This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

In case no one knows, The Masters’ Golf Tournament is over for the year, though the memories will linger with me for months.

This means it’s time to stop writing Masters’ blogs, so I go today to a continuing peril for all of us – disinformation.

It’s the attempt by various individuals – read the main one being Donald Trump – to befoul the air with bombast and lies.

The Atlantic Magazine wrote about this peril this week:

“We are living in a modern Babel, Jonathan Haidt argues:  ‘America is polarized, factionalized, and angry.’  He blames social media—specifically, how it evolved after 2009.

“Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies:  Social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories, Haidt writes.  ‘Social media has weakened all three.’”

Trump was merely the first politician to exploit this new political and cultural environment.  There will be more.  There already are.

But, how do we put the country back together again?  Haidt, the author, proposes three reforms, each of which will take time, if they have the potenjtial to be successful at all.

1. Harden democratic institutions. 

“Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district.  One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries, replacing them with a single, non-partisan, open primary from which the top several candidates advance to a general election that also uses ranked-choice voting.”

2. Reform social media. 

“The main problem with social media is not that some people post fake or toxic stuff; it’s that fake and outrage-inducing content can now attain a level of reach and influence that was not possible before 2009.  Perhaps the biggest single change that would reduce the toxicity of existing platforms would be user verification as a pre-condition for gaining the algorithmic amplification that social media offers.”

3. Prepare the next generation. 

“The most important change we can make to reduce the damaging effects of social media on children is to delay entry until they have passed through puberty.  More generally, to prepare the members of the next generation for post-Babel democracy, perhaps the most important thing we can do is let them out to play.”

As I write this, I remember a major Atlantic article that ran before the last presidential election.  It posited that Trump’s major campaign strategy would be to impart disinformation.

He did.

I even remember the name of Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, who made his professional reputation by lying, cheating, and stealing, no matter the consequences.

The good news is that, in the end, neither Parscale nor Trump was successful despite the vitriol they espoused then and continue to espouse today about a stolen election.

It’s just another of Trump’s actions as a narcissist – he lies all the time as a matter of course.  Truth doesn’t matter.  Nor does context.  Nor does the future of this country.

In another article this week, Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg wrote this:

“Last week, a Michigan congresswoman whose existence had not yet entered the rest of the country’s consciousness credited, Donald Trump with having ‘caught Osama bin Laden,’ among other terrorists.

“It is difficult to forget that night in 2011 when Barack Obama told the world that, on his orders, a team of Navy commandos had killed the al-Qaeda leader.  But Representative Lisa McClain, a first-term member of Congress, showed that, with effort, and with a desire to feed Trump’s delusions and maintain her standing among his supporters, anything is possible.

“In ordinary times, McClain’s claim would have been mocked and then forgotten.  But because these are not ordinary times — these are times in which citizens of the same country live in entirely different information realities — I put her assertion about bin Laden on a kind of watch list.

“In six months, I worry, we may learn that a provably false claim made by a single unserious congressional backbencher has spread into MAGA America, a place where Barack Obama is believed to be a Kenyan-born Muslim and Donald Trump is thought to be the victim of a coup.

“Disinformation is the story of our age.  We see it at work in Russia, whose citizens have been led to believe the lies that Ukraine is an aggressor nation and that the Russian army is winning a war against modern-day Nazis.

“We see it at work in Europe and the Middle East, where conspiracies about hidden hands and occult forces are adopted by those who, in the words of the historian Walter Russell Mead, lack the ability to ‘see the world clearly and discern cause and effect relations in complex social settings.’

“We see it weaponized by authoritarians around the globe, for whom democracy, accountability, and transparency pose mortal threats.  And we see it, of course, in our own country, in which tens of millions of voters believe that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president because the man he beat in 2020 specializes in sabotaging reality for personal and political gain.”

So, what happens in what could be called the “disinformation age,” not the “information age?”

Mass delusion has enormous consequences for the future of democracy, especially in the U.S.

As one expert noted, “Democracy depends on the consent of the losers.”

But, the Atlantic continues, “Sophisticated, richly funded, technology-enabled disinformation campaigns are providing losers with other options.” 

They don’t have to accept losing in the sense of losing a political argument or contest.  They want to fight.  They want to oppose.  They even want to kill. 

For all of us, we need to focus, as much as we can, on the difference between disinformation posted by those who want to influence with lies and innuendo, and information you simply don’t like or find narratively inconvenient.

Decide first, with energy and intellect, what you think, by relying on credible sources of information.  Then be willing, in a spirit of compromise and openness, to consider what others think, and, even, be willing to change your mind.

Also, avoid drowning in social media, with its inherent excesses.  

That’s the way to limit disinformation.