Every time I have sat down in the past couple of weeks to write a post I am overwhelmed by a sense of doom and gloom, and just found myself staring at the screen. This doom and gloom of course reached a high, or should that be low, on Wednesday the 9th of November, when the announcement that Donald Trump was now the US President elect was made.  To be honest it wasn’t a surprise, in fact I remember saying to a lot of my colleagues that he would win. One of my colleagues told me to put some money on the outcome if I was so sure, as the odds were very good. I replied that I couldn’t do that as I didn’t want to profit from such a disastrous result-although I could have given the money to the excellent ProPublica.

If you haven’t heard of ProPublica to quote from its website,

‘ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. ‘

and its mission is:-

‘To expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform through the sustained spotlighting of wrongdoing.’  (https://www.propublica.org/about/)

It would be easy to say that only bigots and racists voted for Trump, and I am sure that a lot did, but not everyone that voted for him can be labelled as such. Trump’s promises appealed to that forgotten class which has been left behind in the wake of post industrial capitalism. The divide between the haves and the have nots is wider than ever. Politics seems incapable of providing a vision for the future, where everyone indeed has a future. (Watch the excellent HyperNormalisation, Adam Curtis’s latest offering, on the BBC iPlayer if you get the chance.) The only people who seem to get rewarded in our Neoliberalist western world, are the people at the top, the people with power and wealth, who seem intent on making sure that the system benefits them, and if you aren’t part of the wealth making machine, it is your own fault.

The opportunity to start to provide a new vision for the future was missed following the financial meltdown in 2007. One banker was prosecuted in the USA and no one in the UK. Only Iceland seemed to take the matter seriously, and laid the blame for the collapse very much at the feet of the bankers and politicians who caused the collapse. This is where the seeds of disillusionment were sown and hate and blame have grown as a result. Trump has tapped into that hate and provided easy targets for the forgotten class-mostly white and male-to blame, the immigrants, refugees, Mexicans and so on. AsTrump has pointed out, quite rightly, the system is sick, about that there is no argument, but Trump is not the person to fix it. He is a liar and an opportunist, a bigot and a misogynist. As my good friend who lives in Boston would say…”we are all going to hell in a hand cart”. I really, really hope she is wrong and that there is a more positive vision out there.

One thing this election, and the Brexit vote back in June, showed very clearly, was the power of social media, and I don’t mean that in a good way. What was demonstrated was the ease with which lies and misinformation can be posted and circulated, in many cases going viral, and the subsequent ease with which those lies and misinformation were believed. We have long known about the power of traditional media-the fourth estate-to misinform, but the use of social media adds a whole new dimension fifth estate? What is now more than ever, is teaching people the skill of evaluating information, so that they know its source and how reliable and valid that information is. That will be the topic of the next blog. Expect some references to a television show of the 19902 ‘Drop the Dead Donkey’ which will provide some excellent illustrations of how information is manipulated depending upon who is pulling the strings.