Trump's support is cratering - not because he tried to mount an insurrection, but because he failed

 I wrote an essay years ago entitled Radicalisation and the Fifth Column that threatens to undermine America from within, but though it looks prescient today, I don't think I had the faintest idea what was going to ensue once Donald Trump was elected president. That essay was about the (now very tame looking) move by Tea Party senators to use a government lockdown to stymie Obama's healthcare reforms. In it I argued that Ted Cruz, a strident voice at the time, represented a sort of radicalisation that had its roots in the Dirty Harry/Hans Solo/John McClane trope of Hollywood action men. Hollywood, I argued, has long promoted an image of a maverick lone wolf who alone can see through the corruption and ineptitude of officialdom and indeed government itself. They therefore choose which laws to follow and which to break, and in doing so are lauded as heroes. A large swathe of Americans, I argued, have become radicalised by this incessant diet of anti-establishment machismo to the extent where they regard destructive rulebreakers as more worthy of respect than the forces of law and order themselves.

Well, it seems now as if that process of radicalisation was both deeper and broader than I suspected at the time. My tone then was one of wry amusement at the quirks of a society that spent too much of its time watching movies. Ted Cruz and his like seemed a bit of a joke - an irrelevance in the brave new post-racial world that Obama's election had summoned up. How wrong could I be?

Trump's presidency, viewed from over the pond, was disturbing for two main reasons. The first (and truly terrible) reason was the substance of what he was doing - reinforcing white supremacy and brutal prejudice against immigrants and Muslims; destroying international collaborative structures; and giving aid and succour to dictators across the world. The second reason was almost as bad though. In all this time it was clear that for all his stupidity, narcissism, misogyny, ineptitude and racism, nearly half of the population of the USA liked what he was doing. And then, when he capped his four years with the most callously ignorant mismanagement of a global pandemic, the response of 74 million of his fellow Americans was to attempt to give him four more years as president.

And then the final act. An attempted insurrection that, had it not been hamstrung by its own ineptitude, could have led to Trump being installed as permanent dictator (he often promised to his rallies that he would serve 8 or maybe 12 more years). Shortly after the failed invasion of the Capitol, Trump's allies began turning against him and his popular support collapsed, to the point where (according to Pew) it now stands at a mere 29%. Leaving aside that even that figure represents near enough 90 million Americans who still reckon Trump is the man for the job, one might assume that this is evidence of the US finally coming to its senses.

Well, yes and no. It is worth remembering that the defection of Trump's allies was nowhere near immediate. Even after being shut away for their own protection whilst an unruly mob stormed the Capitol, 147 Republican lawmakers continued the attempt to defy the will of the People by voting against the certification of the electoral votes.

Since then the mood has unquestionably changed though. Ten Republicans voted to impeach and a growing number of senators are suggesting that they might even vote to convict. And in the wider population, though Trump's aggregated popularity still stands at 38% or so, it is plummeting at an unprecedented rate. One might assume that this is because of the emerging understanding of just how potentially terrifying the Capitol invasion was, and I am sure things like the death of Officer Sicknick have disgusted many. However I would argue that the main feature for Trump's falling popularity is not the realisation that he is a narcissistic sociopath (that surely was always obvious) but the fact that he is also a proven loser. 

Just for a moment imagine that the mob had seized and destroyed the electoral votes, had maybe taken some prominent Democrats and 'turncoat' Republicans hostage and had then been called off by Trump and instructed to hand their hostages over to the authorities. Imagine then that Trump had declared a state of emergency, cancelled the election results as fraudulent and instigated martial law (he has packed out the pentagon with sycophants and clearly has supporters in the armed forces, if not at the highest level).

The question is, would his popular support then have cratered? I am afraid to say that if anything it would have hardened. This would have been Trump definitively doing the thing his supporters had been praying he would - taking on the Swamp.

But his support has cratered, so why? I wrote a while back another (then tongue-in-cheek) essay, suggesting that the continued support for Trump could be explained by another Hollywood trope, the High School bully The thing is about bullies, while they reign supreme everybody wants to be on their side, but when get their comeuppance those same people turn against them. And maybe the explanation is as simple as that. For all the grand-guignol theatrics and the violence-and-hate-laden conspiracies, Trump's Great Awakening/Kraken Unleashed/Trust the Plan (other melodramatic terms are probably available) wannabe coup was a failure.

