Andrew Marantz writes for The New Yorker about people who change what other people think. He came to that subject through religion, which he studied at Brown from 2002 to 2006, and through literary nonfiction, which he studied at NYU from 2009 to 2011. From religion he learned to read belief from the outside as a working system. From literary nonfiction he learned to render that system in scenes. A reporter who writes about Mike Cernovich the way an anthropologist writes about a small village is doing work neither field alone produces.
Marantz was born in 1984 to two physicians and grew up in the lower Connecticut suburbs that point at New York. He read The New Yorker as a boy. The magazine he later joined had already shaped his sense of what good prose can do. That is a small fact with consequences. The house style of the magazine rewards patience: long takes, scenes built from observation, a reluctance to declare too soon. It also imposes limits. The reader expected by the magazine is educated, urban, and broadly liberal. A writer trained on that reader builds his moral vocabulary partly to suit him.
He joined the magazine in 2011 as a kind of utility man. Early pieces ranged across hip-hop authenticity debates, the Truman Show delusion, Las Vegas service workers, and Liberian war crimes. The breadth was a writer testing his range. The pieces share a temperament: curiosity about subcultures, attention to how members of a group talk to each other, and an aversion to easy contempt.
After 2016 his subject narrowed. He started reporting on the men who built an audience by being unpleasant on the internet. He sat with White nationalists. He went to alt-right conferences. He spent time with podcasters and message-board operators and the half-trolls who treat racism as a long joke. The book that came out of that work is Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation, published in 2019.
The book has two arguments. The first concerns how speech works on platforms tuned to reward outrage. Engagement is the unit the algorithm reads. Outrage is the most reliable way to produce engagement. So a man who can produce outrage on demand has a structural advantage over a man who cannot. He does not need to be persuasive. He needs to be loud, ugly, and quotable. The platform handles distribution. The press handles laundering. By the time a fringe slogan reaches a senator, the senator can claim he is responding to the public mood.
The second argument is about Richard Rorty. Marantz reads Rorty the way some reporters read Foucault: as license to take language seriously as an object of study. The claim he draws from Rorty is that the way a culture talks to itself sets the limits of what it can do. Change the talk and you change the politics. He does not romanticize this. The same insight a labor organizer might use to expand sympathy is available to a man who wants to make slurs sayable again. The reporting in Antisocial spends most of its time on the second case.
The Rorty reading lines up with a darker one drawn from James Baldwin. Marantz cites Baldwin to keep the moral stakes in view. Without that pressure his treatment of the alt-right could slide into mere portraiture. The men he writes about are pathetic, lonely, and small, and what they say is also poisonous. Both can be true.
A reader can see Marantz changing his mind across the book. He arrives a free-speech liberal. He leaves something else, though he cannot quite say what. He sees that the marketplace metaphor breaks down when one party can flood the market with cheap counterfeits. He sees that traditional gatekeepers were doing more useful work than their critics admitted. He stops short of endorsing platform censorship at scale. The result has the shape of a question. He is honest about not having solved it.
That honesty marks his strongest work and his weakest. He is a careful diagnostician and a poor prescriber. The closing pages of Antisocial gesture at norms, at moderation, at better conversation. They feel thin against the reporting. He wants institutions to do something he is not sure they can do, and he does not press the question of who pays the cost of asking them to do it.
His method is the part of his work most often misread. Critics who dislike him say he platforms his subjects. Defenders say he exposes them. Both miss what he does. He reconstructs a community from inside its own talk. He notices what the members find funny. He records the slang. He maps the small status hierarchies that decide who speaks first in a chat. The result reads like ethnography in part because that is what it is. The training in religion is doing work here. A man taught to study Pentecostal speaking-in-tongues without believing it can study a Discord server about race war without endorsing it.
The lineage worth naming runs through Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe. Didion taught a generation of magazine writers that close attention to surface detail can carry an argument about the underlying culture. Wolfe taught them that subcultures are worth taking seriously as social systems. Marantz draws from both, though he lacks Didion’s coldness and Wolfe’s fascination with class. His tone is warmer and more anxious. He likes the people he reports on more than he should and trusts them less than he wants to.
His position at The New Yorker shapes the work in ways he leaves unnamed. The magazine pays him to bring back reports from places its readers do not go. That is a useful arrangement and a constrained one. The reader he writes for already agrees with him about the broad shape of the problem. The argument he builds is built for that reader. Sharper writers have noticed that the elite media class he writes within is part of the system he describes. Marantz nods at this and moves on. He works there. The institution he writes from is one of the engines of normalization he describes elsewhere.
The later work expands his range. He has written on artificial intelligence and the men who fear it, on the slow corrosion of democratic norms, on the contest for young male voters, and most recently, with Ronan Farrow, on Sam Altman. The line through these subjects is the same line that runs through Antisocial. He keeps asking how a culture decides what is sayable, and what happens when the answer is handed to a small number of platforms and a slightly larger number of men who know how to use them. The subject has gotten bigger. Synthetic media multiplies the problems social media introduced. Trust in shared facts goes on dropping. He follows the trouble where it goes.
He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Sarah Lustbader, a criminal-justice reformer, and a son born in 2017. He treats his subjects as neighbors he disagrees with and writes about them with the patience disagreement demands. That patience is his signature and his limit. It opens doors. It also slows him from naming, in plain terms, the pressures that produced the people he writes about.
What survives in his work is a habit of reading talk for what it does rather than what it claims. The trolls he covers are not stupid. They understand the platforms they use better than the editors who try to manage them. Their craft is provocation calibrated to algorithmic reward.
‘A Big Misunderstanding’
Andrew Marantz writes in the tradition Pinsof attacks. His 2019 book Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation treats online extremism as an epistemic problem. The story runs as follows. Platforms optimized for virality flood the public square with garbage. Gatekeepers collapse. Ordinary people fall down rabbit holes. Democracy suffers. Fix the information environment and the politics improves.
Pinsof reads this as the misunderstanding myth in pure form.
Consider the figures Marantz embeds with. Mike Cernovich, Mike Enoch, the Proud Boys, the meme-makers and Discord trolls. Marantz portrays them as people captured by bad epistemics, addicted to outrage, lost in a feedback loop of contrarian status-seeking. Through Pinsof’s lens these men run high-fidelity coalition strategies under competitive pressure. They test frames. They refine language. They adapt to audience response. They derogate rivals with precision. This is optimization, not cognitive failure.
Cernovich does not sit in a rabbit hole. He stands on a rooftop with a megaphone, calling allies to him and enemies to combat. The rabbit hole framing flatters the journalist who claims to map it.
Marantz inherits Richard Rorty. He repeats the line that to change how we talk is to change who we are. Pinsof treats this as the high water mark of intellectual self-flattery. Language does not constitute the social order. Coalitions do. People do not fight because their vocabularies diverge. They fight because the coercive apparatus of the state can only serve one coalition at a time. The winner imposes its preferences on the loser.
Marantz’s focus on “misinformation” is a coalition move. Pinsof points out the term has two definitions and both fail. Define it broadly and it covers everything, including elite journalism. Define it narrowly and it covers fabrication, which is rare and historically unimportant. The category serves a function. It lets one coalition mark the speech of rivals as illegitimate while protecting its own. Fact-checkers are not neutral arbiters. They are combatants with credentials. They derogate rival speech under cover of epistemology.
The activists and platform reformers Marantz profiles sympathetically are not exempt from this analysis. They tell themselves they protect democracy. Pinsof says they pursue status, moral authority, and coalition dominance, even as they experience their motives as altruistic. The sincerity is part of the design. Self-deception greases coalition behavior. Robert Trivers worked this out decades ago. We persuade others by first persuading ourselves.
Marantz misreads his subjects at a deeper level. He calls them antisocial. Pinsof might call them hyper-social. The trolls form tight loyalty networks. They reward in-group sacrifice. They punish defection. They coordinate aggression against out-groups with speed and precision. That is sociality at full power. What Marantz mourns as the loss of civil discourse was a settled hierarchy in an earlier period. One coalition held cultural authority. Others stayed quiet. The discourse looked peaceful because the fight was suppressed. The fight returned.
Marantz’s stated motive is to understand a broken information environment and help repair it. His actual position is to chronicle for one coalition its struggle against another. The New Yorker is not a neutral observatory. It is the magazine of an elite formation with interests, sensibilities, and rivals. When Marantz argues in the New York Times that “Free Speech Is Killing Us,” he does not depart from journalism into advocacy. He does what coalition members do under pressure. He asks the state to suppress rival speech. The intellectual class loses control of the narrative and reaches for the coercive apparatus.
Marantz sees a sick patient. The patient is the public sphere. The disease is misinformation. The treatment is content moderation, media literacy, platform reform, and renewed gatekeeping. Pinsof says there is no sick patient. There are competing coalitions doing what coalitions do. The “sickness” is the temporary breakdown of the previous coalition’s monopoly on respectable speech. From the perspective of the rising coalition, nothing is sick. Power is shifting.
Marantz cannot accept this because accepting it dissolves his role. If the problem is not misunderstanding, the explainer has no special task. If the trolls understand themselves perfectly well, the journalist who claims to decode them is just another partisan with a notebook.
Pinsof closes with the line that the only misunderstanding is that there has been a misunderstanding. Apply that to Antisocial and the book’s premise inverts. The figures Marantz studies are not lost. They know what they want. They want status, allies, money, and political power. They use the tools available. The figures Marantz aligns with want similar things and use different tools. The hole Marantz describes in such loving detail is the social order operating as designed.
Marantz is a careful reporter and a strong stylist. Antisocial contains real ethnography and useful detail. Pinsof’s framework does not erase the book. It reframes it. Antisocial reads less as a diagnosis of a broken public sphere and more as a record of one coalition trying to make sense of its rivals using the vocabulary it has, under conditions where its older vocabulary no longer commands assent. Marantz sees this about his subjects. He does not see it about himself. The hole studies itself and pretends the study is a ladder.
The Great Delusion
In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Marantz’s Antisocial rests on a liberal anthropology. People form their views through information intake. Bad information produces bad views. Better information produces better views. Reform the information environment and you reform the people.
Mearsheimer rejects this anthropology at the root. Humans are social from start to finish. Tribal attachment precedes individual reasoning by decades. By the time a man can think clearly, his family, his church, his school, his neighborhood, and his nation have stamped him with a moral code. Innate sentiments do further work. Reason arrives last and weakest.
If Mearsheimer is right, Marantz misreads his subjects from the first page.
Take Mike Cernovich or Mike Enoch. Marantz portrays them as men who fell into bad information loops, who got captured by algorithmic feedback, who lost their way through failed epistemic hygiene. Mearsheimer reads them differently. Each man arrived at his politics through socialization, group attachment, and innate sentiment, with reason playing the smallest part. The internet did not create their tribal commitments. It gave them tools to express commitments formed long before.
