Air Date 12/3/2024
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. At a time when there are very legitimate concerns about men's place in society, the manosphere has stepped in to fill the gap in the cultural discussion to give an answer —not a good answer by any stretch, but an answer—to young men about modern masculinity, which included a strong push to vote Trump.
For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in just over 50 minutes today includes Why Is This Happening?, Straight White American Jesus, Factually! with Adam Conover, It's Been A Minute, Gettin' Grown, and WordPress. Then, in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in four sections: Section A: The Media Landscape; Section B: Men Are Not Okay; and Section C: What We Can Do.
The Role of the Press in This Moment with Matt Pearce - Why Is This Happening - Air Date 11-19-24
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: I guess let's just open it up. What do you think about how the information environment is here in our current [00:01:00] 2024?
MATT PEARCE: I don't review it positively. And I also have a lot of those same thoughts that you do where I'm just like, am I just -- is this because I'm getting into middle age that I'm starting to get anxious about media being consumed in a new way that I'm not familiar or comfortable with or don't understand? And, to be honest, I, can't eliminate the possibility that's true.
But I actually do think there have been a few major phenomena that have happened over that past decade. And I think you're totally correct. I think there was a decade in which social media was this environment that was significantly shaped with, and in part by, major media institutions like the kind that we had in the 20th century, something like MSNBC cable news, something like the LA Times, the newspaper.
But we've entered, I think, what comes after [00:02:00] that, which is this new space where we still have social media and we have even newer things that are less social versions of social media, actually, and they're not influenced as much by what traditional media covers. Those of us who are in the journalism industry and in the profession of fact finding and truth seeking or whatever you want to call it, are really, really starting to roll that boulder uphill because we're working with platforms that have become monopolies in the space that we're talking about, Google and Meta. We're talking about companies that had once shifted from the anybody who posts, you know that your post is going to appear in a timeline; we've shifted to algorithmic sorting of information, so there's now much more curation and selectivity from these platforms that we're using to consume information, which is broken. This direct connection between media [00:03:00] or content creators like us and consumers.
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: Wait. I want to stop. Can we stop right there? Because actually that alone I think is worth taking some time with.
So the point you're making there -- and let's go back just as a comparison of 2014 -- what would happen on Twitter is you would find people that you would follow. And you would choose to follow or unfollow them based on were their posts good or funny? Which a lot of that was that.
But then sometimes something would happen; it would be like you would find someone who was an expert in something, who genuinely was, right? And there was a way of figuring this out; you could see what their bio was and often the verified check would help you a little bit with that. But It's like "I run a company that does shipping logistics and there's a barge stuck in the Suez and here's what is going to happen" and you wouldn't just credulously if you or I say, oh whatever they say is true, but you would follow and you start to be like, oh, this person actually has some chops. You might even contact them. And there was a relationship, a direct relationship of [00:04:00] capital and credibility that would build up with individuals. That now the algorithm -- so that's the follower method that has been supplanted by the algorithm method, in which you don't know who's showing -- there's some random person just showed up saying "Oh, HIV doesn't cause AIDS. Oh, here's a cute new miniskirt. Here's -- oh look at this: Caleb Williams missed this open throw on third down." It's like the non-algorithmic version, at least there were these trust relationships you could establish with the individuals you chose to follow. The algorithmic version, there's just stuff being thrown at you. It's like, I don't know who that dude is, if they know anything or not, I just saw it on the feed.
MATT PEARCE: You've landed on also one of the major features that's changed here, which is that the internet used to be more work. You have to put in a lot of your own work to figure out what you wanted to see and who are you going to follow and who you're going to listen to and what you were going to share. The onus was on you. And [00:05:00] what has happened, essentially these last five and 10 years in particular, is that we have shifted to this more passive version of consumption through all of these platforms.
And it's once you think about it, and once you look for it, you see it everywhere. And it's not just from something like the For You page for TikTok, which has this brilliant black box. Nobody knows really what influences it, but it's excellent at figuring out what kind of stuff you'll linger on. And they'll serve you up an incredibly random slurry of content that is not necessarily timely. I say slurry because--
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: Slurry is exactly the right word. Someone just put it in a blender, and then you just put the hose in your mouth, and they just pump it into you.
MATT PEARCE: There's been a breaking of chronology that has happened here, actually, because news used to be timely; you turn on your cable television and it would be what is happening right now. But that's also one of the new dislocations, which is that you pop open X, the Elon app, or TikTok, and what you're [00:06:00] looking at could have been from last year or six months ago or whatever.
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: And you have no idea, like nothing is -- I was going to say postmarked, which is a funnily antiquated term.
This really struck me the other day because I didn't quite realize how much that had happened with Instagram. But it occurred to me the other day, I had a moment of realization of how non chronological the Instagram feed has become, because a day or two after the election, I'm scrolling through Instagram and it's showing me all these people excitedly going to vote on Tuesday. And " let's go do this," showing me their "I voted" sticker. I'm like, no, I do not want this content. Why are you showing me this?
MATT PEARCE: Oh, if you looked at the other Meta product Threads, which they created as a Twitter killer or a Twitter replacement after Elon bought X, it was one of the single most bizarre user experiences that you could have in an app exactly because of this dynamic where the election was basically [00:07:00] over on election night. Donald Trump was elected president effectively. And for a day or two on that app, at least, because of this platform decision to prioritize this kind of ambient rather than timely information, you would get all this stuff about the early returns and people being excited to go out and it just emphasizes how much that you're not quite living in the same information reality as the other people using the exact same service as you, because you're time traveling a little bit in a weird way.
And it's just, that's so unique because all the trends and information and media development for what, the past two centuries, had been to bring the news to you faster and then even more timely versions--
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: More timely, more logical. Yes.
MATT PEARCE: There was this whole phenomenon, up to the minute, and it drove everyone crazy when CNN was created, Ted Turner, it was this whole phenomenon that you would have a 24-hour news cycle, which was not a thing before then. And it was really [00:08:00] disruptive to elected officials who suddenly realized that they had to be on all the time or that there was a story all the time and it'd be different from what the story was in the morning.
So that had been the single direction of technological development up until that point. And it is really weirdly suddenly broken recently.
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: It's so weird that we have -- yes -- that after all these developments towards live, up-to-the-minute, up-to-the-second, to now break into this non-chronological universe -- which by the way, I just want to be clear why that's happened. It's happened because eventually you run out of things that are happening, but the algorithm still needs your eyeballs. So you have to break away from chronology because not enough stuff is happening. So you reach a terminal point of stuff happening. The chronology you've gotten up to the second, but you still need growth after people know everything that's happening every second. So then you have to be like, here's a clip from the taxi sitcom from [00:09:00] the 1970s. Like here's a football highlight from 1997 because I got to keep you here. I just, we're just, we got to throw you stuff. So it is a market incentive that broke it. Because once you hit the hard limit of "it's as up to date as it can be," and you still need to throw content at people, you have to just depart from it.
The #MenToo Election Catholics, Latinos, and the Manosphere - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 11-11-24
BRAD ONISHI - CO-HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: Well, you go from the Women's March to #MeToo. And you have these years, 2017, 2018, 2019, where there is just intense backlash against the culture of sexual abuse. You see celebrities, not only Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, but you also see the likes of Louis C. K. or Aziz Ansari or whoever may be also, come under intense scrutiny. Celebrity after celebrity, high profile person after high profile person, people being accused of untoward behavior, of unwanted sexual advances, of sexual abuse, of sexual [00:10:00] harassment. And it just seemed to be ubiquitous.
The point I'm trying to make is that that first Trump presidency inaugurated what I think was a systemic dismantling of some of the foundations of patriarchy, misogyny, and assault in places like Hollywood, but also places like political offices and so on and so forth. Matt Lauer's another one. I'm just thinking of others that really got caught up in scandal and accused and taken down.
I think what we saw in the 2024 election was a backlash to that backlash. And I don't think it's right. I don't think it's good. But I think it's something that we have to take into account as a factor of what happened here in 2024.
For the record, it seems, according to the data that we have now, that Trump's resounding win was largely about the economy, that [00:11:00] the 2020 election was a backlash election to the pandemic and to Trump's mishandling of everything related to the presidency and also his -- the scandals, the failures, the racism, all that stuff. Okay? People turned out and got him out of office, barely.
But four years have gone by, and inflation has been a constant factor. People are having a hard time buying homes, buying milk, buying eggs, going on vacation, even though everyone supposedly has a job, according to the data that's there. So I don't want to overlook that. And we're going to just keep thinking about that and what that means here over the next couple of months.
But there's another way to think about this bro vote that Trump tapped into, that it's a backlash to the backlash. That if 2017 kicked off the #MeToo movement, then 2024 was the #MenToo election.
It was the election where young men who have moved to the right [00:12:00] and found a new political niche and are now ensconced in their own media enclaves have emerged, and made their voice heard.
One of the things that happened after Trump was elected the first time is many of us discussed and analyzed and talked about media silos and echo chambers. And a lot of that was focused on our parents. Hey, the boomers are all over there watching Fox News. How do we get them out of that little echo chamber?
Well, I think one of the things that we're now understanding is that 18- to 29-year-old men have their own version of that. And it's different, but the same in some ways.
So how did Trump reach out to young men and how did he cultivate his favorability among them? Well, as many of you probably know already, he went on a just slew of bro sphere podcasts. This is according to Olivia [00:13:00] Craighead at New York magazine. In the lead up to election day, Trump went on a slew of massively popular podcasts, catering to right-leaning young male audiences. That demographic: white men, ages 18 to 29, wound up voting for Trump by a 28 point margin.
As it turns out, the mastermind behind this plan might have been Trump's 18-year-old son, Barron. So there's a bunch of pieces out today that are -- today and the last week -- that are talking about Barron Trump as a behind the scenes figure and connecting Trump to the bro culture and the manosphere and all of these podcasts.
So if you read these pieces at New York Magazine, and at Newsweek and at the Wall Street Journal, what you'll find is that there's this sense that Barron was the testing field. Ask Barron what podcasts he listens to. Ask Barron who are the guys he likes and maybe we'll go on those.
The other one is a consultant who's connected to J. D. Vance and that's Alex [00:14:00] Brusovitz, who is the guy who chose Tony Hinchcliffe, Kill Tony, the comedian who made the Puerto Rico joke, to appear at the New York rally.
