What the hell are we doing?
I have eyes and ears, you know
I just woke up with a terrible headache. I stayed up too late last night after watching the presidential debate (more on that shortly); I’ve been staying up too late all week and it’s starting to catch up with me.
This was the big chaos week for Fruitless. After spending most of June pre-recording episodes for July, I’ve spent the last week of the month trying my damnedest to hit my episode quota for June. I got close to pulling it off, but the final free episode of the month—a bookclub episode—needed to get rescheduled.
That’s on me. I usually don’t count bookclub episodes toward my “2 free episodes per month” promise since they require more work than other episodes and the other bookclub hosts tend to have chaotic schedules; there’s a lot of stuff out of my or the co-hosts’ control surrounding that show, so I try to keep pressure off of it. However, for June, I didn’t want to come up with another episode for the month since I’ve already recorded so much, so I decided to count the bookclub toward the quota and roll the dice. It didn’t work out.
It’s obviously not the end of the world. I’m just tired. I don’t have enough of a following for anyone to be particularly mad that I didn’t make the quota, but I get obsessive about my own silly goals.
Cancelling the recording session last night opened my evening up to watch the presidential debate, though. So I guess there’s that.
This is the media round-up, a newsletter where I (Josiah) write about all the things I’m watching, listening to, reading, and producing.
New from me
So here’s what I did get out for June. Last week, I released an episode with Jason Kirk about his novel, Hell is a World Without You. You can listen to that here.
On the Patreon, I released another episode of the Music Exchange. This time, Josh and I talk about The Troubled Stateside by Crime in Stereo and Chaos A.D. by Sepultura. It’s a fun one. You can find that here and listen to it and much more for a mere $3.
Lastly, I released a Patreon episode at the beginning of the week about the series, Scavengers Reign, and why you should watch it featuring my good friend, Jackal. I liked this episode and kind of regretted pay-walling it, so when I realized I was going to be short this week, I decided to release it on the main feed and just consider it “episode 37,” (I already recorded myself calling the first episode of July “episode 38,” so this is what we’re doing here; not that anyone but me probably cares about how I number these).
(EDIT 6/30/2024: I just re-recorded myself saying “episode 37” because I am obsessive about the numbers and it was bothering me that the numbering would forever be weird going forward if I didn’t just take the five seconds to do that)
You can listen to the Scavengers Reign episode here.
The presidential debate
I’m probably not going to talk about much other media on here. Since this whole week has been so podcast-oriented, all my watching and reading is related to episodes of the show. You can listen to those to get my thoughts on Scavengers Reign, Chaos A.D., and (in a week or so) If We Burn. The one exception is that I got to show Kelli one of my favorite movies last weekend: O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000). That was a delight.
No, we’re talking about the debate this Friday. I can’t really think about much else this moment.
What the hell are we doing?
I’m not a fan of Biden. Prior to last October, I was able to see him as ultimately a progressive force. Don’t misunderstand me here, I’m not saying I thought any radical change was coming because of Biden, but he functioned like a milquetoast liberal who occasionally pushed for something good. I’m not currently making payments on my student loans due to my income level, for instance. It’s not loan forgiveness and it’s not sufficient to address the student debt crisis, but it’s more than anyone else had done. There were a handful of these little issues that justified a leftist case for just taking the wins we can get with Biden and then pushing for a better candidate come next election.
Of course, I was a Biden critic that whole time as well. For the handful of good things, there was plenty to criticize, but it was the same criticisms I have for most Democrats: milquetoast, liberal, willing to throw labor under the bus at a moment’s notice. We know how Democrats operate. None of that was particularly new.
In October, as the war/genocide in Gaza commenced, I found the handful of wins insufficient to make a left wing case for Biden. Genocide changes your moral calculus—if you have a working conscience, at least. Since October, I’ve seen that very few Democrats have a functioning conscience.
As we have approached the election, Biden has been making baffling attempts to win over right wing voters while absolutely alienating any voter concerned about Gaza. It’s starting to become a joke. How can you seriously tell me Biden is the lesser of two evils on an issue like immigration, after he has begun to openly embrace xenophobic policy and rhetoric? The cries of “kids in cages!” for almost eight years now feels like a joke. There just isn’t a case for this. We are, at this point, talking about an election between a fascist and a conservative.
It’s become apparent that Biden is uniquely bad, even for a moderate Democrat. This is especially dispiriting for those who, like me, do genuinely believe Trump is a threat to democracy and represents a fascist turn in American politics. The problem is that Biden also seems to represent a slowed or softened version of that same erosion of democracy and that same fascist turn—not in the sense that Biden would be the fascist, but that he’s building the groundwork for it just as much as Trump.
Even if that were that not the case, it’s also clear that Biden is not particularly with it anymore. This is obvious to anyone who watches him talk and I’d honestly feel sorry for him were he not actively arming a genocide and had he not repeatedly clarified that it’s his decision to stay in the race, out of some repugnant sense of entitlement and pride.