The same applies to the alt-right rank and file. Marantz tracks young White men radicalized through YouTube, Reddit, and podcasts. The radicalization story assumes these men once held neutral views and then moved under the pressure of argument and meme. Mearsheimer’s framework suggests they carried ethnic, regional, class, and religious attachments long before they found the platforms. The platforms gave shape to commitments already laid down.
Marantz inherits liberal universalism. His New Yorker frame treats human rights as a self-evident moral grammar. Bigotry then looks like a failure to grasp universal truth. Mearsheimer says the universalism is a tribal product. It grew in a particular soil, among a particular coalition, in a particular historical moment. Treating it as universal is a coalition move, not a discovery.
This sharpens the critique of “misinformation” already implied by Pinsof. Marantz wants better gatekeeping and platform reform to clean up the information environment. Mearsheimer asks what might change even if the cleanup succeeded. Reason is the weakest of three forces. A purified information stream still meets a man whose tribal identity, family loyalties, and innate sentiments formed in childhood.
Marantz’s hope rests on a model Mearsheimer rejects. The model says: present good arguments, expose bad ones, build healthy discourse, watch the public mind correct itself. The model assumes the public mind is mostly made of arguments. Mearsheimer says the public mind is mostly made of attachments. Arguments float on top.
The implication for journalism cuts deep. Marantz writes long, careful, scene-rich pieces designed to move readers through reason and empathy. Under Mearsheimer’s anthropology, that craft reaches the part of the reader that least controls his beliefs. A reader’s tribe was set before he could read. His New Yorker subscription confirms a tribal location. His response to Marantz’s reporting flows from that location more than from the prose.
Marantz himself looks different under this lens. He attended elite universities. He works in elite media. His social milieu prizes cosmopolitanism, pluralism, and the language of harm and inclusion. Mearsheimer’s framework treats this milieu as Marantz’s tribe. His commitments grew there. They feel universal because everyone around him shares them. The trolls he profiles experience their commitments the same way, inside their own circles. The two camps grew from different tribes.
The quarrel between Marantz and his subjects looks like a quarrel between two coalitions, each grown from socialization and innate sentiment, each persuaded that it speaks for humanity.
Mearsheimer’s foreign policy point completes the picture. Liberal states pursue ambitious foreign policies because liberalism declares its values universal. Mearsheimer calls this a delusion. The delusion appears at home as well. Marantz’s calls for content moderation and platform reform carry the same universalist confidence. He treats his coalition’s preferences as the floor every reasonable person accepts. Mearsheimer says no such floor exists. Other coalitions stand on different ground and will not move off it through argument.
The hole Pinsof describes deepens under Mearsheimer. Pinsof says we understand our incentives and act on them. Mearsheimer says we do not understand the moral code we inherited, because we did not choose it, and we cannot easily revise it. The man Marantz hopes to reach by changing the conversation was made before any conversation reached him.
Marantz’s project does not collapse into nothing. His reporting records what coalitions look like under stress. But the stated purpose, to repair a broken public mind through better discourse, sits on an anthropology Mearsheimer rejects at the root. Marantz is not building a ladder. He is decorating the walls of a hole dug before he arrived.
Watergate as Democratic Ritual & Cultural Trauma
Marantz’s project, taken across his magazine work and Antisocial, can be read as an attempt to produce the same alignment around online extremism, the alt-right, and the platforms that amplified them. He documents the polluting figures. He names the threat to the civic center. He calls for institutional social controls. He addresses an audience that constitutes a differentiated elite countercenter. He participates in the broader anti-Trump trauma construction that elaborated through the late 2010s into the early 2020s. The work has the shape Alexander describes. The five conditions are present in his text. The question is whether the cultural conditions outside his text allow them to align in the broader civic body the way they aligned in 1973 to 1974.
They have not. The Trump victories of 2016 and 2024 are the empirical evidence that the trauma construction Marantz served has not achieved civic-religious generalization across the broader American body. Within elite liberal institutions, the construction is dominant. Within the coalitions Marantz writes for, it commands authority. Across the wider civic terrain, it has not crossed the threshold. Marantz’s carrier-group work succeeds in its bounded audience and fails to generalize. His prose addresses the converted. The ritual he is performing does not engage the full Alexander apparatus because the conditions for full engagement do not exist outside the New Yorker reader’s institutional sphere.
This bounded success has shaped his prose in ways the Alexander frame makes visible. Successful civic ritual produces the kind of confident priestly performance the Senate hearings showed. The senators who performed during Watergate did not hedge. They did not qualify. They spoke from inside a sacred order whose authority they could take for granted. Marantz cannot speak this way. His magazine’s voice does not allow it. His readers’ political situation does not authorize it. He must construct the polluting figures through documentation rather than denouncing them through pronouncement. The literary nonfiction training, the ethnographic method, the reluctance to declare too soon, all of these reflect a prose tradition built for a culture whose civic religion had not yet fragmented as the contemporary one has.
The cooling-out problem Alexander identifies operates against Marantz in a specific form. His subjects deploy a sophisticated cooling-out apparatus. They claim to be joking. They claim to be performing irony. They claim that their statements about race or violence operate in a technical-rational mode of cultural commentary rather than in the porous mode of civic combat. Marantz’s task is to break their cooling-out and demonstrate that what they are doing has the civic significance the cooling-out denies. He works hard at this. He cites Baldwin to keep the moral stakes in view. He documents the real consequences that follow from the speech the cooling-out frames as merely speech. The work is competent. The cooling-out is partly broken in his audience. Outside his audience, the cooling-out holds. Many Americans who read about his subjects through alternative channels accept the cooling-out frame and view Marantz’s anti-cooling-out work as itself an overreach. The civic ritual cannot complete because the cooling-out apparatus retains its authority for half the country.
Now bring in the cultural trauma essay.
Alexander’s argument is that traumas are constructed by carrier groups making four interlocking claims. The nature of the pain. The identity of the victim. The relation of victim to wider audience. The attribution of responsibility. Successful trauma construction requires all four to be answered in ways that resonate with the audience the carrier group addresses. The carrier group itself must occupy structural positions, hold material and ideal interests, and bring discursive talents that fit the symbolic work.
Marantz answers all four with precision. The pain is the corruption of public discourse, the rise of organized cruelty in political life, the hijacking of platforms designed for connection by men who use them for harm. The victims are the targets of online harassment, the broader public sphere, democratic deliberation as a practice. The connection to wider audience extends through anyone who values civilized public conversation, which his readers consider themselves to do. The responsibility belongs to specific named figures, Cernovich and Spencer and the others, plus the structural enablers, the platforms, the algorithms, the free-speech absolutists, and the techno-utopians who built infrastructure that rewards the named figures’ behavior.
The construction is well-formed. Each of Alexander’s four pieces is in place. The work fits Alexander’s description of carrier-group activity in religious, aesthetic, legal, scientific, and mass media arenas. Marantz operates in the mass media arena with the discursive resources of the literary nonfiction tradition. His New Yorker position gives him structural standing. His training in religious studies and literary nonfiction supplies the discursive talents. His material interests run through book sales, magazine contracts, and the broader market for the kind of work he does. His ideal interests are framed as commitment to journalism and to democracy. He is, in textbook Alexander form, a carrier-group figure doing trauma-construction labor.
What makes him distinctive within the form is the ethnographic method. Alexander’s typical carrier-group figure builds the trauma construction from outside the polluted population. He does not need to know the men he denounces. He needs only the documentary apparatus that lets him classify them. Marantz operates differently. He embeds. He spends time with Cernovich. He attends the conferences. He records the language and the small-status hierarchies and the coded jokes that the participants do not explain to outsiders. This is religious-studies ethnography applied to political subcultures. It produces a different kind of evidence than the standard carrier-group apparatus produces.
The ethnographic method creates a tension Alexander’s frame helps name. The carrier group’s symbolic function requires the polluted to be classified clearly as polluted. The ethnographic method requires the polluted to be rendered as humans operating inside their own coherent symbolic world. Marantz’s prose carries both at once. His subjects appear as pathetic and lonely and small. They also appear as poisonous. Both are accurate within their respective frames. The two frames do not fully reconcile in his prose because they are doing different kinds of work. The ethnographic frame is humanizing because that is what ethnographic prose does. The carrier-group frame is classifying because that is what trauma construction requires. Marantz holds both. The holding produces what readers notice as ambivalence.
Critics of his work split along this seam. Defenders say he exposes his subjects through patient documentation. Detractors say he platforms them by giving them the dignity of careful attention. Both miss what the Alexander frame makes visible. The ethnographic method is providing carrier-group evidence in a form the carrier group’s traditional methods do not produce. The patient attention is not in tension with the classifying function. It is the means by which the classifying function operates in this specific case. Marantz is not platforming and he is not exposing. He is documenting in a register his magazine’s readers can absorb. The documentation feeds the classification. The classification was already in place before the documentation arrived.
Alexander’s pollution-transfer logic clarifies the structure of the work further. Marantz does not stop at the named alt-right figures. He extends the pollution to the techno-utopians who built the platforms, to the libertarian free-speech defenders who refused to crack down, to the gatekeepers who failed to gatekeep. The pollution travels outward from the obvious cases to the structural enablers. This is essential carrier-group activity. Naming the obvious figures is the easy part. Extending the pollution to the structural enablers is what gives the trauma construction the scope to demand institutional response. If only the named figures were polluted, you could fire them and the problem would stop. If the platforms are polluted too, you need platform reform, content moderation, government intervention. The pollution transfer authorizes the institutional response the trauma construction calls for.
This is what Marantz’s project provides for the broader anti-Trump trauma construction it serves. The construction needed evidence that the alt-right was structurally enabled rather than merely individually present. Marantz produced the evidence. The evidence carried the authority of patient ethnographic documentation rather than the authority of polemical assertion. This made it more durable than polemic. It also made it less ritually charged. The trauma construction required ritual charge to generalize. The patient documentation could not supply the charge. Other carrier-group figures had to convert Marantz’s documentation into ritual material. Some did. The conversion was incomplete because the underlying material was not fully ritualized to begin with.
The Rorty borrowing Marantz draws on is itself a piece of carrier-group symbolic work. Alexander would notice immediately. Rorty’s claim that culture’s vocabulary sets the limits of what culture can do is a piece of philosophical authorization for the symbolic work Marantz wants to do. It tells him that documenting and reframing language is not a marginal activity but a central political practice. It gives him intellectual permission to treat the alt-right’s vocabulary as politically consequential rather than as merely offensive speech. The borrowing serves his carrier-group function. He needs the philosophical authorization to do the symbolic work the trauma construction requires. Rorty supplies it. Marantz uses it. The use is not cynical. He plausibly believes Rorty is correct. The belief is what makes the use effective. Pinsof’s frame already named this. Alexander adds that the philosophical authorization is itself part of the ritual apparatus. Carrier groups need legitimating frames. Rorty supplies one for the kind of work Marantz wants to do.
