It wasn't unexpected, just misreported.

Hello, I'm Chloe Humbert, and I'm recording this on Wednesday, November 6th at 4.40 p.m. I just watched Kamala Harris's concession speech, and I was expecting this. I know I wasn't the only one, but I was expecting this. I'm not saying it makes it any easier. I see a big media failure. I think there's a lot of... blame to go around, of course, every time. But I want to suggest to people that you don't, and this is something I've been trying to get across, is that if I wanted to make money doing this, like, I know what to do. Like, there are buzzwords I can use. I could be a gift to rivals, as they say. And, you know, say the right things to get the, you know, the boosting. I mean, I can't, a lot of people don't want to believe this, but there's plenty of evidence that this happens. And there it is. I sent postcards to voters for months. I phone banked, even though I heard things and I saw things that, you know, I felt were really losing messages. And I don't expect to agree with everything that a candidate is, you know, standing for. I mean, I do think this is, you know, a case of being strategic. I am of the mind that, like Sam Seder on the Majority Report says, you're not voting for a messiah. You're voting for your preferred adversary. And that's how I really do see things. But there's... I... I'm worried that things will be memory holed and misconstrued and everybody's in their own silo and they only see what they see and you don't always see what other people are seeing. And let me tell you, in Pennsylvania, we have had nonstop lies on ads. It's nonstop ads of text messages, billboards, flags, people having things like everywhere. You know, text messages, YouTube ads, radio ads, billboards. Did I mention billboards? It's just been relentless. And just locally, I could tell you that in 2016, I never saw one single Hillary Clinton sign anywhere in my area. I did see an effigy, a 20-foot tall wooden effigy of Hillary Clinton outside of Allentown that said Hillary for prison. But no, I never saw a single sign. And in 2020, there were tons of Biden signs here in Scranton. And that's just the way it is. And even after people pulled out their signs from 2020 and put them up this summer. Okay, so that's why I kind of was, I was against, you know, Biden stepping down no matter what. Not because I think he, you know, was, none of this is ideal, right? But... Anybody who says that there wasn't any sexism involved in this, don't listen to that. That's off the wall. So the point being is that I didn't really see a whole lot of Harris signs. And when I requested one, I didn't get one. Nobody from any of the campaigns brought me anything. We had some campaign signs from a couple years ago for... like my state rep. So anyway, who was running unopposed. You just can't make this stuff up. Oh, gosh. So yeah, so some of the ads that were here in Pennsylvania were like, there's this one guy who has kept saying, my retirement plan is to move to Mexico, denounce my citizenship, and then sneak back over the border and Matt Cartwright will give me everything I want for free. And of course, there are lots of people, including Democrats, who believe this nonsense. hey really do believe. And I mean, in a former job I had, I know I talked to people who really thought that the government was just giving out free stuff to anybody who's Black or an immigrant or an ex-con. That's what they believe, because that's what they're told in these right-wing media spaces. They keep repeating that. And the mere exposure effect, even… You know, even if they have counter evidence, they still believe it because of the mere exposure effect. I mean, that works on all of us. None of us are immune to that. A context, Matt Cartwright, my representative in Congress, he did run a primary against an incumbent Democrat several years ago, a decade ago, and maybe just over a decade ago. I want to say it was 2013. And he ran it from the left. And he won. And he has endorsed Medicare for all every Congress or whatever. And he has done that. And he has been progressive on a lot of things. However, in recent times, he's just been running to the right. He's always been a little bit on the… he's always been a little bit funny on some things like one time using talking points of a medical device industry and during the Obamacare, you know, debacle of the, you know, whatever. And he did stop doing that publicly. And then the other thing was, uh, At one town hall, he had recounted, like, what I would consider to be like an urban legend that is not racist on its face, but definitely had that history to it, if you are familiar with urban legends. So not a perfect person. Not a terrible representative for many years. You know, kind of helpful for some years. But in the last couple of years... First of all, he's run to the right. Every month there was a newsletter saying, you know, how much he was funding the police. Now, I'm sure that there are a lot of constituents who want the police funded. That's not... I'm not... Nobody was asking him to defund the police. But it just seemed a little bit strange that that's what he was highlighting. Now, to be fair, he was talking about having a train, you know, that was long like, there hasn't been a train to New York from Scranton since, like, before I was born, probably. I'm a Gen Xer. So... That has been in the works, and he was integral for that. So not saying he didn't do anything, but he really did run to the right on a lot of stuff. And he was very much, you know, I'm a bipartisan. Now, of course, a lot of the bipartisan stuff he did was with, I want to say, I forget the guy's name, but he's a former CIA officer, I believe. But he wasn't an insurrectionist. He wasn't an insurrectionist. He wasn't an election