And in Hollywood, nobody likes a loser.

The narrative of conspiracy theories

 I wrote some time ago (here) about the universal nature of narrative in the ways we engage with the world. Just recently I have become aware of a striking illustration of that phenomenon. In the period after Trump's defeat in the election I (unwisely) responded to a Twitter thread about how fishy it was that Alaska and North Carolina had still not been called for Trump, when Pennsylvania and Arizona had been called for Biden.

The responses to my contribution gave me a glimpse of the dark and dangerous rabbit hole that seems to have swallowed up the large numbers of Trump supporters who are buying his 'Big Steal' conspiracy theories. Of course I knew about the prevalence of conspiracy theories in contemporary far-right 'politics' - QAnon anybody? - but it was interesting watching new theories being constructed in real time. I shan't bother with the details - something about pro-Biden states being called too early and pro-Trump states too late, so that the corrupt Lamestream Media could create a false impression of Biden having won - but what I noticed was some of the language, which people on this thread exchanged without feeling the need to expand or explain what, to outsiders, seemed very cryptic messages.

And the word that jumped out most was 'narrative', often used alone. Here is one example: "And they called Virginia with 1% reporting. Narrative." Another: "If you think that matters you haven't been paying attention. Narrative" and a third, simply: "Narrative, you cocksucker."

This got me thinking, and I suddenly realised that narrative is in fact completely central to any conspiracy theory. You see, the creators and disseminators of conspiracy theories face a fundamental problem in that they generally have little or no actual, hard evidence on which to base their claims. So what do they do? They use what in QAnon world are actually called breadcrumbs: little snippets of largely unconnected or irrelevant 'facts' that they suggest are in fact intrinsically and causally related and together reveal a massive, previously untold story.

This is precisely the way narrative works. History may be (in Alan Bennett's immortal words) "One fucking thing after another" but we simply cannot prevent ourselves connecting those things: this happened because that happened. We construct a narrative to make sense of the things, because that gives the world meaning.

But in conspiracy theories the human narrative imperative has a very powerful effect: it draws the listener in and makes them entirely complicit, and in a sense the less clear or relevant the base 'facts' of the conspiracy theory are, the more powerfully they draw people in. Why? Because it is the listener who is making the connections themselves and the listener who is, in a sense, constructing their own narrative out of them. And the more other people say, "That's ridiculous, those facts don't lead to that conclusion!" the more they can say, "you just don't understand. I can see the narrative that connects them but you can't, because you are stupid/ a Democrat/ a Remainer/ blinded by mainstream media etc etc."

In fact, any attempt to persuade a conspiracy theory victim of the absurdity of the narrative they have bought into risks itself becoming part of the same narrative: "You would say that, because you're obviously [insert appropriate insult here]." 

So how can conspiracy theories be combatted? Well, one way is simply not to pay much attention to them. To frame it, yet again, in narrative terms, the despised and rejected truth-teller who fights tirelessly against the hordes who deny his truth (and yes, it's largely a masculine image, I believe) is a heroic figure. The deluded fantasist who walks the streets shouting whilst others simply ignore him is not.

The continuing mystifying support for Trump and the hollywood trope of the High School bully

 I am sure I am not the only one who daily checks Project 538's Trump approval tracker to see whether the latest examples of the US president's stupidity, boorishness, racism, support for foreign tyrannies or attempts to subvert his own country's democracy have 'moved the dial' of the American electorate's approval of him. Only to find that they haven't.

And therein lies something of a mystery. Whilst Trump was an insurgent candidate, playing the outsider card, I sort of understood how people could choose to overlook his misogyny, crudeness, ignorance, short attention span... (I could go on) because they wanted somebody to go in there and shake things up a bit. Many Americans' lives no longer come even close to the dream they were promised, and the easiest people to blame are the (undoubtedly self-serving and out-of-touch) politicians who ply their trade within the Beltway.

Trump is no longer an insurgent, however. The big beasts in 'the swamp' are now generally his creatures (even if he spends a great deal of his time deriding and condemning them) and he is making almost no attempt nowadays to present any agenda for change. In 2016 the slogans of 'lock her up'. 'drain the swamp' and 'build the wall' might have been crude, simplistic and fundamentally meaningless, but at least they gave the illusion of an agenda for change, but this time round there isn't even a pretence.

