Article / Archive
Donald Trump’s presidential victory stunned even the pundits and political reporters who had already watched him win in 2016. He had run a bad campaign by any reasonable standard. His rallies were sparsely attended. He was frequently incoherent. Everyone hated his VP pick. He embarrassed himself so badly at his first debate with Kamala Harris that he subsequently refused to debate her at all. His own campaign aides told reporters that he was psychologically unravelling; he professed admiration for Hitler, and his former chief of staff came forward to say that he was serious.
How, the pundit class asked, could anyone see all that and still vote for the guy? Well, leaving aside the obvious answer—there are a lot of bad people out there, and at least some of them voted for a fascist leader because he reflects their values—a whole lot of people just weren’t seeing it. Or, if they did, they may not have believed what they saw.
There has been a collapse of truth over the course of the last four years, from the wilds of the internet to the most venerated and reputable mainstream publications, and it has fallen squarely on the heads of queer and (especially) trans people. Before we get there, let’s start with the internet—it’s where the problem started, though not where it will stop.
In November 2024, the Center for Countering Digital Hate published a study finding that Elon Musk’s political posts had been seen 17.1 billion times on X —“over two times as many views as all the U.S. ‘political campaigning ads’ that X has recorded in its political ads disclosure dataset.” It is no surprise, given Musk’s increasingly far-right politics—he put over $250 million of his own money into Trump’s campaign—that a lot of these posts were misleading or inflammatory. Yet what he got wrong had more influence than anything that anyone else got right. A vocal Trump stan purchased the social platform where many people got their news, and his permanent Main Character status made it possible for him to control the conversation.
Musk is not the only guy pumping misinformation into the social media ecosystem. A December report from the Pew Research Center finds that 21 percent of U.S. adults, including 37 percent of adults under 30, get their news from social media influencers rather than news publications. This isn’t new, but the demographic and ideological makeup of those influencers does a lot to explain how the country tilted right: “Around three-quarters (77 percent) have no past or present affiliation with a news organization. Men outnumber women by a roughly two-to-one margin. And among those who express a political orientation, more identify as right-leaning than left-leaning.”
So, sure, a lot of the news people received was ideologically skewed or irresponsibly reported. That’s been a problem for a while now. What’s new is that a lot of it was just plain made up: There was the AI-generated robocall from “Joe Biden” that told people not to vote in the New Hampshire primary. There were the deepfaked celebrity “endorsements” from Ryan Reynolds and Taylor Swift. Overall, as per Pew, 73 percent of Americans “say they have seen inaccurate news coverage about the election at least somewhat often.”
Worse, the fact that there was some false information floating around online meant no information could be fully trustworthy. According to the Washington Post, “many of the posts involving the use of AI in the election—44.8 percent—suggested that the other side was using AI habitually and therefore nothing it said could be trusted.” Anything you didn’t want to hear could be fake, and only the news you wanted to believe felt true, leading to a climate where, according to Berkeley professor and digital misinformation expert Hany Farid, “as a society now, we’re living in an alternate reality … we’re disagreeing on if two-plus-two is four.”
This also means that people are casting votes without necessarily being clear on whom—or what—they’re voting for. It’s traditional to think of voters as rational actors who evaluate the two candidates’ arguments and vote for the one that reflects their own priorities, but in 2024, nine out of 10 Harris voters who placed democracy at the top of their priorities said that they were “somewhat or very concerned that electing Trump would bring the country closer to authoritarianism.” Meanwhile, eight in 10 Trump voters “felt electing Harris would bring the country closer to authoritarianism.” If you believe these concerns were stated in good faith—and I’m not sure you should—then everybody was voting against the same thing (authoritarianism) but everyone was also pretty sure that their preferred candidate was the only one who opposed it.
One candidate did run on defending liberal democracy. The other candidate publicly vowed to govern as a dictator “on day one.” So you can see the problem.
The truth is, though, that it’s too easy to blame the internet. It’s even a bit too easy to blame Elon Musk (something I ordinarily have no problem doing). People are only turning to these sketchy and disreputable information sources because they no longer trust the traditional news media—and the legacy media has worked overtime to break that trust.
Of course, the Trump campaign’s closing argument rested on hatred and vilification of trans people. In its final weeks, the Trump campaign spent over a third of its budget on anti-trans ads alone. This, too, is no surprise: hating and vilifying trans people has been the centerpiece of Republican politics for the past four years, culminating in this month’s oral arguments in the Supreme Court case United States v. Skrmetti, where trans advocates including ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio have tried—though, given the overwhelmingly conservative makeup of the current court, they are very unlikely to succeed—to protect youth access to medical transition.
