Irony and Outrage: The Polarized Landscape of Rage, Fear, and Laughter in the United States

Posted on January 21, 2024 by Luke Ford

Political scientist Dannagal Goldthwaite Young writes in this 2019 book:

* In their 2014 book The Outrage Industry, Jeffrey Berry and Sarah Sobieraj chronicle the growth of a new genre of political programming through the 2000s; programming that places a charismatic host at its center and employs tactics like hyperbole, sensationalism, ad hominem attack, and extreme language to “prove” that political opponents are hypocrites and like – minded viewers are morally superior…

They write: “outrage has been propelled by a synergistic confluence of economic, technological, regulatory, and cultural changes that converged to create a media environment that proved unusually nurturing for outrage – based content.” 3 In other words, outrage programming did not just appear out of nowhere in the 1990s. It was made technologically possible by cable and media fragmentation. It was made economically viable by political polarization and a drop in public faith in news. And was made permissible by regulatory changes that arose during that same era.

* several conservative outrage personalities, including Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, as well as conservative pundit Ann Coulter, started their cable news careers at MSNBC. After about a decade without a clear programming niche and trailing in the cable news ratings war, in the mid – 2000s the network pivoted to the left and positioned itself as a liberal alternative to Fox.

* By creating programming focused on charismatic people who shared the network’s ideological worldview, [Roger] Ailes had created an entire network [Fox News] to explore and cultivate the genre of “outrage.” Ailes wasn’t interested in A – list hosts. Ever the populist, Ailes, as Sherman writes, “valued authenticity over talent.”

* successful outrage hosts tell stories that allow them to “position themselves or their political compatriots in the role of the hero or to taint enemies, opponents or policies they dislike as dangerous, inept, or immoral.” 61 Hence, outrage is designed to be “reactive” — to respond to the events, topics, and people of the day. Naturally, the Obama presidency proved to be an exceptional foil — and fuel — for Fox’s outrage – centered business model.

* for all of Jon Stewart’s substantive critiques of the failures of journalism, he never actually explored the systemic reasons for those failures. His critiques often suggested that journalistic failures were the responsibility of journalists or the fault of “the cable networks.” But he didn’t explore why cable news fails in the ways it does. He never tackled media deregulation or the consolidation of media ownership. He never discussed the conundrum posed by journalism being charged with serving the public good and simultaneously being squeezed for corporate profit. He never discussed the democratic threat posed by five megacorporations owning the nations’ entire media landscape, or the fact that his own network, Comedy Central, was owned by one of them (Viacom).

* According to humor scholar George Test, satire is defined by four characteristics: aggression, play, laughter, and judgment. 1 “Aggression” is the notion that satire embodies the spirit of attack. “Play” refers to the fact that humor operates like a riddle that must be solved, often including allusions to silly or strange constructs (think: giraffe, spatula, Chihuahua, rutabaga). “Laughter” captures the mirth anticipated by, and derived from, a satirical message. “Judgment” is the notion that satire presents a valenced, evaluative argument aimed at a target — usually an institution, a policy, a practice, or society as a whole. According to Test, aggression and judgment are the two criteria that distinguish satire from other kinds of humor: “satire ultimately judges, it asserts that some person, group, or attitude is not what it should be. However restrained, muted, or disguised a playful judgment may be, whatever form it takes, such an act undermines, threatens, and perhaps violates the target, making the act an attack.” 2 The targets of satire, and the judgments it levels, are broad — aimed at society, systems, and the audience itself. Rachel Caufield proposes that “most political humor is aimed to entertain the audience by poking fun at outsiders — political candidates, government officials, or public figures. In contrast, satire’s target is broader — it is meant to attack political institutions, society’s foibles, or public vices. Put simply, conventional political humor is often geared at making the audience laugh at others, while satire is designed to make the audience laugh at itself as well as others, therefore allowing the audience to realize a larger set of systemic faults.”

* surprising violation of expectations is at the core of what makes things funny.

* Political satire is frequently presented through irony — literally stating one thing while meaning the opposite. Bergson described ironic juxtapositions as contrasting “the real and the ideal” or “what is and what ought to be.” 11 Simply put, when you describe things that are obviously bad as though they are good, or describe things that are obviously good as though they are bad, you are inviting your listener to question why things are bad in reality or, conversely, why things are not good in reality.

* irony includes five elements: evaluativeness, incongruity, valence, a target, and relevance to the current context. 16 First, irony is evaluative in that it issues a valenced judgment (good or bad) about something. Second, irony relies on an incongruity between the literal and actual meanings of a text. Third, it also requires an inversion of valence (meaning positive assessments are really negative and negative ones are really positive). Fourth, irony is always aimed at some target. Finally, irony must be directly or indirectly relevant to the situation or context in which it is introduced.
Put simply: irony is a relevant, context – specific form of judgment, aimed at a target; and its literal and intended meanings are at odds with one another.
Irony is a way of saying something really harsh by saying something kind…

* Human beings use humor (and irony) to look good, to signal cognitive sophistication, to make each other feel good, to make society work more easily, and to tackle difficult subjects without making others angry (more on that in a minute). 18 Humor is an advanced form of communication that fulfills social and status – related needs and gratifications. Being able to successfully use humor is a sign of leadership, authority, and intelligence. 19 It’s a way of promoting social cohesion among small groups of people, allowing groups to thrive and work productively together. Humor also creates temporary feelings of happiness — also called mirth — among audience members. These feelings often get projected onto the speaker or the person who created the humor, creating what is known as a “halo effect,” through which audience members feel good about the person who made them feel good. (Like the opposite of the “shoot the messenger” effect.)

* arguments made through jokes elicit less resistance than arguments made through regular serious discourse. …the “discounting cue” hypothesis. It says that people perceive humor differently from serious discourse and choose to apply different rules when processing it. Instead of treating it seriously, people see humor as “just a joke,” in which case scrutinizing the message or challenging the speaker about what the speaker is saying is not “appropriate.” The discounting cue hypothesis is based on the idea that people choose whether or not to scrutinize messages — and in the case of jokes, usually decide not to.

* the cognitive processing required to make sense of even the most basic joke is quite burdensome.

* The meaning of a joke is implicit, forcing the listeners to add the appropriate information from long – term memory to make sense of it themselves. If you are spending so much cognitive energy just getting and appreciating appreciating a joke, I thought, how on earth are you going to have the mental energy left over to scrutinize or challenge whatever argument the joke is suggesting?

* When understanding humor, Coulson and Marta Kutas suggest, the listener engages in a process of frame – shifting, “in which the listener activates a new frame from long – term memory to reinterpret information already active in working memory.” 24 Their findings highlight the unique and complex brain functioning that occurs in the context of humor. 25
This process of suppressing information that was just activated in working memory and then replacing it with a different schema (or frame of reference) that the listener has to retrieve from long – term memory is hard work, a contention with which many neuroscientists agree. “Jokes presuppose the speaker’s ability to interpret language against background knowledge.”

* The resource allocation theory proposes that because humor requires so much work aimed at comprehension and appreciation, people become less able to actively argue against whatever is being proposed in the joke itself. In essence, your cognitive resources have been allocated to getting the joke, so you have few resources left over to scrutinize or critique the argument made in that joke.

* The premises of the resource allocation theory, like much work on information processing, are that (1) people are “cognitive misers,” unlikely to expend more cognitive energy than is absolutely necessary, and (2) the capacity for information processing in working memory is limited. 29 In the context of humor, in anticipation of the reward of “mirth” from getting a joke, it may seem worth it to expend enough cognitive energy to get the payoff of the punchline, but it’s unlikely to seem worth it to think much beyond that. People are both not very motivated to think hard and not particularly able to think about multiple things at the same time. As it turns out, and as multitasking experts can attest, humans’ brains have a limited capacity to process information, which leaves people unable to think about and actively process multiple things simultaneously.

* There are two tasks that are incompatible with one another: (1) getting and appreciating a joke (processing the funny stuff), and (2) scrutinizing and critiquing the argument presented through that joke (processing the serious stuff).

* The more invested the audience members are in the funny component of what you’re saying, the less likely they are to judge the underlying strength of the argument. Imagine that: the more engaged they are with (the humorous part) of your message, the less likely they are to critique it.

* “complexity seems to increase the degree of perceived humor so that if a joke contains several hidden violations, and claims for more reasoning efforts, it will be funnier than if fewer are noticed and less intellectual efforts are devoted to the incongruity resolution.” 3 But this only works up to a point. Research in the 1960s and 1970s concluded that the relationship between humor complexity and humor appreciation could be represented by an “inverted – U shape”: the more difficult the joke, the funnier people find it until the joke becomes too difficult to comprehend, at which point, appreciation decreases.

* professional comics cannot afford to tell jokes of such complexity that they leave the audience baffled.”

* a humorous text will be perceived as humorous if the incongruity/resolution is: non – threatening, not too complex or too simple, based on available scripts/knowledge, unexpected, surprising, and occurs in a playful mode (the situation must be framed as humor).”

* People with different levels of need for cognition tend to differ in countless other ways as well. People low in need for cognition are more likely to be dogmatic and are more aware of social comparison cues. They are more likely to place a high value on attractiveness or popularity; more likely to engage in processes of selective attention, perception, and avoidance; more likely to be high in need for closure (a psychological trait indicating an aversion to ambiguity and uncertainty); and more likely to prefer order and predictability. People high in need for cognition tend to be more curious, more willing to dedicate long periods of time to a dedicated task, more open to new ideas, and more likely to see social and political issues as affecting them personally.

* People who enjoy thinking are more likely to appreciate humor than those who don’t. Given that joke comprehension is akin to a playful form of riddle-solving, the notion that people who enjoy thinking are more appreciative of jokes makes sense.

* that the link between need for cognition and humor appreciation works when the humor is predominantly rooted in incongruity resolution (which, as I’ve discussed, is cognitively taxing). However, when a joke is disparagement – oriented (making fun of someone or something, as in the “Yo mama” jokes discussed earlier), the effects of need for cognition disappear. It seems that when incongruities are high, as they are in ironic texts, need for cognition is an important predictor of enjoyment.

