Why I Was So Wrong About 2024, And What That Means for 2026
Controlling the realities of those who oppose your agenda is a powerful thing
The explanations as to why my optimism ahead of the 2024 election was so misplaced have always been well meaning, sensible, and totally unsatisfying.
For those who might be new to Bad Faith Times, I had argued in the months ahead of the ‘24 election – in BFT blogs and podcasts with enormous audiences – that there was no case to be made for Americans returning the nation’s first tyrant to power four short years after they had ousted him. I urged folks to Watch The Game and not fall for what I saw as the right wing’s faux confidence that their god-king could win another term, though there were some crosstab polling numbers that made me queasy in the weeks before Election Day.
I promise this was not a bit. It was not a plea for currency in the attention economy. This was my honest assessment of another Most Important Election Of Our Lifetimes: An imperfect Democratic candidate could easily dispatch a guy whose approval rating among independents had dropped into the mid-30s by November 2020. Joe Biden, despised by the American left for thirty years, got more votes than any candidate in history. There was, I believed in my marrow, no argument whatsoever for Trump in ‘24 winning back millions who turned against him four years earlier and far more deciding to give up the fight against the authoritarian menace.
I think the disconnect – the explanation for why I had no business being optimistic in 2024 – can be found in the algorithms and the bottomless money reserves of those who control what we see on our phones.
Denny Carter
I’ve spent much of the past couple years writing about the international fascist order’s determination to birth their twisted unreality into the world. We saw this most clearly and traumatically when the broccoli-cut DOGE hackers – in what can only be described as a coup – destroyed swaths of the U.S. government and starved hundreds of thousands overseas based on Elon Musk's unreality. What else is AI but a tool for wiping away the last remnants of shared reality and replacing it with a far-right unreality that both legitimizes the fascist cause and makes its solutions not only viable, but necessary. It’s why Musk, the very essence of evil, is singularly obsessed with ensuring his AI abomination reflects his white supremacist worldview. It’s probably why the Trump regime is suddenly concerned with reviewing AI products before they are released to the public. The machines must be racist.
Almost all of my analysis of the American right's unreality barging into culture and politics is centered on how powerful social media algorithms generate reality for true believers in the fascist cause, for those who want to adopt tech oligarch's unreality as their own. What I somehow missed in the run-up to the 2024 election was the tech oligarch's unfettered ability to curate realities for voters across the political spectrum, even – and especially – for those who hate their fucking guts.
My Bluesky buddy Jason Sattler at The Farce recently wrote a harrowing piece about the American right's devilish marriage to the country's tech oligarchs, who are intent on speed-running democratic decline.
The dirty digital dissembler handles the electorate. In 2024, advisers to Musk ran a $45 million false-flag campaign so precise in its cynicism that it deserves to be described slowly and disdainfully. Muslim voters in Michigan received pro-Israel ads designed to look like Harris campaign materials. Jewish voters in Pennsylvania received the opposite message from the same shop. Young liberals got videos about how Harris had betrayed the progressive movement. Working-class white men in the Midwest got warnings that Harris would institute racial quotas and take away their Zyn pouches. Four brand names, zero common origin, one coordinating strategy. They called it “false positives” internally. The goal was not persuasion. It was subtraction — push enough Democratic-leaning voters into confusion, disgust, or exhausted abstention. Harris dropped eight million votes from Biden’s 2020 total. Trump gained fewer than two million. The election was decided, as the architects intended, by subtraction.
And so you had millions and millions of people who in 2020 voted for the singularly uninspiring Joe Biden sit out the 2024 election, or decide to cast their lot with the candidate promising to ethnically cleanse and raze Gaza and build casinos and luxury hotels on the graves of Palestinians. Folks joke about psychological operations (psyops) on social media all the time. The thing we should remember about psyops – myself included – is that they work. No one, not even you, is immune to propaganda.
These psyops, which, to describe them accurately, make you sound deranged, are made possible with the cooperation of Musk and the X platform formerly known as Twitter. There's a reason, after all, the Trump regime has threatened to arrest and deport international researchers in the US who want to study AI and social media algorithms. Regime officials who are mostly stupid and disorganized and undisciplined understand one thing: Americans can never know what's in Elon Musk's black box, for the explanation for where we are today lies inside (ignore Musk's recent promises to make the X algorithm open source; this will be his version of releasing the Epstein Files).
Attacks and threats against social media researchers extends beyond the U.S. government and into Silicon Valley itself, where tech companies – working for the president and his lackeys – have abruptly cut off academics’ and nonprofits’ access to data and pursued legal action against researchers studying their social media platforms. It's not a conspiracy theory to say there is a concerted effort to conceal what hides beneath Mother Algo.
In the summer and fall of 2024 I had not thought about the kind of unreality creation outlined by Jason in The Farce. That's on me. Because I knew then and know now that the brain-killing machines resting in our pockets are controlled by our enemies. Maybe I was coping. Maybe I could not deal with the prospect of people – decent people, people who care about people – being so easily steered toward support for the strongman, and toward their own doom.
Denny Carter
The inhumanity of capitalism is enclosing at an exponential pace today, and that means the algorithms that were once conducive to democracy and self governance have been captured by the servants of capital. They will do the bidding of capital. They will unquestioningly follow capital's logical to its natural conclusion: Control over everything and the elimination of any barrier to capital's growth. It's why Twitter had to go. It's why Zuck went fast. It's why Trump walks into China for an official state visit with his little Silicon Valley piggies in tow, on leashes, eating shit. Capital must be serviced. Capturing the algorithms that dictate reality was a key – maybe The Key – to the whole hideous project, and using them against people who virulently oppose the project was a cute little trick in 2024.
Jason pointed to revealing work from University of Washington disinformation researcher Kate Starbird, who has shown disinformation most quickly spreads with "misinterpreted evidence, omitted context, exaggerated impact, falsely attributed intent, each handoff up the legitimacy chain, leaving no single actor caught having to answer for the lies."
This is nothing new: Republicans have been ratfucking their way into power for generations. What is new is the godforsaken technology that supercharges all this ratfucking. "What AI adds is scale, speed, and the terrifying capacity for individual targeting, the right lie, for the right voter, at the right moment of doubt," Jason writes.
All this, as Jason writes, is why the 2026 midterm elections are existential in every way, and might represent the last chance for pro-democracy forces to slip a footing the door before it shuts on them for years or decades or generations. The 2026 midterms will "set the template" for "whether the regulatory architecture governing AI gets built before the industry captures the builders."
The Republican Party and the AI industry over the past few years have become one unholy blob of world-ending fascism, sucking in Democrats here and there. They are one and the same, and they must be seen this way by elected Democrats and by an American public that does not understand the monstrous goals of Musk and Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and the rest of the billionaires who oppose the very idea of society and now have the means and the machines to end it.
I remain confident that the American electorate's pulsating disgust of the regime and their allies can carry pro-democracy leaders to power this year, as we saw last month in Hungary. Even so, I can't dismiss the possibility that I either won't and can't consider the algorithms' power to demoralize democracy enjoyers just enough to hang on to power and put the finishing touches on AI tycoons' plans: Namely, substituting actual reality for their unreality once and for all. For Democrats, there will be no point in governing without first heavily regulating artificial intelligence and using the power of government to destroy the empires of Musk and the rest. It's us or them. That's just the way it is.
BFT Pod Szn
Below is my weekly Bad Faith Times podcast for those who support the site (check out last week's here). I talked about Jason's piece in The Farce along with Maine Senate candidate Graham Planter's ideas for stopping the Supreme Court's anti-constitutional justices.
Thanks to all those who support BFT.
Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.