Yet it would not be possible for those anti-trans arguments to have such power, or to be so widespread, if outlets like the New York Times had not spent the past four years platforming and mainstreaming them, turning the formerly fringe hatred of a bunch of bigots into soft-focus breakfast-table chatter about “parents’ rights” and “concerns.”
Transition care is not new, and its efficacy is not in question—it is the only treatment that relieves gender dysphoria, at any age, and there is clear medical consensus on that fact. There are also, however, a whole lot of cis people who feel that relieving a child’s gender dysphoria is less important than their own discomfort or their own desire to have a cis child. Too many outlets and reporters chose to prioritize those voices over the voices of trans people trying to live their lives with comfort and dignity, and this was the inevitable result.
This is not the only time—not even the only recent time—that transphobia has been the leading edge for fascism, or the most successful plank in a campaign of misinformation. The Nazification of unvetted pseudo-news platforms like Substack also began with their commitment to platforming anti-trans influencers. For platforms and people alike, transphobia is an extremely reliable predictor of right-wing drift. Its rhetorical arsenal is comprised mainly of lies, conspiracy theories and medical misinformation, but—like misogyny, which has also proved to be a fertile recruiting ground for the far-right—transphobia sounds “reasonable” to even many liberals, and so people who are drawn to it can be sucked into that deeper sewer of conspiracy theory and propaganda without noticing.
In theory, journalism is an institution that is only loyal to the truth—it has no priors to confirm and no masters to please, only a duty to print the facts. It’s debatable whether journalism has ever really worked that way, but if it did, people could turn to the news to sort out fact from transphobic fiction. Instead, the most venerable newspapers are the ones doing the most to promote lies.
2024 was the year without truth—the year when, as predicted, we flew blind into the storm. But how do you restore truth in a culture committed to avoiding it? Who do you trust, when everyone is building their brand off the bigotry of the moment, internet bozos and Grey Ladies alike? We have lost our reasonable voices, our agreed-upon facts, maybe even our ability to tell fact from fiction. There is no plan to get them back, and no telling what, in the chaos and confusion of the next four years, we might lose.
Donald Trump’s presidential victory stunned even the pundits and political reporters who had already watched him win in 2016. He had run a bad campaign by any reasonable standard. His rallies were sparsely attended. He was frequently incoherent. Everyone hated his VP pick. He embarrassed himself so badly at his first debate with Kamala Harris that he subsequently refused to debate her at all. His own campaign aides told reporters that he was psychologically unravelling; he professed admiration for Hitler, and his former chief of staff came forward to say that he was serious.
How, the pundit class asked, could anyone see all that and still vote for the guy? Well, leaving aside the obvious answer—there are a lot of bad people out there, and at least some of them voted for a fascist leader because he reflects their values—a whole lot of people just weren’t seeing it. Or, if they did, they may not have believed what they saw.
There has been a collapse of truth over the course of the last four years, from the wilds of the internet to the most venerated and reputable mainstream publications, and it has fallen squarely on the heads of queer and (especially) trans people. Before we get there, let’s start with the internet—it’s where the problem started, though not where it will stop.
In November 2024, the Center for Countering Digital Hate published a study finding that Elon Musk’s political posts had been seen 17.1 billion times on X —“over two times as many views as all the U.S. ‘political campaigning ads’ that X has recorded in its political ads disclosure dataset.” It is no surprise, given Musk’s increasingly far-right politics—he put over $250 million of his own money into Trump’s campaign—that a lot of these posts were misleading or inflammatory. Yet what he got wrong had more influence than anything that anyone else got right. A vocal Trump stan purchased the social platform where many people got their news, and his permanent Main Character status made it possible for him to control the conversation.
Musk is not the only guy pumping misinformation into the social media ecosystem. A December report from the Pew Research Center finds that 21 percent of U.S. adults, including 37 percent of adults under 30, get their news from social media influencers rather than news publications. This isn’t new, but the demographic and ideological makeup of those influencers does a lot to explain how the country tilted right: “Around three-quarters (77 percent) have no past or present affiliation with a news organization. Men outnumber women by a roughly two-to-one margin. And among those who express a political orientation, more identify as right-leaning than left-leaning.”