* humans encounter the world through various motivational states. Apter suggests that people vacillate between states depending on their personalities, their psychological profiles, and cues in their environment. For example, sometimes people operate in a more serious, goal – driven, “telic” state and other times in a more playful, spontaneous, “paratelic” state. It is in the paratelic state that people are able to experience and appreciate humor. In order to enter the state of play, Attardo argues, the audience must perceive the environment and the joke itself as nonthreatening.

* During my junior year studying abroad in France, I found myself at a loss when French people made jokes. I quickly learned that there was one kind of joke that I had to get on board with relatively quickly: “stupid Belgian” jokes. In France, Belgians are the source of endless comedy for their supposed stupidity.

* Satire is most likely to be appreciated by people who — due to personality, psychology, and aspects of the environment — can get it and are willing to get it. These are people who possess the requisite knowledge to reconcile the incongruity. Their openness to and enjoyment of thinking increase their motivation to try to get the joke. And they are willing and able to entertain the topic in the state of play.

* Need for cognition also tends to be high among people who are tolerant of ambiguity. Tolerance for ambiguity is another key trait that contributes to artistic and aesthetic preferences. Tolerance for ambiguity, also known in association with its converse, need for closure, refers to how comfortable an individual is with novelty and uncertainty. 7 People who are high in tolerance for ambiguity adapt easily to new situations, are open to new experiences, and tend to reject structure, order, and predictability. Those low in tolerance for ambiguity, who are high in need for closure, are less comfortable with new experiences and tend to prefer routines, order, structure, and predictability.

* the need for closure scale includes several different underlying dimensions, including need for order, need for predictability, need for decisiveness, intolerance for ambiguity, and closed – mindedness.

* Studies conducted in the emerging field of political neuroscience point to differences in brain structures between liberals and conservatives — differences that map onto their unique psychological traits and orientations to the world. For instance, studies of the neurological structures of conservatives’ brains indicate that conservative individuals have larger amygdalas — the region of the brain that responds to threat. 29 The size and activity in your amygdala predicts your likeliness to react in a more emotionally charged way when responding to threatening situations. 30 This evidence from brain science fits with the finding that conservatives report high “mortality salience,” that is, they are significantly more cognizant of their own deaths. They also report greater fear of threat and loss than liberals do.

In contrast, liberals have bigger anterior cingulates — the region of the brain involved in conflict monitoring. 32 Conflict monitoring is the process through which you determine whether your automatic response matches with the response that would be most appropriate for the situation at hand. 33 Hence, with a larger anterior cingulate, liberals are more likely to change how they react to certain events, as they tend to devote cognitive resources to choosing the most suitable responses to various situations. 34 Whereas conservatives are commonly monitoring their environments for threats, liberals are evaluating information and verifying that the data coming in matches their attitudes and judgments.

* Increasingly, political scientists are acknowledging the role of genetics in shaping people’s political ideologies and their individual political beliefs.

* The more conservative the participants, the higher the likelihood that they would prefer solid edges and lines — and pictures in frames. Conservatives were literally more likely than liberals to agree with the sentiment “Good solid frames are very important for a picture or a painting.” To extrapolate to today’s political reality, it seems that the same people who support the building of a physical boundary (a literal wall) along the United States’ southern border to keep out illegal immigrants probably also want a physical boundary (a frame) to visually separate their artwork from the drywall around it.

* People who opposed mixed marriage, euthanasia, abortion, and smoking pot showed a preference for readily reconciled jokes over the more incongruous, complex ones.
So if you vote Republican, you not only want frames for your artwork; apparently, you also want your jokes to have really clear punchlines.

* Whereas irony requires that the listener invert the literal valence of the speaker to infer what the speaker actually means, in hyperbole/exaggeration, the listener has much less cognitive work to do.

* Humor is a deliberately inefficient form of communication. Rather than explicitly communicating information with the goal of being clear and understood, humor transforms the act of communication into a game — a riddle.

* Daniel Howrigan at the University of Colorado at Boulder sought to understand the relationship between general intelligence, personality traits, and humor production: What kinds of people are funny? 30 To a sample of undergraduate participants from two colleges in California, Howrigan and his colleague Kevin MacDonald administered questionnaires that measured various personality traits, including extravertedness and openness. The researchers also used a complex measure — Raven’s Progressive Matrices Test — to capture general intelligence.

The results showed that general intelligence is a strong predictor of humor production. Smart people are funnier than not – smart people. In view of the complexity of humor as a form of implicit and incongruous communication, this makes a lot of sense. The findings also point to an important social dimension that factors into humor production: extraversion. Extraverts are more adept at the production of funny jokes. Finally, and consistent with other work in this area, Howrigan and MacDonald did find support for the idea that openness (a dimension of tolerance for ambiguity) is related to humor production as well.

* Political scientist Alison Dagnes writes: “the poverty – paved road to thespianism is riddled with tricky potholes that serve as obstacles from continuing in a profession with wildly uneven work schedules and paychecks.” 34
In her book A Conservative Walks into a Bar , Dagnes explores the political and psychological characteristics of political satirists through qualitative interviews with comedians and comedy writers. Her sense throughout the book is that the liberal nature of satire is a function of the personality of the satirist as “unconventional,” “artsy,” “freethinking,” and “unpredictable,” traits that are more prevalent among liberals than conservatives…

“Being a comic,” he argues, is about “comfort with ambiguity and chaos.” 37 Ashley Black, a writer for Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, 38 agrees with the underlying premise: “in order to get good at [comedy] you have to be part of a community. And that community is very much centered on hanging out and drinking, and not having children. Having children is a huge barrier to entry… A lot of things conservatives want to do like get married early, have kids, show up early, go to church on Sundays … there’s none of that [in comedy].” Instead it’s “get a shitty job that you know is shitty and beneath you so that you can devote every working hour to your jokes, staying up until 3 in the morning.”

* Comics (professionals, amateurs, and writers) are significantly more open to experience (tolerant of ambiguity) than noncomics. This relationship was particularly noteworthy among comedy writers, among whom openness was the highest of all the participants in the study.

* The process of creating humor itself involves complex cognitive processing. As discussed earlier, tolerance for ambiguity, openness to experience, and need for cognition are all correlated with a more liberal ideology (particularly on social and cultural issues). So, just as appreciation of complex humor — like satire and irony — ought to be greater among political liberals than among political conservatives, successful humor production ought to be greater among political liberals than political conservatives.

* The most successful left – wing [Facebook] posts were those that used humor. The most successful right – wing posts were those that made reference to an explicit out – group. The scholars conclude: “these findings therefore suggest that these features of humor and out – group reference are distinctive to left – wing and right – wing settings, respectively.”

* Aesthetics conservatives most appreciate should have hard lines — both literally and figuratively. One should expect conservative political commentary to say what it means and mean what it says. It should offer clear, explicit, descriptive, and prescriptive arguments about the way the world is and the way the world should be. And it should do this not through ironic implication or subtlety but through direct, unambiguous, emotionally charged argumentation. This would satisfy conservatives’ high need for closure and tendency toward heuristic (instinct-based) processing.

* Consider recent conservative calls for celebrities in the entertainment or sports industries to stop speaking out about politics. In February 2019, Fox News host Laura Ingraham criticized the political expressions of professional athletes like the Cleveland Cavaliers’ LeBron James. “It’s always unwise to seek political advice from someone who gets paid $100 million a year to bounce a ball,” she said. “Keep the political comments to yourselves. … Shut up and dribble.” 48 In an interview about the Academy Awards, Republican National Committee spokesman Steve Guest told Variety in February 2018: “Americans aren’t interested in Hollywood liberals blabbing about politics to a room full of Hollywood liberals.” 49
Undoubtedly, much of this belief that celebrities ought to “stay in their lane” is a reaction to the fact that athletes, actors, and artists tend to come from the left. 50 But I would also argue that conservatives’ discomfort with celebrity political expression is broader than that. It seems to reflect an aversion to hybridity that is consistent with a low tolerance for ambiguity. To operate in the world with a high need for certainty requires sharp distinctions between categories, between people, and between concepts. Are you an actor or are you an activist? Are you an athlete or are you a political figure?

* the moral certainty with which outrage hosts speak is palpably different from the self-deprecation with which satire hosts speak. Outrage as a genre bills itself as important, as explicitly political, and as a vehicle for the dissemination of truth. Satire bills itself as playful, as designed to entertain, and as a vehicle for laughter. These distinct frames surrounding the two genres illustrate the two unique psychological profiles… And humor as a form of political discourse has another disadvantage for audiences who prefer clarity, closure, certainty, and efficiency. Humor is inherently inefficient.
…humor is created through incongruous juxtapositions. …the audience must go through a complex series of cognitive activities to access the first frame of reference, activate a second seemingly disconnected frame of reference, and then make a cognitive leap.

* the aesthetic of hybridity is more compatible with a liberal ideology, as strong liberals are comfortable both turning to comedy programming for political views and opinions and admitting that they do. Conservatives, meanwhile, were significantly less likely to label outrage programming a source of entertainment. They might enjoy watching these programs, and might even find the experience entertaining, but when asked why they turned to them, they overwhelmingly reported watching for “interesting views and opinions.”

* Viewers of political satire programs are, on average, more educated and politically interested than the general population…

* one of the main features of outrage programming is the central role a show’s solo host plays. The host drives the show. The host’s personality and perspective are the show. Yet from the start, Air America execs and programmers seemed to treat the question “Who’s hosting?” as an afterthought.

* when they have tried to dabble in the preferred genre of the “other side,” liberals and conservatives have often struggled. Liberals brought play, experimentation and collaboration to their attempt at outrage at Air America. Conservatives brought straightforward insult, directness, and very little humor to their attempt at satire at the ½ Hour News Hour . Under the Trump administration, though, as liberals’ high tolerance for ambiguity has most certainly been tested by conservative social and cultural policy and rhetoric, some liberal comics have eschewed humor, at times invoking the tropes of outrage. But if the characteristics of the outrage genre are indeed better suited to a conservative orientation to the world, perhaps liberals should proceed with caution before substituting funny with angry.