And yet, according to opinion pollsters, at least 40% of Americans (that's 120 million people!) say that they approve of the job Donald Trump is doing and will vote to give him four more years (if not more) to carry on doing it. I could list all of the appalling, incompetent, shameful things that Trump has done or not done, said or not said, but it would make no difference. That 120 million seems to be an absolute floor, of people who (as Trump himself boasted) would carry on supporting him even if he shot somebody dead on Fifth Avenue.

So, why? Some factors are clear of course. Trump's increasingly strident dog whistles towards the overlooked white underclass no doubt have an effect, because they allow the Bob Ewells of 21st Century America to rally behind a leader who can shout their resentment from the rooftops. Another factor is the facebook-enabled siloisation that insulates people from any opinion that challenges their own. Yet another is the appallingly partisan nature of US politics that separates everything into red and blue and blinds many to anything beyond that. There have been many thousands of words written by much more knowledgeable commentators than me on these and other factors.

But still...

One hundred and twenty million people. If they stood in a line, 10 abreast, they would reach from LA to New York. All saying Donald Trump is doing a pretty good job, and we want more, thanks very much. 

Of course, one possibility is that all 120 million are racist, misogynist enablers who simply don't care about the suffering of their fellow Americans or the future of the planet, but might there not be a slightly more forgiving narrative to add into the mix? It's not that I think the well-worn traditional arguments, like those I have listed above, are wrong, it's just that they are all problematic in some way as a means of explaining such a high floor to Trump's popularity, particularly now that he is no longer an insurgent outsider. So my additional factor to consider is this: the experience that many Americans seem to share of having been bullied at High School. I don't know this first hand of course, but you can learn a lot about a society by considering its fairy tales, and in more movies than I care to admit to having watched, the villain is the jock who wields unquestioned power to intimidate and harass in the corridors of a High School.

In these fairy tales the jock is always dethroned, whether by the nerd or the cool outsider, but that is clearly wish fulfilment. In reality, jocks in US High Schools seem to benefit from a high degree of official protection, because of their financial value to the school (High School football for instance is very, very big business) and the only sensible response to their bullying, I imagine, is not to challenge them - indeed to try and get on their side.

If this is indeed the case, then it provides a ready-made reason for millions of (otherwise not vile) people to want to be with Trump rather than against him. Bullying is the very essence of his personality and he has shown many times how vindictive and cruel he can be, to the extent even of saying that 'Red' states which elect Democrats had only themselves to blame for coronavirus deaths and deserved no support.

When a bully that powerful and impregnable is standing with his acolytes in front of your locker, are you really going to tell him you don't like him very much?

Living in Interesting Times

You will almost definitely have been reminded at some point over the last months and years of the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." If you are anything like me you will probably have responded with a sadly bewildered shake of the head, accompanied perhaps by some comment about Trump, Brexit or Covid-19. "Interesting times. You're telling me," you may have said. You won't have had to ask to have the reference explained, because it is such a well-established truism, with the sort of paradoxical incisiveness that gives saying like this such force.

Except there's a problem: there is no real evidence of any such Chinese curse ever having existed.

So why do we like to think that one did? Well, until very recently there was a sector of society who believed at a pretty instinctual level that too-rapid change of any sort was fundamentally worrisome - that the best thing the world could do was to keep pretty much everything as is, except for improving the availability of avocados and consumer electronics. This of course was conservatism, and back then it aligned pretty closely with Conservatism. Agitating for change was what socialists and animal rights activists did, and framing your resistance to change as a piece of ancient Oriental wisdom gave it a sort of solemn legitimacy.

And then, suddenly, in the US and the UK at least, everything went topsy-turvy. Who are the angry ones now, taking up arms and invoking the language of war, their faces red with fury? It is the brexiteers and the Trumpians who talk of American carnage and fighting them on the beaches, whilst the anti-racists and the climate activists and the liberals engage in passive resistance and "take the knee."

