By Terry Manning
In just a couple of days, the world will witness Donald J. Trump’s return to the Oval Office as the duly re-elected president of the United States of America.
Since the election results were finalized, I and many other Americans have been working through the stages of grief over this prospect.
First, denial: I can’t believe we are about to have another four years of this frigging guy.
Bargaining: Surely something will happen to save us from another four years of this frigging guy.
Anger: I can’t believe! We are going to have! Another four years! Of this frigging guy!
Depression: Lord, please help us through four more years of this frigging guy. Amen.
And finally, acceptance, followed by a question: Why do we count presidents by terms instead of counting the number of people who served? One person being both 45th and 47th seems … odd. But hey, we’re in a post-logic society now, right? Anything goes!
I have watched and read as world-class editorial cartoonists have been shut down by the owners of the newspapers carrying their creations because they depicted a little too accurately just how far these tech billionaires are genuflecting to try to protect themselves against scrutiny from the incoming administration.
The whole concept of “eff you” money goes out the window when you look at these people. They have enough money to last 100 lifetimes and yet the first thing they do when they see Trump coming is breaking out the kneepads. I don’t get it.
Maybe they learned the right (or wrong) lessons from Elon Musk and X. I’ve written here that I thought it was a colossal mistake on his part to buy the former Twitter, that the best he could hope to do was not lose as much money as most people on social media platforms based on public input.
How wrong I was. He has made the once-popular platform into a cesspool of lies and misinformation that functions as a little more than a loss leader to host his efforts to boost and influence the incoming Trump White House. No doubt the money he has spent so far, no matter how much he ticks off Steve Bannon and the rest of the MAGA bigots, will return profits for his other companies.
With Jeff Bezos neutering the Washington Post, and Musk leveraging his millions into a shadow presidency, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg probably felt like he had no choice but to yield to the turning tides.
In his announcement, Zuckerberg said, “We will end the current third-party fact-checking program in the United States and instead begin moving to a Community Notes program. … We want to undo the mission creep that has made our rules too restrictive and too prone to over-enforcement.”
I can agree with him on part of this. It takes little to nothing to earn a timeout on Facebook if you use the wrong words or phrases, including references to one’s own faith. I used to manage a message board where I could enter words that would flag posts to be sent to me for review, but that ancient technology seems to be missing at Facebook, where the “wrong” words are evaluated entirely out of context.
Anyone with a satirical bent or snarky tone would do well to err on the side of caution.
But does he really think community-based aunts and uncles, mamaws, and pop-pops who regularly get riled up and forward misinformation can recognize that stuff better than professional fact-checkers? I think not.
This is our new reality. We have a habitual liar/felon in the White House, a Congressional majority of habitual liars who support him at every opportunity, and a nation of supporters who pretend anybody who actually listens to him and takes him seriously suffers from some derangement syndrome.
I refuse, though, to succumb to the MSNBC model of continuing to tilt at windmills people have moved on from. Trump is in power. Some people will find out the hard way what they purchased with this pig in a poke.
As for me, I know rain falls on the just and the unjust. I have faith in the long-term arc of the moral universe. In the short them? Viva la résistance!
Terry E. Manning is a Clemson graduate and worked for 20 years as a journalist. He can be reached at teemanning@gmail.com.