What Alexander’s two essays do not predict, but what his frame helps see, is what happens when carrier-group work is performed competently in service of a trauma construction that does not generalize. Most of Alexander’s examples are successful generalizations. Watergate worked. The Holocaust narrative worked, with the Israeli state as one of its institutional fruits. Civil rights worked. These cases show what successful carrier-group activity looks like when it culminates in civic-religious authority. Marantz’s case shows something different. The carrier-group activity is competent. The trauma construction is well-formed. The audience is reached. And yet the broader civic generalization does not occur. The book wins prizes. The author keeps his job. The construction the author serves remains influential within its institutional sphere. The civic body outside that sphere does not absorb the trauma construction as sacred. Trump wins again. The platforms expand under different management. The cooling-out apparatus the construction tried to break holds for half the country.
This is the structural condition of carrier-group work in a fragmented civic order. The Watergate consensus was possible because the United States in 1973 still had something like a unified civic religion that could be activated by appropriate ritual conditions. By 2019 and certainly by 2024, that unified civic religion had fractured. Multiple competing civic constructions ran in parallel. Each had its own carrier groups, its own trauma narratives, its own pollution-purification rituals. None could fully command the civic body because no civic body of the kind Watergate addressed any longer existed. Marantz’s work is excellent within the carrier-group apparatus of one of these competing constructions. It cannot generalize because the conditions for generalization across the fragmented civic order are not available to any carrier group operating from within only one of the constructions.
This produces the specific quality his late work has. The 2019 book carries the energy of someone who still believes the construction might generalize if the documentation is patient enough and the prose careful enough. The work after 2024 cannot maintain the same energy. The events have demonstrated that the construction is not generalizing on the timeline its carrier groups expected. Marantz keeps doing the work. He cannot easily do anything else. The work has shaped him and the audience that supports him. To stop performing it would be to acknowledge a failure his coalition cannot accept. So the work continues, with diminishing returns relative to the scale of its ambition, addressed to an audience that already accepts its premises, providing further documentation of phenomena the audience has long classified.
The deeper tension Alexander’s frame surfaces is the tension between his ethnographic instincts and his carrier-group function. The ethnographic instinct, taught by religious studies, is to render the subject’s symbolic world as coherent on its own terms. The carrier-group function requires the subject’s symbolic world to be classified as polluted in the carrier group’s larger frame. These two operations are not fully compatible. A scrupulous ethnographer might produce material that humanizes the polluted in ways the carrier-group function cannot use. A scrupulous carrier-group operator might produce classifications that the ethnographic eye cannot endorse. Marantz’s prose shows the friction. The friction is part of what makes the work distinctive. It also limits the work’s effectiveness as carrier-group production. Other writers, less ethnographically careful, produce more usable carrier-group output. Marantz produces something more honest and less powerful. The trade is real.
The comparison to Scheuer and Cofnas the Alexander frame supports is sharp. All three are carrier-group figures performing civic-religious work. Scheuer attempted to construct trauma where none had generalized, then watched generalization occur in a direction he could not control, then spent the rest of his career performing counter-ritual against the dominant construction. Cofnas attempts counter-ritual against an established construction within his institutional sphere, drawing on countercurrents that have grown stronger in recent years. Marantz performs ritual labor in support of an established construction whose generalization has stalled at the boundary of his audience.
Each occupies a different position in the carrier-group apparatus, and each produces a different shape of work as a consequence. Scheuer escalates because his counter-ritual is not authorized by his institutional environment. Cofnas remains analytic because his institutional context still rewards the analytic register. Marantz hovers in the ambivalent middle because his institutional context rewards exactly the kind of careful, ethnographically informed prose he produces, and that prose cannot generate the ritual charge that would push the construction it serves into civic generalization.
The man is not a failure. The construction he serves is not a fraud. Both have done work the previous decades have rewarded. What the Alexander frame makes visible is the structural condition that limits both. The carrier-group apparatus only produces civic-religious authority when external conditions support generalization. Conditions in fragmented civic orders rarely support generalization. Most carrier-group work, across history, has produced bounded effects within particular institutional spheres. Watergate is the exception, not the rule. Marantz lives and works inside the rule.
Charisma and Social Paradoxes
Marantz came up through the magazine’s fact-checking ranks, became a contract writer, then a staff writer, and has built his reputation on long-form pieces about online culture, the alt-right, social media platforms, populism, and the architecture of attention. Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation in 2019 is the book that defined his public reputation. The book is reported journalism that follows specific figures (Mike Cernovich, Cassandra Fairbanks, Reddit’s leadership, Twitter’s leadership) through specific events to argue that the open internet has been weaponized by bad-faith actors who exploit the architecture for political gain. The book is well-reported in the sense that Marantz spent real time with the figures he profiles. The book is also a coalition document in the sense that it organizes its reporting around a thesis the New Yorker’s audience already holds.
The first paradox Marantz executes is the disinterested-reporter paradox. The reporter goes among the bad people, listens to them, gets close enough to capture their idiom, and then produces an account that confirms the moral framework his audience already operates inside. The audience needs the reporter to have gone close enough that the account is vivid. The audience also needs the account to confirm the moral framework. The two needs are in tension. If the reporter goes too close and starts to humanize the subjects, the moral framework gets compromised. If the reporter stays too distant, the account loses the vividness the audience wants. The paradox is solved by the reporter’s stance. Marantz’s stance is the educated, ironic, slightly horrified observer who can render the alt-right voices accurately while never letting the rendering tip into sympathy. The stance has to be performed continuously. Every paragraph that gets close to a subject has to be balanced by a paragraph that re-establishes the distance.
Pinsof’s framework treats this stance as a social paradox in his exact technical sense. The reporter pursues access to subjects he is going to portray unfavorably while appearing to pursue access for understanding’s sake. The subjects know the reporter will produce an unflattering account but cooperate anyway because the access produces visibility, which has value even when the framing is hostile. The audience reads the resulting account as fair-minded reporting because the access was real and the rendering was vivid. Each side gets something out of the arrangement. The subjects get visibility. The audience gets the moral confirmation it sought. The reporter gets the byline and the reputation. The arrangement works because the strategic dimensions stay concealed from each side. The subjects tell themselves the access will produce a fair account. The audience tells itself the access produced a fair account. The reporter tells himself he is doing journalism rather than writing morality tales. The concealment is what lets the paradox produce value for everyone.
The cue-to-signal-to-negative-cue trajectory applies to Marantz as well. Antisocial in 2019 read as honest cue. The reporter had gone among the figures and produced detailed accounts. The book’s analysis of the platforms was substantive. The framing thesis was contested but the reporting was real. By the early 2020s the New Yorker pieces started reading more clearly as signal. The Marantz profile of the alt-right figure, the Marantz piece on the populist rally, the Marantz dispatch from the platform-policy debate all read as performances of a stance the audience expected. The stance has become predictable. The audience knows what the Marantz piece will conclude before reading it. The conclusion is part of the contract between writer and audience. The piece confirms the framework the audience uses to organize its political commitments. The cue has become signal. Each subsequent piece adds to the audience’s confidence in the framework rather than testing the framework against new evidence.
The signal flips into negative cue for readers outside the New Yorker’s primary audience. The same Marantz piece that reads as fair-minded reporting to a New Yorker subscriber reads as predictable framing to a Substack reader who has watched the same pattern across dozens of pieces. The negative-cue reading explains things the cue reading cannot explain. It explains why Marantz’s pieces never produce conclusions that complicate the audience’s existing framework. It explains why the alt-right figures profiled never come across as complex enough to threaten the moral architecture the magazine operates inside. It explains why the platforms always come across as complicit in the radicalization the pieces describe rather than as one factor among many in a more complicated dynamic. The negative-cue reading is parsimonious. It explains the pattern without requiring a separate account for each piece.
The second paradox Marantz executes is the elite-critical-of-elite-power paradox. The New Yorker is one of the most elite publications in American journalism. Its writers operate from inside the institutional structures that produce and reproduce elite cultural authority. Marantz writes for this publication while presenting himself as a critic of elite power, particularly the elite power exercised through tech platforms. The paradox requires that Marantz’s elite credential give him the standing to speak about elite power while his criticism of elite power gives him the legitimacy to be read as something other than an apologist for the elite. Both halves have to operate at once. The Cambridge MFA-style prose, the New Yorker access, the ability to spend months on a single piece, all signal elite belonging. The criticism of Facebook and Twitter and the alt-right ecosystem signals dissent from elite complacency. The combination is what makes the position work.
Pinsof’s framework predicts that this paradox is stable in the New Yorker context but brittle outside it. The audience that pays for the New Yorker is the audience that wants exactly this combination. Elite enough to be readable as serious. Critical enough to flatter the audience’s self-image as critically minded. The paradox sustains because the audience benefits from it and pays for the magazine that produces it. Outside the New Yorker context, where audiences do not share the same coalition commitments, the paradox reads differently. To a populist reader, Marantz is a credentialed elite criticizing other credentialed elites for being insufficiently effective at maintaining the cultural authority Marantz himself benefits from. The criticism reads as intra-elite jockeying for who gets to define cultural legitimacy. The dissent that flatters the New Yorker audience does not flatter audiences outside the magazine’s coalition. The paradox is coalition-relative.
The third paradox is the I-have-watched-the-bad-things paradox. Marantz’s expertise on the alt-right and online radicalization comes from having spent extended time with the figures he profiles. The expertise validates the analysis. The audience trusts Marantz because he has done the immersion. The paradox is that the immersion is itself ideologically coded as morally suspect. To spend serious time with Mike Cernovich is to risk being contaminated by Mike Cernovich. Marantz solves the paradox by performing the immersion while continuously performing his immunity to it. The pieces include moments where the subject says something that should make a normal person recoil, and Marantz’s prose registers the recoil for the reader. The reader is reassured. Marantz has gone close but has not been compromised. The expertise is validated and the moral architecture is preserved.
The Pinsof framework treats this as a paradox of compromised purity. The expertise depends on the contamination. The legitimacy depends on the absence of contamination. Both are required. The performance of recoil is what reconciles them. The performance has to be continuous because any lapse would compromise the legitimacy. The audience sustains the paradox by reading the recoil as authentic. The reading is mostly correct. Marantz almost certainly does feel the recoil he performs. The paradox does not require the recoil to be fake. It requires the recoil to be visible to the audience and to be visible to Marantz as the marker of his immunity. The arrangement is symbiotic. Both sides need the recoil to register. Both sides participate in registering it.
The fourth paradox is the storyteller-at-the-platform paradox. The New Yorker as institution has its own coalition position to maintain. The magazine has to be sufficiently relevant to political and cultural life that its audience pays for it. The magazine has to be sufficiently above-the-fray that its readers can feel they are not just consuming partisan content. Marantz operates inside this institutional paradox. His pieces have to be relevant enough to be read. They cannot be so partisan that they violate the magazine’s positioning. The constraint shapes the pieces. The shaping is invisible to readers who share the magazine’s coalition position. It is visible to readers outside that position as a particular stylistic register that signals the magazine’s brand more than it signals the underlying reality the pieces describe.