What has been particularly frustrating is that acknowledging these basic facts will often lead to hysterical accusations that you are a Trump voter or you’re helping Trump. This line didn’t work in 2016, it barely worked in 2020, and it’s absolutely not going to work a third time. Criticizing a candidate does not mean support for the other candidate. I don’t understand how you can possibly believe that without a deeply troubling level of self-deception.
In fact, if it is true that negative sentiments about Democrats will lead to a Republican victory, it’s more an indictment of our democracy than of the critics. I know it’s a cliché at this point, but genuinely ask yourself: why are there only two options? I’m not saying we should all vote third party—I’m aware in this country that a huge third party campaign will just end up splitting the vote and favoring the less favorable candidate—but I think it’s worth pausing on the brokenness of this system. This isn’t the case in most other countries. Not that other democracies are doing great right now either, but there are coalition governments and multiple parties in other liberal democracies. Why have we accepted this situation here?
But fine, we’re in that situation. The Democrats are, unfortunately, our only salvation within the confines of electoral politics for the time being. They are the opposition to the fascist candidate. Yet they are stuck trying to sell this salvation-of-democracy narrative with a barely coherent candidate who is becoming increasingly right wing on immigration and actively arming a genocide. The anger here should not be aimed at critics of Biden—it should be at the party for allowing it to get here.
All of this was true before the debate last night.
Debates don’t tend to change minds. They tend to reinforce already existing narratives. This is why I laid out everything above; where I felt we were at before last night. Biden’s job last night was to find a way to worm himself out of this narrative. Instead, what we got, was a man that could not string a coherent sentence together.
I don’t need to give you the play-by-play. If you didn’t watch it, I’m sure you’ve been inundated with clips and quotes from it all morning. It was a train wreck. I don’t think Biden got a single good soundbite out of it, and unfortunately Trump got several. In fact, I’m going to disagree with a consensus view I’ve been seeing online this morning that Trump did poorly as well—I think he did great. Which is scary.
Did he lie a lot? Yeah, he’s Trump. Did he use weird turns of phrase and make nonsense statements? Yeah, like he always has. But Trump’s incoherence is like a car salesman trying to distract you—his incoherence works with his manipulative rhetorical style. Biden’s simply doesn’t. Biden forgets what he’s saying mid-sentence. Trump mid-sentence redirections work like smokescreens.
In fact, Trump not making as much of an ass out of himself as usual is part of what made everything go wrong for Biden last night. I think the Democrats were all banking on the notion that, if we get Biden up there sounding semi-intelligent and calm, while Trump goes off into la-la land, than Biden will win. The reality is, flash polls seem to suggest people thought Trump sounded better than Biden. And I can confirm this from watching. Yes, he is lying, but he’s doing it confidently. He’s a fucking con man. We’ve known this for a decade now.
Right after the debate, the media turned on Biden in lockstep. It was a bit spooky. Had I not watched the actual debate, I would be feeling conspiratorial about how quick the narrative changed. Having watched the debate, though, it makes sense. There just wasn’t any coming back from that. Last night, Biden reinforced the narrative that has been killing him. CNN, MSNBC, and a whole slew of New York Times columnists are now all calling for the DNC to boot Biden out and put literally any other candidate in. This is something a lot of people on the left have been saying for months now, every time getting accused of running defense for Trump. Of course, there are still diehards online, and they have spent the whole morning in a state of denial, saying that Biden sounded level-headed last night, but that he’s just a bit old. This strategy seems to rely on assuming people don’t have eyes or ears.
How did this happen, though? One point that the most hysterical Biden defenders have been saying may actually be true. Biden was particularly under the weather this time—he had a cold, I suppose. He was significantly more conscious for the State of the Union. More than that, some people have pointed to the strange fact that Biden seemed more coherent talking to his supporters before and immediately after the debate. A Twitter mutual of mine, Matt Metcalf, pointed this out and made a comment I think is correct: Biden actually relies on getting energy from a live audience. There was no live audience for this debate.
I don’t actually think this explanation works in Biden’s favor.
Over the past few months, demonstrators have interrupted a lot of Biden’s public appearances. Biden’s campaign also knows that Trump is better with a crowd. He functions like a standup comedian, responding to audience reactions and intentionally working them. Both of these seemed to spell doom for Biden were there to be a live audience. For this reason, it was the Biden campaign that pushed CNN to host the event without an audience.
If this is the case, then the debate was a product of the campaign’s own fear—their fear of Trump’s ability to work a crowd better than Biden and their fear of the Palestinian solidarity protests. Being afraid to go up against Trump with a crowd is understandable, and it’s a natural human desire to avoid confrontation about an unforgivable decision, but none of this is the behavior of someone who is supposed to be the head of the vanguard against American fascism. With the Biden campaign’s cowardly attempt to hide from democracy, supposedly in the defense of it, they kneecapped him.
Maybe it was intentional. Maybe Biden has been refusing to step down, and so they let him go up and fail spectacularly. This conspiratorial explanation would be more flattering to the campaign than what is probably the reality: the campaign, much of the liberal media, and the DNC have been living in a delusion. Last night, I think many of them woke up. We all have eyes and ears, you know.