2019: Well, That Was Interesting....

by Ben Cohen

It has been an extraordinary year for The Banter for a number of reasons, the primary being our continued presence online. We are still here, despite Facebook’s attempts to wipe all small publishers off the internet, and still going at the Trump administration with all our might.

We were out for the count by the end of 2018 after Facebook took away over 70% of our traffic and decimated our ad earnings, and I was on the verge of shutting the site down for good. This was particularly devastating for us given the urgency of the political situation and the need for responsible outlets to report accurately on the news. Thankfully, a truly brilliant email publishing platform, Substack, came along and gave us a lifeline to restart our endeavor in a completely new format. While The Daily Banter died, The Banter Newsletter was born in February of 2019, and here we are almost a year later with a rapidly growing audience and very healthy subscriber base. Thanks to our unwaveringly loyal readers, we aren’t going anywhere.

It has also been extraordinary year in politics, perhaps more so than the previous two, and all thanks to the madman in chief, Donald Trump.

The War on Reality

Donald Trump’s war on reality in 2019 has been unyielding, and Americans are now entrenched in a grim battle for the future of the country. From the release of the Mueller report in April to the beginnings of impeachment proceedings over Ukrainegate in September, 2019 has been filled with enough political drama to last a lifetime. Unfortunately, we now live in an era where a decade’s worth of scandal happens in under a week. And not just the odd week — every week of every month of every year. This isn’t because both sides are just as bad as each other — it is because one side is protecting a deeply unstable megalomaniac with the intellect of, as former Secretary of Defense James Matthis put it, “a fifth or sixth grader”.

Worse than the scandals are the lies — 15,413 false or misleading claims over 1,055 days, as the Washington Post recently reported. Trump has lied about everything conceivable — from making up weather reports to denying attempts to bribe Ukraine, there isn’t a topic the president hasn’t lied about.

The effects of Trump’s non stop battle with facts and evidence have been catastrophic. The country is largely uninterested in impeachment, and Trump supporters are now so immune to reality that nothing could ever convince them that their man has done something wrong. The election in 2020 looks to be unnervingly close — a repeat of 2016 where a seasoned, qualified politician has to fight tooth and nail to compete with a crooked reality TV star with a storied history of misogyny, racism, and sexual assault.

The Sanity Needed to Cover the Insanity

Fortunately for the team at The Banter, we’ve had a less hectic publishing schedule to cover this insanity. When publishing multiple articles a day on The Daily Banter, the team had little time to think or digest the onslaught of news coming in. This was extremely wearing for everyone, and I believe the quality towards the end was suffering. I’m not ready to say Facebook’s obliteration of our audience was a blessing in disguise, but publishing more long form pieces at a slower pace has meant we’ve been able to craft more thoughtful, more in depth pieces that are, I believe, of more use to our readers. From a personal point of view, I now thoroughly enjoy the writing and editing process, and spend significantly more time making sure everything we publish is of a high standard.

The relationship we have with our readers is far more intimate, and we never have to worry about traffic, advertising rates or wretched Facebook newsfeed algorithms. We are sustained entirely by subscription and the mega tech corporations can do nothing to stop us accessing our audience. Way back in 2007 I began emailing Banter articles to friends and family. 12 years later, we’re going back to our roots. The future of publishing it turns out, is the old fashioned email.

A Grueling Year For Everyone

I’d like to take the time on the last day of the calendar year to give a special thanks to everyone reading us. If you are subscribed to The Banter in any way (paid or not), you clearly care about the state of politics in America and want to stay informed about what is going on. You’ve entrusted us to digest and synthesize the news for you, and it has been a real honor to do so. I do not underestimate the psychological toll the political situation has had on you or the rest of the country during this destabilizing time, but by banding together we can collectively maintain our sanity and fight Trumpism effectively.

The Trump administration’s strategy is to undermine everything you believe in — to destroy truth and reason, and wear you down so that you no longer care what is happening to the country. The constant lies and conspiracy theories created by Trump and his band of fascist thugs are tools of distraction. They want you to focus on anything and everything but themselves, and are willing to destroy their own government in the process. He is attempting to destroy Joe Biden in the same way he bulldozed Hillary Clinton in 2016, and he will do the same to any other Democrat he perceives as being a threat to him in 2020. The GOP has supported him without question, shamefully shielding him from an entirely legitimate impeachment process and refusing to accept hard evidence of blatant criminality.

The only way this continues is if good people stop caring. You clearly care, and by joining communities of others who care too, the Trumpism can be fought and beaten.

2020: Make or Break For America

The next year is going to be the most important year in US political history. If Trump is re-elected, it is unclear whether the country will survive as a modern democracy. Trump bends people and institutions to his will, creating a government increasingly in his own image. This is how dictatorships are started, and the US is just as vulnerable to a hostile takeover of democracy as any other nation in history.

At The Banter, our philosophy is simple: we will not give an inch to this madness. Not one. There can be no yielding to fascism or the cowards who enable it, and we will continue fighting hard to combat the non-stop lies and conspiracies coming out of the White House.

Take heart in the fact that you are not going insane, that there are others committed to stopping this madness, and in time, we will be victorious. As President Obama told president Trump during their meeting in the White House in 2016, “reality has a way of asserting itself”.

We are that reality, and we are asserting ourselves with as much vigor as we can.

A Happy New Year to you all, and see you in 2020!!

Ben and the team at Banter

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