So how come? Well, my theory is actually an optimistic one. For decades, the movement of societies across the developed world has been away from patriarchy, white supremacy and parochial nationalism. The process has hardly been smooth or consistent, but just look back fifty years to see how far we have come. I am still shocked watching clips from seventies TV shows to remember how little I questioned the profoundly racist, sexist and xenophobic tone of many of them. But back then, so much existed to support the innate sense of privilege of the white, hetero, English-speaking male and it must have seemed that that was the way it was always going to be. Conservatism and a profound desire not to rock the boat made sense for white, English-speaking males, particularly those with limited other sources of privilege (such as wealth, education or elevated social class). And then, when change did begin happening (women's lib, gay rights, increased immigration, more awareness of other counties, languages and cultures) conservatism was a vital protection against the forces of anarchy.

And then change began reaching a tipping point. The innate privilege that had seemed so permanent began to weaken. The voices of women, people of colour, gay people, foreigners (for God's sake!) began to be heard. Still nowhere as much as they deserved to be heard, but still far too much for the fragile egos of the Donald Trumps, Nigel Farages, Steve Bannons and Boris Johnsons of this world, and certainly far, far too much for their otherwise completely unprivileged, but still White, male and English speaking supporters.

So, suddenly, resisting change was no longer enough. The change had happened, and now it had to be undone, and that wasn't going to happen without a fight. Now it was a question of recapturing rather than just retaining that innate privilege. And so Conservatism (or Republicanism in the US) abandoned the notion of conservatism and became activist. The had to take back control, make america great again, build the wall, send the asylum seekers back. And there was an obvious place to look for the language and imagery they needed - the Second World War. Pretty much the epitome of the 'interesting times' that that mythical Chinese curse evoked, but a time when (at least in the hazy, one-generation-removed 'memory' of the trumpy/brexiteers) the innate privilege of the white hetero English-speaking male was at its height.

So, suddenly, 'interesting times' is what the Trumpians and the Brexiteers seem to want - chaos, division, ripping up of well-established customs and protections and a leap into the economic unknown of twenty-first century isolationism. And why do they want it? Because they know they've lost, and this is their last, desperate roll of the dice.

The trouble is, ancient Chinese curse or not, these interesting times are going to be pretty bloody difficult for everybody.

A strange sort of nationalism

So back in the days of good old-fashioned xenophobia, nationalism was when you believed your country to be superior to any other country and hung your nation's flag over your balcony to prove it. Other countries were sly, untrustworthy, useless or dangerous. THEIR judges were corrupt and/or stupid, THEIR politicians on the take and/or useless and THEIR whole system of government and public service overpriced, weird, ineffective and convoluted.

Somewhere along the line though, that all changed, though it took 2016 (the year of Trump and Brexit) to make that fact clear.

You see, what the brexiteers had in common with Trump was their populist nationalism, to the extent that the two campaigns seem to have come to define nationalism for the 21st Century. And the thing is, it is actually a very weird sort of nationalism indeed when you come to think about it, because to 21st Century nationalists it's not THEIR judges, politicians and public services that are shit, it's OURS!

Take the brexiteers. British Nationalists they may be, but look at the range of things they are willing to turn against: British judges (aka Enemies of the People); the British civil service (foot-dragging Remoaners, every one); British ambassadors ("emotionally needy", according to Theresa Villiers, and expressing sour grapes, according to IDS); the British Parliament (not to be trusted with any sort of decision on Brexit) and of course the Act of Union with Scotland, hence the United Kingdom itself.

Pretty much the full house, you might think, but still trumped by Trump, who has repeatedly described the entire system of government in the US as a swamp in need of draining. But that's not the weirdest thing. The xenophobic arch-nationalist has then turned on his own country's intelligence services whilst praising the leader of a foreign power who has been exposed as engaging in cyber-warfare against the US. You really couldn't make it up.

So it seems that 21st Century nationalism goes hand in hand with full throated attacks on pretty much every institution of that same nation. So what exactly is it that nationalists these days support? Even the flag is problematic, surely. Even more in the US than in the UK, the national flag is an inseparable symbol of the national institutions that Trump's nationalists attack with such gusto. The stars and stripes flutters constantly over the swamp they chant about (over every State building in the land, in fact), and if Russia is suddenly more to be trusted than the US's own intelligence agencies, then which flag should they be rallying behind anyway?

You see it seems that 21st Century populist nationalism is a very direct and emotional concept that bypasses systems of government and national institutions, so that the 'nation' becomes whatever any individual nationalist deems it to be. It's generally a pretty vague concept, but can be easily conjured by well-chosen three-word slogans, apparently: "take back control", "build the wall", "lock her up", "brexit means brexit" and "drain the swamp." Not that specific maybe, but they clearly work, and certainly a hell of lot simpler than the average National Anthem.