So these are the two kind of folks that Trump and his older campaign team decided to ask about where Trump should go.
And, Brusevitz called Barron and Barron started talking to Brusevitz, and here we go, we're off and running.
So Trump went on a bunch of these podcasts. And we've talked about this in the past. He was with the Nelk Boys, Patrick Bet David, Will Compton. He of course went on Joe Rogan. He went on Logan Paul's podcast. And that just led to tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of views.
He connected with people that these young men, 18 to 29, are tuning into on a daily and weekly basis. Joe Rogan is probably the one that you are most familiar with out of this group. But there's somebody else who [00:15:00] was behind the scenes that kind of is a figurehead of bro culture and this whole kind of movement, and that's Dana White.
Dana White is the head of UFC and he's appeared numerous times at Trump rallies and other places. But he was somebody who was a key cog in this whole effort to connect Trump to these young men. "I want to thank some people," UFC CEO Dana White told the crowd during Trump's victory speech in Florida in the early hours of Wednesday. "Real quick, I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Vonn, Bussin' with the Boys, and, last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan." This was Dana White basically saying thanks to the bro sphere out there for making this happen. For helping us to get Trump back to the White House.
"Dana's very much into this world," Trump told Adin Ross. "Dana's a young guy, sort of. Dana's into this world, like he could be an 18- or 20-year-old. He knows more about you and the Nelk Brothers, the Nelk Boys, and [00:16:00] he asked me to do their show. I'll tell you, I got a tremendous response. You do some of these big shows like 60 Minutes, nobody cares."
And there it is. Think about what he just said. You do some of these big shows like 60 Minutes, nobody cares. What he's saying there is, it doesn't move the needle. And going on these shows, these shows that the likes of Barron Trump and other 18- and 22- and 25-year-old men listen to, does move the needle. And we saw some of that in this election.
I will admit that the Friday before the election, I was skeptical. I didn't think that the frat guy who likes to play beer pong and video games and hang out, was going to make it to the polls, stand in line, take 45 minutes, plan his day so he could do that. And again, I'm not saying that the bro vote was the deciding factor here, but I am saying that for the first time in four elections, this demographic broke for Republicans, and it goes in line with trends we've covered on the show: the religious nature of [00:17:00] young men, the ways their political views have shifted, their reactions to things like gender and to issues surrounding gender and reproductive rights and sexuality.
Here is a passage from the Wall Street Journal on this very issue. "To Blake Marnell, a 60 year old from San Diego who's gained his own MAGA fame for attending rallies, in a suit whose pattern resembles a brick wall, the manosphere is an organic phenomenon that grew out of terrain abandoned or overlooked by traditional media outlets. It has some of the DNA of now defunct lads magazines and raunchy television shows from a previous generation, like Jackass or The Man Show. Unlikely to be greenlighted in today's culture, it loves crypto, energy drinks, and Elon Musk."
Inside Elon's Twitter Takeover with Ryan Mac and Kate Conger - Factually! with Adam Conover - Air Date 11-13-24
KATE CONGER: And Twitter's always been such a canary in the coal mine when it comes to online speech. It's easy to forget that it's a deeply unpopular platform, right?
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Even the people who use it don't like it.
KATE CONGER: Snapchat is far more widely used than Twitter, and we never think about what's going [00:18:00] on on that platform, right?
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Yeah.
KATE CONGER: It, everything that happens on Twitter ends up happening months or years later on other social media platforms. And so it's always been a really interesting spot to cover, especially if you're interested in online conversation and how to moderate that and what sorts of movements are starting online.
Twitter has been kind of the beginning of that, and then it spreads to bigger social networks. And so I was really interested in the political influence that Twitter had, despite being so small. And always found that fascinating. And I think that was one of the things that we saw that really drew Elon to it.
He saw the influence, he found a way to tap in and dictate broader conversation from the platform. And so it was just a really interesting kind of step jump in his own power and influence and especially in politics.
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Yeah. It's interesting that, I made fun of him a lot on this channel for the deal [00:19:00] being a money loser, at least at the moment I made the video. But he did it in order to gain power, right? Is that your contention?
RYAN MAC: Yes and no. I feel like he, he in some ways bumbled into it. It was his favorite thing in the world. We chronicle his progression and use of it. Through the years and like a decade ago when he first joined it, he like hated it.
Like he, he like was tweeting very normie things. He was like, I'm at the ice rink with my kids and like, I'm hanging with Kanye at the SpaceX factory. I mean, that's not very normie, but, he like didn't grasp like the purpose of the platform. And at one point he was like, I don't know if I can do this anymore.
And then like slowly through the years, you start, he starts to realize like the power of it. That he can reach his fans directly. That he can push back on the media. That he can shitpost essentially at all hours of the day, and he comes to love it. And so by the time we get to him making the offer, It's his favorite place in the world. You know, in a way that a [00:20:00] billionaire might buy a super yacht or the Clippers or, an island or whatever.
He bought his favorite thing and, you know, he had enough money to do so. And so we approach it from that first. I don't, there wasn't like a, 3D chess plan to be like, if I buy Twitter, I can then influence the election two years later. But certainly he's gained a lot of power since then by running the platform, even in spite of the financial issues, you know?
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: I like the comparison to the Clippers to like a billionaire like Steve Ballmer, and you know, Steve Ballmer often to me seems like the happiest billionaire in the world. Like, he's just, he did Microsoft whatever, maybe he's a good guy, maybe he's a bad guy, I don't know, he's just running a fucking basketball team.
He's like, "YAAA!" And he's like, you know, that energy.
RYAN MAC: He has his arena, yeah.
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Yeah, his energy found the right home, you know? Like, he used to chant "Developers, Developers," now he chants "Clippers, Clippers." Great. Good for Steve. Is it really [00:21:00] that, was it that energy that brought Elon into it? Like just the enthusiasm for he just wanted to buy the roller rink or what?
KATE CONGER: It really is. And, you know, he said in the beginning that he didn't care about the finances of the deal, and obviously it's brought pressure to him since then. And he started to worry about how much money the company loses. But, you know, I think it was just his favorite place to be and, I mean, you see it.
He spends all of his time on X now. If you turn on notifications for his posts, your phone is buzzing all day, all night. And you know, I think he also really objected to the way the company was being run by its former management. He didn't agree with a lot of the content moderation decisions and kind of wanted to get in there and put his thumb on the scale.
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Is that the thing that like triggered him into doing it was content moderation?
Like I, cause I remember being sort of a slow roll of him being, I'm thinking about buying Twitter and I mean, he's clearly the kind of guy who operates by whim and then his whim starts rolling downhill and picking up speed [00:22:00] and picking up its own force. But was it spurred by content moderation initially?
KATE CONGER: It was one of the big concerns that he had. He was really outspoken about objecting to the ban of President Trump's account when that happened. And then right before he came in and made the offer to buy Twitter was when Twitter banned The Babylon Bee, which is like a right wing satirical site that he finds really funny.
And there's text messages that he was exchanging with one of his ex wives at the time talking about, you know, he should buy Twitter to bring back The Bee. And it sounds so silly, but one of the first things he said to Twitter employees when he came into the company that night when he acquired it was that he wanted to reinstate The Babylon Bee's account.
So it is these really kind of small, seemingly inconsequential content moderation decisions that really kind of needled him and got under his skin.
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: I mean, The Babylon Bee is like, I understand it's popular in conservative circles. But it's just an Onion rip off website, like, of which there are dozens on the internet.
There's like, The Hard Times, there's Reductress. There's like a model that like a bunch of, so [00:23:00] just to, and the website still existed. He still could have gone, I'm sure they had a mailing list. He was just mad that he couldn't see the Tweets from his favorite right wing humor publication? I guess comedy really does have power.
We debate that a lot in comedy. But I guess comedy really does influence the world.
KATE CONGER: Yeah.
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: That's insane. I mean, how much was it? You said he sort of bumbled into it. And I remember that being a big part of the narrative that he said he was going to do it and people started egging him on.
And then he, you'll tell me the real version of my memory is he made an offer, then tried to back out and then Twitter forced him to take it.
RYAN MAC: So let's rewind a little bit, which is initially he quietly was buying stock in the company without telling anyone. And he blew past this disclosure role that you have with the SEC, which once you hit a 5% threshold, you have to disclose your ownership stake.
Well, he didn't do that and amassed about a 9% stake in the company before he went public and was like, you know, I've become a [00:24:00] large shareholder in Twitter. I love the platform and I bought all these shares. And so when that happened, Twitter's Board freaked out. They thought, you know, what's the best way we can wrangle him a little bit.
So let's offer him a board seat. They offer him a board seat. He goes back and forth. He thinks it's a good idea initially.
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Can I just ask why? Why do they freak out? Like he, he owns a bunch of stock. Just break down for me what the threat is to them at that point.
KATE CONGER: Well, so they had had an activist investor in the stock, maybe two years prior to this, who came in and tried to force out Jack Dorsey, who was the CEO at the time.
So it was like, they had just kind of been burned by that experience and they had spent the next year and change appeasing that investor and trying to gently edge him off the board and limit his influence in the company. So they had just kind of cleared the slate on that. And then lo and behold, they have another activist coming in and it's just like, Oh, my God, we don't want to go through this again.
RYAN MAC: Or potential activist, but more of a chaos agent, right? You don't know what this guy is [00:25:00] going to do. He pops off. At any hour on Twitter, you know, what if we bring him in and make him our friend? You know, he can be one of 10 or so voices on the Board.
ADAM CONOVER - HOST, FACTUALLY!: Make him feel important.
RYAN MAC: Make him feel important, make him feel listened to. We got this, you know, he's going to be our guy.
And so that it gets announced. And then within a couple of days of that, he's already arguing with the CEO. He is unhappy with the direction of, product launches with, content moderation decisions, you name it. He's in the CEO, Parag Agarwal's DMs or text messages and just lighting them up.
And at one point it's just like, you know, fuck this. Like, I don't need to be on the Board. I'm just going to buy the whole company. And that's when you get the kind of start of the whole thing.
The #MenToo Election Catholics, Latinos, and the Manosphere Part 2 - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 11-11-24
BRAD ONISHI - CO-HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: Now this brings me to a point that I want to make about this new mediascape that is attending to young men and [00:26:00] really cultivating their interests and their politics. If we think about this comparison that he makes about Jackass, for example, I grew up in the 90s and I remember Jackass. I remember when it came out and I remember what it meant to like suburban kids looking for transgression, trespass, ways to be edgy and so on.