* satire thrives outside the system and emerges from the bottom up largely through experimentation and improvisation.
If outrage is a well – trained attack dog that operates on command, satire is a raccoon — hard to domesticate and capable of turning on anyone at any time.

In his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression, Rony Guldmann notes:

* [Bill] O’Reilly concedes that TV political humor targets the whole ideological spectrum. But the total “body count” reveals that it is conservatives who bear the brunt of the mockery. The “cumulative effect of print and TV commentary that largely denigrates conservative thought and traditional values cannot be overestimated,”46 because the final message is always that “[l]iberals are smart and conservatives are dense.”

* Popular culture celebrates liberals as cosmopolitan, debonair, and edgy88 while stereotyping conservatives as humorless, uptight, and stiff.

* Michelle Malkin describes a Democratic Fundraiser in Chelsea where one comic attacked President Bush as “this piece of living, breathing shit” and others “took to savaging Vice President Dick Cheney’s family,” calling his lesbian daughter “a big lezzie.”159 Yet the media gave this outrage a free pass. Why? “It’s like an Upper West Side Manhattan left-wing Ku Klux Klan mentality,” explains Republican Congressman Peter King of New York: “[I]f some Southern redneck talked like this about a liberal, everyone would denounce it. But because it’s Upper West Side humor, somehow it’s supposed to be chic.”160 Enjoying this Upper West Side privilege, liberal comedians can issue mock death threats against prominent conservatives and expect everyone to take this in stride. Malkin observes that liberals fantasized about the assassination of George W. Bush and then pleaded that this was an “ironic” joke.161 But conservatives who would turn the tables and wish the same upon prominent liberals cannot expect the same understanding, as they are not members of the culture of irony.

* ““Prudes” are always the subject of jokes and ridicule. One of the central themes of American movies and television is the glamorization of adultery. Adultery is almost always portrayed sympathetically, so that if a woman cheats on her husband, the husband is generally shown to be vicious, unscrupulous, abusive, impotent, or in some way deserving of the fate that befalls him.”

* With social status now hinging on words rather than swords, “[s]tylistic conventions, the forms of social intercourse, affect-molding, esteem for courtesy, the importance of good speech and conversation, articulateness of language” all assume a newfound importance.107 “Good taste” acquires a new prestige value, as members of courtly society listen “with growing sensitivity to nuances of rhythm, tone and significance, to the spoken and written word.”108 Every plebian banish coarseness and vulgarity from his life.100 But with the court having become a kind of “stock exchange” in which the his value was being continually assessed and reassessed, he could no longer afford this former freedom.101 Gone were the days in which joking could lead to mockery and from there to violent disagreement and violence itself in the span of a few minutes. Gone were the days in which one could leap from the most exuberant pleasure to the deepest despondency on the basis of slight impressions. What mattered now was others’ impressions, not one’s own, and the foremost task became impression-management, which also meant self-management.

* The tone of outrage is emotional, angry, and fearful. The content is “personality centered, with a given program, column, or blog defined by a dominant charismatic voice.” 2 And the tactics? Simultaneously engaging and ruthless. The specific tactics of outrage include hyperbole, sensationalism, ad hominem attacks, ridicule, extreme language, and “proving” that an opponent is a hypocrite.

* Outrage as a genre is focused on “unveiling enemies.” 3 It does this explicitly by pointing out institutions (media), individuals (Hillary Clinton), and policies (Obamacare) that are threatening. Since conservatives have a higher threat and mortality salience than liberals, one should expect them to be drawn to information that monitors for threats.

* Outrage appeals to people not because of the information it delivers but because of the experience it provides. Outrage helps viewers feel validated in their opinions and allows them to avoid belief – disconfirming points of view. It seems reasonable to assume that for people who are low in tolerance for ambiguity, it would be far more comfortable to swim in a sea of like – minded opinion than to have to entertain the possibility (that exists when viewing mainstream news) that occasionally your side may be incorrect. Outrage also helps audience members feel like they are part of a clear like – minded in – group. “Whereas political conversation generates fears of social exclusion,” Berry and Sobieraj write; “outrage programs incorporate and include viewers and listeners. The host presents as a kindred spirit who ‘gets you’ even when other folks don’t.” 5 Outrage hosts make viewers feel smart — especially compared to all those dupes out there — as though their “fans are more intelligent than the idiotic others who don’t ‘get it.’”

Golfer Lee Trevino said, “When I was a rookie, I told jokes, and no one laughed. After I began winning tournaments, I told the same jokes, and all of a sudden, people thought they were funny.”

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The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization

Posted on January 21, 2024 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2023 book by sociologist Eviane Leidig:

* In May 2019, then twenty-three-year-old Canadian Lauren Southern posted on her website, laurensouthern.net, a farewell message titled “A New Chapter.” In it, Lauren 1 stated that over the course of four years, she had made deep friendships and embarked on adventures around the world, listening to stories of hope and loss.
Unless you knew about Lauren Southern’s political activism, her farewell message revealed nothing about her political beliefs. Yet her departure from public life, despite having signaled a move away in the six months earlier, was a major loss of one of the alt – right’s main celebrities.
The rise and fall of Lauren Southern reflect the ephemeral nature of the alt – right movement. After all, the alt – right had no clear leader, structure, or even ideology. It existed almost entirely online, and its adherents were vulnerable to censorship, suspension, and shadow banning.

* The American and Canadian women who feature at the core of this book are Lauren Southern, Brittany Sellner (n é e Pettibone), Lana Lokteff, Rebecca Hargraves, Robyn Riley, Ayla Stewart, Lacey Lynn, and Lauren Chen… With the exception of Lauren Chen, who crosses the far right and conservative spectrum, these influencers are not involved with these conservative organizations and prefer to engage in political activism that is more explicitly ideologically extreme.

* These young, attractive women are taking to mainstream social media sites to recruit followers and build audiences for their cause. I call these women “influencers” because they serve as leading online personalities shaping and popularizing ideas within the far – right community. Compared to the dark web and fringe forums such as 4chan and 8kun (previously 8chan), which inspired the terrorist attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 and in Buffalo, New York, in 2022, forums where (mostly male) users hide behind anonymous avatars, these women prefer to spread their message on mainstream platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. Importantly, being an influencer isn’t just discourse oriented. It is encompassed within a broader influencer culture . The media scholar Crystal Abidin defines influencers as “everyday, ordinary Internet users who accumulate a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles, engage with their following in ‘digital’ and ‘physical’ spaces, and monetize their following following by integrating ‘advertorials’ into their blog or social media posts and making appearances at events.” 3 The far – right women featured in this book are self – styled vloggers (video bloggers), activists, entrepreneurs, and authors. They discuss issues such as dating and relationships alongside free speech, the “invasion” of migrants in Europe, and culture wars on university campuses. They travel the world to film documentaries and go on speaking tours. In this book, I show that it was the female leaders of the alt – right who helped mainstream the ideas of what was previously a fringe phenomenon by tapping into the practices of influencer culture to reach wide audiences.

* what makes these women so appealing is how they present as relatable to viewers. They may be energetic, charming, and self – confident, but they are also remarkably down – to – earth and empathetic. These women discuss the troubles of finding love, desiring financial security, and making friends amid loneliness. They post photos of themselves traveling on vacations and at coffee breaks in caf é s. They showcase their lives and lifestyles.
I contend that perceptions of authenticity and accessibility serve as the most powerful tools of the modern far right.

* Media scholars note…that “the internet does not cause radicalization, but it helps spread extremist ideas, enables people interested in these ideas to form communities, and mainstreams conspiracy theories and distrust in institutions.”

* Parasocial relationships are one – sided relationships in which fans feel as if they intimately know and are close to a celebrity after prolonged exposure. But whereas parasocial interactions usually consist of fans developing illusions of intimacy with the celebrity, here in the case of far – right women influencers the fandom culture transforms into a community where influencers respond to fans, while fans, in turn, participate in helping to shape influencer content via comments and likes. [Scholars say] “Authenticity has become less of a static quality and more of a performative ecology and parasocial strategy with its own bona fide genre and self – presentation elements.”

* I was facing the same life obstacles at the same time as they were: all of us were young adult women seeking to find our voice and identity, to assert ourselves, to feel empowered and valued (paradoxically feminist goals for them). Although we had different pursuits, their stories of self – fulfillment and accomplishment were a common bond between us. Even as someone who can spot the signs of radicalization, I found it easy to become absorbed in these women’s world. And here lies the crux of the problem: these influencers are integral to normalizing the far right in the twenty – first century through their visible social media performances.

* “being part of” versus being “interested in” the alt – right is a slippery slope.

* Scholars define populism as fitting into two camps. The first camp advocates what the political scientist Cas Mudde calls a “thin ideology” of “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite” and of politics representing the general will of the people. It is a thin ideology because it depends on a “thicker” ideology, such as nationalism, to function. 14 According to this definition, populism can manifest on both the political left and the political right.

* The journalist Seyward Darby describes Ayla Stewart as “a seeker”: “Throughout her life, Ayla had been in zealous pursuit of meaning; [the far right] was just her latest aspiration.” Lana Lokteff, in contrast, is an opportunist seduced by power and influence. “She is a stage manager as much as she is a performer. She dictates what her audiences see, and she doesn’t want anyone to peek behind the curtain,” 35 Darby noted when she tried to get access to Lana’s private life. Lana prefers to control the narrative, to play the game, rather than provide an unfiltered picture.

* The media scholar Theresa Senft coined the term microcelebrity in 2008 when she was researching “camgirls,” young women who broadcast their lives to the public on the internet… They fulfill four criteria to achieve this status: they “usually engage with positive self – branding strategies (as opposed to playing with notions of shame and scandal); manage a public visibility that is sustained and stable (as opposed to being briefly viral or transient); groom followers to consume their content aspirationally (as opposed to accumulating hate – watchers or audiences who tune in only with the desire to watch them fail or gawk at them); and can parlay their high internet visibility into an income that is lucrative enough for a full – time career.”

