The Sliver Who Decide

I think I'm starting to figure out what's happening in America.

Traditionally, the United States was a 30/30/30/10 electorate: thirty percent registered Republicans, thirty percent registered Democrats, thirty percent registered Independents, and about 10 percent unaffiliated. However, the thirty percent of Independents weren’t truly independent—they usually leaned toward one party or the other. This effectively created a 45/45/10 split, roughly speaking. This balance has become increasingly tribalized since the 1990s, coinciding with the rise of cable news and the segmentation of information consumption.

Over the past 20 years, social media’s algorithmic influence through personal devices has further hardened this fragmentation. Social media ensures that people consume information from sources that reinforce their beliefs, rarely exposing them to alternative perspectives. As a result, the 45/45/10 divide has solidified. The results of the 2024 election bear this out: as of Monday afternoon, Trump stood at 49.94% of the popular vote, while Harris was at 48.26%. As late ballots from California are counted, this margin will likely shrink, but the election, as most polls predicted, was essentially a coin toss.

It all comes down to turnout—and not just any turnout, but specifically the turnout of the 10% who decide elections. The question is: who are they, and what motivates them?

This 10% represents the lowest-propensity voters—individuals who are least interested, least informed, and least engaged. They are just as likely to skip voting as they are to participate. These voters often glean information passively from the "informational ether" rather than actively seeking it out. They are particularly susceptible to rumor over fact because rumors spread more easily in today’s fragmented information environment. They are more likely to be influenced by emotional appeals, fear, and anxiety and to favor familiar names over the unfamiliar.

Many commentators point to the educational divide in American politics as a key factor, and while education plays a role, it’s not simply about distrust of elites. Less educated voters are often less likely to seek out diverse information sources. The familiarity of a candidate like trump, combined with his simple, emotionally charged messaging, contrasted sharply with Harris’s substance-driven style. This dynamic favored trump, especially with the low-propensity voters who now hold outsized sway.

Two facts from the 2024 election illustrate this:

Lower Turnout: Approximately 5 million fewer votes were cast in 2024 (153.5 million) compared to 2020 (158.5 million). Lower turnout tends to favor Republicans, partly because of targeted voter suppression efforts in swing states. The turnout numbers suggest that Harris struggled to motivate low-propensity voters.

The Rise of Bullet Ballots: A "bullet ballot" is a vote cast only for the top of the ticket, with no down-ballot selections. Historically, these have accounted for less than 1% of total votes, even in recent elections like trump’s win in 2016 or Biden’s in 2020. In 2024, however, bullet ballots surged in swing states, making up 7.2% of votes in Arizona (123,000 votes) and 5.5% in Nevada (43,000 votes). These numbers are significant enough to determine outcomes. While some suggest foul play, it’s equally plausible that disengaged voters only chose the most familiar candidate—trump—at the top of the ticket.

It’s not that Americans are "getting dumber" as some claim; in fact, this is the most educated and literate population in its history. The issue is that elections are increasingly decided by the least engaged and least informed segment of the electorate. Reaching and motivating this group has become the entire game. This isn’t their fault—it’s the result of systemic polarization. However, the locked and hardened nature of the two major voting blocs creates a "tyranny of the minority." This dynamic poses a serious threat to democracy, paving the way for autocracy.

The challenge is clear: finding ways to engage this disengaged segment is critical to preserving democratic institutions. Without systemic changes, the influence of the least-informed voters will only grow, creating a fragile and volatile electoral system.

No One Turns Me Madder Than You

CLICK HERE TO HEAR THE SONG

You say you love me, 

So why am I blue?

You think you own me,

But that aint true.

No matter what I try to do,

No one turns me madder than you. 

I give you money,

And all of my time. 

But it don’t stop you, 

From all your lyin.

No matter what I try to do,

No one turns me madder than you.

You talk about me, 

To all of your friends.

And what I’m hearing,

Deeply offends.

No matter what I try to do,

No one turns me madder than you. 

I ain’t done nothin,

To cause you pain.

But all your talkin,

Drives me insane.

No matter what I try to do,

No one turns me madder than you. 

So please I’m beggin,

Stop all your games.

Puttin me down,

With your false claims.

No matter what I try to do,

No one turns me madder than you.

I say I’m leaving,

You knew I would. 

And I say this time, 

That it’s for good.