The cue-to-signal trajectory applies here too. The New Yorker style was an honest cue in earlier decades. The style emerged from real editorial practices, real fact-checking, real long-form discipline. Across recent years the style has hardened into signal. New Yorker readers can identify a New Yorker piece by its first paragraph because the style has become predictable enough to be recognizable. The recognition is the signal. The piece is doing the New Yorker thing. The doing is what the audience subscribes for. The audience does not read the magazine to be surprised. It reads the magazine to be confirmed in its sense that the world makes sense in the way the magazine says it does. The style is the confirmation. The signal is stable as long as the audience benefits from it. The signal becomes negative cue for readers outside the audience who have learned to read the style as performance.
Marantz’s specific contribution to the magazine’s brand is the alt-right beat. The beat exists because the audience needs to be assured that the alt-right is being watched and that the watching is producing a coherent moral verdict. Marantz delivers the verdict reliably. The reliability is what makes him the right writer for the beat. A writer who occasionally produced pieces that complicated the verdict would be the wrong writer. The audience does not pay for complication on this beat. The audience pays for confirmation. The arrangement is symbiotic. The audience gets what it pays for. Marantz gets the byline and the book contracts and the fellowship invitations. The alt-right figures profiled get the visibility they sought when they cooperated with the access. Everyone involved in the arrangement gets something. The strategic dimensions stay concealed from each side. Each side tells itself a flattering story about why it participates.
The deepest paradox in the Marantz case is the one Pinsof’s framework reaches that other frameworks miss. Marantz is a sophisticated analyst of how attention economies work. Antisocial is an extended argument about how the architecture of online platforms rewards bad-faith actors who optimize for engagement. The argument is largely correct. The paradox is that Marantz himself operates inside an attention economy with similar dynamics. The New Yorker pays him because his pieces generate attention. The pieces generate attention partly because they confirm the moral architecture the audience seeks. The optimization for the audience’s confirmation is the same dynamic Marantz analyzes in the platforms. The platforms are designed to give the user what the user wants. The magazine is designed to give the subscriber what the subscriber wants. Both are attention economies. Both reward optimization for audience satisfaction over optimization for truth. Marantz analyzes one and operates inside the other. The analysis applies to the analyst.
The Pinsof framework predicts that this kind of recursion stays invisible to the analyst because seeing it would dissolve the position the analyst occupies. Marantz cannot see his own attention-economy position because seeing it would compromise the attention-economy position. The audience cannot see the attention-economy position of the magazine because seeing it would compromise the audience’s experience of consuming the magazine as serious journalism. Both sides need the recursion to stay invisible. The arrangement requires the invisibility. Pinsof’s framework calls this symbiotic deception. The deception is real. The participants are sincere. Neither side benefits from the recognition. The framework predicts the recursion will not be acknowledged from inside. It can be analyzed from outside, by writers who do not benefit from the arrangement. The analysis cannot reproduce inside the arrangement what it can produce outside.
A few specific Marantz pieces are worth running through the framework to see how it applies in practice.
The Mike Cernovich profile from 2016 is the cleanest cue case. The reporter went among the alt-right figure, captured the idiom, produced an account that confirmed the moral architecture the audience expected. The piece was reported journalism. The framing was a coalition document. Both descriptions are accurate. The cue-signal-negative-cue framework would say this piece was honest cue at the time. The reporter had done the immersion, the rendering was vivid, the framing was contested but defensible. Read in 2026 the piece reads more clearly as signal. The same author has produced enough similar pieces that the reader knows what to expect from a Marantz alt-right profile before reading it. The expectation is part of the contract. The contract is what the magazine sells.
The 2019 Antisocial book is the inflection point. The book is more substantive than any single profile because the long form requires more substance to sustain. The book also locks in the position. After Antisocial Marantz becomes the New Yorker’s resident expert on alt-right and platform dynamics. The expertise is real and is also a brand. The brand requires continued production of pieces that fit the brand. The production is what the magazine pays for. The brand starts as cue (the reporter who did the work) and becomes signal (the writer whose byline guarantees a particular kind of piece) over the subsequent years.
The post-2020 pieces operate increasingly clearly as signal. The framing is predictable. The conclusions are predictable. The pieces are still well-written. The fact-checking is still rigorous. The substance is still substantial. The cue function has weakened relative to the signal function. A reader could write the conclusion of a Marantz piece from the headline. The piece confirms what the headline implies. The audience does not read the piece for surprise. It reads the piece for confirmation. The signal function has eaten the cue function.
The 2024 piece on Substack hosting Nazi content is a useful case for the framework. The piece argues that Substack’s permissive content policy enables Nazi material to find audiences. The framing is coalition material. The framing is also defensible reporting on a real phenomenon. The two readings sit alongside each other. The piece reads as cue if you share the magazine’s coalition position. It reads as signal if you do not. The negative-cue reading is also available, since Substack happens to be the platform where many of Marantz’s coalition rivals (Cofnas among them) have built audiences that the New Yorker cannot easily reach. Whether the piece is a serious examination of platform governance or an instrument for delegitimizing the platform that hosts the magazine’s competitors depends on the reader’s coalition position. Pinsof’s framework would say it is both. The arrangement requires that it be both. The symbiotic deception lets the piece function as honest reporting for the audience that needs that reading and as coalition delegitimization for the audience that produces the work.
The cleanest contrast with Cofnas is the institutional positioning. Cofnas operates outside mainstream institutions and depends on dissident audiences and Substack subscribers and Free Speech Union legal backing. Marantz operates inside the most prestigious institution in American magazine journalism and depends on the audience that institution has built across decades. The Pinsof framework applies to both because the framework is institution-neutral. Coalition psychology operates the same way in elite institutional positions and in dissident extra-institutional positions. The paradoxes are different in content but identical in structure. Cofnas’s paradoxes require concealing his coalition function under the appearance of careful philosophy. Marantz’s paradoxes require concealing his coalition function under the appearance of fair-minded reporting. Both sets of paradoxes work as long as the audiences participating in them benefit from the participation. Both sets become brittle when the audiences shift or when the strategic functions become visible.
The trajectory analysis I gave for Cofnas applies in different form to Marantz. Cofnas is in phase three or four of a trajectory that has accelerated. Marantz is in a more stable position because the New Yorker’s institutional structure protects the paradoxes more effectively than the Substack-and-X economy protects Cofnas’s. The protections include the magazine’s editorial process, which catches some of the auditor failures Cofnas’s recent essays exhibit. They include the magazine’s audience, which has been trained across decades to read the magazine’s conventions as substance. They include the magazine’s brand, which absorbs and reframes individual writers’ positioning into the magazine’s larger reputation. Marantz benefits from being inside an institution whose paradoxes are more durable than the paradoxes a single Substack writer can sustain. The framework predicts that institutional writers experience the paradoxes more stably than dissident writers, and that institutional writers are correspondingly less likely to see their own paradoxes than dissident writers, because the institution’s stability removes the pressure that might otherwise produce visibility.
The honest application of the Pinsof framework to Marantz produces the same kind of conclusion the framework produced for Cofnas, in different content. Marantz operates a set of paradoxes that serve coalition functions. The paradoxes are mostly invisible to him because the institution he works inside benefits from his not seeing them. The audience benefits from the paradoxes by reading sophisticated journalism that confirms its commitments. The subjects of the pieces benefit from the visibility even when the framing is hostile. The magazine benefits from the brand the pieces sustain. Each participant gets something out of the arrangement. The arrangement requires symbiotic deception. The deception is real. The sincerity is real. Neither cancels the other.
Cofnas and Marantz operate as mirror coalition writers. Cofnas writes for the heterodox-dissident-hereditarian audience in venues that audience controls. Marantz writes for the New Yorker-mainstream-progressive audience in venues that audience controls. Each writer’s coalition has built infrastructure that supports the writer’s paradoxes. Each writer’s paradoxes serve the coalition’s needs. Each writer is sincere in operating the paradoxes. Each writer’s audience is sincere in reading them. The two coalitions read each other as bad-faith operators because the paradoxes that look like sincerity from inside the coalition look like strategy from outside. The framework treats this asymmetry as constitutive of coalition psychology.
Interaction Ritual Chains by Randall Collins
Marantz is the journalist who entered other people’s ritual chains as a participant-observer, attempted to remain outside the rituals he was documenting, and found that the ritual chains operate on visitors whether the visitors consent or not.
Marantz writes for The New Yorker. The magazine is one of the most successful sustained ritual operations in American letters. It has been running its chain since 1925. The chain has charged a recognizable bundle of symbols, including a particular prose register, a particular set of editorial conventions, a particular relation between writer and fact-checker, a particular weekly rhythm of publication. The barrier to outsiders is the editorial process. The mutual focus is the production of long-form reported pieces that meet the magazine’s standard. The shared mood is the seriousness that fact-checked careful prose requires. Bodily co-presence is partial in the modern era, but the magazine maintains an office, holds editorial meetings, and runs the standard corporate-rituals of staff-writer life.
Collins’s framework treats long-running publication chains as habitats that shape their writers. The writer who has been at the magazine for years internalizes the magazine’s standards, the magazine’s preferred moves, the magazine’s voice. The internalization is not deliberate ideological capture. It is the ordinary operation of the ritual chain. The writer is in the chain. The chain is in the writer. The prose shows it.
Marantz has been at The New Yorker since 2011. The chain has had thirteen years of operation on his prose. The voice in Antisocial is recognizably the New Yorker voice. The book reports on subjects the magazine would not have given a staff writer twenty years earlier, but the voice doing the reporting is the voice the magazine has been training across generations. The detached observer with literary range. The careful sentence. The willingness to follow the strange material at length. The eventual moral framing in terms the magazine’s audience can absorb.
The work that produced Antisocial required Marantz to enter the interaction ritual chains of figures he was reporting on. He attended Mike Cernovich’s events. He spent time with Lucian Wintrich, Cassandra Fairbanks, Gavin McInnes, Richard Spencer, Mike Enoch, Jared Taylor, and assorted lesser figures of the 2015-to-2018 alt-right and edgelord scenes. He attended the deplora-ball after the 2016 election. He observed the Charlottesville rally. He spent time at the Daily Stormer adjacent gatherings. He was present at the InfoWars studios. He went where the rituals were happening.
Collins’s framework treats this kind of embedded observation as inherently complicated. Pure observation of a ritual without participation is, in Collins’s strict terms, almost impossible. The ritual works on whoever is in the room. The bodily co-presence supplies signals to all participants. The mutual focus on the speaker, the speaker’s shared mood with the audience, the barrier to outsiders that marks the room as one kind of room rather than another, all of these operate on the journalist as much as on the believers in the room. The journalist can resist some of the operation by holding the symbols at arm’s length, but the bodily signals the ritual produces still arrive at the body. The body responds in ways the conscious observer cannot fully control.
Marantz’s prose in Antisocial documents this experience. He notes his own discomfort at finding the events sometimes funny. He notes catching himself laughing at jokes he disapproved of. He notes the moments where the rituals worked on him in spite of his commitments. The honesty of the reporting on these moments is one of the book’s strengths. He was inside the rituals. The rituals operated on him. He noticed the operation. He recorded what he noticed.
