The mountain we must find our way around

I had planned to have two versions of this post ready to go after Election Day, depending on the outcome. As a realist, I was prepared to win or lose. I wasn’t prepared for Trump to win; I’m still processing that.

Anyway, in the final scramble to reach voters, I couldn’t find the time to write either version. Now that I do have the time to think and write, I realize my message would have been the same regardless of the electoral outcome at any level.

Originally I’d seen gerrymandering as my biggest challenge in this race. My solution was to vastly outwork my opponent to reach voters individually, and I did that. I started canvassing in March. But the obstacle I couldn’t find my way around was a mountain of right-wing propaganda.

When I spoke with conservative voters, they would tell me the facts as they believed them to be. That is, they repeated what they’d been told by trusted sources—their public officials, their preachers, the TV personalities who deliver what’s labeled as news—and the trusted people in their lives who would further disseminate that bad information.

They told me stories about “illegals” getting free food and government housing, reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s race-baiting about “welfare queens” living large on the taxpayer dime. 

They seemed unfazed by the radical idea of government forcing raped children to give birth or allowing miscarriage to become a potential death sentence—the logical result of fifty years of outrageous claims about abortion.

They showed me that propaganda is having generational effects. Many parents mentioned that they were homeschooling because public schools encourage kids to switch genders. A grandmother told me her daughter was the only mom in her friend group who’d vaccinated her child.

Some of these lies, such as the ones fueling the antivax movement, are being pushed by foreign governments to destabilize American society. Clearly they’re working.

If we want to have any electoral success in Tennessee, and if we want the United States to continue on the trajectory of a first-world country, we must find innovative ways to combat what’s essentially military-grade disinformation. We can’t do it going door to door in election years. 

There’s a lesson to be learned from the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. In East Tennessee and western North Carolina, where distrust of the federal government is rampant, some of FEMA’s staunchest defenders were the local people, including public officials, who were shoulder to shoulder with the federal relief workers on the ground. 

The push for progress in conservative communities must be grassroots and continuous, and I think it will be done most effectively outside the traditional framework of politics.

Let’s think about alternative, sustainable ways to do what I was hoping to do as a politician: get out into communities, listen to people, and earn their trust. Then maybe when we speak the truth, they’ll believe us—and vote for us.