No matter what I try to do,

No one turns me madder than you. 

The Buggy-Whip's Revenge

One of the Allan Lichtman's favourite claims about his 13 Keys to the White House system is that it's robust and time-tested, developed from looking at 165 years of presidential elections, he claims, 'since the days of the buggy whip.' He uses 'the buggy-whip' phrase in response to critics who ask if it's possible whether technology will force him to change the system, for example, because of the way information is conveyed today compared to earlier years. Lichtman has argued that the Keys cannot be changed on the fly. He says, 'the Keys worked before there was radio, before there was television, before there were computers and the internet.' Actually no it didn't. 

The Keys have actually only worked since 1984, Reagan's reelection, the first election he predicted correctly. Exactly forty years later, with the unexpected result of the 2024 election which the Keys (or more accurately Allan using the Keys) got wrong, he is forced to reconsider his position and claims. And I began to think about what he missed and why. 

Lichtman has come to the conclusion that the main reason the Keys failed this time was because of the  impact of disinformation, which he calls 'unprecedented'. His reasoning is that the Keys are based on the performance of the incumbent government not the campaign. But that basis gets called into question when voters are unable to accurately assess the performance of the governing party. If they are besieged by misinformation and disinformation it makes a fair assessment impossible. The speed and pervasiveness of disinformation is why he believes we are living through 'unprecedented' times. 

But are we?  

If disinformation is the problem, then first off, he'd have to admit that his correct predictions going back to at least 2016 were just lucky. Disinformation was certainly prevalent back then. Lichtman has argued that it wasn't as prevalent as it is today, which may or may not be true. But then he'd have to explain exactly when the disinformation tipping point occurred and why.

I began to think that Lichtman actually has it backward. He's wrong today because he is right, in a way. He's right to diagnose the problem of the Keys as being the disinformation environment. But he's wrong to say that it's unprecedented. In fact, disinformation and bias was much worse a hundred years ago, and even worse at the time of 'the buggy-whip'. My guess is that the Keys would not have worked as a predictive system back then. I'd argue that the only reason why his system has worked at all since the early 80s is because most information was consumed in a centralized and more or less homogenous way since the advent of television. The era of mass-media through television was the first time that most Americans got their information in the same way and through only a handful of trusted sources that adhered to journalistic standards. The 'Walter Cronkite' era of news and information has not been the rule in American history, it's actually been more the exception.     

There have been several distinctive eras when Americans have lived with pervasive disinformation and inside information silos, and they were associated with political and social upheaval:

1. The Era of Radio (1914 - 1945)

The first massive technological shift in the widespread dissemination of information. With the rise of radio, governments and media outlets heavily regulated and censored news to rally public support and maintain morale during the two wars. News outlets leaned into nationalistic and, at times, propagandistic tones. War-time propaganda often left out nuanced perspectives, leaning heavily toward the government’s stance on both domestic and international issues. During World War II, news coverage was patriotic and promoted the Allies’ goals, with critical information about the war effort or allied mistakes often downplayed or omitted.

2. The Era of "Yellow Journalism" (1890s - early 1920s)

Yellow journalism was characterized by sensationalized stories, exaggerated headlines, and little regard for factual accuracy, with newspapers competing for readership, especially in rapidly growing cities. This era’s reporting often shaped public opinion through dramatic and often misleading coverage. For instance, yellow journalism played a significant role in stirring public support for the Spanish-American War in 1898.

3. The Partisan Press of the Early Republic (1780s - 1860s)

Newspapers during the early years of the United States were explicitly partisan. Papers were often funded by political parties or prominent politicians, and their primary role was to advocate for a particular political viewpoint rather than objective news reporting. Partisan newspapers played an essential role in political mobilization, with many acting as mouthpieces for emerging political parties (e.g., Federalists vs. Anti-Federalists, then later Federalists vs. Democratic-Republicans).

Many argue that today’s era represents a peak in news bias due to the sheer speed, reach, and personalization of information through social media and digital platforms. It's perhaps more accurate to say that information bias has ebbed and flowed throughout history. Rather than thinking our time is 'unprecendented', perhaps it's more instructive to take a deep dive into the preceding eras to explore how they have been impacted by information bias, and how they have responded to it.

trump 2.0 - A Good Thing

I'm strangely sanguine about trump 2.0. 