To run a shopping cart full speed ahead over a curb or to do something else that was just ridiculous. Okay, that's one thing. But here's the thing is, Jackass and even The Man Show were not going to cultivate politics. They weren't going to, they weren't going to be the things that shaped how people voted or how they thought about really important issues like reproductive rights.
Now we also used to have folks like Rush Limbaugh. And Rush Limbaugh would, of course, get on and talk politics for hours and hours a day. But the two were separate, right? If you have Jackass and you have Rush [00:27:00] Limbaugh, you have two separate things. And you're going to capture two different audiences. And some folks may listen to both and they may be fans of both and all that, great.
The point I'm trying to make is that we now live in a situation where if you want to win a presidential campaign, You might go on a show like the Nelk Boys or Theo Von's podcast and you'll talk politics and you'll then go to the very tip top of the mountain, which is Joe Rogan, who always mixes politics with culture and politics with conspiracy theories and reality TV and celebrity gossip and everything else.
Joe Rogan is the epitome of mixing what might've been the Jackass lane and the Rush Limbaugh lane into one. Now is he Rush Limbaugh? No, he's different than that. And I'm not trying to roll over all those differences. I'm trying to make a point here is that this bro vote is one that exists in a new media landscape.
And so we can make comparisons to bygone [00:28:00] decades. We can make comparisons to Rush Limbaugh or Jackass, but I think we have to recognize the dynamism of these podcasts, these pundits, these talking heads, these YouTube channels. The streamers, the folks on Kik, the folks on Twitch, and so on. Here's Steve Waldman writing at Politico.
Biden won 18-21 year olds by 60-36%. Harris won by 55-42%. So now we're in a very specific range. New voters, 18-21. This is their first time voting. Biden wins them 60 to 36. Harris wins them 55 to 42. A noticeable drop. Waldman says, "There's no group where the information consumption has changed more than young people."
3% of seniors get their information from social media. 46% of 18-29 year olds get their information from social media. So if you're 18-29, there's about a 1 in 2 chance that you get your information from [00:29:00] TikTok. Or from any other social media site. Waldman continues, "The reliance on social media as a news source among those groups is probably a bigger factor in 2024 than 2020.
In part because a new cohort of voters raised on social media as teenagers entered the electorate. And Latino voters are disproportionately young." So now he's bringing in Latino voters and the ways that young Latino voters voted. And I'll get to, I'm gonna spend time on Latino vote, the Latino vote in general here in a minute.
In 2020, 23% of adults got their news from YouTube. In 2024, 32% did. Think about that friends. Just think about adults in general. One third of adults now got their news from YouTube. The portion on TikTok, getting your news from TikTok is 17%. We're at a place where like, you know how you were worried about your parents and them listening to Fox [00:30:00] News and Newsmax, young folks are basically relying on TikTok and YouTube. And it's not just young folks. I mean, all adults, but, it skews disproportionately to those who are 18-29, Waldman keeps going. "The nature of these platforms has changed too, as more of their users come to rely on them for news. In 2020, 28% of regular Instagram users got their news there, and 2024, 40% did, according to Pew Research Center. In 2022 per 22% of TikTok's users got news there, and 2024, 52% did."
I can keep giving you numbers and, I'm not necessarily, I'm not a data scientist and I'm not a numbers person, but what these numbers say overall is this: even since 2020, the amount of people getting their news from TikTok or Instagram or YouTube has gone up consistently. The other big factor, Waldman says, that changed is that one of the biggest platforms, X, formerly Twitter, [00:31:00] has gone on, at least its owner, went all in for one candidate.
Here's the kicker, you ready? These studies reveal an interesting fault line. While most women get their news from TikTok, most young men get their news from YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit. This confirms that men and women often act on different sources of information. Yet, while we spill many words analyzing whether New York Times headlines normalize bad behavior, we know very little about what news and information rises to the top on Reddit and YouTube.
And finally, if you read a newspaper, odds are 3 to 1 you voted for Harris. So if you read traditional newspapers, if you read The New York Times, The Washington Post, or the LA Times, Star Tribune, whatever it is, on a regular basis, 3 to 1 you voted for Harris. Couple takeaways before we take a break. One, there was a deliberate effort by the Trump campaign to reach out to young men 18-29.
That's true. The campaign [00:32:00] believes it made a difference because they shouted out those folks on election night. Dana White was the lead in that whole effort. Joe Rogan kind of the king of the pile. And then there was all these other podcasters and YouTubers and others that, that really cater to the Barron Trumps of the world.
And what we see is that those young people, uh, the younger the voter is, the more they rely on social media for their news. That's an issue we have to address. We talked about this in 2016 and 17 about, "oh my gosh, all our parents are watching Fox News, what are we going to do about it?" Now we're in a place where young people don't know how to get news, other than on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or Reddit.
And if you're a young man, there's a good chance you learn a lot of your politics from Joe Rogan, or from the Nelk Boys, or from anyone else that you might be listening to in your earbuds or on YouTube. Those [00:33:00] who read traditional news sources. What's left of journalism seemed to have voted for Harris in a big way.
We could break all that down in more detail, but I just want to conclude this by saying this was the Men Too election. It's sad. It's really hard to say that out loud. Me Too was about dismantling decades, centuries, millennia, time immemorial of men taking advantage of hurting, of assaulting women. Using power to take advantage.
There's been a backlash to that, and there's been a backlash to that in a certain media silo that is really catered to young men. We know the trends. They've moved to the right, they're more religious, and this is a big challenge going forward. I think full stop, for the Democratic Party, sure, but just for our society in general.
Make America Male Again Fifteen years of aggrieved men - It's Been a Minute - Air Date 11-19-24
HANNA ROSIN: I mean, it's funny because the traditional male [00:34:00] female stereotype is like, the longer I am on this earth, the less it makes any sense to me, even though it's like so powerfully ingrained. I mean, the hierarchy between men and women is the most consistent hierarchy across history, across cultures, across continents.
It gets replicated over and over and over again all the time. Kind of men above women, men above women. Why? Like, why are the traditions this way? Like, I would ask the guys who I was reporting about in the book, like, why can't you just get a job teaching? Nope. Why can't you get a job in the hospital? Nope.
That's woman's work. Why? Why? Like, what would you lose? Because if you think, one of the things about women is that they have, for the last century, think about how many stereotypes of femininity They have busted through for one reason or another, like how you dress, if you work, if you're allowed to work when you're married, are [00:35:00] you allowed to work when you have a small child.
BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: Right.
HANNA ROSIN: Are you allowed to be a boss to a man? Are you allowed to run a thing? Like they've kind of trampled all of these old stereotypes. But men, I can't say they're not shifting. They're definitely shifting. I mean, you know, men down the generations shift. Let's take a father who's 30. In a certain social class, there are different expectations of fathers now, I think than there were 2 generations ago.
BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: Oh, fathers who are in their 30s presently? Yes. Yes. Way different.
HANNA ROSIN: I do think maybe we can take some hope in that, that in the current moment, some of the stigmas around how you have to be as a man are fading away. Like in the things we talk about, like a Trump rally or January 6th, maybe there's some very loud theatrical ways in which they're not fading, but maybe there are some subterranean ways in which they are fading, like they're just, you know, what you are expected to do at home, how you can express yourself, how, I mean, I have to [00:36:00] say, I've been surprised at the different corners where I come to see men starting to recognize how important it is to understand your emotions, talk about them, how it holds you back if you can't, like, that's the thing that's sort of trickling wider than, than I expected it to.
BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: I want to put a metaphor to you. Do you know about like the strangling tree? Do you know about that? So there is this tree that grows up and around the an existing tree, molding itself, like around the contours and structures of the original tree. And then slowly over time, the strangling tree overtakes and suffocates the other tree.
Do you see that as maybe perhaps a good metaphor for what's happening with men and women right now? Like women have had to adapt and grow around men, while men have been able to maintain [00:37:00] their status quo. But in the process now, you know, we've gotten to this point where women have advanced. And I mean, metaphorically, of course, men, you know, metaphorically, of course, have, you know, slowly but surely suffocated to a kind of
HANNA ROSIN: Oh, Brittany, that is really
BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: I mean, I can't
HANNA ROSIN: That is good imagery because I have long been thinking, like, there is this sense where women are like hustlers and they're immigrants. They'll take any job, they'll go to the community college. I'm just talking statistically.
BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: No, and that came through statistically, but that also came through in so many of the narratives of your book.
HANNA ROSIN: Yeah, like they're just hustling. It's like, Oh, I got to take care of the kid. Oh, I got to be a pharmacist. I got to go to school. I got to do this. I got to do this. And then all of a sudden, they've strangled this tree in the middle. That's kind of like stood still. You know, I think that's a really, really, really good imagery for this current moment. The only problem with that imagery is that the top leaves of the tree like if you [00:38:00] take the tree still it's like being strangled, strangled down at the bottom, strangled towards the middle, but then when you get to the very top, that center tree totally dominates the canopy, so, that's how I'm going to complete your metaphor there.
I just don't want to, you know, I don't want to be stupid about it, that is also part of the picture that at the very, very tippy top are men. And that at some point you do encounter the mother penalty, and that is very real. Like the caretaking mother penalty still exists and is still around.
BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: Men also have had. And still have immense power and privilege. How much are they actually in trouble? And how much is just them losing some of the power they once took as a given?
HANNA ROSIN: That's the central question. Because, you know, they're losing their position as head of the household. They're losing their economic privilege.[00:39:00]
That's all true. Like that is happening. I guess the question is, what if you just said, so what? Like, what if that was okay? What if all those things were happening and you redefine them as necessary recalibration as opposed to an absolute disaster? Like if you just shifted your brain 20 degrees, you could solve a lot of the problems.
Misinformation, Disinformation, Malinformation ( Feat Esosa Osa)- Gettin' Grown - Air Date 11-12-24
TYKEIA N. ROBINSON - CO-HOST, GETTIN' GROWN: I'm really excited by the work that you're doing because you know, we all use the internet. Most of us use the internet every day and it's sort of known. I mean, I'm going to take us way back black to the past from my, I'm going to just step fully into my auntie for a minute. And I remember. That, you know, it was originally called the information superhighway. Like, that's how people used to characterize this as this place where we have all of this information at our fingertips.
