How to inoculate yourself against bad takes
Resisting the temptation to analyze What Happened may be the most important thing you can do right now.
This is gabestein.com: the newsletter!, which is a completely irregular note primarily focused on the intersection of culture, media, politics, and technology written by me, vitalist technologist Gabriel Stein. Sometimes there’s random silly stuff. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can sign up here. See the archives here, and polished blog versions of the best hits at, you guessed it, gabestein.com.
Inoculation theory is an idea from social psychology that people can be made resistant to persuasion if they’re told what’s coming ahead of time. “They’re going to tell you this, but remember…” It’s no panacea, but it’s one of the more effective cognitive tools we have for collectively shoring up beliefs. It works best when the inoculation highlights both the content and the persuasion method. “They’re going to tell you this, but what they’re doing is manipulating you using these techniques. So, remember…”
Anyhow, this weekend, now that the immediate shock of the election is wearing off and the takes are flowing, you’re going to go to people’s houses for dinner and talk about What Happened and they’re going to advance a lot of theories. They’re going to use a lot of persuasive tactics like quoting well-known smart people who agree with them or pulling out statistics and graphs. But we can be honest in this humble newsletter, what they will all be doing is trying to apply simple, intelligible models of causality to an event far too complex to support them, especially a week after the event when the fog is still clearing.
It’s only human to want to know the cause of events, so we can certainly forgive and empathize with them. Many of the people you talk to will be avoiding the psychological pain of admitting just how different America has become from what they believed it to be. But some of them will have a vested interest in believing and advancing a particular set of stories because they work in or around Democratic politics and they sense the money spigots repositioning themselves, and it’s for that reason that I think we should be particularly careful when it comes to letting ourselves get carried away with narratives about What Happened.
You should, of course, be skeptical of me, too. I certainly have vested interests in and around Democratic politics. But I’m also not speaking from a position of any influence whatsoever, and I’m not arguing for any particular version of What Happened. Instead, what I’d like you to consider this weekend is that perhaps our culture of agonizing over What Happened is as responsible for What Happened as any particular story of What Happened.
Remember Project Alamo? Neither did I, until someone brought it back to my attention this week. As a refresher, it was the codename for the 2016 Trump campaign’s digital strategy to serve swing voters in key districts with micro-targeted, “psychographic” Facebook ads designed to either persuade them to vote for Trump or, more cynically, convince them not to show up at all.
In the aftermath of 2016, Project Alamo was a prime contender for What Happened, at least in my circles. Except, like all things Trumpian, it’s still quite unclear the degree to which the project was truly effective, or just a coat of marketing gloss on a pretty run-of-the-mill digital ad strategy. Certainly Brad Parscale, the man behind it, was no savant. After his success in 2016, he was made Trump’s original 2020 campaign manager before being unceremoniously replaced by the normie campaign veteran Bill Stepien midway through that election cycle. The 2024 campaign was run by two extremely old-school, veteran GOP campaigners, and it’s unclear the degree to which they prioritized psychographic targeting at all.
They didn’t have to. By the time 2024 rolled around, the strategy of peeling off specific disaffected groups of voters from the Democratic coalition by persuading some to flip and dissuading others from showing up at all, which started with Project Alamo, had gone from a fringe campaign tactic to the 24/7/365 thrust of the entire right-wing media operation. All the messaging, all the noise, all the tactics, flowed downstream from that project.
By spending all that time in the aftermath of 2016 agonizing over whether Project Alamo was What Happened, we allowed ourselves to ignore the fact that key slices of voters were increasingly tuning in to right-wing media and tuning out left-wing politicians. Whether or not psychographic micro-targeting played a role in that movement, the fact that our most influential donors, campaigns, wonks, and activists not only didn’t have a strategy to combat what was happening, but barely seem to have even seen it happening, despite all the post-2016 analysis, is a much bigger problem than What, specifically, Happened in 2024.
We need to fix our culture of understanding the world before we can fix our politics. And you can help with that this weekend by resisting the temptation to dig in to the takes.
I hope you have a great one.
Gabe