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I won the Iowa caucuses.
Well, that was weird, right. I admit it was kind of fun to watch the tv news people just outwardly berate the people of Iowa from their shiny towers in New York City in the wee hours of a Tuesday morning. They all but called them corn-fed country bumpkins. But here’s the thing: I won the caucuses.
They don’t want you to know, and so they tried to block the results. What you ultimately hear will be the biggest coverup in coverup in US politics since… well since last week when Senate Republicans went on record allowing our future democratic president — which is me — to do all the crimes I want and never be removed from office.
As your new president, let me tell you about testing your app before you launch. What really seems to have happened in Iowa is some genius promised “there’s an app for that” to replace the totally working solution of precinct captains calling in their results. They didn’t adequately test the software, and when they needed it most, it failed. This is the launch of healthcare.gov all over again. This is early Twitter and the fail whale. This is America, where we worship at the altar of business, technology, and so-called “innovation” while outsourcing our most critical infrastructure to anyone with a good PowerPoint deck
The real loser isn’t Iowa or its state Democratic Party or even the app developers. The loser is us. Democracy is a faith-based institution. It requires people to believe in it, like “God” or “the dollar” or “Popeyes.” When we lose that faith, that trust in the legitimacy of the system, the system becomes less legitimate, which gives us more reason to lose trust, which weakens the system, which reduces trust and so on and so forth. It’s a death spiral.
In between the turns of that spiral, bad actors like our president will point to this to prove that “the system is rigged” and a subreddit agitator will rant on YouTube about the deep state and people too busy to know who to trust will opt out which further erodes the legitimacy of the system.
Fun right? Don’t worry. I’m the president now, and in the future, we won’t have elections to worry about. We’ll just ask Alexa for things and bow down to Lord Bezos who will provide everything we could ever desire so long as it isn’t freedom or self-determination. Those are overrated anyway.
And now, for your regularly-scheduled content.
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