Part of it probably has to do with how in recent days I've become wary of the five-alarm fire mode that I get from my online information sources. Post-election, I'm more attuned to the fact that the outrage machine is as much a phenomenon of the center-left as it is of the far-right, and during the campaign it was on overdrive. These days I have my intellectual filters on. I'm trying to look at things with a bit of perspective.  

Part of it might also have to do with eating humble pie - I was so convinced that Harris was going to win the election, and trump was going to either be fitted with a prisoner monitoring anklet or spend the rest of his days fighting in the courts to stay out of jail. But instead we learned what we already knew, rich people don't often go to jail, and there are two justice systems one for the wealthy and well-connected and one for everyone else. It stings to see it confirmed for the umpteenth time, but in retrospect it's not that surprising. Trump has already achieved his main re-election goal: To stay out of jail. We had hoped otherwise, but we knew it was always very possible. 

I don't think this version of trump means America will sink into full-on authoritarianism. It's true that trump has autocratic aspirations, but let's face it, the guy is an unhealthy, disinterested octogenarian. He's got golf on his mind, not absolute power. He's not an ideologue with a strategy and program, like Victor Orban in Hungary. He covets all the trappings of success, wants money and fame and the image of power. But I think he's too venal and lazy to want the responsibilities and hassles associated with actually wielding power. You can already see this in his first picks for his Cabinet. A hodge-podge of characters, most of whom have no or little experience for their positions. Their main qualifications are that they look good on television (Peter Hegseth, Kristi Noem), straight out of central casting, as trump likes to say, and they were lapdog loyal to trump. It's always about image with trump, never substance. Substance is too much work. With trump there is always sure to be a lot of incompetence. And that's a good thing.

Don't get me wrong, I think trump 2.0 is going to be bad. Probably worse than his first term, but maybe only a little bit worse than Dubya Bush, who sunk America into a war from which it could not extricate itself for two decades. Bush was probably the most ignorant President of my lifetime until trump. He did a lot of damage. But unlike Dubya, trump is positively allergic to war. He is certainly capable of fumbling into one, that's true. He'll get a lot of pressure from his buddy Bibi to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, but I think he'll resist. On the foreign policy front, Putin will make a fool of him (it's already started), and the instant peace he claimed he could achieve in Ukraine and the Middle-East, will be exposed for the nonsense it always was. But hey, if trump is capable of bringing peace and security to the world, I'm all for it. That would be a good thing.

Trump's second objective this election, after staying out of jail, was always the grift. He will do whatever he can to leverage his office to make money in whatever way he can. This will likely mean selling access to foreign leaders, compromising national security in any number of ways, further enriching his friends and coterie of loyalists. This presidency will far exceed the corruption of his first term. But I suspect it will be on full display, or at the very least, easily uncovered. And that's a good thing.

Where trump will do his most damage is domestically, and especially to the people who voted for him. He's already effectively signaled his intention of handing the keys to the administration to Elon Musk who will be in charge of something called the Department of Government Efficiency, a non-governmental 'agency'. Elon views government as a bloated inefficient corporation. His objective, in the words of Speaker Mike Johnson, will be to 'take a blowtorch' to the adminstrative and regulatory state. Of course that means getting rid of, or severely cutting back on, all of the programs that benefit the most disadvantaged citizens. To quote Elon from the campaign, 'it will mean hardship in the short term'. I trust that Elon (and his partner in crime Vivek Ramaswamy) will do what he says they will do. I also expect trump will go full steam ahead on the deportations, the tariffs, and the tax cuts for the rich. The more successful the implementation of all this is (which is doubtful), the more it will effect and alienate a large part of trump's constituency and present a gaping opening for the Democrats. That's a good thing.

So all in all, a lot to be sanguine about. Of course, there are always surprises, and four years is a long time. Actually, I expect it will be two years that trump has full control of government and can do his most damage. I'm in a sit-back-and-watch mode, because I'm feeling like the more damage he and his crew do, the better it will be politically for the Democrats. And that's a good thing.

The Party of Radicals

So the Democrats are no longer the party of the working class. That seems to be the worrisome consensus of the political mavens and pundits. If they want to win elections they have to learn how to speak to working class voters again. It was always thought that wealthy and upwardly mobile people who have an interest in maintaining the status quo would vote Republican, and the working classes who are more interested in progressive policies that contribute to economic redistribution would vote Democratic. We're being told that has now reversed. Let's look at the evidence from recent elections: 

#1: Until this election, Democrats won the popular vote in every election since 2004. 