Several of Marantz’s subjects were charismatic in Collins’s strict sense. Cernovich generated rituals around himself. Spencer at certain moments could command a room. Yiannopoulos in his peak period could produce extraordinary energy in audiences. Marantz watched these men do their work. He recorded what they did. He was less susceptible than the audiences who came pre-disposed to the symbols, but he was not fully insulated.
Collins’s framework predicts that charismatic figures can attract observers as well as believers because the ingredients of the charisma operate on whoever is in bodily co-presence. The journalist who finds his subject magnetic against his ideological commitments is reporting accurately on what is happening in the interaction. Marantz reports the magnetism in several scenes. He does not pretend to have been immune. The lack of pretense is the journalistic asset. He is reporting on the rituals, including their operation on himself.
The framework also predicts that charismatic ritual leaders draw their energy in part from the audiences they assemble. Spencer needed the audience that came to his rallies. Cernovich needed the followers who watched his streams. Yiannopoulos needed the crowds at his college appearances. The ritual is not a one-way transmission. It is a mutual generation. The leader supplies the focus. The audience supplies the energy. The leader concentrates the energy and reflects it back. The audience receives the reflection and amplifies it. The cycle compounds. Collins’s framework treats this as the normal operation of charismatic ritual. Marantz’s reporting captures the cycle in operation. The book is in part a record of the cycle running for several years across many sites.
Antisocial was published in 2019 at the moment when the cycle the book documents was beginning to break down. Yiannopoulos had been deplatformed. Spencer’s organization was disintegrating after Charlottesville. Cernovich was pivoting away from the alt-right brand. The Daily Stormer had been chased off mainstream hosting services. The deplatforming campaign that ran from 2017 through 2019 produced what Collins’s framework would predict: a sharp drop in the bodily co-presence available to these movements. The rituals that had been generating energy required venues. The venues were closing. The ritual chains were attenuating because the ingredients were no longer reliably available.
Marantz watched this happen. The book records the closing of venues, the loss of advertising, the loss of payment processors, the loss of social media platforms. The framework Collins supplies tells you what these losses do to ritual chains. The losses do not just remove technical infrastructure. The losses remove the ability to assemble bodily co-presence. The remaining chains run at lower density. The energy generation drops. The participants who needed the chains to charge their symbols and supply their emotional energy face the same depletion that affects all ritual participants whose primary chain has lost its venue.
The post-2019 history of these movements is the predictable consequence. Some figures faded. Some pivoted to other movements. Some maintained smaller versions on alternate platforms. The alt-right as a coherent ritual ecosystem mostly stopped functioning. The Trump presidency had given some of the movements oxygen they could not generate on their own. The deplatforming withdrew the venues. The two together broke the chain.
Each of Marantz’s pieces in The New Yorker is a ritual operation in Collins’s terms. The reporter goes out, finds material, assembles it inside the magazine’s voice, sends it through fact-checking, and delivers it to the magazine’s audience. The audience reads. The audience completes the ritual by reading. The shared mood between writer and reader is established by the magazine’s recognizable register. The barrier to outsiders is the level of attention required to read New Yorker prose at length. The mutual focus is the subject of the piece. The bodily co-presence is absent in the strict sense but partially supplied by the regularity of the magazine’s appearance and the shared awareness of the magazine’s existence as an institution.
The pieces Marantz produced from his alt-right reporting succeeded at this ritual operation. The audience that reads The New Yorker was given access to the rituals Marantz had documented, in a form that the magazine’s audience could read without entering the original rituals themselves. This is the function magazines like The New Yorker have always served. The reader gets the embedded material at one remove. The reader does not have to attend the deplora-ball. The reader gets to know what the deplora-ball was like through Marantz’s prose. The chain that produced Marantz’s prose carries the reader some distance into the chains he was observing. The reader does not enter the alt-right rituals, but the reader is informed about them.
Collins’s framework treats this as the normal operation of literary journalism in modernity. The reader who cannot personally enter ritual sites of interest reads about them. The reading provides a thin version of the experience. The thin version is enough for the reader’s purposes. The professional journalist’s job is to produce the thin version with enough fidelity that the reader gets a useful picture. Marantz did this job at high quality. The pieces and the book remain among the better records of what the alt-right ritual ecosystem felt like at its peak.
A substantial part of Antisocial argues that the major social media platforms had built systems that selected for and rewarded the kind of charismatic ritual operation the alt-right was running. The platforms were ritual hosts. The platforms supplied the bodily-co-presence-substitute that the new movements needed. The platforms charged with their attention metrics what Collins’s framework would call symbols, and the symbols circulated through the platforms’ algorithms in ways that selected for high-engagement material. The high-engagement material was usually the material that produced the strongest emotional reactions. The strongest emotional reactions were often produced by the kind of polarizing material the alt-right specialized in. The platforms were therefore amplifying the rituals.
Marantz’s analysis is correct in its Collins-relevant features. The platforms had built ritual hosts. The hosts selected for the rituals that generated the most engagement. The engagement was the platforms’ revenue. The platforms could not stop selecting for engagement without breaking their business models. The selection produced the alt-right amplification. The alt-right amplification produced the cultural-political moment Marantz was reporting on. The chain ran from the engineering choices through the algorithms through the user behavior to the political effects. Marantz traced the chain.
The deplatforming response was the platforms’ attempt to break specific ritual chains they had been hosting. The response worked at the level of the specific chains. The response did not change the underlying selection. The platforms still select for engagement. The selection still amplifies whatever rituals can produce the engagement. The amplified rituals after 2019 have been different from the alt-right rituals before 2019. The selection mechanism has remained the same. Collins’s framework predicts that any platform that selects for engagement will produce charismatic-ritual amplification of whatever movements can supply the engagement. The movements change. The selection persists. The amplification continues.
Collins’s framework asks where the writer’s own emotional energy comes from. Marantz’s energy across the period of the alt-right reporting came from several sources. The New Yorker chain supplied institutional energy. The reporter’s own progressive politics supplied a kind of motivational energy through clear opposition to what he was reporting on. The encounter with the rituals he was documenting supplied energy through the bodily mechanisms Collins identifies, including the uncomfortable energy of finding the material strange and disturbing. The book project itself supplied the goal-oriented energy of producing a sustained work.
The framework predicts that journalists who report for years on movements they oppose face a particular kind of depletion. The opposition is energizing in the short run but exhausting over the long run. The constant exposure to material the journalist disapproves of produces what some of Marantz’s New Yorker colleagues have described in their own reporting as a kind of soul-fatigue. The fatigue is the predictable result of running a ritual chain whose primary mood is opposition to other people’s rituals. The opposition cannot generate the same kind of sustained energy that participation in rituals one endorses can generate. The energy drops over time.
Marantz’s post-2019 output has shifted away from the alt-right reporting toward other subjects. He has covered other topics. He has written about social media policy. He has written about other political and cultural questions. The shift is consistent with what Collins’s framework predicts. The writer who has been running on opposition energy for several years needs to find other sources or the chain attenuates. Marantz found other sources. The output continues. The intensity of the alt-right years has not been replicated, because the conditions that produced that intensity have not been replicated. The framework predicts this. The writer would need a new charismatic ritual ecosystem to embed in, and the new ecosystem would have to be at the energy level the alt-right was at its peak. No such ecosystem has emerged for him to embed in.
Collins’s framework gets sharp when Marantz is placed next to the figures he wrote about. Mike Cernovich at his peak was running a charismatic ritual chain that produced enormous emotional energy in his followers and in himself. Yiannopoulos at his peak was running a similar chain at higher density. Spencer at his peak was attempting to run such a chain and partially succeeding. Each man was in the spike phase of a ritual chain. Each man’s prose, video, and stagecraft were the residue of the chain running hot.
The framework predicts that spike-phase charismatic chains burn through their fuel faster than steady-output institutional chains. The spike phase generates more energy per unit time but cannot sustain the rate. The chain attenuates. The participant who has built his career on the spike-phase output faces depletion when the spike ends. The post-spike careers of Marantz’s subjects show the depletion clearly. Cernovich produces less and reaches fewer people than at his peak. Yiannopoulos has cycled through several smaller versions of the original operation. Spencer has effectively withdrawn. Each man’s emotional energy and institutional reach has dropped.
Marantz, by contrast, has a steady-output institutional chain at The New Yorker. The chain produces less energy per unit time than the spike-phase chains his subjects were running. The chain produces energy steadily across years. The framework predicts the trade-off. Marantz cannot match the per-piece intensity that his subjects could produce at their peaks. Marantz can produce work at his level for decades while his subjects burn out in years. The trade-off is the structural difference between institutional and charismatic ritual chains. The framework does not say one is better than the other. The framework says they have different shapes. Marantz chose the institutional shape. His subjects chose the charismatic shape. The shapes produced the careers the framework predicts.
The framework also clarifies an ethical question Marantz’s reporting raises and that he addresses in his prose. The journalist who embeds in rituals he disapproves of, generates traffic for those rituals through his reporting, and amplifies the figures he is reporting on through the act of reporting on them, faces a real puzzle. The amplification effect is documented. Mainstream coverage of obscure online figures has often increased their reach. Marantz’s pieces and book have been read by people who then sought out the figures Marantz was profiling. Some fraction of those readers were drawn to the figures. The journalism produced both effects. The framework Collins supplies says that writing about a ritual is itself a kind of ritual, and the ritual of writing carries the symbols of the original ritual to new audiences. The audiences receive the symbols at one remove. Some of them complete the ritual the original symbols were designed for. The journalism extends the chain it was documenting.
Marantz acknowledges this in the book. He does not have a clean solution. The acknowledgment is the honest move. The framework does not provide a clean solution either. The framework only describes what happens. Writing about rituals extends them. Refusing to write about them leaves them unobserved by the wider audience. Both options have costs. The journalist chooses among the costs. Marantz chose to write. The chain extended through his writing. Some of the extension served his goals. Some of it served the goals he opposed. The framework predicts both. The framework does not resolve the question. The journalist resolves it case by case. The resolution is rarely fully satisfying.
Marantz is the participant-observer who tried to maintain the buffer between observer and observed and partially failed at it because the framework predicts that buffers always partially fail when the rituals are running. The book records the failure honestly. The honesty is the asset. The framework can be applied to many cases of journalism on movements, and the same patterns will emerge. The journalist enters the ritual. The ritual operates on the journalist. The journalist records the operation. The recording is more useful when it includes the operation than when it pretends the journalist was insulated.
Marantz’s prose stays inside the New Yorker register because the New Yorker chain has been running on him for thirteen years. The register has limits. It cannot fully convey what the alt-right rituals felt like to the people who completed them as believers. The prose can only convey what the rituals felt like to a thoughtful skeptic in the room. The conveying is incomplete by the nature of the chain producing it. The framework predicts the incompleteness. The book is the best the chain could produce. The chain is the chain. The book is what the chain produced.