And I don't think that we've ever had real conversations about vetting information, about thinking about what [00:40:00] information we are seeing may or may not be true, how to get into that. And so even these terms: misinformation, disinformation, malinformation. I would say that these are not terms that I hear heavily in the media, and in the onslaught of things that we get all of the time.
So can you talk a little bit about sort of the utility and the significance of you know, why it's important for everyday people like us to think about our information through these lenses, especially in the climate that we're in.
ESOSA OSA: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I think that, you know, you're absolutely right, Keia. We are seeing that the correlation between content and credibility really crumble and deteriorate.
TYKEIA N. ROBINSON - CO-HOST, GETTIN' GROWN: Oh say that louder. Content and credibility. Everybody with a microphone has credibility these days, which is wild, but I'm sorry, I cut you off.
ESOSA OSA: No, [00:41:00] no, no, no, no. Look, at the end of the day, it's just credibility is being determined by following in a lot of different respects, right? And that's a very dangerous environment because we all know that there are tons of people out there with millions of followers who just fundamentally don't know what they're talking about.
TYKEIA N. ROBINSON - CO-HOST, GETTIN' GROWN: Fundamentally, truthfully.
ESOSA OSA: I spent four years in finance trading stocks and bonds to start my career. And when I see some of these folks, you know, just decide to be, investor, you know, consultants online, essentially. Telling folks to, you know, put 40% of their earnings into the stock market. I'm like, this is dangerous. Like who's doing this? This is...
JADE VERETTE - CO-HOST, GETTIN' GROWN: And that's all their content is, it will be blocks and blocks of them sitting and talking to a wall, giving you all the advice in the world. And it just never seems viable. [00:42:00] How do you decipher what's what? Like when you're putting this study together, because this is what you're doing, how are people supposed to pay attention to this kind of stuff? Cause some of it is quite convincing.
ESOSA OSA: Oh, a hundred percent. And first, to answer the back half of Keia's questions, we got to understand why disinformation is so dangerous, right? The reason that disinformation is so dangerous and effective is that a lot of our brains, most of our brains work in a very similar way. And that is that the more times we hear something, the more likely we are to believe it's true. And the more likely we are to believe other people believe it's true as well, right?
Our brains substitute repetition for truth. This is how we teach little kids everything, right? This is how our brains still work. And so in the current social media environment, if disinformation is an amplification problem at [00:43:00] its core, then the current social media environment is making the spread of disinformation kind of hyperbolic.
Most of these platforms are created, the underlying algorithm is coded to put information in front of you over and over and over and over again. And so, the ability to persuade, to make folks believe that something is true, has never been more potent. If the President of the United States came out every single day, right, and told us all that the sky was green. Think of the level of repetition that we get on cable news, local news, social media, we would all eventually step outside and just be like, 'I'm not, I'm not sure.' Right? And so regardless of your background, your income, your education. That's how you can get whole countries to believe propaganda that's fundamentally not true, right? But in terms of what we can do to fight back, we've [00:44:00] got to rethink what our social media consumption looks like, and what our social media guardrails are. When we are on these platforms, we've got to get one, very comfortable with checking our sources before sharing content, right?
You know, we put up a website, kind of "factcheckthebs.com" where you can go, and if you need five different fact checking websites, there they are for you, right? But we've got to be able to take a step back before we potentially push incorrect information, especially right now as we're getting very, very close to an election and we're going to reach a fever pitch of the amount of disinformation that we're going to see here in the next few days. Especially when content is making us hyper emotional, either extremely mad, what have you. [00:45:00] That's exactly when we need to just pause and double check that that is correct because that's often where how disinformation can go viral, so easily. And then, you know, we want to make sure that we're constantly telling our friends and family to make sure that they're careful here as well, and that they are checking their sources because we do know that telling someone to check their sources before they share content online makes them less likely, significantly less likely, to share bad information. Unfortunately, for only 72 hours.
So it's gotta be. Something that we constantly are saying or, and then we've got to hold people accountable when they are wrong and when they are loud and wrong and repeatedly wrong. Right. We cannot continue to allow these types of things to, move forward.
How the Fediverse can make social fun again - WordPress - Air Date 8-12-24
DOC POP - ASSOCIATE, WORDPRESS: Let's talk a little bit about what is the Fediverse. How do you describe this to new users?
BART DECREM: [00:46:00] You and I, we both came here for the original promise of the Internet, which is anybody can set up a website, you can go anywhere in the world, you can meet people, you can discover your community, your tribe, wherever it is, and that's the magic of the Internet circa 1990, right?, when it first got started. And so you end up with a model where people build blogs and websites, and then they start meeting friends and connecting with them. And it's all sort of disparate. And the original superpower of the internet, it's decentralized. Nobody controls it. There's a protocol underneath it called TCP IP. And anybody can build up a thing and you can find anything and connect with anything.
What happened over the years is that people go, Well, we can make that more user friendly and we can make that easier and especially as the iPhone comes into play, you start having these walled gardens. And so one big one is Apple another big one is Google another big one is Twitter and Facebook and so on. And so what they do is they say we're gonna get you going in four seconds. Just download the app, [00:47:00] give me access to your address book, and I'm going to tell you all of your friends that are already here and you're up and running and that's great because it delivers a really good user experience.
But what you end up doing is you end up shutting out and little by little the internet starts looking more like AOL. It's a walled garden, it's a shopping mall. You're at the mall and the mall is great and safe and convenient but there's a big wall around it. These giant tech companies have slurped up all the market share, have slurped up all the attention. And they deliver addictive user experiences—and some of those are great, and some of those are just addictive—and they have massive adoption. And social systems have a big network effect. The more people there are, the more valuable it is, right? So you get entrenched markets power.
And so over the last 10 years, we've sort of lost our way and we've gone farther and farther away from the original promise of the internet, which is nobody controls it. Anybody can set up their own spot and then anybody can go anywhere. And so we've lost sight [00:48:00] of that. And the Fediverse at its core, it's going back to the original promise. Can we go back to the original promise of the internet that anybody can set up their homestead, you know, their own place, can own their own piece of real estate on the internet, can connect with whoever they want to, but can we learn from the last 20 years and can we learn some new tricks?
And so as we do that, and anybody can set up an app or a website or a service, can we make it so that there's a social frame that comes with that? So that you don't have to start completely from scratch when you build your website. The login, the connections, the social engagement metrics, they can go along with that. So the Fediverse is an attempt to go back to the promise of the Internet of nobody can still controls it, anybody can find their tribe and express themselves and go wherever they want to go. Let's go back to that and away from the model of walled off gardens by five or six or seven companies.
And so as we think about the open internet, what are the building blocks? What are the [00:49:00] foundations of that? Well, there's the email protocols, you know, SMPP and IMAP and all that, right? And another important open protocol is RSS, and podcasts are built on it, and newsreaders used to be built on that. And so when you have these protocols that are open standards, then people can go build on that and then anybody can build user experiences, whether that be an app like Mammoth or a destination website or whatever it is.
And so the way I think of the Fediverse is these are our cousins, man. It's like RSS and podcasts and email and SMTP, you know, that's the world that we live in. And so can we go rebuild the social web on those foundations of open protocols that include email protocols and RSS, very much so, but add the social protocols from ActivityPub.
DOC POP - ASSOCIATE, WORDPRESS: I want to hear more about what you are going to work on next. I know the Mammoth is the first project and you seem very excited about the Fediverse. What else are you working on?
BART DECREM: Well, Mastodon has been the killer app for the Fediverse. It's been the killer app for [00:50:00] ActivityPub and it still is. And so we thought the biggest problem with Mastodon is making it approachable to newcomers, right? And so we're going to keep doing that. But the really cool thing that's going on right now is that there's these other things blossoming on the Fediverse. You know, Automatic with WordPress has some really cool projects going on. Flipboard is on the Fediverse. There's a newsletter platform called Ghost. Meta has joined with their Twitter alternative, which is Threads, and they have 130 million people there. Those 130 million people, well, the ones in the U. S., which I think is about half, are now federated. So if you're on Threads, you're part of the Fediverse, or you can go to your settings and just flip one button and you're part of the Fediverse.
And so what's going on this year that's super exciting is that we're going from just an alternative to the three or four big social media companies to an alternative to the web that's taking shape. And so what I think is very exciting is that broadening of the space. And that's the Fediverse. So this year, [00:51:00] we're in conversations with other people that are building here and saying, what do we need to do to get a million websites on the Fediverse? What do we need to do to get a hundred million people on Mastodon or on WordPress or on Ghost or on Flipboard, whatever the other apps are on the Fediverse. What are the core building blocks that are yet to be built? Do we need a login system that's unified? How do you bring money into the Fediverse so that you can have creators earn money? Is it microtransactions? Does it look like newsletter subscriptions and all of that?
So there's a lot of work to be done to lay the foundations for a Fediverse with 100 million people on it and then a billion people on it. I think we're going to get there because people want an alternative. People want a place where it's real people and it's real publishers. And the AI stuff, it's cool, but what about the web that we came here for 20 years ago? And so that's the opportunity. So this year, we're going to launch a major new initiative. That's more about [00:52:00] ActivityPub and the Fediverse going beyond Mastodon.
DOC POP - ASSOCIATE, WORDPRESS: I think it's super important if we get this critical mass, I think companies no longer will be able to trap us in our walled gardens. We made a mistake somewhere 20 years ago, maybe 25 years ago. And this is our chance. It's like, we're rewinding time. I seriously feel like some DeLorean's going to come out, like, Hop in, we're fixing the internet, and that's our chance to do it right now.
BART DECREM: Yeah. It's about the network effect. It's about social discovery, but these words are all sort of complicated and super nerdy, right? And sort of tech bro Silicon Valley. But, discoverability is, Hey, I've got a newsletter and I want people to read my newsletter and subscribe to it and hopefully pay for it so I can make a living, right? That's how you end up with a healthy media ecosystem and creator economy. And so what you need is you'd be able to find your stuff.
