“This reality-fracturing is the result of an information ecosystem that is dominated by platforms that offer financial and attentional incentives to lie and enrage, and to turn every tragedy and large event into a shameless content-creation opportunity. This collides with a swath of people who would rather live in an alternate reality built on distrust and grievance than change their fundamental beliefs about the world. ” —Charlie Warzel, in The Atlantic
Reprinting here what I put out to my Substack newsletter, Hu’s Letter, this morning.
This edition is gonna be a little different from the usual fare, given we’re headed into another four years of a Trump administration! I am not going to share poetry because all the poetry being passed around in the wake of the decisive re-election of criminal/con man/rapist/racist/dumb dumb Donald J. Trump has somehow made processing the grim reality we’re in harder for me. Instead, this particular TikTok worked better on me, h/t Friend Doree:
Speaking of TikTok… imho the single most important thing to understand about this election is a tech/culture story. It’s the complete realignment of cultural power away from “trad media” and toward right-leaning or extreme right podcasters and influencers. The story of the 2024 election is that of political technology.
[Racism and sexism] were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office…
We all ignore Joe Rogan and the manosphere to our peril. When I say manosphere, I mean the algorithmic amplification/reinforcement of a right wing fictional universe (via small batch Substacks and Rumble, up through podcasters and YouTubers, OANN, Fox News). It is a mirror industry of social media platforms built specifically to amplify right wing voices and cannot be ignored, because it lures in apolitical/typically fence-sitting participants, notably any man under 30 who has a hobby:
I want to point you to a few useful follows and pieces that are clarifying. Because yes white dudes broke for Trump (as they have before). But Kamala Harris also underperformed with almost every kind of young person: young white women, young Black voters, and young Latinos. And Democrats will never claw their way back to power without understanding how a powerful disinformation infrastructure works to advantage billionaires and what they want. Links and follows:
- Follow Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic, and researcher Renee DiResta, on Threads:
- Why Democrats are Losing the Culture War, in The Atlantic:
The so-called Breitbart Doctrine stated that “politics is downstream from culture”—that is, the ideas conveyed by popular entertainment shapes consumers’ worldviews. This proposition called for conservatives to build a shadow Hollywood that tells conservative stories and raises up conservative stars (Duck Dynasty’s un-P.C. patriarch, Phil Robertson, won an award named for Breitbart in 2015). In the long run, though, the doctrine’s biggest impact has been encouraging the right to get creative with online culture.
They instead built that “shadow Hollywood” where it really matters: not in film and TV, but online.
- How Trump Won the First Influencer Election, from The Hollywood Reporter.
- Also, Taylor Lorenz at User Mag has been writing really helpful guides to the frontier of this cultural battle and why you can’t just build a “liberal Joe Rogan:
“This imbalance when it comes to online influence is no accident. It is the result of massive structural disadvantages in funding, promotion, and institutional support. And understanding why Democrats can’t (or really won’t) cultivate an equivalent independent media ecosystem that rivals what the right has built is crucial for anyone who hopes to ever see the Democrats back into power…
Leftist channels do not receive widespread financial backing from billionaires or large institutional donors, primarily because leftist content creators support policies that are completely at odds with what billionaires want.
Left leaning influencers argue for things like higher taxes on the rich, regulations on corporations, and policies that curb the power of elites. Wealthy mega donors aren’t going to start pouring money into a media ecosystem that directly contradicts their own financial interests.”
- Wired has this visual guide to the influencers who shaped the election.
tl;dr I think it is futile to analyze any of the 17,000 campaign tactics or strategies or decisions that could have gone differently. The key factor in 2024 was the strength of a fictional cinematic universe that holds extreme sway among young people and men in America (and frankly, more and more in other parts of the world as well).
Now What?
The Washington Post has this great long read from 2023 on responding to the “crisis of masculinity,” writing:
If the right has overcorrected to an old-fashioned (and somewhat hostile) vision of masculinity, many progressives have ignored the opportunity to sell men on a better vision of what they can be.
George Conway, writing in The Atlantic, says our one hope is Trump’s incompetence:
He represents everything we should aspire not to be, and everything we should teach our children not to emulate. The only hope is that he’s utterly incompetent, and even that is a double-edged sword, because his incompetence often can do as much as harm as his malevolence. His government will be filled with corrupt grifters, spiteful maniacs, and morally bankrupt sycophants, who will follow in his example and carry his directives out, because that’s who they are and want to be.
Okay, before the next Trump administration starts, Brian Beutler, writing in Off Message, offers another glimmer.
“Is there any reason not to despair entirely?
One source of hope is that the future is unwritten.”
Finally, paraphrasing Elizabeth Warren here: On the road ahead, there will still be opportunities to fight back. We might not win most of them. But when we arrive at each of those moments, we will have a choice to give up or fight forward. Extremists are counting on us to point fingers at each other and lose trust in our ability to make change. We will continue to fight for each other.
We will return to regular newsletter programming next time.
