GEMS OF THE MONTH: Reminders that our reality-based world is still here

A few beautiful truth bombs from the world outside the spin zone...

A semi-regular feature here on LiteralMayhem is the “BS of the Month Award.” But we thought we’d take a break from the negative this month, stepping back from calling out the ugliness of spin, to celebrate some laudable examples of un-spin.

It’s easy to fall into a cynical mood from encountering so much spin and hype just in the normal course of living. Last week we took up the topic of hype, and saw that far from being a simple, benign form of speech – worthy of mere giggles and shrugs – hype is a way of pressing a specific agenda. Buying into the hype is buying into the agenda of the hypsters.

Consumer hype. Political hype. Technology hype, especially. They all serve to warp our perceptions of reality, to influence our understanding and decision making.

With all of it, the aim is for us to live in the hyped world as if it was the real world. Buy it. Believe it. Submit to it. Ingest its images and messages and form our responses and behavior around its imperatives, rather than sticking a pin in it and popping it.

Here are a few examples of people who stuck a pin in it, to create a jarring shift back to what used to be called reality—when it was a real thing that people could agree actually existed.

1. “Budget Dust”

It was always an asinine claim that one could make a meaningful dent in the federal budget deficit by firing a bunch of park rangers, cancer researchers, and telephone operators at the Social Security Administration.

Yet somehow, the mainstream news media treated Elon Musk’s DOGE exploits like they might really accomplish the deed. They debated back and forth, what constituted a “cut”… was a canceled program a “cut” … did DOGE have the right to make those cuts in the first place? They covered every new development as if the matter wasn’t already settled. (The answer was always: No, they cannot now, nor will they ever, dent the federal budget this way.)

After all the sturm and drang, all it took to puncture the hype and spin was a small pin prick. Here is a conservative think tanker, by way of Michael Tomasky at The New Republic:

Jessica Reidl of the Manhattan Institute—yes, the staunchly conservative and generally pro-Trump think tank—recently told The New York Times’ David French: “So right now I would say DOGE has saved $2 billion, which, to put it in context, is one-thirty-fifth of 1 percent of the federal budget, otherwise known as budget dust.” [emphasis added]

While Elon has faded from the political headlines of late, the blood from his chainsaw is still dripping from many federal departments and will be for some time to come. DOGE and its reckless minions aren’t going anywhere. They’re working away all the same… Musk or no Musk.

But Reidl’s rejoinder is a reminder that the reality-based world is still out there, waiting to be revealed by a quick, sharp jab through the spin.

Tomasky tries. He gives voice to a lot of our collective frustration over the misrepresentations and misdirection of the current regime, around every bit of poor policy, every piece of warped legislation. You can’t say that he’s shy about expressing opinions. The title of that piece (“Elon Musk is an Evil Piece of Garbage”) won’t win any awards for humility; Tomasky can’t be accused of pulling punches or mincing words

But even with all the paragraphs of heated language and hair-pulling, Tomasky didn’t accomplish what Reidl did with one delicious bon mot. She applied a magnifying glass to DOGE’s claims with the precision a child frying an ant on the sidewalk.

“Budget dust”… put it in your vocabulary. It’s bound to come in handy over the coming years as the reality-based world continues to beckon us home.

2. “More guts and balls”

Sticking with The New Republic—this time from the Daily Blast podcast with Greg Sargent—we get another example of puncturing the hype/spin bubble, this time with a shiv instead of a needle.

Sargent and his guest, Guardian columnist Moira Donegan, discussed the recent appearance Pete Hegseth in front of Congress, in which Sen. Elissa Slotkin slipped an ice-cold shiv between his ribs in the direction where, in a regular human, his heart might be.

Slotkin reminded Hegseth that his Republican predecessor in the Trump 1.0 administration had refused an order to shoot civilian protestors, telling him that Mark Esper:

“… had more guts and balls than you.”

In another exchange, about whether army troops deployed to Los Angeles were given orders to arrest and detain protestors, when Hegseth ducked the question and said that the order was clear (without specifying what the order was), Slotkin simply said:

“Be a man, list it out.”

Her directness and simplicity are, again, what impress. It works in a way that sturm and drang and breathless accusations don’t. Because squeals of pain are what they actually want to hear. Per Sargent:

A big part of this for people like Trump and for Hegseth is that they want liberals like you and me to squeal about it. That is absolutely central, right? It’s the sound of submissiveness, they think. In their heads, when liberals squeal in protest about the military walking down Pennsylvania Avenue, it’s just a sign of submission, weakness. It’s a sign of Trump dominating us.

Donegan agreed, pointing out that…

When you say, This guy’s a dictator, this is fascism, you are both describing the truth and giving him what he wants, right? It actually does put the liberal pundit in a double bind.

They are describing the same thing William Finnegan did in a post on The Long Memo titled The Regime Doesn’t Fear Your Rage, It Fears Your Absence. Though a bit polemical, the piece strikes a nerve in observing:

Though Trump’s version is particularly grotesque, the model he employs — rule by spectacle, consumption of outrage, capture of institutions — isn’t unique. From Erdogan to Modi to Xi, the modern autocrat thrives not by eliminating dissent, but by turning it into entertainment.