We found ourselves in a world. with walled gardens because Twitter and Facebook and TikTok is like, We'll take care of all that. You make a good video and we'll get a hundred million people to watch it. The only problem is now you're stuck in our [00:53:00] platform and we capture all the upside and we extract all the value from that. And so the great thing with ActivityPub, we're like, how can we develop a system that lets you create content and people enjoy that content and the content be found, you know? How do we make it so that you, Doc, can find a really great blog post or creator or website and then tell me about it and I find out about it and make that fun, user-friendly, and competitive? Like, can we create a world where The Verge—and this is one of the companies that's actually working on this—they have a news site and, historically, news sites like The Verge have been really dependent on Google and Facebook and Twitter for their distribution. And then that doesn't end well because they end up, extracting all the value and taking it away from you, right? So, a site like The Verge is like, Hey, we need people to come to our website and then we're going to have a full experience there and we want people to come back and we want people to leave comments.
But what if I'm reading a story on The Verge and then I leave a [00:54:00] comment and then the people that follow me on Mastodon can read that, within their Mastodon app? Now we're letting you find out about stuff that I've discovered and I can make recommendations for you for stuff to read and that's the alternative to the walled gardens that we're building here.
Note from the Editor on the slow process of fixing our broken internet
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with Why Is This Happening? looking at the modern media landscape and the rise of algorithms. Straight White American Jesus explained the election and bro culture as a backlash to the #MeToo movement. Factually with Adam Conover went over Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter. Straight White American Jesus looked at the evolution of the media landscape that targets young men. It's Been A Minute examined the evolving nature of the gender dynamic. Gettin' Grown discussed the detrimental effects of mis- and disinformation on the internet. And WordPress looked toward the future of the fediverse.
And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dives section. But first reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes featuring the production crew here discussing all [00:55:00] manner of important and interesting topics, often trying to make each other laugh in the process, sometimes just to avoid crying. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new members only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support. There's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Members also get chapter markers in the show, but depending on the app you use to listen, you may be able to use the time codes in the show notes to jump around the show, similar to chapter markers. So, check that out. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership, because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.
Now, before we continue on to the Deeper Dives half of the show, a quick thought on the role of the tech companies in bringing us to the state we are in. Famously Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook had the motto "Move fast and break things", and I'm sure I am not the first to point out that while [00:56:00] Facebook scaled, along with all the other social media networks, to reach and mediate the discussions between billions of people online, they managed to break some things. Maybe not irreparably, but definitely broken. And frankly, it would be surprising if they didn't.
Now, in that last clip that we just heard from WordPress, the title image—so, you couldn't hear it, it was only visual—that they used for this video was an old computer monitor—you know, like old school hacker might've used it—with a sticker on the front that said "move purposefully and fix things". So the hope is that better ways of communicating online are not only possible, but preferable to the vast majority of people.
So if better social media networks are built. People will likely gravitate toward them. That is sort of happening right now. There's the Exodus away from X. Bluesky is the current beneficiary of that. [00:57:00] I don't have a strong opinion about how good Bluesky is. I think they could still end up being terrible, but structurally speaking, I know that they are much less likely to be terrible. And what we can say for sure is, they're trying. So, you know, progress.
But, we don't just need new platforms. We also need regulation of any site that uses algorithms to suggest information, be it images, text, video, or audio. The reason is that there is absolutely no hope—none—in appealing to the humanity or civic duty of anyone who works at companies like Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter, when the profit motive drives them to tune their algorithms for engagement rather than quality. Now, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act [00:58:00] regulates these platforms as though they are passive conveyors of third-party information. They just provide the platform and other people provide the content. But the algorithms they use to display that third party information to its users makes them anything but passive in the distribution of that information. Humans employed by those companies make decisions about the functioning of their algorithms. Those decisions, change what people see when using their platforms that should open them up to legal liability for what is shared in a way that could force them to entirely rethink the structures of those algorithms.
Currently that is not the case, but it could be. In August, a court found that the mother of a little girl who died after taking part in the blackout challenge that had gone viral on TikTok, was allowed to sue TikTok because their algorithm [00:59:00] was considered their expressive speech, which should not be shielded by Section 230. The algorithm is the functioning of corporate speech. So, that is not passive. That is them taking an active role in the distribution of information.
So, there is that legal pathway that's happening. That is not all that needs to happen. There also needs to be proactive regulation, but these things combined really could fundamentally change the functioning of our algorithmically-driven media online. The nature of the world is that those who want to break things will always be able to move faster than those looking to thoughtfully build systems that are good for people. But there's no rule that says that the early movers who break things get to add the last word.
SECTION A - MEDIA LANDSCAPE
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on three topics. Next up, Section A: The Media Landscape, followed by Section B: Men Are Not Okay, [01:00:00] and Section C: What Can We Do?
The Role of the Press in This Moment with Matt Pearce Part 2 - Why Is This Happening - Air Date 11-19-24
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: I think, again, if we're thinking of this Ferguson era, which I think is really useful, like the 2014 The decade that was, there was a understanding of some symbiosis between the platforms and the media outlets, the platforms amplified the work of the media outlets, amplify their reach and in the case of Facebook, particularly less so Twitter.
Could drive traffic that could be monetized. So you had this ecosystem in which each part was kind of getting something out of it. It wasn't really, it didn't feel zero sum. Is that a fair characterization for at least the contemporaneous understanding back then of how it was working?
MATT PEARCE: Yeah, it was, it was, it was like, What would it be like?
It would be almost like a free trade agreement where, you know, you have this, you have this old country of old media that suddenly got access to this brand new, vastly, rapidly growing market of social media [01:01:00] users who, you know, if you're the LA Times, you know, that means that you can suddenly reach people who are outside of Los Angeles, Southern California, California, you could talk to people in Missouri, New York, Canada.
Yeah. the United Kingdom. Um, you, we sort of globalized media, uh, in a way that I think even the internet before social media hadn't really accomplished because it wasn't as if people were just sort of sitting there at their browsers at home and, you know, 2005 being like, I'm just going to go wander over to, you know, you know, look at the Guardian or something and see what's going on in Britain.
That wasn't the way that most people were exactly using media and at least not at scale. And social media changed all that. It gave news companies access to this huge new market of consumers. And you saw investment piling into the media industry, which had been struggling for decades. This form of these like venture capital funded firms and, and like buzzy digital news startups like BuzzFeed Vice, and they were Partially premised [01:02:00] on this idea that, you know, digital media is kind of this new thing.
It's transmitted to the public in this new way. We're going to try to meet the platforms and create stuff that's going to be really good and go viral on social media. I mean, the BuzzFeed logo is literally like an arrow that like, goes up. It is. It is the number go up media outlet that was created to try to capture this concept of what People thought the internet was going to be and then then it all kind of fell apart I think for a variety of reasons and there have been some other journalists who have kind of chronicle a little more closely how the relationship between places like BuzzFeed and You know, Mark Zuckerberg collapsed and part of it was that when your platform is serving up a lot of hard news and political content that those publishers tend to also want to get paid for producing that stuff.
And, you know, I think the mentality of the platforms mentality of companies are like Google are like, well, you know, we're a we're [01:03:00] a marketplace. We're not like You know, we're not the newsstand that needs to, like, buy copies of your newspapers so that we can sell them to people. You need us more than we need you, and I think that's been the mentality that has driven a lot of these hostile architecture changes, um, uh, from these companies, because it's not I don't think they see the whole scope of the world because these are truly global companies.
They see the whole scope of billions of potential users and customers who are looking at their digital advertisements. And they're like, we actually don't need these legacy media companies that are producing all this like complicated information and demanding money for it. Because first of all, it doesn't seem like the consumer demand for that information.
Is necessarily all that significant if we stop featuring it so much.
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: Yeah, and basically right what was symbiotic became a kind of clientelist relationship
MATT PEARCE: We are a captured industry to be clear
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: Yes, like and it shows up in the bottom line of journalism outfits shrinking [01:04:00] bottom lines More economic scarcity.
It's harder to make a profit more dependent and you get more and more dependent on whatever tweak they do the algorithm so they can make some change in the code in the black box that sends a lot of traffic your way, which is what Facebook basically did because they wanted to compete with Twitter and that lasted and then they could take it away.
And once it went away, the relationship to the readers had been so intermediated by the feeds, by the platforms that people were going to the platforms, they weren't going to the, you know, the outlet. And then the platform can be like, well, we'll just show them dance videos and talk shows. And people were like, yeah, that's fine.
I don't. Yes,
MATT PEARCE: yes. I mean, the consumers are the other part of the story, which is that we do have these monopolistic platforms that make design and sort of political economy decisions that dramatically affect us and the kind of information we get. But it is in partnership with users who love to be served.
slurry. I mean, that is, [01:05:00] that is, that is a big part of it. And that's one of the big challenges.
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: Well, and part of it too, is that the, there's a few things going on. I mean, one is that journalism is a business, but it's a business that is endowed with a bunch of values and a role in democracy that makes it different than like restaurants, you know, like restaurants, there's only going to be restaurants.
Restaurants are a hard business. Lots of restaurants go out of business. It's really hard to make them work, but there's always going to be restaurants and restaurants are a key part of like urban and civic life and life in general, but they're not enshrined in the constitution and they don't, they don't play a central role in self governance journalism is a business that is a business, but also just functions differently in the, in the constitutional fabric.
And it also functions with a different set of like, Principles like people like and again, this is where I sound fuddy duddy But when we get things wrong, we correct them, but that's just not true for [01:06:00] a enormous world of people That are feeding people information without that Like, without this sense of, I don't know, responsibility?
What's the right word?
MATT PEARCE: I think what you're describing is that journalism and publishing, unlike other businesses, has this unique labor tradition that has a kind of anti commercial bent that doesn't really make sense. I mean, Yeah. Talking about like the role of local restaurants in the economy, restaurants are very important in the economy, you know, their owners and employees will vote in elections and maybe they'll make political contributions or lobby or whatever, but a restaurant's not going to go take down the Pentagon.
Um, Your dominoes is probably not going to be publishing the Pentagon Papers because it thinks that, um, you know, Lyndon B. Johnson's doing something wrong, uh, in Vietnam. I mean, over the past century in particular, I mean, there's always been a history of expose journalism in the [01:07:00] United States and, um, that started with publishers.
But if you look, uh, back to the, uh, 60s and 70s, which was our sort of modern era of accountability journalism, That attitude of having an adversarial approach with government, of engaging in investigative reporting, which is not super efficient and sometimes not very popular, um, that was inculcated by groups like the Investigative Reporters and Editors, uh, Membership Association, which I've been a proud member of longer than I've been a member of my own union.
