Democracy and the Wild World of Current Conservative (?) Media

It's been a weird weekend

AI is getting weirder, too. An image from the prompt “A team of five circus performers (a carnival barker, a lion tamer, a woman with a mustache, an acrobat, a giant), standing back to back on a semi-destroyed New York City street, looking outward and to the sky, as if preparing for the next phase in a battle.”

TLDR: This week, I report out on my adventures into right-wing media.

• Why it matters: There is a strong argument to be made that democracy depends on the establishment of a shared set of facts. We won’t get there without some effort to understand the voices shaping some Americans’ view of the facts.

• I teach undergraduate political science, so I consider it one of my professional responsibilities, too.

• I teach my students to do the same, by way of AllSides, the Axios-Politico-The Hill triumvirate, and the secret weapon I tell every one about, memeorandum.

On one hand: Left-wing media has its extremities. Pitches on free food for everybody and the racism of anti-pit bull rules come to mind. Darker, to me, are those who argue against the importance of free speech or celebrate terrorist attacks against civilians.

• But by and large, left-wing media is pretty… boring. It is mostly committed to a sort of modern, secular, American antidisestablishmentarianism.¹

On the other hand: Right-wing media, by contrast, is a circus carnival of wild ideas. Here’s a sampling from what I've read in the last couple of weeks, as I've tried to find voices that (a) are pretty far out there but not QAnon, and (b) play meaningful enough roles in the new Republican media ecosystem that their ideas are circulating among actual decision-makers in Congress and would influence a second Trump administration.

• Curtis Yarvin, advisor to billionaire Peter Thiel and Senator JD Vance, went on Charlie Kirk’s podcast this week to argue the next Republican President should declare a state of emergency at the inauguration, nationalize police forces across the country, and give them all red armbands. Kirk, to his credit, didn't bite on that one.

  • Charlie Kirk also recently hosted Steven Miller, former President Donald Trump’s senior advisor on immigration, who says that the Trump administration would build a network of detention camps to accomplish the largest mass deportation in history.

• Brian Glenn is the face of the Right Side Broadcasting Network, which Politico describes as “like NFL RedZone for Trump rallies, covering them hours before any speakers approach the dais. Now, as Trump’s general election campaign kicks into high gear, it has also cemented itself as the pro-Trump media outlet of record for the MAGA base.”

  • Glenn is also dating Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom I have begun to think is better understood more as a one-woman social media platform than a congressional representative.

  • MTG is so adept at search engine optimization and social media vitality, I’ve started to wonder if she began pushing for space lasers on the southern border just to push her “Jewish space lasers” comment onto page two of search engine results and therefore out of the public memory, like Boris Johnson attempted with his red Brexit bus.

  • This personal brand-focused politics further fractures the feedback loop between policy and electoral politics. Legislators are now more likely to boost their electoral chances not by advancing in the party or passing legislation voters want, but by making otherwise nonsensical “big moves” against each other, like Survivor superfans building their tribal “resume.”

• The Joe Rogan Show, which Ad Fontes classifies as slightly right of center and generally untrustworthy, spent over three hours last month hosting Tucker Carlson (“interview” is too strong a word here, I think). I made it through about thirty minutes, during which I learned Carlson believes Rogan’s theories about UFOs are mistaken; they are actually spiritual phenomena of some kind.

  • Incredibly, Carlson—whose claims about the 2020 election cost him his job and Fox News $787 million—has this to say about lying:

  • “… lying is bad. It's bad not just in a legal sense, in that it can be illegal to lie, but it's bad for you. It rots you. Being a liar makes you a bad person. When you lie, you are serving evil. There's a moral quality to it that's inescapable and very obvious, and only advanced civilizations ignore that lying is bad.”

The one ideological thread holding these folks together is anti-elitism. In different ways, each believe political elites are unfairly rigging the game against the rest of us.

• That—populism—is a powerful force in the history of American politics.

• As Thomas Chatterton Williams puts it in a piece about Michael Kirby, we don’t have to accept these authors’ view of the solution to find points of agreement with their diagnosis of some problems:

  • “… as the internet and social media have allowed us to peer inside our national institutions, there is no denying their stewards have suffered profoundly from the exposure. And yet, I kept asking myself a question and phrasing it to Kirn in different ways: Why can’t we do two things simultaneously? Why can’t we revise our estimation of a decadent and often deceitful ruling class and refuse to downplay the sui generis outrage that is Donald Trump? It is not an acquittal of [the elites] to insist that a second Trump term would be a mistake.”

We can’t build a persuasive, alternate story—one that pulls together Americans frustrated with the direction of the country —unless we listen, even and especially to voices we don't like.

1. Why yes, your intuitions are correct! I have been waiting thirty years to write something with that word in it.