Under the previous President, Donald J. Trump’s opponent had been the Secretary of State, which meant that she’d been intimately, and professionally, involved with the obliteration of Muslims.
And say what you will of Donald J. Trump, but for all of the endless accusations hurled in his direction during the Year of the Misplaced Butter, no one ever suggested that he’d killed a Muslim.
Experience matters!
It wasn’t as if Donald J. Trump’s victory was unprecedented. Recent history had contained another split between the Electoral College and the popular vote.
2000 AD!
Everyone forgot.
But not me.
Here are three emails between me and a woman who shall remain nameless:
Sat, Nov 5, 2016 at 11:26 AM
From: XXXXX (xxxx@xxxx.com)
To: Jarett Kobek
Subject: quick
election prediction in 1, 2, go!
Sat, Nov 5, 2016 at 12:42 PM
From: Jarett Kobek
To: XXXXX (xxxx@xxxx.com)
Subject: Re: quick
TRUMP
possible popular/electoral split
Sat, Nov 5, 2016 at 1:26 PM
From: XXXXX (xxxx@xxxx.com)
To: Jarett Kobek
Subject: Re: quick
Omg not again. Not again. I cannot take another popular/electoral split. I will lose my goddamned mind.
She didn’t lose her goddamned mind.
But everyone else did.
The Weinstein story exploded and went metastatic in a way that stories don’t go in an era of media fragmentation and a politically divided citizenry.
It was all-consuming, a black hole at the center of a depraved galaxy.
It opened two floodgates.
The first floodgate had held back a torrent of stories about men who worked in the Celebrity branch of American governance and their proclivities towards sexual assault.
The second floodgate was ancient magic.
It’d been there for a very long time, holding back all of women’s awful experiences with men from the dawn of civilization.
And now it was open.
There was an organic outpouring of stories.
These appeared on social media under the hashtag of #MeToo.
Women wrote about being sexually harassed, about being raped, about being treated like idiots. It amounted to a profound discomfort with the way that sexual politics worked in the post-industrial civilized world.
And let’s be clear.
Whatever the merit of any individual statement, the general intent of #MeToo was undeniable. It was people saying that a society built around the whims of men is a recipe for a disaster.
And if you disagree with that, go and look out the fucking window.
Or inside your smartphone.
And, reader, don’t mistake me for one of your dopey male acquaintances who, after #MeToo broke, went and posted statements on Facebook about how they were learning to be better people, when all they were really saying was this: Please don’t get me fired because I tried to fuck you when I was drunk at the office holiday party.
I wrote an entire book about the horror of a society built around the whims of men, and I did it long before there was any obvious reward for performing this particular piety.
It’s called I Hate the Internet.
It made me famous in Serbia.
Serbia!
Despite its obvious virtues, #MeToo demonstrated why the Twenty-First Century AD may preclude the possibility of meaningful political protest.
In August of 2017 AD, Donald J. Trump returned to Trump Tower, which was a giant golden skyscraper that he’d built over Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.
This was where Donald J. Trump had lived before he moved into the White House.
This was where he had staged his bid for the Presidency.
He hadn’t been back since he’d become President and earned the right to bomb the living fuck shit out of Muslim peasants in the name of American freedom.
A few days before his return, there’d been a White Supremacist rally in Virginia where a young woman was killed when a Neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors.
On the very same day as Donald J. Trump’s return, I happened to be staying on the eleventh floor of the Warwick Hotel, which is about two blocks south and one block west from Trump Tower.
From my hotel room, I could hear the protests outside of Donald J. Trump’s former home.
I walked over to Trump Tower, where the NYPD had blocked off Fifth Avenue.
Donald J. Trump still hadn’t arrived.
Like the novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Trump Tower was empty of its eponymous hero.
About two thousand people were barricaded on both the west and east sidewalks.
People were holding signs.
People were wearing T-shirts relevant to their political protests.
People were using their cellphones to record video of the protests.
People were chanting.
They were screaming: THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!
When they screamed THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE, I think what they meant was this: Donald J. Trump, here is the face of the American public, and we oppose you in all of your manifold perversions. We repudiate you in your evil. A change is gonna come, Bubba.
The scene was straight out of Tolkien.
A few thousand people, restrained by the Orcish Host of the NYPD, had been corralled into pre-approved places from where they shouted impotent chants at an impregnable empty golden tower.
The protestors were right.
It really was what democracy looked like.
In an era when significant amounts of social protest occurs on the Internet, it necessarily means that all of that social protest is monetized.
And not by the protestors.
#MeToo generated unbelievable amounts of web traffic.
For months, it was an international spectator sport.
Almost every time that someone interacted with #MeToo, they were generating income for Facebook or Google or Twitter, which were the three companies that dominated advertising and political expression on the Internet.
Here’s a list of the major institutional holders of Facebook, circa September 2017 AD: The Vanguard Group, BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, State Street Corporation, T. Rowe Price Associates, Capital World Investors (a subsidiary of Capital Group), Northern Trust, Morgan Stanley, Invesco, Geode Capital Management.
Together, these ten companies owned just over 31 per cent of Facebook.
Here’s a list of the major institutional holders of Google, circa September 2017 AD: The Vanguard Group, BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, State Street Corporation, T. Rowe Price Associates, Capital Research Global Investors (a subsidiary of Capital Group), Capital World Investors (a subsidiary of Capital Group), Northern Trust, BNY Mellon, Wellington Management.
Together, these ten companies owned just over 31 per cent of Google.
Here’s a list of the major institutional holders of Twitter, circa September 2017 AD: The Vanguard Group, ClearBridge Investments, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Slate Path Capital, State Street Corporation, OppenheimerFunds, Coatue Management, First Trust, Northern Trust.
Together, these ten companies owned just over 27 per cent of Twitter.
With one exception, none of these institutional holders was operated in any meaningful sense by anyone other than some old white guys in suits.