Um, and you have this weird, this bizarre phenomenon. It's such a bizarre sociological phenomenon, which is that Over the last several decades, the practice of investigative reporting spread across corporate newsrooms in the US at companies that like, you know, like Gannett or whatever that, you know, normally a lot of us are yelling at because we don't think they're very responsible as newspaper owners.
And yet, in these same companies, which are very much commercial enterprises, you would have, would have in these newsrooms, these very [01:08:00] kind of like commercially inefficient. Kind of economically irrational acts of journalism happening that are very much cloaked in the First Amendment and the idea of holding the government accountable and essentially acting as an anti authoritarian institution.
Um, and especially if you look back to, you know, Watergate, uh, the Pentagon Papers, a lot of what investigative journalists are writing about are abuses of power. With the kind of authoritarian character. It's, it's the keeping the national security state in check. It's keeping an eye on local law enforcement, which has the power to kill and sometimes does.
Unpacking American Extremism - In The Thick - Air Date 11-14-24
MARIA HINOJOSA - HOST, IN THE THICK: Karen, you know, we're hearing about the specificity of the attacks on the trans community and how much fear there is there. You know, you write for the Washington Post, right?
It's all about Washington politics. What do you think this victory means for the future of our democracy?
KAREN ATTIAH: Yeah. Look, I think this country is a young democracy. I don't [01:09:00] think a full democracy is anything but a country that gives protections and voice to the most marginalized. I mean, I think, you know, as a journalist, we're seeing definite attacks on the press.
We're seeing attacks on organizers. I think it's not a coincidence to me that that after platforms like Twitter were so instrumental in making so many of these issues, whether it was racism, police brutality, Me Too, so visible and forcing those issues of America not holding up to its promise for Black people, for women, for trans people.
To me, it's not a surprise that the tech broligarchs came in, bought up these platforms. We now have Zuckerberg saying, we're not going to do politics. We're not going to do [01:10:00] news. And to me, it, it is also, I think this question, you know, not just of our elected officials, but again, of our ruling class, which yes, includes.
The Elon Musk, the Peter Thiel's, the Mark Zuckerberg's who have an insane amount of unaccountable power over what we see, over what we consume, over what we believe to be real, who have leaned to the right, who have, I mean, Elon tried to tilt this election in favor of Trump. And I think this is going to be something that we're going to have to really figure out and grapple with as we're moving in this increasingly mediated space.
I mean, what does it mean? For a handful of men, of white men, a couple of South African immigrants who have decided that they want to reshape this country into a country that silences the press, that wants to elevate high testosterone men, white men, [01:11:00] into power. Right. When I look at democracy, it's not just about elected officials, but it's about the class of wealthy, ultra rich billionaires that we have actively working with the fascist government and or caving.
So what does it mean for us to fight back against that?
There's a lot of news deserts, right? This media environment is now less diverse than it was in the 90s. It is not an accident that newsrooms have been slashing the news staff of people of these different backgrounds, black, Latino, trans. So the fact that everybody's dumbfounded about what's happening, like, yeah, no shit, because the people whose job it was to interpret and to give voice to these issues, y'all let them go because you want [01:12:00] to quote unquote appeal to your core slash white audience.
MARIA HINOJOSA - HOST, IN THE THICK: You know, one of the things, Imada, obviously, the reason why In The Thick came into existence was to have an independent analysis of the politics from a non white perspective, right? We were all, the three of us, basically yelling and screaming, this is not a normal election. This is not a normal party, not a normal So, final question, what has been the role of mainstream media in helping to make this all happen?
IMARA JONES: Oh boy. I think that if you see yourself as a part of the establishment, then your role is to preserve the established order. If you see yourself in the role of preserving the established order, that any perceived threats to that order will be preserved. marginalized, period, full stop. And I think that one of the issues is that [01:13:00] a part of the established order is that there are two parties, you treat them a certain way, and you don't actually listen to the content of what they're saying.
You know, there's a president, whoever the president is, you report on them in a certain way. So you're just actually publicizing and lifting up the conversation that the established order tells you. So when you have a major party that's captured by an extremist movement. You just keep doing the same thing.
And what you've ended up doing is to legitimize those extremist views. Cause you just cover them like everything else.
Misinformation, Disinformation, Malinformation ( Feat Esosa Osa) Part 2 - Gettin' Grown - Air Date 11-12-24
TYKEIA N. ROBINSON - CO-HOST, GETTIN' GROWN: I was gonna ask, um, so I think your report, which I love by the way, um, and I think I've said that before, but I'll probably say it again. So just like, um, so the black online disinformation landscape, what I think is so Masterful about it is that, you know, it's very clear that you've done a lot of, uh, research to help us to understand a, the dis, what a [01:14:00] disinformation landscape is and sort of its implications, particularly around, um, you know, uh, voter engagement, uh, narratives, political narratives, just sort of all of the things that, you know, You know, would encourage or facilitate or even discourage someone to engage in the system.
And so many of us have not been even socialized to think about it in that way. Uh, and so I would love if you could just, you know, I'm going to encourage everyone, we'll put the link in the description box, but if you could just for anyone who's listening, who's never heard of this report, never heard of Onyx Impact, um, you know, tell us, tell us what the report is from, you know, as the, as the author and as you know, your organization, like this is what you've done, you know, give us a summary of what is in it and how we could leverage it, especially in this, in this critical time.
ESOSA OSA: Yeah, absolutely. So what this is. [01:15:00] Is a, a landscape and what I mean by landscape is, is like a, a, a plotting out like on a map, a mapping of who the main actors are writing false or misleading information is and what the main narratives, uh, the main false or misleading narratives happening in these spaces are.
And lastly, Uh, how they interact with each other and how they become viral. The reason that it's important to, to, to start with this is because you can't really begin to address the problem unless you know what the problem is. And unless you know how the problem spreads, this is the case in most research.
And I think what is most important for folks to get out of this report is an understanding of the importance of what we call. Kind of gateway influencers and platforms of [01:16:00] these legitimate black, uh, staples of news and culture, right? Who are honestly the, the, the main places where black folks are getting a lot of their news and information from right now, especially young black folks.
You know, we did a study on its impact, uh, recently 15 percent of young black folks are going to cable news to get, uh, and use information. Seven, seven, uh, relative to 73% of them who are going to some type of social media platform, right? And so, uh, we did seven focus groups and, uh, national focus groups of black folks and every single focus group named the Breakfast Club as a place they get using information from.
And so if you're. If you are, so regardless, I hear y'all and
JADE VERETTE - CO-HOST, GETTIN' GROWN: you don't have to, it's okay. This is my [01:17:00] views. These do not reflect the views of his Sosa. Okay. Also, these are my views. But that shit is scary. Okay. Sorry. No, but just as someone who reads like,
ESOSA OSA: you know, just as a person, you know, we would talk to read newspapers and I mean, even just read books and to develop a perspective.
Like, you know, it's kind of scary that that's sort of been watered down to the comments, but in the captions, that's my soapbox. You're not wrong. And I, but I don't think we're necessarily going back to that. Right. So we've got regardless of your, of your views on. On the breakfast club on the shade room on, you know, a lot, a lot of these other, uh, platforms, if this is where folks are going to get their information from, then we need to, um, make sure this is where we're also putting good information, right.
You're not wrong. Building a healthier black information ecosystem is going to take steps, right, is going to require us [01:18:00] amplifying and creating larger platforms for folks who are telling truthful information to be investing in these, in, in new black media opportunities, new black podcasts, new black radio show, all these types of things.
Uh, and in the meantime, In the meantime, making sure that we are engaging with platforms where black folks currently are. And so, uh, that's, that is the most, I think, important. And that's actually why, you know, we put this, we put this out in June, like, uh, very, our number one piece of strategic guidance, like y'all got to engage in these gateway platforms and influencers.
And unfortunately, you know, it took a change in the presidential ticket, um, to start. Start seeing someone, uh, go on to these platforms, right? Uh, repeatedly start talking on these platforms. And when I tell you that is the only time that we have seen any, uh, positive [01:19:00] content about the Democratic candidate, like, uh, uh, Pierce, any of these faces.
Right. Um, and so it's, it's, it's more important than folks realize. And it's, and it's why we put that at the top of our, our strategic guidance for this, this particular report.
SECTION B - MEN ARE NOT OKAY
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: Men Are Not Okay.
Make America Male Again Fifteen years of aggrieved men Part 2 - It's Been a Minute - Air Date 11-19-24
HANNA ROSIN: The story of men and women, just to give us the gender binary for a minute, of the last 40 or 50 years, is a story about Like, the world moving very quickly, and women doing a better job of, like, sort of keeping up with it.
With a lot of struggle. Like, think of it as an actual treadmill. Like, just the world moving more and more, like, the treadmill's going faster and faster, and women are struggling, but kind of keeping up. Like, they're just kind of adjusting, or, or figuring out how to go to college, or like, if marriage is, and they figure out, like, how to take care of the kids, and how to stay in the workforce.
BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: Yeah.
HANNA ROSIN: [01:20:00] And men just. Not able to like shift or keep up. It's not about total numbers like men sinking, women rising. It's about women rising and men like not quite able to rise or keep up. And so I think there's something real about that for men and the anxieties. There's something real about like, I don't know who to be without the structures.
I don't know. Who to be in the world without marriage, or I don't know, like who to be in the world without the provider role or the husband role. It's like without these traditional man roles, I feel really discombobulated and lost. Whereas I think women have been rolling through the collapse of roles for like a century.
Like the roles collapse and they just kind of like keep on moving and there's lots of theories about why that is. Like some of it is about your brains develop. earlier. Some of it, some of it is about skills like organization skills. Some of it [01:21:00] is because like the kids are there and women have to take care of the kids.
So there's all sorts of reasons why women are able to kind of find stability as women, whereas men have a harder time finding stability as men.
BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: Hmm. Hmm. In talking about some of the challenges that men Maybe facing or dealing with in our current society. Uh, let me describe a man to you. I'm into this.
Yeah. I'm into it. We'll call him Luke. Let's call him Luke. Luke. Luke lives in a large town. That's a little more rural than suburban Pennsylvania. He's middle aged about 45 years old. Uh, he's divorced. He doesn't see his children often. Luke is white and he makes around 40, 000 a year.