When regimes seek legitimacy, they love resistance. It gives them spectacle — a foil. It justifies crackdowns. It feeds the theater.

[Me: Are you listening Michael Tomasky?]

This is why autocrats host sham elections. Why they allow protests in kettled squares. Why they let social media platforms fester into screaming voids. Resistance becomes part of the machine — absorbed, processed, neutralized.

We should know this by now. The Trump Regime feeds on performance — especially its own.

Finnegan’s point is that refusing to participate, and puncturing the pretense that the spectacle is what’s real, is the most effective way to combat an authoritarian regime. His piece focuses on withdrawal (of presence and consent) but he also advocates refusal to participate.

What this regime craves is your continued attention.
Your participation.
Your compliance — even in anger.

Starve it of those, and what’s left?

And that’s exactly what Slotkin has done in a simple, direct, no-bullshit kind of way. She withdrew her participation in the stage-managed outrage and stuck her shiv right into the heart of Hegseth’s performative bluster.

We all need to do more of that—more guts and balls, specifically.

3. Sincerity

Spin cannot abide true sincerity. Yes, sometimes spin and hype (a separate species within the genus of “spin”) are delivered with a gloss of sincerity, but both are fundamentally insincere, as they are intentionally stilted forms of communication: agenda-based presentations of selective reality.

One of my favorite writers, the cranky Ed Zitron (Where’s Your Ed At?), recently wrote a beautifully blunt piece titled Sincerity Wins the War. In it, he takes journalists to task for acting like tape recorders.

The problem he sees with the news media is its insincerity, which manifests in a kind of “guy said thing” style of reporting facts without context. That is, some powerful (often rich guy) guy said something about something he believes is super important and the reporter wrote it down and here it is, validated simply by being repeated.

Sincerity would require investigation, critical thinking, and maybe some trenchant criticism. Per Zitron:

Your job is not to report “the facts” and let the readers work it out. To quote my buddy Kasey, if you're not reporting the context, you're not reporting the story. Facts without context aren’t really facts. Blandly repeating what an executive or politician says and thinking that appending it with “...said [person]” is sufficient to communicate their biases or intentions isn’t just irresponsible, it’s actively rejecting your position as a journalist…

To be clear, I’m not saying we have to reject every single announcement that comes along, but can we just for one second think critically about what it is we are writing down.

We do not have to buy into every narrative, nor do we have to report it as if we do so. We do not have to accept anything based on the fact someone says it emphatically, or because they throw a number at us to make it sound respectable…

That, to me, is sincerity. Constrained by an entirely objective format, a reporter makes the effort to get across the context in which a story is happening, rather than just reporting exactly the story and what the company has said about it...

The problem, ultimately, is that everybody is aware that they’re being constantly conned, but they can’t always see where and why. Their news oscillates from aggressively dogmatic to a kind of sludge-like objectivity, and oftentimes feels entirely disconnected from their own experiences other than in the most tangential sense, giving them the feeling that their actual lives don’t really matter to the world at large.

On top of that, the basic experience of interacting with technology, if not the world at large, kind of fucking sucks now…

At scale, we as human beings are continually reminded that we do not matter, that any experiences of ours outside of what the news say makes us “different” or a “cynic,” that our pain points are only as relevant as those that match recent studies or reports, and that the people that actually matter are either the powerful or considered worthy of attention…

As a result of all of these things, people are desperate for sincerity. They’re desperate to be talked to as human beings, their struggles validated, their pain points confronted and taken seriously. They’re desperate to have things explained to them with clarity, and to have it done by somebody who doesn’t feel chained by an outlet…

What people are hurting for right now is actual, real sincerity…

Really, I don’t have a panacea for what ails media, but what I do know is that in my own life I have found great joy in sincerity and love. In the last year I have made — and will continue to make, as it’s my honour to — tremendous effort to get to know the people closest to me, to be there for them if I can, to try and understand them better and to be my authentic and honest self around them, and accept and encourage them doing the same. Doing so has improved my life significantly, made me a better, more confident and more loving person, and I can only hope I provide the same level of love and acceptance to them as they do to me.

Reminding ourselves we still live in a reality-based human-made world (even if it doesn’t feel that way sometimes)

It feels like reasserting reality over spin can be a huge struggle these days. Especially when the spectacle of spin and hype is so immersive and ascendant—as William Finnegan and Greg Sargent both observed, even gaining power from our very shouts of resistance. And especially when we’re surrounded by media that stoke the spectacle for its own commercial benefit, rather than deflating the bubble.

The three examples above are reminders that there is a narrow path out of the madness, starting with sincerity and a withdrawal of participation.

We won’t donate our rage to its cause. We’ll surgically and calmly (even frigidly) puncture all the pretense, grandstanding, and performative bluster. We’ll use their own language against them to reveal the truth of who they are and what they are doing, whether that’s a political regime or a technology regime.

We’ll remind ourselves, and the world, that reality still exists and that we still live in it, even though the all-consuming spectacle of spin and hype often obscure it.

As Finnegan observes, even our anger is in fact an exercise in compliance.

So:

Don’t resist.
Refuse.

Refuse their efforts to force us to live in spin. Refuse to accept that the spin is what’s real. Coldly and systematically force them to participate in reality instead.