Marantz as Pseudoargument: A Pinsof Reading
The New Yorker profile and the long-form journalistic book are registers that present themselves as inquiry. The conventions are familiar. The writer immerses himself in the world he is covering. He spends time with his subjects. He reports what he sees and hears. He arranges the material into a narrative that allows the reader to see the world the writer has entered. The form has the markers of careful observation. The prose is polished. The fact-checking apparatus of The New Yorker is one of the most rigorous in American journalism. The book carries copious endnotes. Names, dates, and quotations are accurate within the conventions of the genre.
The first thing Pinsof’s framework registers is that surface accuracy is not the same as argumentative honesty. A pseudoargument can be factually accurate at the level of individual claims while performing operations that fit the function of tribal performance. The diagnostic is structural. It asks how the material is arranged, what work the arrangement does, and whether the form fits the function the work claims for itself. Marantz claims to be doing inquiry into how online extremism captured a part of American culture. The diagnostic asks whether the form of the work fits this function or whether it fits some other one.
The diagnostic check produces several findings.
Marantz does not engage with the strongest versions of the views he is covering. The figures he profiles are real, and the views they hold are real, but the views are presented in their most rhetorically vulnerable forms rather than in their strongest analytical forms. When Marantz covers a figure like Mike Cernovich, the coverage emphasizes the figure’s most provocative tweets, his most embarrassing moments, his most pseudo-philosophical posturing. When he covers more substantive figures from the dissident-right intellectual ecosystem, the same selection function operates. The book includes brief encounters with thinkers whose work would require sustained engagement to refute, but the encounters are framed to display the thinkers as social phenomena. The strongest versions of the dissident-right critique of mainstream institutions, of progressive cultural enforcement, of demographic transformation, or of post-1965 American politics do not appear in their strongest forms. They appear filtered through the social and rhetorical failings of the figures who hold them.
Pinsof’s framework reads this selection as a sign that the function of the work is not persuasion of skeptics. Persuasion would require engaging the dissident-right view at its strongest and showing why even the strong version fails. Marantz’s work does not attempt this. It engages the dissident-right view at its weakest and shows why the weak version fails. The reader who is already persuaded that the dissident right is contemptible has his prior confirmed. The reader who is uncertain is not given the materials he would need to evaluate the case on its merits. The reader who is sympathetic to dissident-right analyses recognizes immediately that his views are not being engaged and has no reason to update.
The work performs the rallying function for its target readership. The New Yorker’s readership is heavily concentrated in the professional managerial class, in coastal cities, in academic and media institutions, and in the broader cultural infrastructure that the dissident right has positioned itself against. This readership has its own coalition identity, its own shared references, its own villains, and its own analytical reflexes. Marantz’s work creates common knowledge for this coalition. It establishes a shared narrative of how the country went wrong, who is responsible, and what kind of people the responsible parties are. The narrative is sophisticated and well-written and carries the institutional weight of a magazine that has been a coalition flagship for decades. Pinsof’s framework predicts that pseudoargument operates most powerfully when it serves a coalition that needs shared knowledge, and Marantz’s work fits the prediction precisely.
The rationalization function operates through the journalistic apparatus. The endnotes, the fact-checking, the embed methodology, and the institutional standing of The New Yorker all do work for the reader. The reader is given permission to trust the analysis on the strength of the institutional credentials rather than on the strength of the analysis. He does not need to evaluate whether Marantz’s framing of the figures he covers is the most accurate framing available, because The New Yorker has fact-checked the piece. He does not need to evaluate whether the embed produced an accurate picture or a curated one, because the conventions of long-form journalism present embed work as a window onto reality. Pinsof’s framework reads this as an appeal-to-authority operation performing the rationalization function. The credentials carry the conclusions, and the conclusions are the conclusions the audience came to read.
The status-attack function dominates the work. The figures Marantz profiles are subjects of sustained status attack across hundreds of pages. The attacks are not crude. They are achieved through selection of detail, through tonal cues, through the placement of unflattering anecdotes at points of maximum rhetorical effect, through the framing of moments that invite the reader to feel embarrassment or contempt for the subject. The technique is among the most accomplished forms of long-form journalistic status attack in contemporary American writing. A reader who finishes a Marantz profile of a dissident-right figure has not been given an analysis of the figure’s ideas. He has been given a portrait that lowers the figure’s social standing in the eyes of the readership the magazine serves. The lowering is the point of the genre, even when the genre presents itself as inquiry into ideas. Pinsof’s framework reads this as a textbook status-attack operation, and it reads the literary sophistication of the technique as evidence that the operation is performing its function with unusual efficiency.
The status-defense function operates for Marantz’s coalition. The mainstream institutions that have come under attack from the dissident right are defended throughout the work, often by negative comparison rather than by positive argument. The dissident right is presented as so contemptible that the question of whether its critiques of mainstream institutions have merit drops out of view. The reader does not need to evaluate whether progressive cultural enforcement has the features the dissident right ascribes to it, because the people making the criticism are the kind of people Marantz has shown them to be. The status defense of the progressive coalition is achieved through the status attack on the coalition’s critics.
The concealment function operates through the conventions of the magazine profile. Marantz presents himself as an observer rather than as a coalition combatant. The framing positions him as a journalist doing reporting, not as a member of one tribe rendering members of another tribe for the consumption of his own. The framing is necessary because, as Pinsof points out, overt tribal performance loses status and effectiveness. The work has to present itself as inquiry to do its rallying and rationalizing work. Marantz performs the inquiry persona consistently. He uses the conventions of curiosity, of careful observation, of charitable engagement at moments where charitable engagement makes the eventual unflattering portrait more devastating. The conventions are part of the operation. Pinsof’s framework reads them as the most sophisticated form of the concealment function pseudoargument requires.
A complication is worth dwelling on, because it bears on whether the framework’s verdict is fair. Marantz is sometimes correct on the merits. The figures he covers are sometimes the figures he describes them as being. Some of the dissident-right ecosystem includes grifters, fantasists, opportunists, and people whose intellectual seriousness does not survive close inspection. Marantz’s portraits of these figures are often accurate. A framework that classified all unflattering coverage of a political coalition as pseudoargument would be useless. Pinsof’s framework does not do this. It does not classify by topic or by valence. It classifies by structural fit between form and function.
The substantive question of whether Marantz’s portraits are accurate is separable from the structural question of what the work is doing. The work could be doing pseudoargument while the portraits are accurate. Pinsof’s framework explicitly allows this. A piece of journalism that arrives at correct portraits of its subjects through pseudoargument operations is still doing pseudoargument. The function of the work is not to evaluate competing analyses of American political culture but to consolidate a coalition around a shared understanding that the coalition already accepts. That this understanding happens to be correct about specific figures is a separate matter from what the work is doing as an activity.
The same diagnostic that classified Judging Freedom as pseudoargument despite the show’s predictive successes classifies Marantz’s work as pseudoargument despite its factual accuracy on individual portraits. The structural test does not depend on whether the conclusions are correct. It depends on whether the form fits the function of persuasion. Marantz’s work does not engage the strongest versions of opposing views, does not display the markers of inquiry that real argument requires, treats opposition as confirmation, performs sustained status attack on his subjects, performs sustained status defense of his readership’s coalition, and conceals the operation under the conventions of journalistic objectivity. The work passes the diagnostic for pseudoargument cleanly.
Several additional Pinsof diagnostics check out.
The work treats opposition as confirmation. When the figures Marantz covers respond to his coverage, the responses are folded into the narrative as evidence of the figures’ bad faith rather than as occasions for revision. The structure closes the system. A dissident-right writer who attacks Marantz’s coverage as biased is treated as confirming the bias the coverage describes, because the writer’s attack itself becomes a piece of the dissident-right behavior the coverage was diagnosing. This is the same structure Pinsof identifies in pseudoargument across the political spectrum. The framework cannot meet a falsifying response because the framework absorbs the response as further evidence for the framework.
The work shows little curiosity about counterexamples. Dissident-right figures whose work is more substantive than the rhetorical caricature would allow receive minimal treatment. The intellectual genealogy of dissident-right critiques of mainstream institutions is largely absent. The continuities between dissident-right concerns and concerns that other parts of American political culture have raised receive no acknowledgment. The work does not examine whether progressive cultural enforcement has the features the dissident right ascribes to it, because the work is not built to examine this question. It is built to render the dissident right as a sociological phenomenon, and the rendering proceeds without serious engagement with the substance of the dissident-right critique.
The work is overconfident about the moral status of its subjects. Figures are presented as contemptible without sustained argument that the contempt is warranted. The presentation depends on the cumulative force of selected detail rather than on direct engagement with the figures’ arguments. A reader who agrees with the cumulative impression has been confirmed in his prior. A reader who does not agree has been given no materials for revising. The overconfidence is a tell. Persuasion requires that the reader be given the case against the writer’s conclusion. Tribal rallying does not, and the work does not.
The work engages in deflection. When the dissident-right ecosystem produces figures whose work is harder to dismiss, the discussion shifts to figures whose work is easier to dismiss. When a figure’s career produces an accomplishment that complicates the unflattering portrait, the discussion shifts to a different period of the career or to a different figure entirely. The motion is constant. The framework reads this as a verbal-sparring function. The goal is not to settle a question but to keep moving so that no question gets settled in a way that damages the analysis.
A point of contrast with the previous cases clarifies what is distinctive about Marantz. Duke, Jones, Cofnas in his weakest registers, and Napolitano are all positioned by mainstream institutions as outside the realm of legitimate discourse. The framework’s classification of their work as pseudoargument runs in the same direction as the institutional consensus. Marantz is positioned by mainstream institutions as an exemplary practitioner of careful journalism on a politically charged topic. The framework’s classification of his work as pseudoargument runs against the institutional consensus. The framework either applies in both directions or it applies in neither. Pinsof’s account requires that the framework apply in both directions, and the application to Marantz is the test case.
The framework passes the test. The diagnostics that classify Duke, Jones, and the rest as pseudoargument classify Marantz’s work the same way. The form does not fit the function of persuasion. The form fits the function of coalition consolidation, status attack on the coalition’s enemies, status defense of the coalition itself, and concealment of all of the above under the costume of inquiry. The institutional setting in which the work appears is more prestigious than the settings in which Duke and Jones appear, and the literary craft is more accomplished than the craft Napolitano displays in his interview format. The institutional setting and the craft do not change the structural diagnosis. They change the audience the work reaches and the effectiveness of the operation. The operation is the same.
What is distinctive about Marantz’s case is the level of craft at which the pseudoargument operations are performed. The selection of detail is more skilled than in the Duke or Jones cases. The framing of subjects is more subtle. The status attacks are achieved with greater literary economy. The concealment of the tribal function under the conventions of journalism is more sophisticated than the concealment of the same function under the conventions of theological treatise or racial autobiography. The craft is real, and the framework registers it as a sign that the operation is being performed by a skilled practitioner of a refined version of the genre.