HANNA ROSIN: Mm
BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: hmm. And he recently faced bankruptcy.
If I told you this man stormed the Capitol building on January 6th, 2021. Would that surprise you?
HANNA ROSIN: No.
BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: Why not?
HANNA ROSIN: Because this is the big change that happened between the time I wrote [01:22:00] the book and now this is the biggest change that happened. People did not identify as aggrieved men. They just kind of lived that way and were embarrassed by it.
So the Lukes, the Lukes who appeared in my book, I'll tell you about one Luke who appeared in my book. He lived in one of these towns, a little more rural, just like you described, and the factory shut down. This is totally typical white American story. It was a black American story, sort of 34 years before in the cities, then it became a white American story in the rural areas.
And so Luke's wife was still working. She was still working in the schools. And she would put her. Paycheck down on the table and then Luke would go cash that paycheck. Hmm. And there was a sense of shame around it. Now 15 years later, Luke is wearing a T-shirt saying, the end of men. Like he's not embarrassed.
He's like part of some [01:23:00] big political movement slash community of like, we are aggrieved too. So that's what I watched happen in the 15 years where like the Lukes who were like. quietly suffering started like really loudly suffering and that upended our politics and our culture in so many ways. Hmm.
That's interesting. Cause I bet underneath your question maybe is like, should I feel sorry for Luke? Is that what you're trying to? No, that is, that's actually, that's, that
BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: is
HANNA ROSIN: not
BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: one of the questions that I have. I mean, I, I, I mean, I got to come clean. Luke is not. a real person, but his characteristics were all ones pulled together from people's lives that actually did storm the Capitol.
Yeah. On January 6th. Yeah. And I brought up this kind of composite character, Luke, because I think that that character is a good way to think about how Gender anxieties can actually be an expression of other anxieties in our lives. What do you think about that? [01:24:00] 100%.
HANNA ROSIN: I think it's the most powerful, most concrete and most persistent expression of generalized anxiety.
I mean, I was at a Trump rally and the number of times The people use expressions like we don't want beta males. We want alpha males. We, I'm telling you, we want a world where men are men and women are women. And I'm thinking. The world is changing really fast like the world around gender and all over the place because it's it's happening in urban places in rural places like the way a younger generation thinks about what gender is and what their own gender is.
It's really shifting radically and and how that is just genuinely terrifying. To people or it just becomes like a like a split like the country splits in two and one part of the country has really like rigid traditional ideas of gender and the other goes and like totally the other direction.
BRITTANY LUSE - HOST, IT'S BEEN A MINUTE: I mean, it's interesting [01:25:00] because like when it comes to sort of like the make America great again era, you know, like the past nearly 10 years, there's these like two competing gender ideals butting heads against one another.
What do these two mentalities say about what we as Americans value? Or in other words, like, What hopes and fears do we unconsciously put inside of our views on gender?
HANNA ROSIN: I feel like I'm in some kind of Buddha mood or something. I mean, the immediate answer that comes to me is Go for it. The world is an unstable and scary place and people have lost a lot of their Grounding, whether because fewer people are getting married, because jobs are less stable, because the climate disaster, sort of for all sorts of [01:26:00] reasons.
And I think some people are grasping for stability. Kind of backwards outside themselves, like make America great again, go back to the other time when things were like this and I recognized them and everything didn't seem out of control. And some people are looking for stability kind of inside themselves, like self determination, who I am, my own identity, I get to decide.
Like, what I want to be, and I think that's very grounding and empowering. So I think everybody's experiencing similar instability and just looking for answers. In different places. Yeah, finding their comfort in, in different ways.
Barron Trump & the ‘Bro Vote’ Helped Sway the Election. What Happens Next - CNN - Air Date 11-9-24
CLIP: It's been a big week for the manosphere. Figures from this proudly anti feminist section of the internet, made up of influencers, Dreams come true guys, Trump's in the White House. pundits, comedians, streamers and podcasters are still reveling in Donald [01:27:00] Trump's triumph, and claiming they played a big part in helping him win what is being called the gender war election.
I need an abortion. Get fucked. Many of them have spent the days since Trump's victory mocking female voters. Guess what? Guys win again. It's your body, my choice. As a president who was found liable for sexual abuse, ponders whether to radically redraw abortion rights across the US. I'm president. I want to protect the women.
I'm going to do it whether the women like it or not. Yet as the dust settles, the Republican Party has a problem. Oh, yeah! What does it do with the tide of angry young men who sent them back to the White House?
Though plenty of women voted Republican, The gender war election framing has been pushed by some of the world's loudest voices. Elon Musk, [01:28:00] Trump's biggest supporter in recent months, tweeted, The cavalry has arrived. Men are voting in record numbers. They now realize everything is at stake. The top reply came from the notorious influencer and accused rapist and human trafficker, Andrew Tate.
His summary of the election? It's men versus gays and chicks. We have a new star. A star is born, Elon. Many have criticised the world's richest man for stoking the fires of gender conflict, and some have pointed out that more young women voted Trump than they did in 2020, with support increasing for Trump.
From 33% to 40, yet the increase in young men voting for Trump was even higher, jumping from 41% to 56%. Trump's support is strongest among young Republicans, gen Z, and young millennials giving him a crucial edge in what's been described as one of the most consequential elections in US history.
DANA WHITE: Fuck Kabbalah Trump 2024, [01:29:00]
CLIP: and Trump's secret weapon in securing the So-called bro vote.
appears to have been his gigantic, chronically online, 18 year old son, Barron. Barron Trump. Hey, you're pretty popular, right? He might be more popular than Don and Eric. Barron Trump, along with his MAGA influencer best friend, Beau Loudon. The strategy is reaching an audience that, you know, maybe isn't being recognized.
Joe Rogan obviously picked President Trump. I helped set that up too. Definitely talked to some people about that. We're tasked by the Trump campaign with helping to reach out to Gen Z men. Donald J. Trump! And they did it through their favorite influencers, many of whom were name checked live from Trump's victory podium by UFC boss Dana White.
DANA WHITE: I want to thank the Nellboys, Aiden Ross, um, uh, uh, Theo Vaughn, Bustin with the Boys, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan.
CLIP: Aiden Ross is one of them. A 24 year old streamer, whose career [01:30:00] highlights include being the man who sniffed Andrew Tate's chair after interviewing him, and hosting a live stream with the incel and white supremacist Nick Fuentes.
Uh, dude, it's actually like a pleasure to talk to you, bro. A close friend of Barron, Aidan Ross hosted Trump on his stream in August of this year. My son Barron says hello. He's a great young guy, but he's a big fan of yours. What's up Barron? Yeah, Barron's awesome. Barron also appears to have close links with the notorious influencer Andrew Tate, after the two were linked to a failed meme coin cryptocurrency.
I'm gonna text Barron. Him and I talk quite often. In private messages acquired by Vice, Senior members of Tate's misogynist network The War Room speculated for years that the 2024 election would be a gender war where the nuances of identity politics would fall away, leaving a direct battle between men and women.
To ensure the result they wanted, Tate Ross, the Nelk Boys, and a whole host of alpha male influencers spent election day telling their followers to go [01:31:00] out and vote for Trump. If Kamala's in charge, we're one period away from global destruction. We need a man in power, we need a man in charge. When Donald Trump was announced as the next president, those same online figures were quick to gobble up the credit for galvanizing the so called pro vote.
Bring down the temperature. Despite outgoing President Joe Biden asking Americans to unite and set aside their differences, Trump's victory looks likely to kickstart another four years of division and rancor. It was always bigger than Trump. If you take him out now, it won't even matter. Seven people will replace him, bro.
Women across the US are vowing to stop dating, marrying, having sex, or having children with men. Inspired by the 4B movement in South Korea. We are just really sick of men's shit. This is the consequence of toxic masculinity. An offshoot of Me Too formed after the murder of a soul woman in 2016 has grown in response to concerns including revenge porn and digital sex crimes.
Pressing topics in the US, with [01:32:00] women reporting an extreme uptick in online misogyny since Trump's win. And it's like, You're a fucking retard. In response, Nick Fuentes, popularizer of the inflammatory slogan Your Body, My Choice, has been doxxed, with social media users posting his home address. He's already run into trouble with the law, after macing a 57 year old feminist on his doorstep.
DANA WHITE: Hi.
CLIP: Oh my god, what, what are you doing? Even within
the MAGA camp, the celebratory tone adopted by people like Fuentes and Tate is causing division. Hillary Crowder, a trad right political commentator, has encouraged the Republicans to disavow the red pill manosphere nonsense. The question of whether they will or not looks set to define the next chapter in US politics.
Why did young men shift to Trump 'Aspirational masculinity', says Scott Galloway - VICE - Air Date 11-15-24
MICHAEL SMERCONISH - HOST, CNN: Joining me now is NYU Business School Professor Scott Galloway. He's the host of the podcast, Professor G. Great to have you back. We've all heard of toxic [01:33:00] masculinity. What is aspirational masculinity?
SCOTT GALLOWAY: Good to be with you, Michael. Um, aspirational, feeling good about being a man. Um, believing you, uh, are entitled to more economic opportunity than is currently presented. Look, we, you referenced this. I feel like most of the stats I was going to discuss, you've already kind of stolen my thunder. But essentially, this was supposed to be the election, uh, the referendum on bodily autonomy.
This was the testosterone election. Look at who Trump went on, look at who and what he went all in on. Crypto, Elon Musk, rockets, cars. Uh, you talk about podcasts? There's a difference between being right and being effective. Whether, we can discuss whether his policies are right or not, but gosh, talk about effective.
That number you mentioned, a total of 55 million people listen to or watch the Rogan podcast. The average [01:34:00] age is 34, skews male. Just to talk about broadcast television, some of the best shows on MSNBC, seen as a left kind of leaning network, get a million viewers and the average age is 70, and it skews female.
So what would be more effective? 1 million 70-year-old women, or 45, 50 5 million, 34-year-old, uh, men in your state. The swingings of swing states young men were nine points towards Biden in 2020, and then 18 points toward, um, Trump in 24. That's a tectonic shift, and it all comes down to my opinion, to the same thing.
