaks us out so reliably that people build entire social media presences joking about it.

Surprisingly, our brains don’t hate the awfulness of the news cycle so much as its uncertainty. News stories about terrible things horrify us, but what keeps us in frozen anxiety are the all the questions they raise, but can’t answer:

• What happens next?

• How will we get out of this?

• When will justice come?

Our brains rebel at that kind of uncertainty. It makes us anxious. So we seek out content to close those loops for us.

It’s called “doomscrolling” for a reason.

Because the present is hideous, and the future isn’t yet written, answers will always elude us. Our resolution-seeking brains don’t want to accept this. The stakes are too high. Our Democracy, and even our survival, are on the line, so we simply have to know. Our brains tell us that if we just imbibe a few more data points, pundit prognostications or hot takes, we’ll know for sure precisely what’s going on and what’s going to happen as a result.

We can’t predict the future, but many content creators make good money pretending they can.

You know the type. They’re the ones telling you that fascism is a done deal, and all is lost. “Why There Won’t Be any Midterms!!” They ridicule our naivete for thinking we can overcome this. Or else they’re telling us “Trump is Failing!!” and the regime is bound to collapse under the weight its own corruption any day now. They make confident predictions about Trump’s failing health and mental state and imply that the rest of us just need to keep enough popcorn on hand while watching his administration implode. When the news cycle shifts, these creators shift too, and drag their audiences with them. After the last big No Kings protest and Democratic special election victories, I saw many pivot from forecasting doom to promising that the regime would crumble sooner than later. Then when more bad news arrived, they swung back to hopelessness. We don’t need that.

Here’s an Alternative

Dooming and “one weird trick that will end fascism” content might seem different on their face, but they have three big things in common

1. They tell you that the future has already happened

2. They tell you the ultimate outcome is the result of the result of big, inevitable things over which you have no control

3. They ask you to feel things, but never to do anything

Riding the doom/complacency cycle is no way to run a resistance, but it’s the ride many of us have gotten on because we don’t know any other. I realized this months ago when I attended an Indivisible organizing call. One of the speakers there, a BIPOC woman, said one of the most life-changing things I’ve ever heard.

Nobody gets a prize for telling us the precise temperature of the water we’re drowning in. Nobody gets a prize for being the first to say, “I told you so!” as the tanks roll over us.

Read that again, and consider: we don’t need to know everything. Hell, for most of the work that keeps a resistance movement going, we don’t need to know much of anything. We just need to be willing to help and show up where we’re needed. We don’t need to go to Washington; or even leave our zip code.

I’m a big idea guy who likes to analyze situations from across multiple disciplines and perspectives. I’m incredibly well read. You know what my most important resistance work has been? Stocking grocery bags for food banks. You know the best use I’ve made of my creativity and communication skills? Packing Somali and Spanish-language fliers that other people made into plastic sandwich bags along with 3D-printed whistles that other people made.

This has been some of the most fulfilling work of my life. Here’s how it goes: a friend texts me on short notice to help out with mutual aid work and I say yes. People need stuff; we get it and bring it to them. Simple, right? But it helps people. And helping people right where we are is how we get through this. We look after neighbors we’ve never met because it’s the right thing to do, but also because it helps us build powerful local networks that can mobilize for other resistance work.

If you don’t know how this is done, read Dr. G (Your Weirdo Friend) on Substack. She has a great primer

The Daisy Chain: A Neighbor's Guide to Mass Cooperation

Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people are already doing this. You can too.

What to read while you’re getting connected

Nonviolent civic resistance has a successful history, and a body of literature that’s far more instructive than 99.99% of all the takes you’ll read online. Here are some:

Meditations in an Emergency by Rebecca Solnit
Wonderful, instructive and inspiring blog from one of the standout voices in contemporary resistance.

The Checklist to end Tyranny by Peter Ackerman
This is an awesome, comprehensive guide to the major ideas, challenges and techniques of successful, nonviolent civil resistance. Every page is a treasure of great information.

Overcoming Despair and Apathy to Win Democracy by George Lakey
Inspiring and instructive story of how everyday Serbians used nonviolent people power to topple the regime of “Butcher of the Balkans,” Slobodan Milosovec