#2: Democrats won the working class vote in 2020 against trump.  

#3: Democrats received the endorsement of most major unions in 2024. 

You can slice and dice the results in any number of ways, but these data points suggest that it's not a 'working class problem' per se. Maybe we need to take a step back to get proper perspective. 

Traditionally, the Republican Party stood for promoting government restraint ie. less involvement in the lives of citizens, less taxes and less government regulation. They want more free-market enterprise, barrier-free international trade, and culturally more traditional (family, religious) values. The Democratic Party stood for the principle that government could be a force for good in society. They support government programs that make society more equitable and just, programs that help the economically disadvantaged and promote the rights of minorities. In the last 100 years it was the Democrats who were responsible for the two greatest efforts to re-shape American society; the 'New Deal' under FDR in the 1930s, and the raft of legislations under the banner of the so-called 'Great Society' of the 1960s enacted by LBJ (civil-rights etc.) In sum, the Republicans were deemed conservatives, the party associated with a go-slow, cautious approach to governance, and the Democrats were pegged as progressives, pursuing social and economic transformation. But is that actually the political dynamic? I think there may be another way to understand it. 

FDR's elections in the 1930s was a response to the excesses, scandal and economic mismanagement of the 'roaring' 1920s, a decade of Republican administration (Harding, Coolidge and Hoover) which led to the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression (1929). Similarly, Obama's improbable election as the first African-American President in 2007 was preceded by the Great Recession financial crisis of 2007 after 8 years of the Republican George W. Bush administration. Even Reagan ran up huge budget deficits in the 1980s, and Clinton balanced the budget and ran surpluses. Historically-speaking, Republicans almost always make the economic messes that the Democrats find themselves having to clean up. In the process of political and economic housecleaning that follows the drunken Republican frat-party of spending and tax cuts, Democrats used their opportunity, not just to sweep the floor and throw out the trash, but also to re-arrange the furniture and put the house properly back in order. Democratic policies and programs have never been the political, economic and social engineering they are made out to be. They ensure greater systemic stability. 

Take Biden's victory in 2020 for example. I've argued that trump would have romped to victory in 2020 if not for the unforeseen economic disaster created by the Covid pandemic. Biden certainly didn't win the election because he ran a stellar campaign from his basement. It was a case of the American voter turning out in record numbers to mandate the Democrats, led by the supremely competent and experienced Joe Biden, to clean up the mess left by a Republican. Same old story. And he did a magnificent job. What was the Democrat's reward for putting the house back in order? The re-election of trump and the Republicans sweeping back into power. This is the ebb and flow of American politics.

Time and again, the Republicans have won elections by branding the Democrats as 'radicals'. It's classic projection. In truth, the Democrats have always been and remain the party of the working-class, the party of stability, the party of fiscal responsibility, and it's been the Republicans who have been the radicals. Trump isn't a break from that, he's a continuation, an updated version. The radicals are the ones who want to impose 200% tariffs on all imports. The radicals are the ones who want to deport 12 million 'illegals'. The radicals are the gun-toting cowboys who want to take away the bodily autonomy of women. The radicals are the ones who will pardon the mob that violently attacked the US Capitol and called for the hanging of the Vice-President. The radicals are the ones who want to put an anti-vaxxer in charge of national health policy, and do away with the Department of Education. The radicals are the jurists who confer an unconstitutional 'presumed immunity' on the President. The radicals are the ones who would elect a convicted felon to hold the highest office in the land, in charge of preserving and protecting the Constitution. The radicals want to implement Project 2025. 

And when the dust settles the Democrats will once again have to clean up the mess. If they are given the opportunity, that is. 

The Enemies List

As with so much in your personal life, so often politics comes down to mood. 

