Blog For Iowa

Allison Gill of Mueller She Wrote and Simon Rosenberg of Hopium Chronicles are two of the best people to follow on the internet. Allison was a guest on Simon’s podcast this weekend.  You’ll learn where the name Hopium Chronicles originated, a quite interesting anecdote.

“Hopium is an internet slang term that describes an unfounded or unrealistic state of optimism. The term is a portmanteau of hope and opium, implying that a person is using false hope as an addictive, mind-numbing drug to avoid facing a difficult or negative reality.”

The word does NOT describe Hopium Chronicles.

I hope you enjoy this amazing conversation as they parse through the new strategy of authoritarians, the polling industrial complex, the fall of Nate Silver, how to focus on the fight and the wins without getting nasty feedback from the internet, and much more.  I am including a text highlight from the conversation.  It confirms much of what I observed and you likely observed  from the past three elections. But the media doesn’t cover certain ideas or truths and Simon explains why. Here’s ten minutes of the conversation that I found fascinating and the rest of the conversation was just as good so I hope you watch.

Follow Allison Gill at Mueller She Wrote on Twitter and Blue Sky and elsewhere.

Follow Simon Rosenberg at Hopium Chronicles on Substack and Blue Sky and I’m sure plenty of other social media platforms including YouTube.

Simon Rosenberg: “I’ve been working full time in Democratic politics for over thirty years. I started my career as a TV producer and writer so I grew up on the media side of the business. I’ve always been in the communications side of politics. I came to believe during the course of Trumpism that one of his central strategies was to pump negative sentiment into our discourse every day and to make us feel bad about our country, our leaders, our institutions, each other, everything. And that we needed a strategy to respond to that negative sentiment by putting positive sentiment into the world, not because we just wanted to feel better, but because that negative sentiment was a precursor for Trump to push his radical politics.

He got up at the UN last week and told every country in the world their countries are horrible. The person who really first turned me onto this was Anne Applebaum and in 2016 she talked about how Trump’s speech at the Republican convention sounded as if it could have been written by Moscow, that of all of the indictments there was nothing uplifting about America. It was all the terrible things that we had done and she was so shocked by it because it was such an un-American speech and it was the beginning of me really starting to think about discourse, of us taking greater responsibility of managing our discourse. She’s since written about how the new strategy of authoritarians is not to tell you how good their countries are but to tell you how bad yours is as a matter of strategy to create again this kind of sense that we need something radically different than what we had.

I think Hopium in part came about through Nate Silver in 2022, a week before the election.  When I was saying that I thought the election was going to go better for us and there was going to be no red wave, he accused me of “smoking Hopium” and misleading the Democratic party.

And so when I founded my Substack community a few months later I used that as a way of acknowledging that part of the project was to reject the bullshit and to reject the corruption of our information space and to be far more purposeful about lifting America up and lifting each other up than tearing us down as part of my central undertaking.

And so I haven’t talked about this for a long time but that’s part of what’s behind it. Every day I try to stay very focused on, not dwell on all the terrible things that happen but what can we do that will make it more likely that we can mitigate the damage and win back power – that’s what we’re focused on in the Hopium community.”

Allison Gill: Ah, Nate Silver, heh-heh.. he and I got into a bit of a tussle when I pointed out that the WSJ poll that many corporate media conglomerates and 538, his podcast, were relying on about what the U.S. voters thought about Joe Biden and his age, that that WSJ poll kicked off the push to get Biden out of the race. I noted that the pollster that did that poll was Fabrizio-Lee, run by Tony Fabrizio. And if you’d like to do a word search for Fabrizio in the Mueller report you’ll find that he comes up quite often in the Mueller report. And so when I pointed that out, a lot of people including Steve Kornacki and Nate Silver and whoever hosts the 538 Politics podcast, not Nate himself, called me out and said that I was ignoring reality and again smoking Hopium. They didn’t reach out for comment, they just dragged me on their podcast..

Simon: Yeah,  the fact that President Trump’s pollster, while he’s working for Trump, does a poll that is considered to be “independent” is part of the corruption of the whole information space around polling.

What happened with the red wave in 2022 and why everyone got the election wrong was that independent polling showed the race close, but the Republicans dropped fifty of these very right-wing polls that were far more Republican than the independent polling and those got put into the polling averages and the polling averages then moved to the right. And so if you were just following the polling averages, you saw a red wave. If you dis-aggregated those polls from the polling averages, the independent polls, you showed a close competitive election.

So I had the audacity to dismiss fifty polls… the way the system works, is what Nate Silver was telling us at the time, is that even if those are Republican funded polls, you throw everything into the blender, it all comes out okay. But garbage in, garbage out. This was an attempt to game the polling averages; the same thing happened in 2024. Instead of fifty polls they had one hundred and fifty polls in 2024.

And so like every other part of the information space that we live in now, polling and early vote data are contested spaces by the right where they use illicit tactics to gain advantage.

I mean this shouldn’t be a big surprise. Once you tried to overturn the American government in 2021, you know, throwing fifty right-wing polls into the polling averages is like miniature golf compared to what Trump had done in 2021… But the polling industrial complex defends itself because so many people make money off of interpreting this stuff. And we even had it just happen this week…” WATCH.

“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” Andy Dufresne, The Shawshank Redemption.