It’s seldom that one person so neatly encapsulates an entire way of thinking and the demographic that embodies it…
Such a person is 47-year-old Sharon McMahon, a former American Government teacher from Minnesota. (If you’re wondering who elected Tim Walz look no more!)
Ms. McMahon is a tall, willowy blond who has the Minnesota accent that could get her on Garrison Keillor‘s old radio show, as well as the politics that go with it. She first rose to prominence on social media when she launched a systematic campaign to disabuse the rest of us of misconceptions about COVID and the 2020 elections. As she coyly put it, itís not easy dealing with people who are so dumb they think that the Electoral College is a place, an actual degree granting institution, with itís own campus. (Yeah, and infant Kamala Harris’s first word was Fwee-dom).
As McMahon’s web site points out, it’s only natural that as a former high school teacher she would dedicate herself to fighting ‘misinformation’. As she said, once you understand the non-partisan facts, you will feel less ‘afraid.’ You know, obvious factual propositions, empirically verifiable, like ‘Trump is literally Hitler,’ or ‘Kamala Harris is one of the most accomplished people in American politics today’ or ‘Inflation is transitory’ or ‘The border is secure, or would have been except for Trump’ or ‘Crime is way down in the U.S.’
You know, propositions that every thinking person who drives a Prius with a COEXIST bumper sticker instinctively understands to be true.
Ms. McMahon has now parlayed her fame as an internet warrior against misinformation into becoming a bestselling author. Her first book is ‘The Small and the Mighty’ – actually a very enjoyable anthology of biographical sketches of half a dozen Americans in history. These include educators, philanthropists, and local civic leaders. None are household names, and each overcame incredible misfortune to achieve their dreams.
Ms. McMahon then wove skillfully into this reading of her book at a local library function in Kansas City last week high praise for the role of public libraries as a bulwark of democracy. She gave examples of self-taught American heroes and their championing the tradition of public libraries in the country, among them Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin.
The audience consisted of true believers, a thousand strong, three quarters women and a quarter men (think, White Dudes for Harris). After the encomiums to libraries as a place of refuge, the snark fest began.
First there were attacks on J.D. Vance (sarcastic asides about childless cat ladies’) as well as Elon Musk. (‘Who cares about building a weirdly shaped rocket ship?’) There was also an oblique reference to Project 2025, i.e. ‘If someone has a plan who says he wants to be a dictator, believe him.’ (Elon Musk said that Project 2025 is Q-Anon for liberals and he is right.)
Then a really strange interlude followed.
There is a well-known trope in fantasy literature where there is an evil leader whose actual name is known but cannot be spoken – either by his own followers out of respect or by others out of fear. Ms. McMahon managed this trick neatly.
In the midst of a heartwarming anecdote about the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, McMahon teared up, dabbed her eyes and stopped speaking. (She had described how Benjamin Franklin had noticed the image of a shining sun carved into the back of another delegate’s chair.)
‘We are the same moment we were at then. Was the sun rising on us as a country or setting?….I know many of you are feeling extreme anxiety right now. It is a time fraught with peril. It feels powerless. Some people feel the wolf at the door. I don’t know if the wolf gets in the house. But we have the power to make this America’s rising sun moment! Maybe history will look back and say this was the moment things changed.’
Trump as Voldemort, Sauron, Beelzebub.
What followed was a series of double talk worthy of the high-pressure sales techniques showcased in David Mamet’s ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ about a boiler room operation selling time shares from a grimy office in Chicago’s Loop.
McMahon was adamant about doing everything possible to stop the spread of misinformation, but was also insistent that censorship must be avoided at all costs. It never seems to have dawned on her that one person’s fighting misinformation is another person’s censorship.
Nor did she realize that suppressing opposing points of view can be rationalized as simply standing up for The Truth, i.e. non-partisan facts (whatever those are).
A perfect example is found on her Instagram account, where she vows to debunk the idea that America is a constitutional republic rather than a democracy. This seems to me an opinion or conclusion rather than demonstrable fact.
After all, when her hero Franklin was asked at the end of the Constitutional Convention what form of government the drafters had given the country he answered; ‘A Republic, if you can keep it.’
No one in that thousand person audience realized how close we are to losing it, not least the speaker, ‘Americaís Favorite High School Government Teacher,’ but for precisely the opposite reasons than they might imagine.