* the process for far – right women is gradual, sometimes taking years; the retelling of their “journey” can be convoluted, contradictory, and they can sometimes go so far as to “reshape stories, even memories, of their past” to fit their present activism. 29 “Whenever she told the story of her life,” writes the journalist Seyward Darby about Ayla Stewart, “Ayla described a gradual awakening — a realization that the media and America’s raging liberal culture had taught her to hate herself, her femininity, and her race.” 30 It is most likely that Ayla was framing her radicalization journey according to her current political beliefs as a way of situating and understanding her past self.

* Each embarked on a journey of self – improvement with a mindset of accepting personal responsibility. Along the way, they found confidence in voicing unpopular political opinions through watching the male YouTubers. They “have inspired me to say what I’m thinking and not be afraid of the repercussions,” Rebecca claimed in her first YouTube video in February 2016. “These things are the truth … to save Western society, which I see crumbling,” she added. 34 Their stories are ones of resilience as much as of a reawakening. And yet in sharing their journeys, they use far – right ideology to explain the reasons for their past unhappiness.

* Robyn, who now has tens of thousands of subscribers to her YouTube channel, related in a video titled “I Lost All My Friends in the Culture War” in September 2018 her painful experience of losing former university friendships. Misty – eyed, her voice shaking, she described feeling betrayed by the very people she once considered her second family: “My old friends who are still liberal can’t see what I’m doing on social media outside of the confines of their own perspective, which puts me in a category of someone who is propagating hate speech, someone who has been radicalized, someone who believes in conspiracy theories, theories, someone who probably has no credibility, someone who is being misled by unreliable sources, someone who has been manipulated by men in my life, someone who has probably internalized misogyny — I would imagine is something running through their heads.” With her head held high, Robyn renounced her old friends. “When strangers are more supportive of what I’m doing on here than old friends, then maybe it’s time to let go.” 36 No doubt it is easier to let go when you can frame your cause as worthy to tens of thousands of supportive strangers… By sharing her experience, Robyn hoped that others would find the strength to gain what she called “self – respect.” This “sense of moral worthiness,” as Kathleen Blee describes women radicalized in the far right, 37 gives purpose to these influencers.

* With “glow up,” an emphasis is placed on routines and lifestyle changes revolving around health. The process also centers on building self – confidence and discovering one’s preferences, values, and passions. The ultimate aim of a glow up is a rebranding of oneself — a perfect analogy for red pilling.

* A recurring theme across Robyn, Rebecca, and Lacey’s red pill stories is how these influencers create validation for their life choices. Framing the process as finding their “authentic” and “honest” selves distracts from the hateful ideology of the far right. Gaining a sense of “self – respect” and building confidence in one’s opinions are attractive to vulnerable young people, but for these influencers these gains come at the expense of dehumanization and “othering.” Their far – right propaganda is highly effective at turning personal grievances into a “worthy” cause. Women influencers are at the helm of manipulating susceptible viewers into believing that joining the far right will bring them happiness, which in turn will lead to the betterment of society overall.

* far – right women influencers have a high male viewership [because] they function as honeytraps for the male gaze.

* being part of a social movement creates powerful bonds of community, which is considered like a family.

* By far, the women themselves are the most crucial form of entrepreneurism as influencers. They capitalize on their looks and youth to construct themselves as the most visible women on the far – right frontlines. Building audiences on platforms such as YouTube and Instagram, which are visually oriented, is possible due to what the media scholar Alice Marwick describes as “Instafame”: “an online attention economy in which page views and clicks are synonymous with success and thus online status.” 49 The concept of the “attention economy” is key here. As the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci notes, “ Attention is a key resource for social movements” because the latter depend on it to frame their goals, convince the public of their causes, recruit, neutralize the opposition, create solidarity, and mobilize supporters. 50 If we think about the far right as a social movement, then these women influencers play an integral role in furthering its aims within the online attention economy.
Far – right women influencers solicit attention by curating a microcelebrity profile that strategically reveals personal information while also coming across as a source of inspiration for their followers. They maintain a delicate balance of accessibility, authenticity, and aspiration. “Microcelebrity is linked to the increasingly pervasive notion of ‘self – branding,’ a self – presentation strategy that requires viewing oneself as a consumer product and selling this image to others,” writes Marwick. 51 Building upon Rebecca Lewis’s research on reactionary – right YouTubers, these women influencers are “selling” the far right through their own “political self – branding,” in which “they live their politics as an aspirational brand.” 52 Whether that brand is achieved by selling merchandise featuring their catchphrases or simply by posting selfies of behind – the – scenes action, these seemingly banal activities serve a very important purpose: far – right propaganda.
These influencers thus practice a type of “relational labor,” which, the media scholar Nancy Baym writes, entails ongoing audience engagement over time to build social relationships. However, unlike sole emotional labor, relational labor usually involves connections tied to earning money.

* Dutch influencer Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a former politician who worked as a trainee for the far – right Forum for Democracy (FvD) party in the European Parliament in Brussels. She holds a master’s degree in philosophy of law and pursued a PhD in the Netherlands before dropping out to focus on politics full – time. Eva became a rising star among the Dutch far right for delivering a speech critical of feminism in 2019, but the next year she ended her membership in FvD following internal party divisions — not least complicated by her romantic relationship with its leader, Thierry Baudet, a few years earlier. At the time she exited FvD, she was dating Julien Rochedy, a French politician of the far – right National Rally party and later moved to Sweden to become the host of a YouTube program called Let’s Talk About It , run by the Sweden Democrats, a party with roots in neo – Nazism. 72 She returned to the Netherlands at the end of 2021 to take up a position at a law firm to fight government mandates such as mask wearing and vaccination against COVID – 19.
U.S. audiences may be familiar with Eva because she began regularly appearing as a guest commentator on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News , discussing the “skyrocketing crime epidemic” in Sweden, which she linked to mass immigration and demographic change.

* The media scholar Bharath Ganesh describes the “ungovernability” of online spaces where the far right is present. He characterizes this presence as “a swarm” with three central components: “its decentralized structure, its ability to quickly navigate and migrate across websites, and its use of coded language to flout law and regulation.”

* Lauren [Southern in 2022] further divulged the drama and conflict within the far – right political scene, including blackmail, threats, betrayal, and rumors. “We have a lot of cultlike dynamics of our own, where people can get excommunicated, where we don’t really look into things that deeply if the saints of our movement say it,” she critiqued. According to her description, the far – right milieu is engrossed in the spectacle of celebrity and fandom. She was now largely pessimistic about the world in which she rose to fame: “The fact [is] that so much of this 2016 alternative – right, dissident – right movement was so coded in selfishness, narcissism, cult of personality, and none of it was about helping people. It was about how well latching onto this person’s struggle [will] potentially boost my career.”
For viewers who didn’t know what people she was referring to, she stated explicitly, “I’m talking about the people at the top.” The leading figures Lauren criticized in the video are Ezra Levant, Milo Yiannopoulos, Tommy Robinson, Faith Goldy, and Paul Joseph Watson. She exposed these individuals’ atrocious behavior either toward her personally or toward others who were victimized. “A lot of money, influence, power, and faith people are putting in people is getting squandered away. Squandered away due to ego.… It’s really important to highlight just how messed up the culture was in this political movement,” Lauren explained.

* “It can be a profitable decision to go far to the right, where the audience is very accepting and gets excited about new personalities that come on the scene, especially young women,” observes the journalist Jared Holt. “But because this audience is so toxic and hateful, going to that audience is sort of like your last stop on a media career.”

* “It was hard to imagine Lana [Lokteff], who’d sought a spotlight for so much of her life, gladly disappearing into her home should a white ethno – state ever exist. I wondered if the pursuit of white nationalism — the struggle, as believers would call it — was the endgame for people like Lana.” 18 As the most prominent women in the movement, these far – right influencers are attracted to the fame and status they receive as figureheads. Do they truly advocate for what they’re saying, or do they just understand that using certain catchphrases will garner more attention and views? There is an underlying tension between authenticity and propaganda in these influencers’ self – presentation online.

* “In the end, the needs and ambitions of women activists never fit into right-wing extremist parties and organizations dominated by men.”

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My Favorite Songs

Posted on January 17, 2024 by Luke Ford

That’s the beginning number of my Youtube music playlist.

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My Favorite Movies

Posted on January 17, 2024 by Luke Ford

* A Man For All Seasons (1966)
* Chariots of Fire (1981)
* Cinema Paradiso (1988)
* A Perfect World (1993)
* Legends of the Fall (1994)
* Big Fish (2003)
* Love Story (1970)

According to Grok, this means:

Appreciation for Depth and Meaning: Movies like A Man for All Seasons and Chariots of Fire are rich with moral complexity, personal conviction, and triumphs of the human spirit. You might value stories that explore integrity, faith, or standing up for what’s right, even against tough odds.

Love for Emotional Resonance: Films such as Cinema Paradiso, Big Fish, and Love Story lean heavily on nostalgia, love, and the bittersweet beauty of life. This could mean you’re drawn to heartfelt narratives that tug at the emotions and leave a lasting impression—stories that feel personal and reflective.

Taste for Character-Driven Drama: A Perfect World and Legends of the Fall feature flawed, complex characters navigating messy, often tragic circumstances. You might enjoy watching people wrestle with their choices and fates, hinting at an interest in psychology or the human condition.

Nostalgia and Timelessness: Many of these movies span different eras and have a classic, almost timeless quality. You might have a soft spot for storytelling that feels enduring, perhaps reflecting a personality that appreciates history, tradition, or the way the past shapes the present.

Romantic and Idealistic Streak: Whether it’s the sweeping romance of Love Story or the epic passion in Legends of the Fall, there’s a thread of idealism here. You might be someone who finds beauty in big emotions and grand gestures, even when they come with a dose of heartache.