Occam's chainsaw

I loathe Michael Gove, but I have to say I am often grateful to him for clarifying what it is I do and don't believe. It isn't quite as simple as saying that 'Gove says it therefore it is wrong' (though that is an entirely reasonable starting point), it is more a question of the faux-reasonable and pseudo-intellectual style in which he pontificates provoking a stronger than usual reaction in me.

Take his recent performance as chair of the new commons 'Brexit' committee in which he "pressed experts on how the UK could achieve a “quickie divorce” with the EU regardless of the economic consequences, as he raised concerns that civil servants were over-complicating the process." Clearly proud of his erudition he invoked the image of Occam's razor as the tool to be used in this sort of debate. And something about the posiness of that reference really got me thinking.

Occam's razor (named after the English Franciscan friar of that name) is the scientific principle that simpler hypotheses are preferable to more complex ones, and that therefore scientists should seek to reduce rather than increase complexity in their hypotheses. Michael Gove, clearly delighted by this idea, sought to apply it to the Brexit process, and why not? Throughout the referendum campaign he and his colleagues sought again and again to reduce the complexity of the arguments involved until they essentially came down to one sentence: "Take back control." Control over what was never clearly defined, and neither were the mechanisms by which this amorphous control was to be regained, nor the other consequences that might ensue. Occam's razor, see! Everything else could be left as vague and unspecified assertions about immigration, £350 million a week, new trading opportunities, return to pounds and ounces... anything you want really.

The thing is, of course, that that is not remotely how William of Occam intended his philosophical razor to be used. The point for him was that simpler hypotheses are better because they are MORE EASILY TESTABLE. Gove and his cronies have used their version of the razor to achieve the exact opposite. By airily dismissing any discussion of any of the intrinsic complexities of the questions in hand they have come up with sweeping generalisations that almost by definition can never be tested. When will we know that, as a country, we have 'taken back control?' The only way literally to achieve that would be to remove ourselves from any and all trans-national agreements (the UN, NATO, the International Criminal Court, the Commonwealth...), banish any and all multi-national companies from the UK and replace parliament with a system of rolling plebiscites, with everything from tax to street-lighting decided by referendum.

Is that what the Brexiteers were arguing for? Who knows. Maybe some were, but there is no way of knowing, and that's the point. Once a political aim becomes so simplistic and general that it is completely untestable then you can read into it whatever you want.

And it isn't just in the Brexit debate that this distorted Occam's razor has been weilded. Trump' campaign was all about simplistic, generalised and utterly untestable statements like "Drain the swamp" or "Make America great again." Even the apparently testable ones like "Build the wall" and "Lock her up" were really there as rallying cries rather than statements of intended policy, as Trump's rowing-back since the election has made clear.

And there is a wider seam of this sort of stuff that goes way beyond election politics. I happened to come across a Facebook argument between my brother (a mathematician and scientist) and various climate change deniers. My brother's posts were long (sometimes overlong, to be fair), thorough, nuanced and well researched. What he was often met with was memes. I happened across the same phenomenon in the bizarre world of the flat-earthers and wrote about it here.

But what Michael Gove, with his faux-philosophical intervention on the subject, prompted me to realise was that occam's razor remains a very useful image in these circumstances. A razor is a tool one uses with circumspect precision to remove hairy irrelevances to reveal the living essence of the person (or issue). Once a razor has been applied properly (and carefully) one can see clearly who or what one is dealing with, and so come to sensible and robust conclusion about them. What Gove, Farage, Trump, the flat-earthers and their like are wielding is what I would like to call occam's chainsaw. By recklessly destroying all complexity, relevant or irrelevant, from an issue and reducing it to puddle of minced flesh suitable to be formed into a meme they remove any possibility of any further debate. How are you supposed to argue with "take back control" or "make America great again"?

However the converse of this is also clear. Just as one should never, under any circumstances, use a chainsaw to shave with, so one should immediately reject any response to a complex issue which reduces it to a meme.

Or, to express that as a meme:

So, are Trump and Brexit the internet's fault then?