There was an inevitably about this election. One that I admittedly refused to acknowledge (because I don't believe we should be governed by mood). The Democrats and Harris (or Biden) were never going to win no matter what they did. It didn’t matter that they passed historic legislation on infrastructure, manufacturing and lowering drug prices. Legislation to relieve student debt, and historic investments in clean energy. It doesn’t matter Biden led the world in a coalition to help Ukraine fight against Putin's illegal war of aggression, and he strengthened and expanded NATO. It doesn't matter that Biden inherited an economy in total collapse, and notwithstanding the dire predictions of most economists that a recession was inevitable, piloted it to a soft landing, creating record numbers of American jobs. He is handing his successor an economy that is the envy of the world. He never got credit for any of it. The highest approval rating of Biden's presidency was the day he was inaugurated and basically dropped after that (it actually started dropping six weeks later, in mid-March). Biden had the shortest 'honeymoon' period in presidential history. Today his approval rating stands dismally in the mid thirties, almost historically low.   

The pandemic had a lot to do with it, and still does. I agree with Vlad Vexler (belatedly) that this election was the second term election that trump would have won handily had Covid not intervened. Biden rode pandemic anger and fear against trump to victory in 2020. The American people remained angry throughout the Biden administration, and trump has now rode that post-pandemic anger to victory in 2024. There was nothing the Democrats could do about it.

The 'To-Do List' versus the 'Enemies List' - a line from the Harris campaign that sums it up perfectly. Democrats always naively believe that Americans want their president to work on their behalf. But that premise is wrong, particularly in the post-pandemic period. If the Democrats failed at anything in this campaign, it's a failure of imagination: they could not imagine that Americans would prefer an Enemies List over a To-Do List. But they did. This election showed that Americans want a president who will be an avatar for their mood. One who expresses the anger, victimization and hostility they are feeling. It's not more complicated than that.  

I hope the Democrats, who are now going through an election post-mortem and 'soul-searching', don't draw the wrong conclusions. I've been hearing all sorts of nonsense from talking heads and pundits about how Democrats are no longer the party of the working class, or how they are out of touch with the average American. They ran a positive campaign that offered hope, optimism and solutions. A campaign that was supported by the largest unions in the country and addressed the concerns of the average family. But that campaign was beaten by a campaign that was underwritten by billionnaires and expressed anger, grievance and victimization. 

So what is to be learned from soul-searching? For one thing, I hope the Democrats learn that in this election there was nothing they could have done differently to win. 

I also hope the Democrats learn one important lesson from the Republicans, and that's to double-down on exactly who they are. The one thing I know about voters is that they hate inauthenticity. Democrats fundamentally believe that government can and should work to benefit the collective good. They believe government can solve problems. They are all about the To-Do List, and I hope whatever changes they decide to implement to fight future elections, it involves adding to that list. There will come a time soon when Americans want a President who enters the Oval Office carrying a To-Do List instead of an Enemies List.  

Getting it Wrong

Pretty much everyone got it wrong, terribly wrong. 

CNN released 7 battleground state polls in the last 48 hours before the election: 

Wisconsin - Harris 51%-46% (+6)

Michigan - Harris 48%-43% (+5)

Arizona - Harris 48%-47% (+1)

North Carolina - Harris 48%-47% (+1)

Pennsylvania - Harris 48%-48% (tied)

Nevada - Harris 47%-48% (-1)

Georgia - Harris 47%-48% (-1)

All very wrong. CNN was not alone.

All the professional pollsters got it wrong, some very very badly. Most, like Nate Silver, said it was essentially a coin toss. It wasn't a coin toss. In the final analysis the respected 538.com aggregate of polls had Harris ahead nationally by a little more than one percent. I know that this doesn't sound like much, and is well within the so-called statistical 'margin of error' - a euphemism for it could be off by as much as 6-8 points in either direction ie. pretty much useless. Turns out it was.   

J. Ann Selzer the lauded pollster whose forecasts of Iowa elections have been uncannily accurate for decades, got it horribly wrong. She came out with her final poll for the Des Moines Register on the weekend before the election showing Harris up by 3 points in a deep-red state trump won in 2020 by 8 points. The result sent shock waves through the pundit class. Trump ended up winning Iowa by more than 13 percent, a difference of 16 from Selzer's result.   

Another state maven Jon Ralston, editor of The Nevada Independent, is respected for understanding and accurately forecasting Nevada's unique voter patterns. He doesn't use mathematical modelling like Selzer, nonetheless, he wasn't shy to predict the outcome of this election to the tenth of a percent, with Harris winning 48.5 percent to trump's 48.2. His reasoning was that it all depended on how non-major-party voters break, and he believed they would break for Harris. He was way off. So far, trump is beating Harris by more than 4 percent in Nevada (the race hasn't been officially called yet).