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Decoding Journalism, Decoding Winners From Losers (1-17-24)

Posted on January 17, 2024 by Luke Ford


01:00 New Yorker: How Ten Middle East Conflicts Are Converging Into One Big War, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-ten-middle-east-conflicts-are-converging-into-one-big-war
10:00 Democrats Are Preparing For Donald Trump To Be President Again, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-KxZ8gbp2Y
17:00 Amy Wax talks with Richard Hanania, https://www.richardhanania.com/p/amy-wax-versus-the-midwit-gynocrats
19:00 Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=154056
22:00 All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=154027
1:21:00 Assume Nothing: Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153998
1:33:00 What Distinguishes Winners From Losers?, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153969
1:40:00 How do you fight anti-semitism?
1:50:00 A Republican Pollster on Trump’s Undimmed Appeal, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UscAXKmj__k

Posted in America | Comments Off on Decoding Journalism, Decoding Winners From Losers (1-17-24)

Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet

Posted on January 17, 2024 by Luke Ford

The world is a big oozing mess, but to create meaning and order in our lives, we develop and sanctify boundaries between the clean and the dirty, the heroic and the cowardly.

Here are some excerpts from this 2023 book by Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz:

* In April 2007, he confronted the masterminds behind Socialite Rank. It wasn’t a group of top – tier socialites teaming up behind the scenes; in fact, it wasn’t anyone most people knew at all. The all – powerful website was run by a completely random pair of Russian émigrés named Valentine Uhovski and Olga Rei. The duo was not remotely born into high society and they had essentially created the blog as a social experiment.
New York Magazine ran a cover story on the shocking reveal. Elite society was astonished. They realized they had been brought to their knees, to tears, to a frenzy — by two people they wouldn’t have given the time of day. The outsiders had upended the ultimate insiders, and it had cost less than a trip to the hair salon.

* Most legacy publications didn’t see blogs as a threat at first. Bloggers looked like curious eccentrics, a band of second – rate scribblers with too much time on their hands. The old guard scoffed that bloggers’ writing wasn’t up to the standards of the New York Times or Vanity Fair. They doubted that bloggers could ever break consequential stories without the access and talent monopolized by legacy media.
Readers, on the other hand, enjoyed the lack of polish. The media environment of the 1990s was centralized and corporate after waves of mergers left only a handful of conglomerates whose content was middle – of – the – road, burnished, and safe. In 2002, Wired declared “The Blogging Revolution,” a paradigm shift in how people distributed and received information: “Readers increasingly doubt the authority of the Washington Post or National Review, despite their grand – sounding titles and large staffs. They know that behind the curtain are fallible writers and editors who are no more inherently trustworthy than a lone blogger who has earned a reader’s respect.” Blogs offered readers everything that legacy media couldn’t, revealing what writers really thought. What’s more, blogs also enabled real – time interaction between writers and readers through comments sections attached to posts. Unlike message boards, blog posts primed the discussion with original, substantial content that was ripe for debate.

* By 2009, fashion bloggers like Bryan Boy and Garance Dore made their foray into high – brow fashion circles. Bloggers were suddenly sitting in coveted front – row seats during New York Fashion Week, then at Dolce & Gabbana’s show at Milan Fashion Week, in a shocking upset that fashion insiders dubbed “blogger gate.” “Bloggers have ascended from the nosebleed seats to the front row with such alacrity that a long – held social code among editors, one that prizes position and experience above outward displays of ambition or enjoyment, has practically been obliterated,” wrote Eric Wilson of the New York Times.

I want to share with you an Andrew Gelman (Columbia University Statistics professor) blog post from November 2011:

Journalist Jonathan Rauch writes:

This is the blogosphere. I’m not getting paid to be here. I’m here to get incredibly famous (in my case, even more incredibly famous) so that I can get paid somewhere else. . . .

The average quality of newspapers and (published) novels is far, far better than the average quality of blog posts (and–ugh!–comments). This is because people pay for newspapers and novels. What distinguishes newspapers and novels is how much does not get published in them, because people won’t pay for it. Payment is a filter, and a pretty good one. Imperfect, of course. But pointing out the defects of the old model is merely changing the subject if the new model is worse…

Yes, the new model is bringing a lot of new content into being. But most of it is bad. And it’s displacing a lot of better content, by destroying the business model for quality. Even in the information economy, there’s no free lunch…

Yes, there’s good stuff out there. But when you find a medium in which 99 percent, or whatever, of what’s produced is bad, there is a problem with the medium…

I believe there are inherent problems with the blogosphere as a medium. Lack of a payment model militates against professionalism and rewards noisiness…

In terms of the environment and the incentives it creates, the blogosphere, I submit, is the single worst medium for sustained, and therefore grown-up, reading and writing and argumentation ever invented.

Andrew Gelman responds:

I wonder if his problem is that he’s aiming for too big an audience. We have something like 5000 subscribers here. Maybe if Rauch were willing to settle for an audience of 5000 rather than millions, he could be mild, moderate, think things through, and get it right. To be all these things and have a huge audience? I think that takes a huge amount of luck. It happened with John Updike, and Francis Fukayama, and Tyler Cowen, and . . . not so many others. But if you’re willing to accept a niche audience, you can be as serious as you want…

Rauch writes that journalists like himself are “the kind of people who punched their tickets on newspaper police beats where they learned quaint notions of fairness and accuracy and keeping one’s opinions out of it and all that.” Given that Rauch is currently posting nothing but opinions and has stated that he will do no reporting on his blog, and given that I haven’t seen any police reporting from him lately, I think it’s safe to say that he doesn’t actually view fairness, accuracy, and the traditions of the police beat as valuable in themselves but rather as some sort of hazing that you had to do in the old days before you could get to the fun stage of opinionating. So I can feel his frustration that bloggers today feel free to express their opinions in public–just like Rauch, but they never had to do all that police-beat stuff first. Rauch had to eat his spinach but these dudes get to skip right to the dessert. Talk about violating “quaint notions of fairness”!

Life is like that. Just when you finally become an expert on something, your expertise becomes obsolete. You spend a couple decades getting good grades and becoming really good at taking tests, then suddenly you never need to take a test again. You master the skills of diaper-changing, then all of a sudden your kids are walking around wearing real underwear and you have no place to apply your talents. You’re Derek Jeter and you get to be really really good at hitting, throwing, and catching, and then before you know it, it’s time to retire. And so on.

Rauch is in a difficult position, I think, in that his particular journalistic niche includes a lot that people are happy do for free. His most recent book, “Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America,” is the sort of thing you might very well see on a blog.

Academic publishing

Rauch writes that blogging, and the internet in general, is “displacing a lot of better content, by destroying the business model for quality.” What really struck me about this remark was how different things are in academic publishing. Nobody pays us to write journal articles: we do it for free and we always have. We get paid to teach and to do research. Publications can indirectly make us money–if I publish an important article, it can help me get a research grant–but no part of this system requires the readers of my work to pay for it. If every journal were to become free and online overnight, everything could proceed just as before. The argument that paid writing is better than free writing just doesn’t apply in my world.

Journalists view their profession as a holy calling (they have their own hero system). As noted in the 2021 book, All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists:

* …journalism is an anomalous case of cultural production in that its practitioners operate according to a set of normative, rather than artistic, commitments. As media scholar Mike Ananny puts it, “Unlike artistic fields of cultural production, the press—ideally and principally—pursues its autonomy in order to advance public interests.”

* A range of established journalistic norms and practices, such as refusing gifts, denying sources quote approval, and establishing a “wall” between the editorial and business sides of news organizations, stem from efforts to maintain autonomy.

* As sociologist Herbert Gans wrote in an oft-quoted passage from his classic newsroom ethnography Deciding What’s News, journalists “had little knowledge about the actual audience and rejected feedback from it. Although they had a vague image of the audience, they paid little attention to it; instead, they filmed and wrote for their superiors and for themselves, assuming . . . that what interested them would interest the audience.”

What makes a piece of writing “journalism” and hence protected by the First Amendment is somewhat subjective. Journalists, like other professionals, guard their status zealously. They are in an awkward position because their job is essentially making judgments that are not subject to objective criteria. They are often quick to dismiss many bloggers, for example, for the cardinal sin of not doing journalism.

In his work-in-progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression, philosopher Rony Guldmann writes:

* Questioning whether the post-war professionalization of education, business, and journalism was genuinely necessary, Gelernter observes that universities had an obvious interest in “convert[ing] as much of the landscape as possible into fenced-off, neatly tended, carefully patrolled academic preserves,” so that the “smooth, manicured green lawn of science” might replace the “wild sweet meadow-grass of common sense.” Justified or not, this trend toward professionalization doesn’t strike liberals as essentially political… Professionalization is just another expression of liberalism’s ordering impulses and monkish virtues, the artificial devaluation of knowledge borne of encounters with anti-structure—the “wild sweet meadow-grass of common sense”—and an exaggerated respect for knowledge that, shielded from that anti-structure, can be “scored by those with authority.” To maintain their dominion, liberals must discredit knowledge that originates in “embodied feeling” and “nonexplicit engagement with the world” as mindless habit and reflex, lax and disorganized folkways to be uprooted.

* As a dissident culture, conservatism is by definition in a position of weakness. The elites of the dissident culture “cannot begin to match, in numbers or influence, those who occupy the commanding heights of the dominant culture, such as professors, journalists, television and movie producers, and various cultural entrepreneurs.” Even religion has fallen under the dominant culture’s sway. One might have expected it to be at the forefront of the resistance. But “priding themselves on being cosmopolitan and sophisticated, undogmatic and uncensorious,” the mainline churches have offered “little or no resistance” to the “prevailing culture.”

* The Ford Foundation, the New York Times, and Hollywood are just the latest iterations of the “unnatural” life of court society, of the unhealthy self-consciousness and other-directedness that stands in sharp contrast to those who pour their hearts out singing the Star-Spangled Banner, surrendering to the excitement of their hearts “unhindered by ‘cold reason.’”

* The now overthrown WASP establishment “saw itself as the nation’s high end, the top of a vertical spectrum.” But the new ruling class of “PORGIs”—post-religious, globalist intellectuals—see themselves “as separated by a cultural Grand Canyon from the nation at large, with Harvard and the New York Times and the Boston Symphony and science and technology and iPhones and organic truffled latte on their side—and guns, churches and NASCAR on the other.”