It goes without saying that there has been a troubling sea-change in the way politics is done (in the UK and the US anyway) over the last few months. The question is, why? Of course, populist demagoguery and the appeal to the lowest common denominator of mysogyny and racial and religious prejudice are hardly new, and neither is the phenomenon of post-truth politics . It's just that in the past it has taken conditions like the collapse of the Weimar Republic to bring them to the fore. And though there has been an economic downturn since the global financial crash, people aren't yet having to take a barrowload of banknotes to the shops to buy a pound of potatoes.

So why have the electorate turned their faces so vehemently against 'experts' and 'the establishment' that they are prepared to support people who are saying things that would not long ago have been unthinkable? And I don't just mean Trump's offensiveness towards women, the disabled, muslims and even PoWs, Johnson's racial slur on the President of the USA or Farage's Breaking Point poster. There is their utter disregard for normal standards of truth and honesty and their willingness to threaten political violence if they don't get their way (both Farage and Trump have explicitly warned of, and even encouraged, people taking to the streets if their agenda is frustrated). There is their willingness to talk in ludicrously broad terms of what they are going to achieve without the slightest attempt at formulating policies for doing so. Their willingness to whip their electorate up with promises they have absolutely no intention of delivering on.

Not so long ago these people (Trump, Farage, Johnson, Gove and others) would have become political pariahs for the way they have behaved - banished to the wastebin of political history like Nick Griffin, Jean-Marie le Pen or Ross Perot (all of whom would probably in 2016 be seen as rather conservative with a small c). So what has changed?

Is it ludicrous to suggest that the growth of the internet and social media holds part of the explanation? You see it used to be that the general electorate had an extremely unequal relationship with the political establishment. Political leaders were part of a secret world to which we, the electorate, had no real access and whose denizens knew far better than we did what was wrong with the world and how to put it right. You could protest of course, and many did, but you would never really know what went on in the corridors of power and never fully grasp the hugely complex levers of power that these people wielded.

The internet has changed all that. There is wikileaks of course, exposing the soiled underwear of that political establishment for all to see. But there's also Twitter and the like. Time was that political leaders pontificated on the BBC news and all you could do was shout at the television. Now political leaders have twitter accounts and your tweets are allowed exactly the same number of characters as theirs. It's like the scene at the end of the Wizard of Oz when the curtain gets pulled back to reveal the funny little man operating the machinery.

But the other thing that twitter does is allow (encourage even) strident and simplistic comments to be instantly disseminated with no real challenge. Time was, if a politician wanted to say any of the things Trump has put in his tweets they would have to do it either on TV or in parliament, and there they would be subject to more or less effective questioning and made to explain or justify their remarks. On twitter, that simply doesn't happen in the same way. Social media operates as a series of 'echo chambers' within which people generally hear repeated and amplified messages with which they are already inclined to agree. And if there is any voice of dissent it can quickly descend into a 'he said, she said' twitter storm that really doesn't hold anyone to account.

And it seems to me that this provides fertile ground for the dissemination of the sort of populist, demagogic politics we see from Trump and the Brexiteers (now there's a name for an apocalyptic Death Metal band...). And once a movement like that starts in social media world it can be very hard both to gauge accurately and to stop. The normal standards of decent political discourse simply don't apply in social media echo chambers, and anyone interjecting with rational, fact-based or expert counter-arguments can easily be dismissed (and/or personally attacked) as establishment stooges or even 'enemies of the people.' And the left-wing liberals would never set foot in these sort of social media echo chambers anyway (they have their own) so such a movement can grow virtually unchecked.

So what can be done?

I have always felt that, in the long term at least, an increase in the ability of people to communicate directly with each other must be a good thing. However recent events have shown beyond doubt that removing too rapidly the governing mechanism of respect for political establishments has been extremely dangerous. And now the only thing to do is somehow offer and disseminate an alternative discourse with which at least some of the people currently caught up in demagogic populism can engage. We won't do it by lecturing either (which sort of rules me out!) The liberal left needs to develop memes and (non-sarky) tweets and snappy one-liners about the empowerment of ordinary citizens and the benefits of cultural cross-pollination and the enormous benefits that liberal democracy has brought.

We need clever people and young people and people whose minds haven't atrophied or solidified around crass simplifications about immigration and scroungers. Thankfully that's just what we've got. But they need not to disappear into their own comfortably outraged echo chambers but get out there and start repairing the damage.

Good luck with that.