So, sure, a lot of the news people received was ideologically skewed or irresponsibly reported. That’s been a problem for a while now. What’s new is that a lot of it was just plain made up: There was the AI-generated robocall from “Joe Biden” that told people not to vote in the New Hampshire primary. There were the deepfaked celebrity “endorsements” from Ryan Reynolds and Taylor Swift. Overall, as per Pew, 73 percent of Americans “say they have seen inaccurate news coverage about the election at least somewhat often.”
Worse, the fact that there was some false information floating around online meant no information could be fully trustworthy. According to the Washington Post, “many of the posts involving the use of AI in the election—44.8 percent—suggested that the other side was using AI habitually and therefore nothing it said could be trusted.” Anything you didn’t want to hear could be fake, and only the news you wanted to believe felt true, leading to a climate where, according to Berkeley professor and digital misinformation expert Hany Farid, “as a society now, we’re living in an alternate reality … we’re disagreeing on if two-plus-two is four.”
This also means that people are casting votes without necessarily being clear on whom—or what—they’re voting for. It’s traditional to think of voters as rational actors who evaluate the two candidates’ arguments and vote for the one that reflects their own priorities, but in 2024, nine out of 10 Harris voters who placed democracy at the top of their priorities said that they were “somewhat or very concerned that electing Trump would bring the country closer to authoritarianism.” Meanwhile, eight in 10 Trump voters “felt electing Harris would bring the country closer to authoritarianism.” If you believe these concerns were stated in good faith—and I’m not sure you should—then everybody was voting against the same thing (authoritarianism) but everyone was also pretty sure that their preferred candidate was the only one who opposed it.
One candidate did run on defending liberal democracy. The other candidate publicly vowed to govern as a dictator “on day one.” So you can see the problem.
The truth is, though, that it’s too easy to blame the internet. It’s even a bit too easy to blame Elon Musk (something I ordinarily have no problem doing). People are only turning to these sketchy and disreputable information sources because they no longer trust the traditional news media—and the legacy media has worked overtime to break that trust.
Of course, the Trump campaign’s closing argument rested on hatred and vilification of trans people. In its final weeks, the Trump campaign spent over a third of its budget on anti-trans ads alone. This, too, is no surprise: hating and vilifying trans people has been the centerpiece of Republican politics for the past four years, culminating in this month’s oral arguments in the Supreme Court case United States v. Skrmetti, where trans advocates including ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio have tried—though, given the overwhelmingly conservative makeup of the current court, they are very unlikely to succeed—to protect youth access to medical transition.
Yet it would not be possible for those anti-trans arguments to have such power, or to be so widespread, if outlets like the New York Times had not spent the past four years platforming and mainstreaming them, turning the formerly fringe hatred of a bunch of bigots into soft-focus breakfast-table chatter about “parents’ rights” and “concerns.”
Transition care is not new, and its efficacy is not in question—it is the only treatment that relieves gender dysphoria, at any age, and there is clear medical consensus on that fact. There are also, however, a whole lot of cis people who feel that relieving a child’s gender dysphoria is less important than their own discomfort or their own desire to have a cis child. Too many outlets and reporters chose to prioritize those voices over the voices of trans people trying to live their lives with comfort and dignity, and this was the inevitable result.
This is not the only time—not even the only recent time—that transphobia has been the leading edge for fascism, or the most successful plank in a campaign of misinformation. The Nazification of unvetted pseudo-news platforms like Substack also began with their commitment to platforming anti-trans influencers. For platforms and people alike, transphobia is an extremely reliable predictor of right-wing drift. Its rhetorical arsenal is comprised mainly of lies, conspiracy theories and medical misinformation, but—like misogyny, which has also proved to be a fertile recruiting ground for the far-right—transphobia sounds “reasonable” to even many liberals, and so people who are drawn to it can be sucked into that deeper sewer of conspiracy theory and propaganda without noticing.
In theory, journalism is an institution that is only loyal to the truth—it has no priors to confirm and no masters to please, only a duty to print the facts. It’s debatable whether journalism has ever really worked that way, but if it did, people could turn to the news to sort out fact from transphobic fiction. Instead, the most venerable newspapers are the ones doing the most to promote lies.
2024 was the year without truth—the year when, as predicted, we flew blind into the storm. But how do you restore truth in a culture committed to avoiding it? Who do you trust, when everyone is building their brand off the bigotry of the moment, internet bozos and Grey Ladies alike? We have lost our reasonable voices, our agreed-upon facts, maybe even our ability to tell fact from fiction. There is no plan to get them back, and no telling what, in the chaos and confusion of the next four years, we might lose.