Top data gurus got it terribly wrong too. Analyst Tom Bonier who runs a website called TargetSmart specializes in analyzing the early vote numbers. He said that the hard data of actual votes (not models of 'likely voters') showed a significant gap between women and men in voting, and the numbers indicated that the abortion issue was probably a huge motivator that could make the difference for Harris. It didn't. The gender gap was more or less a wash for both candidates.

So scientific modellers, the data analysts and the pundit/journalists got it completely wrong. Surely academics fared better. Well, a certain very prominent one didn't.

Allan Lichtman is the renowned historian some have called the 'Nostradamus of US elections'. He developed The 13 Keys to the White House which had an unblemised record of predicting the final result of presidential elections since the early 1980s (with one exception in 2000, the so-called 'hanging-chad' election decided by the Supreme Court that ended when the count was abruptly ordered stopped with a 536 vote margin in favour of George W. Bush). Lichtman brashly says that we can throw the polls in the trash because they aren't worth a damn thing. He was right about that. He claims that it's governance that matters, not the candidates - except a once in a lifetime superstar like FDR, Kennedy, or Obama - or campaigning. On the face of it, his method sounds questionable, because that would mean, in theory, campaigning could never change the outcome of an election, so what's the point of wasting all that time and resources? But his method, developed by examining 165 years of presidential election history - 'from the days of the buggy whip' as he puts it - ensures the robustness of his system over time. In September, before the debate (because debates don't matter) he announced that according to the 13 Keys, Harris was a shoo-in. This time his method was just as wrong as those useless polls. 

Notably, the online offshore betting markets turned out to be more accurate than the professional pollsters. I consider this purely serendipitous. 

The one respectable commentator who got it right was a fellow from the UK on YouTube named Vlad Vexler, who calls himself 'a baby public intellectual'. I started following him at the start of the war in Ukraine because he has a special interest in Russian politics and great insight into what makes Putin tick. Vexler said he thought trump always had the advantage, even after Biden left the race, and never wavered from his belief that trump would win. At one point, he even looked at Lichtman's 13 Keys and showed how the inventor could be mis-using his own system. He said he believed that the Keys actually predict a trump victory. As a social scientist/political philosopher, Vexler takes a broad historical view, believing that there are identifiable and undeniable trends that compel events. These forces cannot be easily taken off course (except by cataclysm, for example, a world war.) The salient political trend we are seeing for decades now, he argues, is 'democratic backsliding' precipitated by a retreat of the US from the global order it established after 1945. The force of this trend has been accelerating due in part to profound changes in the information environment. He calls the period we are experiencing, Post-Truth Populism. In 2020 he believed trump would be re-elected easily, if not for the global pandemic. But the pandemic didn't halt the historical trend of democratic backsliding. Rather it was a bump on the road, and therefore he predicted, failing another such major event, trump would handily win in 2024. He nailed it.  

Notwithstanding his expertise in Russian politics, I thought Vexler was completely off base. There was no way you could apply analytical tools about historical world events to the particularities of this US election. Turns out I was wrong, he could, and with accuracy.         

This is the 3rd election in a row  - 5th if you count the 2018 and 2022 mid-terms, especially the one where the 'red wave' never materialized - when the polls were inaccurate. Is it something about trump that makes his candidacy unique and difficult to model? Is it something about our unique information (and disinformation) environment that makes gathering accurate responses to polling unusually difficult? Is it a psycho-social phenomenon, like a herd mentality, in which analysts and pollsters are afraid to be too far outside the margins from their competitors, so they adjust their approach to be similar to others? Is it all of the above?

Whatever the answer(s) - and I don't have one - I can only say that in my experience, the social media algorithm seems to have a lot to do with the skewing. This election was a sort of litmus test for me. A test of my ability to stay objective and seek out accurate information on the state of the race so I could make up my own mind about the outcome. I failed the test miserably. I was caught in my own information bubble. All of my sources of data and analysis reinforced my hopes and beliefs about what I thought would happen. My opinions hardened. When one of my favourite commentators, someone who I respected tremendously for his insight, voiced a dissenting perspective, I thought he was off his rocker and paid him no further heed on the subject (although I'm still an avid watcher of his channel). He was right and I was wrong. The experience has taught me something meaningful about myself, and about the subtle and not so subtle dangers of the world we live in.