Dissident-right responses have answered the work on its own terms, treating it as journalism that has gotten the facts wrong, and providing counter-portraits that emphasize different details. The strategy is reasonable but partial. If the work is pseudoargument, then disputing its factual claims does not address what the work is doing. The work’s function is tribal consolidation for The New Yorker’s readership, and that function is not defeated by dissident-right counter-portraits, because the readership does not consume dissident-right responses in the first place. The function is defeated, when it is defeated at all, by exposure of the function. Showing what the work is doing as an activity is more damaging to the work than showing that any particular portrait within it is uncharitable.
The structural diagnosis matters more than the topical one. Marantz’s portraits of individual figures can be evaluated case by case, and the evaluation is worth doing. What the evaluation cannot do is unmake the work. The work is not held together by the accuracy of those portraits. It is held together by a coalition function that the portraits serve. The coalition function does not depend on the portraits being unfair. It would operate equally well if the portraits were fair, because the function is not about getting the figures right. It is about giving the readership a shared understanding of what kind of phenomenon the dissident right is, and the shared understanding does the work the readership came to receive.
The applied verdict is that Antisocial and Marantz’s broader body of New Yorker work on the dissident right are pseudoargument of unusual literary accomplishment. The reporting, the embed methodology, the fact-checked endnotes, the polished prose, and the air of careful observation are all parts of a cover story for operations that have nothing to do with persuasion of skeptics. The operations are tribal. The tribe is the professional managerial readership of The New Yorker and adjacent publications. The work rallies, rationalizes, attacks the coalition’s enemies, defends the coalition’s standing, and conceals all of the above under the conventions of journalism. It does each competently enough that the cover has held within its target readership for the better part of a decade.
The work gives its readership a shared understanding that the readership uses for political and social purposes. What the work cannot do is what it claims to do, which is to provide an inquiry into the dissident-right phenomenon that a reader could use to understand the phenomenon on its own terms. A reader who wants that kind of understanding has to read the dissident-right writers in their strongest forms, and to evaluate their arguments. Marantz’s work cannot substitute for this evaluation, because Marantz’s work was never built to perform it.
Explaining the Normative
Andrew Marantz writes from inside the New Yorker about online extremism, the far right, and what he calls the hijacking of the American conversation. His normative vocabulary runs through every paragraph. Norms. Democratic backsliding. Disinformation. Extremism. The public sphere. Turner’s question runs underneath all of it: where does the authority for these terms come from?
Marantz never defends his normative premises. He assumes them. The American conversation has a proper form. Certain people speak inside it. Others seize it illegitimately. The owners are never named, but they are implied. They are the institutions Marantz writes from, the readership he writes for, the professional class that shares his training.
When Marantz calls something extreme, he treats the center as fixed. Turner might press: what establishes this center? Marantz produces no argument. The center is the position of his own coalition, presented as the position of civilization.
Consider his use of “disinformation.” The word looks descriptive. It is normative. To call speech disinformation is to claim the authority to draw the line between truth and falsehood, and to draw that line where one’s coalition draws it. Marantz never defends the authority. He proceeds as if it requires no defense.
Marantz quotes Karl Popper (1902-1994) on the paradox of tolerance, and the citation supplies normative weight. Turner notes that philosophical citation does not stop the question, it relocates it. The authority of philosophy is also a set of professional habits universalized. The regress has no bottom.
His subjects, Mike Cernovich, Milo Yiannopoulos, Cassandra Fairbanks, the Proud Boys, various Reddit communities, get profiled with attention but framed as violations of standards Marantz never states. The standards are the standards of New Yorker liberalism, trained into staff writers over years of editing, citation, and selection. Turner’s claim: these standards are coalition habits dressed as democratic norms.
The “techno-utopians” of Marantz’s subtitle made empirical predictions that failed. The internet did not produce the conversation those men expected. Marantz reads the failure as moral. Turner reads it as predictive. A failed forecast is not a moral collapse, but Marantz’s normative vocabulary cannot tell the difference, because the vocabulary collapses the empirical question into the moral one before the question can be posed.
Marantz writes about Reddit and the “manosphere” as failures of norms. Those spaces have norms. The norms differ from his. The conflict runs norms against norms. Framing it as norms against chaos hides what is happening, which is one coalition naming its own habits “the norms” and a rival coalition’s habits “extremism.” Turner’s lifelong target is this exact move, the conversion of local coalition discipline into universal normative authority by sleight of vocabulary.
When Marantz says “democracy,” he means an arrangement. Liberal institutions. Expert authority. Credentialed journalism. Deference to professional sources. Other arrangements claim the same word. The word does not settle which arrangement has the better claim. Marantz proceeds as if it does, and the proceeding is doing the work the argument should be doing.
The moral seriousness is real. Marantz believes what he writes. Sincerity does not establish authority. His normative claims need empirical grounding, and the grounding he supplies is the agreement of his own professional class with itself.
What is the New Yorker doing when it publishes him? It supplies its readership with evidence for conclusions the readership already holds. The norms are not discovered in the reporting. They precede the reporting. The reporting confirms them. Turner’s framework treats this loop as the central fact about normative discourse in modern professional life. The reader does not learn what the norms are. The reader learns that the norms hold, which the reader already knew.
Marantz writes as if he has access to a normative order that stands above the coalition conflict he describes. He does not. He writes from inside one coalition, defending its habits, using its vocabulary, addressing its members. The reporting is good. The frame is local. The authority is assumed.
The Set
His circle includes several layers. At The New Yorker: David Remnick, Jelani Cobb (b. 1969), Evan Osnos (b. 1976), Jane Mayer (b. 1955), Adam Gopnik (b. 1956), Larissa MacFarquhar (b. 1968), Patrick Radden Keefe (b. 1976), Dexter Filkins (b. 1961), Lawrence Wright (b. 1947), Ronan Farrow (b. 1987), Masha Gessen (b. 1967), Sarah Stillman (b. 1984), Hua Hsu (b. 1977), Vinson Cunningham (b. 1985), Kelefa Sanneh (b. 1975), Jia Tolentino (b. 1988), Rachel Aviv, Naomi Fry, Ian Frazier (b. 1951), Susan Glasser, and Jeffrey Toobin (b. 1960). Tech journalism and the platform beat: Kara Swisher (b. 1962), Casey Newton, Taylor Lorenz (b. 1984), Anna Wiener (b. 1987), Charlie Warzel, Brian Stelter (b. 1985), Max Read, Brandy Zadrozny, Joseph Bernstein, and Ben Smith. Researchers on disinformation, extremism, and platform effects: Yochai Benkler (b. 1964) at Harvard, Zeynep Tufekci (b. 1973) at Princeton, danah boyd (b. 1968), Joan Donovan formerly at Harvard Shorenstein, Renée DiResta formerly at the Stanford Internet Observatory, Whitney Phillips, Alice Marwick, Becca Lewis, Kate Starbird, Robert Pape (b. 1960) at Chicago, and Kathleen Belew. The reporters who cover the religious right and Christian nationalism: Sarah Posner, Jeff Sharlet (b. 1972), Michael Edison Hayden, Talia Lavin, and David Neiwert. The cable and digital opinion adjacent: Chris Hayes (b. 1979) at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow (b. 1973), Ezra Klein, Adam Serwer (b. 1982), Spencer Ackerman (b. 1980), and Will Sommer. Anti-disinformation civil society: Nina Jankowicz (b. 1988), Yael Eisenstat, Maria Ressa (b. 1963), and Jonathan Greenblatt (b. 1971) at the ADL. The criminal justice reform world tied to Marantz through his wife: Bill Keller (b. 1949) at the Marshall Project, Emily Bazelon (b. 1971), Dahlia Lithwick (b. 1968), Michelle Alexander (b. 1967), and Bryan Stevenson (b. 1959). Brooklyn literary friends and adjacent figures: George Saunders (b. 1958), Zadie Smith (b. 1975), Jonathan Safran Foer (b. 1977), Joshua Cohen (b. 1980), and Choire Sicha (b. 1971). Historians and political theorists the set elevates: Timothy Snyder (b. 1969), Robert Paxton (b. 1932), Anne Applebaum, Masha Gessen, Ruth Ben-Ghiat (b. 1965), Steven Levitsky (b. 1968), and Daniel Ziblatt (b. 1972). Older voices honored: Joan Didion (1934-2021), Janet Malcolm (1934-2021), Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), George Orwell (1903-1950), John Hersey (1914-1993), I.F. Stone (1907-1989), William Shawn (1907-1992), A.J. Liebling (1904-1963), Joseph Mitchell (1908-1996), and Daniel Ellsberg (1931-2023). Adam Curtis (b. 1955) sits in a particular spot as the documentary filmmaker the set venerates.
What they value.
Liberal democracy as a fragile inheritance that requires active defense. They read Hungary under Orbán, Turkey under Erdoğan, Russia under Putin, India under Modi, the Philippines under Duterte, Brazil under Bolsonaro, and the United States under Trump as instances of the same broad pattern, and they treat the defense of liberal democracy as an urgent project. The Snyder line “do not obey in advance” from On Tyranny operates as set scripture.
Long-form attention as the journalistic form. The 12,000-word New Yorker feature. The reported book years in the making. The patient profile that follows a subject for years. The set treats slow journalism as ethically superior to hot takes and viral content. Marantz’s profiles of Mike Cernovich (b. 1977), of alt-right figures, of platform executives, exemplify the approach: attentive, character-driven, structured within an explicit moral frame the subject cannot escape.
Concern about technology platforms and their effects on democratic discourse. Facebook, Twitter pre-Musk, YouTube algorithms, TikTok, Telegram, Substack. The set treats Section 230 reform, content moderation, algorithmic transparency, and platform accountability as central questions. The platforms produce harms that better governance might reduce.
Anti-fascism in the older sense. Not the street antifa of Portland but the intellectual tradition that draws lines from Mussolini to Trump, from Weimar to Charlottesville, from interwar Europe to contemporary America. They take “it can happen here” as a working premise.
Brooklyn-Manhattan urban cosmopolitan liberalism with sympathies leftward of the older New York Times establishment. They support criminal justice reform. They support immigration. They support reproductive rights. They are skeptical of police, prosecutors, corporate power. They have been more sympathetic to AOC, Bernie Sanders, and the DSA wing than the older liberal commentariat. They keep attachment to liberal institutions while feeling some pull from the left critique of those institutions.
Expertise and fact-checking. The misinformation researcher. The platform integrity professional. The academic at Berkman Klein or the Stanford Internet Observatory. The Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter. These figures embody the set’s preferred mode of knowing: credentialed, careful, evidence-based, opposed to populist epistemics.
A particular relationship to identity. Marginalized identity carries epistemic authority on questions of marginalization. The set listens to and elevates Black, Brown, queer, trans, Muslim, and indigenous voices on the relevant questions. Inclusive language and the cultural reforms of the 2010s are taken as substantive moral progress.
Their hero system.
