Hi everyone,
Once again, I need to start with a giant, all-caps THANK YOU. It’s Only Drowning has been out for only two days and - despite this being a tough week to break through the news cycle - it’s going great.
And to be totally frank, the biggest reason why is readers of this newsletter. I appreciate it so much.
The past 48 hours have been filled with highlights - one of them came last night, when I got to talk about everything from Iran to judges to the book on 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle’s on MSNBC. And a highlight among highlights was hearing from so many of you who enjoyed the excerpt I posted yesterday.
With that in mind, I wanted to share a completely different part of the book - one that deals more directly with current events.
This comes about halfway through, right after Matt and I have wrapped up a trip to an artificial wave pool in Waco, Texas. When I got on the flight to go home, I was still giddy with excitement over my new surf skills.
As you’ll see, it didn’t last.
[As always, if you like what you read, I hope you’ll pick up a copy of It’s Only Drowning today from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or a local bookstore via bookshop.org.]
On the flight back to D.C., I watched a clip from the wave pool in Waco, Texas, paying particular attention to an impish wiggle at the end. I had turned a surfboard! It was a tiny turn, a mini-turn, a soupçon of a turn, but a turn nonetheless. The passenger beside me shifted. I angled my screen, hoping he’d glance over.
That’s not you, is it?” he would ask.
“Well, actually . . .”
“That’s incredible!”
“Oh, it’s not hard. You just have to square your shoulders.”
My neighbor pulled out a book, so I never got to wow him with my humility. But that didn’t stop me from replaying the clip, sliding my finger right to left across the screen like one of those rats they teach to push buttons for cocaine. Thirty thousand feet in the air, I remained a full-time resident of surf world.
Then the wheels hit the tarmac and the real world returned. “Call me please,” read the text from my wife. I assumed our puppy had done something destructive; her most gremlinesque episodes always seemed to occur when I was surfing. But the moment Jacqui answered, I knew this was more serious than a chewed-up slipper. I’d never heard her sound so terrified.
As with most things involving conspiracy theories, the short version of what happened is pretty long. But here goes:
Several weeks earlier, after taking over Twitter, Elon Musk announced he’d discovered something scandalous: the company’s anti-misinformation team was working in concert with the deep state to censor conservatives online. To prove his claim—and to justify firing most of the team’s members—he leaked a batch of internal company emails to the writers of his favorite online newsletters. These bloggers then turned around and released a small fraction of the batch to the public, on Twitter.
Even without context, an examination of the “Twitter Files” showed mostly what you’d expect: a group of human beings making difficult judgement calls, sometimes successfully and other times not. But such analysis reflected a quaint understanding of scandal. Musk and his allies began with a verdict: the company’s former employees were out to get them. Then they searched for evidence. It was an investigative method that left no room for reason or doubt. All information was either proof of conspiracy, proof of a cover-up, or discarded as irrelevant.
On its own, the story likely would have fizzled. There wasn’t enough there there. So, politicians stepped in to keep it in the news. In March, Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican in charge of the House Judiciary Committee, scheduled a hearing so some of the Musk-friendly writers could air their claims in an official setting. In April, one of those writers admitted in an interview that many of the things he said under oath were not exactly true. Democrats on the committee, in a ham-fisted but typical bit of bluster, sent a letter reminding him that lying to Congress is a crime.
To Musk, Jordan, and the rest of the anti-anti-misinformation movement, the letter was further proof of their claims, another example of the regime persecuting a man for bravely telling the not-quite-truth. One member of that movement looked into the process by which the letter had been conceived, scrubbed the metadata from the Word document, and reported that the letter’s author was a judiciary committee staffer: Jacqui Kappler.
This happened to be inaccurate. While Jacqui had created the original document on her computer, like most things on Capitol Hill it had been revised by a small army of staff and approved by a member of Congress. Whether one thought the line about lying to Congress deserved blame or credit, someone else had penned it. But—and here I’m editorializing, but I’m pretty sure I’m right—the outrage machine has never been exceptionally worried about accuracy. What matters is that it’s fed. And now, my wife was on the menu.
Politics, as the saying goes, ain’t beanbag. But when did it become Russian roulette? Ten years ago, a staffer would be named in an article if they were the animating force behind a decision or if they hit someone with their car. In most cases, though, there were bigger fish to fry—elected officials who could afford bodyguards and had interns to screen abusive messages and calls. All that seems old-fashioned now. It’s not just congressional staff in the crosshairs. A TV weatherman in Idaho was bullied into early retirement because he talked about climate change; a Stanford disinformation researcher was forced to move her family into hiding; FBI agents were shot at after Trump was indicted; doctors and nurses at a Boston hospital were sent into lockdown by a bomb threat because their workplace treated transgender youth.
“Don’t worry,” I reassured Jacqui on the phone. “There are, like, twenty of these stories a week. Nineteen of them don’t lead to anything.”
“What if we’re the twentieth?”
“Then we’ll get a ton of death threats and probably have to move.”
“Oh, good,” she said.
As soon as I got home, I hurried inside and locked the door. Then we sat down and checked the internet to see whether our lives would be ruined. Some guy left nasty comments on one of my Instagram puppy pictures. Another, realizing I was Jewish and assuming Jacqui was as well, started an anti-Semitic smear campaign against her. But he got only four likes, the online equivalent of pulling the trigger and hearing the click of an empty chamber, and the outrage machine lumbered on. As night fell, we sat on the couch, pets in close proximity, and gradually untensed.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” Jacqui said.
I exhaled deeply, thinking about everything we’d gone through, and looked into her eyes.
“Did you see the way I turned on that wave?”
Thank you again for your incredible support of It’s Only Drowning - and of me in general. It’s hard to believe, but launch week is almost over. So if you like what you’ve been reading and haven’t yet bought a copy, I would be beyond grateful if you got one from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or a local bookstore via bookshop.org today.
David
P.S. I loved reading your comments after yesterday’s excerpt. If you have any new early reviews, favorite (or least favorite) lines, or questions about the writing process, let me know!
David, I am so looking forward to reading your book, especially after the excerpts you've shared. Thank you!
You ruled with Ruhle last night (with cool surfers shots)!