A funny/depressing thing about political ads being shown in Iowa is that each party accuses the other of wanting to strip away health care, in language so identical you have to wait to the end to figure out whether it's Trump or Obama who had a deeper hatred for rural hospitals

Iowa privatized Medicaid under Republican rule and has suffered terribly from Republican policies, but the deeper issue is that people no longer inhabit the same factual universe, and there's no trusted arbiter to point to. It's just rival hundred-million-dollar ad buys on TV

I think the problem of ~40% of the electorate being off in epistemic la-la-land is being underestimated. It's been getting worse for a while, but with covid turning us into a nation of shut-ins we are really going to feel the burn this year.

People rightly blame Facebook for some of this fracturing of reality, but underestimate how much of it is demand-driven. The algorithm feeds people conspiracist fantasy because they crave it and seek it out