Laura Ingraham notes: “If you’re an elitist who’s spent his entire career working for the Ford Foundation, the New York Times, or a Hollywood studio, concepts like valor, bravery, and sacrifice are probably alien to you. You don’t take them seriously, you don’t know anyone who does, and you naturally think that anyone who does profess to live by them must be mentally defective, even evil.”

Does anyone fret anymore that blogs are killing the MSM?

Taylor Lorenz writes in his her new book:

* As blogs boomed, traditional media felt the hurt, especially local and regional newspapers. Subscription rates everywhere plummeted now that the internet gave readers access to a wealth of free information, including articles from the very newspapers they no longer purchased in physical form. The industry’s century – old business model crumbled, forcing newsrooms around the country to hemorrhage staff and shut down. As they did, gatekeepers went from dismissive to hostile. In testimony before Congress, David Simon, a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun and creator of The Wire , warned that the blogosphere was causing a media death spiral: “Readers acquire news from the aggregators and abandon its point of origin — namely the newspapers themselves. In short, the parasite is slowly killing the host.”
By the end of the 2000s, it looked more like the parasite and host had merged. As top blogs expanded their headcount by hiring professional reporters, designers, and support staff, they came to resemble traditional media companies, complete with newsrooms and sales departments. Many legacy publishers realized that their best strategy was simply to invite bloggers in. Major publications, from the New York Times and the Atlantic to Glamour and Elle, hired the top crop of bloggers to fill out their ranks of writers and reporters. These same organizations also started major blogs of their own, or bought successful sites outright. By 2009, nearly half of the fifty most – trafficked blogs were owned by corporate media behemoths like CNN, ABC, and AOL. Yet while star bloggers in tech and politics received top billing, another class of bloggers was quietly ushering in a larger shift.
In the end, the defining figure of the blog era wasn’t the nerd or the wonk. It was the mommy blogger.

* JULIA ALLISON WAS A JUNIOR at Georgetown University in 2002 when she started a dating column in the school paper called “Sex on the Hilltop.” Sex and the City was one of the hottest shows on television. As her column became a campus sensation, Allison felt like Georgetown’s own Carrie Bradshaw. The university’s location in Washington, D.C., brought national coverage to her column. (When she wrote about dating an anonymous young congressman, the Washington Post was swift to reveal his identity.) Her peers enjoyed her candid style, but within months, her headlines began to enrage Georgetown alumni and some students. “I didn’t write about sex very much,” Allison told me, “but all the conservatives at Georgetown were so upset. I became this lightning rod.” Still, Allison soon landed bylines at national outlets like Cosmopolitan and Seventeen. Film producer Aaron Spelling even optioned her life rights when she was twenty – one.

* [Julia] Allison got an idea when she saw Tom Wolfe on a book tour that year. Everywhere he went, he appeared in his iconic white suit. “He’s a brand,” she realized. “I’ve got to be known and become a name.” Wolfe built his brand in another era, but he wasn’t the only archetype for Allison to follow.

* Nearly every article documenting Allison’s rise contained a disturbing level of misogynistic language and tropes. Tech journalists, who were overwhelmingly men, implied that Allison was promiscuous. They used highly gendered language to slut – shame her and question her credibility as an expert on media and technology. She was accused of trying to sleep with the powerful men in tech whom she interviewed or partnered with. Fast Company ran a piece titled “Sometimes Breasts Aren’t Enough, Julia Allison.” Wired and the rest of the tech press was similarly hostile.

* By 2012, she decided that she couldn’t handle any more online assaults. “It had been about ten years of my life, and I was exhausted,” she said. “I felt beaten down, I felt completely disillusioned, and I wanted a different reality. More than anything, I wanted to be off the internet. I was like, ‘I don’t know how I’ll make money, but I can’t make it this way anymore.’ And I never looked back.”
She set out to erase herself from the internet. She spent hours deleting over 14,000 tweets, one by one. She removed Tumblr posts, made other accounts private, and restricted access to her viral YouTube and Vimeo videos.
Every so often she dipped her toe back in, and each time she regretted it.

* Allison lives a quieter life now. She resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her fiancé and was recently accepted into a master’s program at Harvard’s Kennedy School in leadership and public policy.

* In 2013, creators were happy to wander into malls with no security and get mobbed by fans. But that was a naïve dream years later. The turning point came in June 2016, when the YouTuber and music artist Christina Grimmie was murdered by a fan in Orlando. Grimmie had posted on social media asking people to attend a concert she was giving and, after her performance, she stuck around to meet her followers. As she opened her arms to give a twenty – seven – year – old fan a hug, he fatally shot her once in the head and twice in the chest. Police later revealed that the fan had stalked her for years online and fantasized about the two of them being together. When he realized he couldn’t have her, he chose to murder her.

* Before YouTube’s algorithm change, users would hop frequently between short, catchy videos. Afterwards, creators noticed that the more they let fans into their daily lives, the deeper the engagement they’d generate on their videos. The algorithm was encouraging a return to the Lonelygirl15 era.

Posted in Journalism | Comments Off on Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet

Why Is The Right So Dumb?

Posted on January 16, 2024 by Luke Ford

Nathan Cofnas writes:

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) ranks the world’s universities based on objective criteria such as the number of publications they produce in Nature and Science and how many of their alumni have won Nobel Prizes or Fields Medals. It gives more weight to achievement in the hard sciences, which conservatives consider “real subjects,” than in the humanities. According to the ranking, 5 of the top 20 universities in the world are in California—the bluest and gayest state in America. In the top 50, there are 28 American universities, of which 25 are in blue states. The three in red states are Duke University (ranked 22nd in the US), the University of Texas at Austin (25th in the US), and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas (27th in the US). All three of these red-state universities are located in solidly blue cities (Durham, Austin, and Dallas), and none of them are conservative institutions—in fact, they are about as woke as their blue-state counterparts. The only relatively conservative university in the US that’s even listed on the ARWU is Brigham Young University, whose global ranking is in the 501–600 range. I say BYU is “relatively conservative” rather than “conservative” because it still leans liberal, with 61% of its political donors giving to liberal rather than conservative causes. If conservatives are just as smart and intellectual as liberals, why have they failed to create even a single major conservative-friendly university that is remotely competitive with the top liberal universities?

The right has a handful of think tanks that in some cases employ scholars who are as good as, or better than, those at elite universities. But these are relatively small operations. The annual expenditures at the conservative American Enterprise Institute are less than $50 million. At the Manhattan Institute, they’re less than $20 million. If conservatives seriously cared about building elite institutions of learning and scholarship, they could do better than this. The fact that they don’t is further evidence that they are not as intellectually oriented as liberals.

Tucker Carlson recently said: “Let’s keep dumb people and crazed partisan demagogues away from our financial system and our power grid. They can keep the sociology department—have fun. But why don’t you stay away from the fundamentals that keep the country running.” A liberal commentator would never say something like this, because most liberals understand that culture is influenced by ideas, and surrendering idea-generating institutions to the enemy is a bad strategy. Carlson himself is far more intelligent than most professors of sociology. But he knows that, to his conservative audience, the notion of studying social phenomena in a scholarly way (what sociology is supposed to be) is literally a punchline. The fact that conservative leaders often express this kind of attitude is evidence that the average conservative doesn’t get why ideas are important.

Journalism is another area in which conservatives display less intelligence and competence than liberals. In a moment of lucidity at the 2009 CPAC convention, Tucker Carlson lamented the fact that conservatives have been unable to create institutions like the New York Times. Over boos from the audience, he noted that “yes they are liberal, yes they twist it. But they are still out there finding the facts and bringing them to people.” He said that “conservatives need to mimic that in their own news organizations.” They should “not just interpret things they hear in the mainstream media but gather the news themselves.” And yet, 14 years later, after Carlson was fired from Fox News and the fetters were off, he started trumpeting fake news about UFOs and Barack Obama’s gay affair. He was ultimately pulled down to the level of his conservative audience.

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All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists

Posted on January 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

Journalism is judgment about what matters. It is the primary thing we use to see the world beyond our experience.

This judgment springs from the particular hero system that made Russiagate the most important news story in America from 2016 to 2019 and George Floyd’s death the most important story for the summer months of 2020 (along with Covid).

Here are some excerpts from this 2021 book:

* …journalists… “occupy jobs centered on the construction and dissemination of what might be called interpretive information or knowledge” rather than aesthetic or artistic products. Whereas individual creativity and self-expression are idealized in artistic fields, journalism’s occupational ideology prizes considered judgment—the ability to quickly absorb, adjudicate between, and publicly communicate complex and conflicting sources of information. Furthermore, journalism is an anomalous case of cultural production in that its practitioners operate according to a set of normative, rather than artistic, commitments. As media scholar Mike Ananny puts it, “Unlike artistic fields of cultural production, the press—ideally and principally—pursues its autonomy in order to advance public interests.”

Therefore, while artistic workers seek aesthetic autonomy, journalists primarily seek professional autonomy—the ability to practice newswork according to a set of collective normative values and with relative insulation from political actors and the market.40 Yet because the U.S. press is heavily commercialized, many of the management tensions and challenges are the same as those found in other forms of industrial cultural production. If aesthetic cultural work is defined by the art-commerce
relation, we might say that journalism is characterized by the democracy-commerce relation.

* It is difficult to publicly measure something or someone without changing it or them in some way. Thus a second thing that evaluative numbers do in the social world is elicit a response from the people and organizations they measure. Scholars call this phenomenon reactivity.

* All mediated forms of culture—from music to television to books—are “carriers of meaning” that influence how we understand the social world.1 Journalism is among the most powerful cultural industries in this regard—not for nothing has it been called “the primary sense-making practice of modernity.”2 It is mainly through news consumption that many of us encounter political leaders and other powerful figures, cultivate a sense of empathy (or antipathy) toward people in different life circumstances, learn about and contextualize contemporary events that are outside our immediate, observable environs, and develop a sense of the crucial issues animating public life.

* Much of journalism history in the United States can be understood as the profession’s ongoing efforts to establish independence from the state and the market, both of which are generally viewed as corrupting influences on editorial freedom and journalistic integrity.6 A range of established journalistic norms and practices, such as refusing gifts, denying sources quote approval, and establishing a “wall” between the editorial and business sides of news organizations, stem from efforts to maintain autonomy.