Arendt sits at the head. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) provide the master frame. The set understands the present through her categories: the masses, the elite, the alliance of the mob and the elite, the banality of evil, the totalitarian state.
Orwell is the second great ancestor. 1984 and the essays on language and politics give the set its vocabulary. Newspeak. Doublethink. The boot stamping on a human face. Orwell’s clarity on propaganda underwrites the disinformation discourse.
The New Yorker tradition. Hersey on Hiroshima. Mitchell on the New York demimonde. Liebling on the press. Shawn as the editor who defended seriousness. Then the modern New Yorker of Tina Brown (b. 1953) and Remnick. Marantz writes inside this lineage and his colleagues read him as continuing it.
The political reporters of the previous generation. Didion on California politics and the 1988 campaign. Malcolm on journalism and its violations. I.F. Stone for adversarial reporting against state power.
Timothy Snyder is the living elder. On Tyranny (2017) and Bloodlands (2010) and his Yale lectures circulate through the set. He gets invited everywhere. He writes a Substack. He testifies before Congress. He is the historian-public-intellectual figure whose authority the set takes as definitive on questions of authoritarianism.
Robert Paxton on fascism. His 2024 statement that Trumpism crossed into fascism was a set-wide event. The aged historian giving permission to use the word was important to them.
Maria Ressa is the contemporary saint. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for journalism in the Philippines under Duterte. She embodies the journalist-as-democracy-defender at personal cost. The set takes her as living proof of the stakes.
Adam Curtis holds a particular position. His BBC documentaries from The Century of the Self through HyperNormalisation and Can’t Get You Out of My Head give the set its frame for how power, media, and consciousness interact. He gets named when set members signal where they sit intellectually.
The fired or pressured researchers function as a smaller hero cohort. Joan Donovan after her departure from Harvard. Renée DiResta after the Stanford Internet Observatory was dismantled in 2024. Nina Jankowicz after the Disinformation Governance Board collapse in 2022. Their experiences of institutional retreat under congressional and conservative-media pressure consolidate the set’s sense of being under siege.
Status games.
The New Yorker byline at length is the apex of the set. A 15,000-word feature carries more weight than five 3,000-word pieces. A profile of a major figure outranks a reported essay. The double-issue piece is sacred. The cover story confers visibility.
Book deals at FSG, Knopf, Viking, Random House, Doubleday. The book that grows from the magazine feature. Antisocial for Marantz. On Tyranny for Snyder. How Democracies Die for Levitsky and Ziblatt. Strongmen for Ruth Ben-Ghiat. The Death of Truth for Michiko Kakutani (b. 1955). The trade book that explains the threat.
Fellowships. The MacArthur. The Guggenheim. The Berlin Prize. Knight-Wallace at Michigan. Berkman Klein at Harvard. Stanford CISAC. Russell Sage. Open Society Foundation fellowships. Type Media Center.
Speaking engagements. The New Yorker Festival. The Brooklyn Book Festival. The Strand. The 92nd Street Y. PEN America events. The Aspen Ideas Festival. The Texas Book Festival.
Awards. The National Magazine Award. The Pulitzer for explanatory reporting or feature writing. The Hillman Prize for journalism in service of the common good. The Mirror Award for media criticism.
Cable and podcast appearances. The David Remnick Radio Hour. The Ezra Klein Show. Pod Save America. On the Media hosted by Brooke Gladstone (b. 1955) and Micah Loewinger. Decoder with Nilay Patel. The Daily.
A cross-platform game runs through the set. The byline at the prestigious outlet, plus the substantial book, plus the academic affiliation, plus the Substack or newsletter, plus the podcast presence, plus the public testimony or congressional appearance. Marantz, Snyder, Tufekci, Gessen all play this multi-position game. The set rewards the figure who keeps presence across modes without losing the central institutional anchor.
Endorsements and quote networks. Jia Tolentino blurbs your book. Patrick Radden Keefe tweets about it. Remnick assigns you the next feature. Choire Sicha emails. Anne Helen Petersen writes about it in her newsletter. These signals confer cohort approval.
Distance from certain figures and outlets. The set scores members on distance from Glenn Greenwald (b. 1967), Matt Taibbi (b. 1970), and the Substack heterodox circle. Distance from Bari Weiss and the Free Press. Distance from Joe Rogan (b. 1967) sympathizers. Sympathy for Substack as a writer’s tool but suspicion of the platform’s politics under Chris Best.
Normative claims.
Democracy is fragile and requires active defense by informed citizens, journalists, institutions, and civil society. The 20th-century assumption of permanent democratic consolidation has collapsed and the set holds it as their task to prevent backsliding.
Disinformation poses a structural threat to democratic deliberation. The remedy is some combination of platform accountability, media literacy, legal reform, and direct counter-messaging. The set treats this as a major project.
Far-right movements deserve serious attention rather than dismissal. They are coherent, dangerous, recruit through identifiable pathways, and journalism must understand them to defeat them. Marantz’s reporting embodies this premise.
White Christian nationalism is a coherent ideological threat distinct from older American conservatism. The set takes it as different in kind from the Buckleyite or Reaganite right.
Marginalized voices deserve elevation on the questions of their marginalization. Inclusive language is substantive. Cultural change is part of justice.
Economic redistribution is also justice. The set holds positions to the left of the older liberal establishment on taxation, on labor, on antitrust, on housing. Some take a DSA-adjacent line. Most do not identify with the left but treat its critiques as within the range of legitimate liberal discourse.
Journalism has a normative role: to defend the conditions of free inquiry and democratic life as well as to report. The set rejects strict objectivity in favor of moral clarity on what they take as settled questions of authoritarianism, racism, and climate.
Essentialist claims.
Fascism has a recognizable shape across history and the United States exhibits its features. Paxton’s checklist applies. Mass politics, charismatic leadership, racial scapegoating, contempt for democratic norms, glorification of violence, mythic past: the set finds these in Trumpism and adjacent movements. This is foundational essentialism.
The online radicalization pipeline is real. Young men move from gaming culture through anti-feminist content through alt-right figures through neo-Nazi material in a recognizable progression. Algorithms shape this pipeline. Identifiable actors profit from it. The set takes the pipeline as established even where the empirical literature is more mixed than the public discourse suggests.
Platform architecture produces particular psychological and political effects. Engagement-maximizing algorithms reward outrage. Attention economies degrade democratic deliberation. The set holds this as causal rather than correlational and treats the technical fix as the responsible response.
The American right has undergone a transformation that makes it different in kind from earlier conservatism. The set draws a line at some point in the 2010s and reads the Trump movement as a categorical break. Establishment Republicans of earlier eras get reclassified as the lost moderates.
Authoritarianism follows visible patterns across countries. Hungary, Turkey, Russia, the Philippines, Brazil, India, and the United States exhibit the same configuration. The set holds this comparative-politics frame as more or less settled.
A claim about marginalized identity and epistemic authority. The set treats lived experience of marginalization as conferring knowledge that those outside the marginalization cannot access. This shapes editorial choices, source selection, and the assignment of moral weight in coverage.
A counter-essentialism about whiteness, particularly White male identity in certain configurations. The angry White man without a college degree, the suburban evangelical, the rural traditionalist, the tech founder with libertarian sympathies: the set draws these portraits with confidence and reads political behavior through them. The portraits are typological rather than individual.
The members of the set know they belong to it. They cite each other in books and longform pieces. They appear together on panels. They review each other in the back pages of the magazines they write for. They share the same fellowships. They publish in each other’s newsletters. They take their work as part of a common project of democratic defense against a tide they believe is rising. They believe history will vindicate their warnings. The cost they pay in industry consolidation and platform pressure is, to them, evidence of the importance of the project they have undertaken.
The Voice
Andrew Marantz writes and speaks in two registers that share a spine but diverge in posture.
On the page, at The New Yorker, he works the participant-observer mode the magazine built its house on. He puts himself in the room with the people he reports on, the trolls and white nationalists and tech founders, and he narrates the scene first, then steps back to assess it. The prose moves from close detail to comic deflation. He builds a moment, lets it sit, then undercuts it with a joke or a wry aside that signals where he stands without him having to announce it. The book that made his name, Antisocial, runs on this engine: immersion, scene, irony, moral worry. He tells you he prefers to describe rather than prescribe, and the writing honors that. In his writing he says he is much more comfortable being descriptive, not prescriptive. The sentences carry a lot of reporting but wear it lightly. He likes the comic simile, the pop-culture tag, the quick reference that flatters a reader who gets it.
The diction mixes high and low on purpose. He reaches for an academic word, then disowns it in the same breath so he does not come off as a show-off. In the TED talk he names two kinds of skepticism and then says he does not want to drown the audience in technical epistemological information. That is the core move. He flashes the credential, then hides it behind self-mockery. It reads as modesty. It also keeps him likable, which is the point.
The persona is coastal, Jewish, literary, and aware of all three. He says so himself. He introduces himself by saying his personality type is like a Seinfeld episode taped at the Park Slope Food Coop. He gets ahead of the charge of being a precious New York intellectual by making the joke first. The self-deprecation is armor. It lowers his status on purpose so the claims that follow seem reasonable rather than preachy.
The spoken voice is softer and more hedged than the written one. In interviews and podcasts he qualifies constantly. He doubles words, “I, I,” and leans on “right?” and “you know” and “like” and “kind of.” He thinks out loud and circles a point before landing it. On free speech regulation he frames two competing concerns, says there is obviously a middle ground, and then says he is curious to hear what the other person thinks. He prefers the question to the assertion. He advances an argument by asking a chain of questions and letting the audience arrive where he wants them.
His signature rhetorical turn is the reframe. He takes a slogan people treat as a conclusion and calls it a starting point. He tells audiences that smart people say “I’m pro-free speech” as if that settles a debate, when it marks the beginning of one, and then he fires off a run of questions about Twitter accounts and harassment to show how much the slogan leaves unanswered. The structure is Socratic. He rarely tells you the answer flat out. He builds the trap of questions and walks you into it.
He grounds his authority in fieldwork rather than theory. The recurring line is some version of “I spent three years embedded,” “I spent four years reporting.” He spent three years embedded with internet trolls and propagandists. The credential is time and proximity, not a degree or a model. He earns the right to speak by having been there, and he reminds you of it.
He positions himself in politics as the reasonable man between two errors. He will not let free speech run on its own, and he will not endorse heavy censorship either, and he keeps locating a sensible middle and inviting you to stand on it with him. The stance is liberal, institutionalist, anti-extremist, and it carries the New Yorker’s confidence that a calm well-reported voice can talk the country back from the edge. He treats his own side’s good faith as given. That is the blind spot in the manner. The hedging and the jokes and the middle-ground framing all assume his readers and listeners already share his sense of who the dangerous people are.
So the through-line: warm, funny, self-effacing, more comfortable describing than ruling, fluent in internet and in highbrow reference, and skilled at lowering his own status to raise the standing of his argument. The written Marantz is tighter and wittier. The spoken Marantz is looser, kinder, more tentative, and quicker to defer. Same man, two volumes.