denier or anything. So I guess you'd say a moderate Republican. And they were decent. And there were some decent bipartisan, you know, they could do things like that. I'm not criticizing that. But - I'm not sure that that's the way you really want to run. I don't know. Whatever his polling or his focus groups were telling him, I guess that's what he thought was the right thing to do. But he, you know, as of this time, it looks like he's going to basically be out and we're stuck with this other guy who nobody knows and inherited a company as a teenager. And who knows what that's going to be like. But another thing that I want to say is that we were hit with like really confusing ad campaigns. So just imagine what people were seeing in their own social media silos. I don't know. But one thing, another thing I just want to say, another thing that I think is important in this time is that - choose carefully who you believe and who you listen to. And one thing that kept coming up and I kept hearing talked about in the media, including liberal, including progressive including left, lefty pundits, you know, and YouTubers and whatever. And I listen to a broad range of I read a range of media and from... It was something that cropped up, smattered across the spectrum of this, is that people kept saying, Trump doesn't even have a proper ground game in Pennsylvania. Like, there were, you know, comments about Elon Musk hiring people who were ill-equipped and underpaid and mistreated to do canvassing. And there was... I mean, I'm... I'm not saying that didn't happen because it obviously very likely did. But to say that Trump didn't have a proper ground game - that isn't true. Here's the problem. Anyone who tried to talk about General Mike... Anyone who tried to talk about that ground game was either a, ignored shadow band, whatever you want to call it. They were ignored or even attacked by liberal, progressive and lefty media personalities. People who mention General Mike kind of get sidelined. They get called conspiracy theorists, mostly by people who sell books and make money off the spectacle and want to, you know, you wonder if they just want to keep it, the circus going. There are people who will benefit off of that. There are gifts to rivals. And they are promoted. Because certain coverage... Of course, there's a point where all publicity is good publicity. Unless it's pulling back the curtain and showing exactly what's going on. And anybody who did that... has kind of been sidelined and attacked, sometimes subversively, sometimes openly, publicly undermined. And by the way, publicly undermining a source of information is a very effective tactic. That is a very effective tactic is to undermine the messenger. So many of us who try to pull the curtain back to what's going on online with all of this, you know, there's a lot to it. There's a lot going on. There's a lot I see. There's a lot of it I've endured over the past couple of years. And it's no joke. I sound like Biden, but it's no joke, man. It's happening. And the internet of fakes is a real thing. So it's not a theory. These people were in our area repeatedly for all kinds of events. They had events all over the country, small events, big events. It wasn't just Trump rallies. There were small events where people were making personal connections with these people and taking those connections out to their networks. And I read a paper from the American Journal of Sociology from 1973 and called The Strength of Weak Ties. And I keep pointing out this quote, quote, “Imagine, to begin with, a community completely partitioned into cliques, such that each person is tied to every other in his clique and to none outside. Community organization would be severely inhibited. Leafletting, radio announcements, or other methods could ensure that everyone was aware of some nascent organization, but studies of diffusion and mass communication have shown that people rarely act on mass media information unless it is also transmitted through personal ties.” unquote. That was from 1973. And I can't help thinking that those partitions into clicks is what's happened with social media. That's what's happened with social media. And I just keep coming back to Adam Curtis in Hypernormalisation. A documentary from 2016 where he said, quote, “the liberals were outraged at Trump, but they expressed their outrage in cyberspace. So it had no effect because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them. Instead, ironically, their waves of angry messages and tweets benefited the large corporations who ran the social media platforms. One analyst put it simply, angry people click. It meant that the radical fury that came like waves across the internet no longer had the power to change the world. Instead, it became a fuel that fed the systems of power, making them even more powerful.” And I see that happening already. If you're still on the social media network, formerly known as Twitter, you're going to be seeing stuff that's there specifically to confuse, mislead, whatever. It doesn't even matter what your intentions are. Nobody is immune because it is manipulated. All of this is. And the mirror exposure effect, also called the reiteration effect, Even after repeated exposure to something you don't like, if it becomes familiar, and even if it's false or bad, it can become viewed as true or acceptable, even favorable, just simply because it feels familiar. That's how normalization works. And then the other problem is normalcy bias, which, wow, it seems to be at the heart of a lot of, whew, like that incident in Wisconsin! So, I would just like to stop here with a quote from Alice Walker, who said, quote, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” unquote. And like it always was, the struggle continues.