* As journalism scholar Michael Schudson puts it in an essay pointedly titled “Autonomy from What?”: “What keeps journalism alive, changing, and growing is the public nature of journalists’ work, the nonautonomous environment of their work, the fact that they are daily or weekly exposed to the disappointment and criticism of their sources (in the political field) and their public (whose disapproval may be demonstrated economically as readers cancel their subscriptions or viewers change channels).”

* As sociologist Herbert Gans wrote in an oft-quoted passage from his classic newsroom ethnography Deciding What’s News, journalists “had little knowledge about the actual audience and rejected feedback from it. Although they had a vague image of the audience, they paid little attention to it; instead, they filmed and wrote for their superiors and for themselves, assuming . . . that what interested them would interest the audience.”

* print-era journalists rejected audience research because doing so was one of the only means to protect their always-tenuous professional status. Sociologist Andrew Abbott has characterized professions as “somewhat exclusive groups of individuals applying somewhat abstract knowledge to particular cases.”

* The accessibility of journalistic language is helpful for informing the public, but it also renders journalists’ claims to specialized expertise potentially suspect. In the absence of a structural closure mechanism that limits entry into the profession or a repertoire of abstract knowledge, journalists create and maintain boundaries
around their profession by “doing things a certain way and privileging certain rationales for those actions.”

* the opinions and assessments of other journalists—rather than outsiders—typically hold the most weight when considering whether the job has been done well or not.

* editors also often perceive metrics as a threat to their own managerial authority and their privileged position atop the newsroom hierarchy.

* In Deciding What’s News, Gans presciently noted that the indifference to audience research that he observed among journalists might well change “should commercial considerations become more urgent” within news organizations.

* There is arguably no other publication in the United States—possibly the world—with
its [New York Times] symbolic significance and level of reputational capital.

* To excel at the traffic game, journalists needed a mixture of luck and skill that was elusive and difficult to reliably reproduce. Journalists spoke regularly of being surprised by traffic. Pieces they expected to be “hits” often drew a smaller-than-
anticipated audience, while articles that seemed “niche” could unexpectedly become popular.

* Grinding in the blogging world had an additional element of intrigue: there was always the tantalizing possibility that any ground-out post could become a surprise viral hit.

* Gawker Media staffers told me their moods rose and fell with the traffic numbers reported in the dashboard, sometimes to a degree that alarmed them.

* “Ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without . . . that a semblance of order is created.” (Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger)

* Journalists at the Times, for example, frequently drew positive contrasts between the Times’s approach to metrics and that of other publications… When I prefaced a question to Cynthia, a Times reporter, by mentioning that the Washington Post had a real-time display of the paper’s top-ranked stories on its newsroom wall, she was incredulous: “They have that at the Washington Post? . . . Oh god, this is so depressing to me.”

* Given the Times’s long-held organizational self-perception as the apex of journalistic professionalism in the United States…

* Although Gawker staffers like Felix and Alison saw BuzzFeed’s editorial approach as synonymous with clickbait and “cheap viral crap,” BuzzFeed itself emphatically rejected this characterization, going so far as to publish a post in 2014 headlined “Why BuzzFeed Doesn’t Do Clickbait.” Ben Smith, who was BuzzFeed editor in chief at the time, argued that those who associate BuzzFeed with clickbait “confuse what we do with true clickbait,” which was, in his view, a headline that baits the reader into clicking by overpromising on what the story, once clicked on, actually delivers. By contrast, Smith wrote, BuzzFeed’s headlines tend to be “extremely direct”: for example, “ ‘31 Genius Hacks for Your Elementary School Art Class’ is just that.”

* Metrics confront journalists with a powerful mixed message. If they ignore the data altogether, they risk being seen as foolishly obstinate, patronizing toward their audience, and behind the digital times—in effect guaranteeing their professional obsolescence and possibly facing managerial censure or even job loss. But if they rely on metrics too much, they risk corrupting their sense of professional integrity and autonomy, and potentially sullying their reputation. To make matters more challenging, there is no widely agreed-upon normative standard within the profession for how to navigate between these two extremes.

* In the common spaces of the New York Times headquarters in midtown Manhattan,
displays of any kind of metrics data were conspicuously absent. Unlike at Gawker, where vast swaths of wall were occupied by large flat screens displaying various
real-time traffic rankings of stories and writers, some of the Times’s prominent wall space was covered with framed reprints of each of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
stories, of which it has published more than any other news organization. The Times’s Pulitzer Wall, as it is known, was a point of pride for staffers, symbolizing the organization’s formidable prestige.

* Editors’ sense of “news judgment” is intuitive and inscrutable (and thus difficult for reporters to argue with). By contrast, metrics had the potential to be equally visible and accessible to all staffers in a newsroom. And because of metrics’ interpretive ambiguity, a reporter could look at the same data as her editor and draw her own—possibly contradictory—conclusions.

As such, Times editors restricted reporters’ access to metrics because they perceived the data as a potential threat, not only to the quality of the paper’s journalism but also to their own managerial authority.

“If you think about an editor, really the only thing an editor has—like their full job is based on their judgment. Because that’s really what they do, is they just sit and use their judgment to edit stories and decide how important they are and where they should go on the site. And so replacing that with metrics of some sort is a massive threat to their livelihood and kind of value in the job.”

* Although they withheld systematic access to metrics, Times editors would strategically disclose particular data points to reporters when they wanted to accomplish a specific managerial purpose or elicit a desired reaction.

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Did Biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin Sleep With Her Subject LBJ?

Posted on January 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

Slate: “The best example is Doris Kearns (now Kearns Goodwin), who spent many hours interviewing Lyndon B. Johnson at his Texas ranch. The author probably didn’t help matters by admitting that LBJ liked to climb into her bed for interviews. But she insists that she never joined the former president in bed, and there is no evidence that a romance occurred.”

Report:

Sycophantic LBJ biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin was having an affair with Lyndon Johnson

LBJ pressured Kearns for sex, later asked her to MARRY him!

Was LBJ biographer Doris Kearns having an affair with Lyndon Johnson? Here is the response of a well known JFK assassination researcher when I posed that question to him: “No doubt about that one ….” Sally Quinn had said some rather provocative things about Doris Kearns-Goodwin’s relationship with LBJ in those “final years.” Here is a reference to that in a Wash Post article (“A Tale of Hearts and Minds, 8/24/75) alluded to in the LA Times in 2002:

Goodwin’s first dip in the waters of infamy came in 1967, when, having received a White House fellowship, she was photographed dancing with Lyndon Johnson at a reception. The story turned on the fact that the president’s dance partner, then Doris Kearns, had just co-written a piece for the New Republic under the headline: “How to Remove L.B.J. in 1968.”

Later, in the early 1970s, Kearns and Richard Goodwin, lovers but not yet married, set off a literary scandal that attracted national media attention. It involved a “psychobiography” that Kearns was writing about Johnson, based in part on intimate conversations they’d had on his ranch in Texas, and a decision to bring Goodwin aboard as a co-author.

Their plan was to expand what had begun as a scholarly work–intended to help secure for her a tenured professorship at Harvard University–break with a smaller publishing house and sell the book elsewhere, for about five times the money. As the dispute grew, the story oozed outward to include speculation in print about whether Kearns might have had an affair with Johnson.

Sally Quinn, flying at her highest as a feature writer in the Washington Post’s Style section, wrote a lively, at times almost embarrassingly explicit, account of the chaos that had come to Kearn’s love and literary life. The piece ran for what seemed like forever, and it included a rather tart summation:

” Kearns has always gotten what she wanted–and made it look as if she didn’t even try. She got elected student-body president at Colby College in Maine, got the best grades, got the best beaux, got into Harvard, got a White House fellowship, got Lyndon Johnson, got her Ph.D, got her professorship at Harvard, got her book, got author Richard Goodwin and got Goodwin to collaborate with her on the book. Those are all things she wanted, or thought she wanted when she got them.”

At one point in the story, the then-32-year-old Kearns is quoted as saying: ” I really believe that Johnson was picking a person he wanted to write about him. People say he was in love with me and things like that. Partly that’s true. But it was much more serious than that.”

Here is another excerpt from Sally Quinn’s 1974 article

“Johnson was terribly possessive of her time, more and more as he came closer to death. She was seeing many men at this point in her life but had no real attachments until she met Richard Goodwin six months before Johnson’s death.”

One time Doris Kearns gave a lecture and said that Lyndon Johnson had compared her to his mother. [LBJ’s mother was quite the enabler of him; as was Lady Bird.] When Kearns comments became public and appeared in print, LBJ said:

“So I’ll just take the knife out of my heart and close up the wound, and we’ll have you back here and we won’t look back in pride or shame. We’ll just start from here and we’ll go on with your book without Parade. We’re both still alive and that’s what counts.”

Kearns has later admitted that Lyndon Johnson used to crawl into bed with her and just talk, but with nothing else going on….

As for me, I am not buying that nothing else went on. The Doris Kearns case is just another example of Lyndon Johnson’s ability to manipulate people and even turn them into sychophants protecting his legacy decades later. Jack Valenti would be another good example.

Doris Kearns Goodwin: “I got to know this crazy character [Lyndon B. Johnson] when I was only 23 years old…. He’s still the most formidable, fascinating, frustrating, irritating individual I think I’ve ever known in my entire life.” [Academy of Achievement June 1996 interview, p.1]

Doris Kearns also told authors Richard Harwood and Haynes Johnson about her relationship with LBJ in an interview that Sally Quinn refers to:

“They both took copious notes. In the interview Kearns told the reporters that her relationship with President Johnson was extraordinarily complicated, that she was still having trouble placing it in perspective, that she was troubled about how to handle her personal relationship with Johnson when she published her own book.

“She told them that the essence of their relationship was that LBJ was in love with her, that he ‘pressed me very hard sexually the first year,’ that he courted her aggressively, that he asked her to marry him, that he was jealous of other men in her life.”

[Sally Quinn, Washington Post, 8/24/75 “A Tale of Hearts and Minds”]

My comment: Really, this kind of behavior from Lyndon Johnson was typical. It is how he behaved his whole life, and I don’t just mean sexually. I am referring to his narcissism, neediness, ability to manipulate people, ability to turn folks into sycophants and slaves and have them do things they would not normally do.

I guess this just reproves the old saying that women love power; even if power is an old bloated, craggy man and a paranoid, mendacious, delusional nut job.

Here is an email to me from a Harvard alum and a nationally known author:

“Robert,
I was a graduate student at Harvard in the Political Science Department when Kearns was writing her LBJ book — the gossip at Harvard was always that she was LBJ’s lover — Kearns was first and foremost an opportunist — if sleeping with LBJ advanced her career, I doubt she hesitated.”

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Assume Nothing: Encounters with Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe

Posted on January 15, 2024 by Luke Ford

Here are some excerpts from this 2023 book by the late Edward Jay Epstein:

* Indeed, it was from [Gerald Ford] that I first heard the term “political truth,” a concept in which facts may be tempered to fit political realities.

* John J. McCloy: “J. Edgar Hoover likes to close doors. I told Warren we had to reopen them.”

Had the [Warren] commission’s investigation faced limits in what it could report? I asked.
He answered by describing Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, in which an investigation uncovered a series of unrelated sexual liaisons. He compared the book to the investigation, saying, “We had uncovered a lot of minor scandals, but they were not relevant to our investigation. We decided not to publish them in the report.”
When I pressed him on what these scandals involved, he replied, “It was as if someone picked up a rock and the light caused all sorts of bugs to run for cover.” He said the Secret Service needed to obscure the indiscretions of its agents the night before the assassination, the FBI had to expunge embarrassing incidents from its reports, and the CIA had to hide its unauthorized domestic activities. He added that even Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the president’s brother, had put his own man, Howard Willens, on the staff to deal with “inappropriate revelations.”

* He said that while no one on the commission had any doubts that Oswald was the shooter in the sniper’s nest, the real mystery for him was “why Oswald was there with a rifle.” He believed there was persuasive evidence that Oswald had been trained in espionage in Russia and that Oswald might have been “a sleeper agent who went haywire.” Warren did not buy his theory, and he lost the argument because “Warren was, you need to understand, stubborn as a mule.”

* [Attorney Wesley J.] Liebeler gave me his own account of the investigation. He ridiculed the seven commissioners, saying the staff called them the Seven Dwarfs because they refused to question the claims of Oswald’s Russian wife, Marina (who was Snow White). He said Dopey was Chief Justice Warren, who dismissed any testimony that impugned Marina’s credibility.
I asked him, “Who was Sleepy?”
He said Allen Dulles, the former director of Central Intelligence. Dulles received this appellation because he often fell asleep during the testimony of witnesses and, when awakened, asked inappropriate questions. For example, an FBI fiber expert was describing the bullet holes in the front of Kennedy’s shirt when Dulles woke up, looked at the blowup of the bloody shirt, and said, “He wears ready – made shirts, huh?” At another point, he spilled a wad of tobacco on a photograph of three bullet fragments and said, as if he had discovered new evidence, that he saw four fragments.
McCloy was Grumpy. According to Liebeler, he became angry when staff lawyers did not pay sufficient attention to his theories about possible foreign involvement.
Liebeler was also scathing about the initial FBI investigation, which he called “a joke.” As for the CIA, he said one of its theories was that Oswald might have been “brainwashed” into serving as a “Manchurian Candidate” assassin. He noted the agency had no basis for this “ridiculous theory” other than a decade – old study it had conducted on brainwashing techniques.

* Arlen Specter: “I showed them the Zapruder film frame by frame and explained that they could either accept the single – bullet theory or begin looking for a second assassin.”

* “Did you examine the color autopsy photos?”
“No,” he answered. “I never saw the autopsy photos.”
“Did anyone else on the commission or staff see them?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
Obviously they were missing. Looking him straight in the eyes, I asked, “Why not?”
Specter shook his head. “You need to ask Rankin.”

* This crucial omission showed that the Warren Commission, no matter how decent and virtuous its seven members, did not conduct an exhaustive investigation. Indeed, it did not even examine the basic autopsy evidence of how the president was killed.

* Numerous fireflies were blinking in the distance. Calling my attention to them, Angleton said the female firefly uses a sort of Morse code of flashes to signal her availability to males. He added, lest I assume it was a chance observation, “Of course, one can’t be sure it’s a firefly.” He explained that the assassination beetle, which was the firefly’s natural predator, had learned over time to replicate this code of flashes. “The firefly responds to this mating call, and instead of finding a mate … is devoured by a beetle.” In this case, the assassination beetle provoked the firefly into flying into the fatal trap.

* [Edward Banfield’s] idea of an intellectual was someone who could see controversial issues in shades of gray, as opposed to a man of action, which included a politician, who saw them in black and white.

* I had learned that projects such as moviemaking, which required the cooperation of many other people, were not for me. My moviemaking ambitions were an ego – driven mistake. I needed to find something less entangling. I decided to move forward with my writing career, a career in which I could be the sole author.

* [Graham Allison] introduced me to Diplomacy, a board game in which seven players are assigned seven countries in pre – World War I Europe and make their strategic decisions. Since there could be only one winner and alliances were necessary to win, the rules permitted players to lie, cheat, and deceive each other.

* As a teacher, I found a marked difference between my Harvard and MIT students. The former were socially transactional. Those in my seminar did not hesitate to attempt to negotiate a better grade on their papers. As I enjoy verbal argument, I usually acquiesced in the negotiations to reward their efforts. One student, Tom Werner, even broadened the negotiations to include an idea to collaborate on a TV series based on a Robert Ludlum thriller. (He went on to produce The Bill Cosby Show. ) On the other hand, MIT students tended to accept their grades as the fate they deserved. They evidenced little interest in engaging in social interaction or negotiations. I did learn from them, however. Unlike their social science counterparts at Harvard, they were the future electrical engineers and computer scientists who would usher in the age of internet.

* I had lunch with Pat [Moynihan] every day while awaiting Kate’s arrival. He was furious at the “minions” in the Nixon administration who were telling him to work to shut down the production of opium in India. “It’s idiotic,” he said. Although India was the world’s largest producer of opium, much of it went to pharmaceutical companies to manufacture codeine, an antitussive. “If they shut down Indian opium, they are going to cause a global coughing crisis.”
It was a role reversal for Pat. When he served in the Nixon White House two years earlier, he had advocated overriding ambassadors and using the threat of military action to suppress opium. I realized that Pat, a chameleon, adapted his views to coincide with his position. In other words, he was a political animal.

He explained that when he joined the Nixon administration, there was a concern that drugs and street crime were linked. He suggested to Nixon that the link theory could be tested by temporarily disrupting the supply of foreign drugs into the United States. What he had not foreseen is that “the Mormons” would expand his idea into policy. “I was as surprised as anyone when they turned my suggestion into the war on heroin.”

* [Tom Wolfe said] that a memoir to be true would have to describe the writer’s most painful humiliations, as Jean – Jacques Rosseau did in his Confessions. He said that would not be easy because a human brain is not wired to relive painful moments. To test Wolfe’s proposition, I later tried to recount one but, as he predicted, it was too traumatic.

* Some five years later, in 2008, the day after Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination for president, I received an email from Katie Rosman, then a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, asking about an exchange I had with her and Obama in 2003 when he was serving in the Illinois Senate… Katie said Obama was standing with Vernon Jordan, whom I also did not know and did not recall ever meeting. She went on to say that she was so impressed with our conversation with Obama that immediately after Tina’s party, she pitched the idea of doing a piece on him to an editor at the New York Times Magazine, but it was rejected on the grounds that a story about an unknown Chicago politician did not belong in the New York Times.

* network television news is a product manufactured by an organization, not by individuals… And while at one level a newsperson chose and prepared individual stories, at another level the organization chose the newsperson. Those who were able to adapt to the networks’ values were retained and promoted. Those who were not able to accept those values were weeded out and shunted aside. From this perspective, it was the organization, not the individuals, that determined the pictures of society represented on national television.

* [New Yorker’s William] Shawn offered me the opportunity to do so by assigning me to investigate the allegations of a conspiracy by the Nixon administration to murder the entire leadership of the Black Panthers, a group of militants opposing the government oppression of Blacks. The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers had reported as fact that the police had killed 28 Panthers. Shawn told me to find out whether the murder of 28 Panthers by the police was, as he put it, “part of a pattern of genocide.”

…That left four questionable deaths in shoot – outs, and all of them were with local, not federal, police.
While “four deaths, two deaths, even a single death must be the subject of the most serious concern,” I wrote, I concluded that false numbers bandied about in the press had only confused the issue of police violence with a conspiracy theory about government genocide.

Afterward, to their credit, many newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, who had lazily repeated the false numbers of Black Panther deaths, printed editorial apologies to their readers.

* I had learned in my work on the Warren Commission that contemporaneous memoranda were far more valuable to understanding a complex issue than the retrospective memories expressed in even the most candid interviews with people involved in the issue.

* Times had changed from the mid – 1960s, when I could get access, unimpeded by a communications officer, to the members of the Warren Commission and its staff. By 1980, all government agencies employed press communications officers, whose job it was to prevent outsiders from getting anything but approved sound bites.

* After the Miami Herald published an exposé of his exploitation of women in November 2018, Epstein sought help, as I learned from one of his close friends, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategic advisor. Epstein befriended Bannon after Trump fired him in 2017 and even planned a trip with him on his plane to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Now he sought Bannon’s help restoring his public image. Bannon suggested Epstein should go public by giving an exclusive interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes or another high – profile TV show. Bannon then became his media coach and schooled him on how to take control of a television interview. To this end, in March 2019, Bannon prepared him through a sham 60 Minutes interview in the living room of Epstein’s mansion with a TV camera crew and indoor lighting. Playing the role of a 60 Minutes interviewer, Bannon fired questions at Epstein about the source of his money, his guilty plea, and his relations with women. Although Epstein thought he did well in this trial run, according to a person who attended this mock interview, he decided against having Bannon try to arrange a real 60 Minutes interview.

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