A 30 year old man or woman isn't doing as well as his or her parents were at 30 for the first time in America's history. And if your son isn't in a relationship, can't afford to buy a home, is anxious, is depressed, are the rights of Palestinians territorial sovereignty of [01:35:00] Ukraine or trans rights? Does that even register on your screen?
This was the testosterone podcast election.
MICHAEL SMERCONISH - HOST, CNN: I want to say that you've spoken of these issues, we've spoken of these issues before there was a 2024 campaign. And I can remember having conversations with Scott Galloway going back two or three years, some of them here on CNN, some of them on SiriusXM, wondering why, and I wasn't thinking Donald Trump, but why doesn't someone champion this cause?
And really, he was the first to step forward and do so.
SCOTT GALLOWAY: He went right, he went, he flew right into the storm. And he embraced this, the manosphere. He talked about the need crypto, right? What is more ground zero for kind of young men and economic opportunity, whether you believe that or not, then crypto. And let's look at some of the stats.[01:36:00]
40 years ago, the average age of the first time homebuyer was 36. Today, it's 54. Pre pandemic, the average home was 290, 000. Post pandemic, it's 420 with an acceleration interest rates. You're looking at the average mortgage has gone from 1, 100 to 2, 200. 40 years ago, two thirds of people under the age of 30 had a home.
60 percent had a child. Have all of a sudden young people opted out of having a home and a child, or maybe they just can't afford it. And unfortunately, The Democrats weren't able to square the circle of the fact that the economy is actually quite good, and some of Trump's policies, whether it be deficit spending or tariffs, will likely result in more inflation and greater interest rates and taxation on the young, but they weren't able to communicate that.
They, in the podcast medium, can't be understated here, Michael, because some of the offensive things that we Democrats thought, that joke is offensive. The Zeitgeist and Podcasts. Is it softens people podcast [01:37:00] hosts aren't looking for a gotcha moment They generally want to present the individual in their best light and it's more got the vibe of can't you take a joke?
And if you look at the nine of the top 10 podcasts Uh, eight of, uh, uh, they lean right, and Trump went on six of them? I mean, there's going to be a lot of forensics here, but not acknowledging the struggles of young men as a broader theme will be a very big issue when we look at the autopsy that failed Harris campaign.
And also, simply put, she should have gone on a plane to Austin. The demographic group that swung most violently towards Trump was young people. The second most violent swing was their parents, age 45 to 64. All of the social engineering, all of the righteous social issues, weren't, didn't even take a back seat.
They weren't even in the car. Because what people see is their, their kids not doing well, specifically young men, and Trump went right into this issue.
MICHAEL SMERCONISH - HOST, CNN: I want to display what you're describing. Put up the [01:38:00] Edison research exit survey data. This was published by the Washington post. I don't know if Scott can see it, but it shows that among 18 to 29 year olds, she had the edge.
But as we've documented, he gained significantly among young men. But now look at the 45 to 64 category. It was the best category for Donald Trump. You just made reference to this, but who are those people as they relate to young men?
SCOTT GALLOWAY: I hear from them every day, Michael. When I started talking about the struggles of young men three or four years ago, there was a gag reflex.
I understood it because a lot of people who entered that void were quite frankly thinly veiled misogynists. The conversation has shifted and the people driving this conversation and the most emails of the demographic I get the most emails from are the following. Single mothers worried about their sons.
Are you focused on international affairs or the rights of special interest group when your son? My daughter's in Pennsylvania [01:39:00] at Penn. My other daughter's in PR in Chicago, and my son is in the basement vaping and playing video games. And you want me to worry about Ukraine? You want me to have empathy for this zombie apocalypse on campuses, which is seen as very democratic?
No, I want my kid out of my house, and I want him to have the same opportunities my generation had. The, the second biggest swing here, or the The, the portion of the female vote that swung most aggressively away from Harris and towards Trump was one demographic, mothers.
Why Men And Boys Are Struggling - On the Media - Air Date 11-20-24
Micah Loewinger: Which I think sets us up to talk about some of the discrepancies that you've observed in the labor market, where men's participation fell by seven percentage points in the last 50 years. That's 96% employment to 89%. Notably, the largest drop has been among young men ages 25 to 34. That would be my age group. [chuckles] You point out that one in three men with no more than high [01:40:00] school level education are unemployed, which is a staggering five million people. What happened there?
Richard Reeves: It used to be true that men could actually do pretty well even without much education for all kinds of reasons, including sexism, but also just because there were a lot more jobs around, or sometimes called strong-back jobs. You had high school education, you could go to a factory, et cetera. Those jobs just aren't there in the numbers they were anymore before, and so less skilled men in particular are really struggling in the labor market. Those are the ones also whose earnings have dropped so that even if they're in work, we've seen a stagnation of male wages in the middle and bottom half of the distribution.
Micah Loewinger: Sometimes this is crudely framed as like the brawny jobs versus the brainy jobs.
Richard Reeves: The Bureau for Labor Statistics actually has a measure of jobs that require physical strength. The number of jobs that require any kind of serious physical strength has now dropped to below 10%. It's not that there are none, but it used to be closer to 30%.
Micah Loewinger: Alongside this is a pretty [01:41:00] striking mental health crisis. Young men are four times more likely to die by suicide. According to Pew, drug overdose deaths among Black men in the US more than tripled between 2015 and 2020.
Richard Reeves: I was very struck by a study published in The British Medical Journal by a scholar called Fiona Shand, where she and her colleagues looked at the words that men use to describe themselves before suicide or attempted suicide, and the two most commonly used words were useless and worthless. This sense of like use and worth, I do think it's an uncontroversial statement to say that it's a pretty universal human need to be needed. Your family needs you. Your employer needs you. Your community needs you. You have a specific role in society.
I see suicide rates and other mental health problems as symptoms of a deeper malaise which is, for many men, a loss of purpose, a loss of meaning, a loss of a sense of how should I be in the world. That's a crisis that we should take very seriously. The solution is not to say, [01:42:00] yes, let's go back to the old world where men were heads of the household and the primary breadwinners, and that worked really well, because, guess what? It didn't work very well.
Micah Loewinger: Speaking of turning back the clock, now that we have a snapshot of these disparities, I want to talk about our albeit broken political conversation and how it's metabolized some of these data points. I think it's really clear how the American right has capitalized on this big time.
Senator Josh Hawley: "I want to focus tonight on the deconstruction of men. Not because I think men are more important, but because I believe the attack on men has been the tip of the spear in the left's broader attack on America."
Micah Loewinger: That's Missouri Senator Josh Hawley speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in November 2021.
Richard Reeves: It's pretty clear what he's doing here. He's taking this sense that men are struggling. Many boys are struggling in school, many men are struggling in the labor market, many dads are struggling to be in their kids' lives. Those are facts, true, and in many cases, getting worse. What Hawley is doing and many others are doing [01:43:00] is channeling that and helping to turn it into a grievance, and then saying, yes, we see you're struggling. Guess whose fault it is? It's the fault of the left because they don't care about you. In fact they think you're toxic. They think you're the problem.
They think, to borrow a phrase from a lot of men's rights activists, that women have problems, men are problems, and they're turning that against the left. My take of this is that if real problems are not addressed by responsible people, by mainstream institutions, they metastasize into grievances. Once they become grievances, they can be exploited for political ends without any tangible solutions. The best that he can do or has done so far is to say we should bring back marriage and bring back manufacturing. Okay. Good luck with that, Senator. There hasn't been a single marriage promotion policy that's worked in the US, and bringing back manufacturing is a pretty tough thing to do.
Even Donald Trump couldn't talk manufacturing back into existence. It just goes [01:44:00] against many of the trends in the global economy. That doesn't matter. The point is not to offer solutions that are actually workable. The point is simply to activate the grievances. Reactionary politicians around the world - it's not just in the US. Look at South Korea. Look at East Germany. Look at Brexit - are actually really working with the grain of this male malaise and turning it to their political advantage, but there are no policies. The cupboard is bare in terms of actually doing anything.
Micah Loewinger: Meanwhile, you believe that the left is basically in denial that this is even a problem. That there are these systemic issues affecting men. This is not the language that you often hear in the left, you believe.
Richard Reeves: I think the problem is that the response from the left has largely been one of an echoing silence. The left really hasn't engaged with these issues very much at all. It almost seems intellectually impossible for those on the left to say, "Well, actually, there are some inequalities going the other way now as well," and take [01:45:00] seriously the issues of boys and men. I get it. There's this kind of visceral reaction. There's a reflex. Even perhaps among people listening to our conversation, there'll be this reflex, like, "Really?"
Micah Loewinger: Well, we're both white guys and we're speaking on behalf of all kinds of people in this conversation.
Richard Reeves: Sure. That "Really?" response is entirely appropriate. They say, "Yes, really. Look at these data points and then we can discuss it and so on, but don't suggest that it couldn't even be possible that there are these inequalities going either way." If the right is trying to turn back the clock, to some extent, on women, I think the left are too often turning their back on boys and men, or worse, sometimes suggesting that if there are problems that boys and men are having, it must be their fault. This is the rare occasion when the left is willing to use very individualistic diagnosis of what's happening.
Typically, the left is more comfortable with structural suggestions as to what's happening. There's this sense from the left of like even if we agree you're struggling, well, they're going to say it's your fault, you just need to shape up. Maybe you're a bit toxic as well.
Micah Loewinger: You've used that term "toxic masculinity." [01:46:00] I'm sure it means different things to different people. I'd like to know how you define it and why you don't like the term.
Richard Reeves: It used to be quite a useful term in obscure corners of academia. It was used by people looking at very violent offenders, men, for whom their idea of what it meant to be a man had become psychologically very strongly connected to violence. Then it broke out into the mainstream in about 2016. My problem with it is twofold. One is it's just used completely indiscriminately to describe any kind of behavior that the user of the term disapproves of.
The other big problem with it is just by putting the word toxic next to the word masculinity, it gets very close to the kind of Puritan ideas of original sin. There is something toxic within you. It allows, again, reactionary. It allows us on the right to be able to plausibly claim, "Look, they don't like you. They're not on your side. They think you're toxic."
Micah Loewinger: I think my favorite version of the toxic masculinity critique, which you cite in your book, comes from YouTuber ContraPoints, aka Natalie Wynn, in her [01:47:00] 2020 video titled Men. "We say, look, toxic masculinity is the reason you don't have room to express your feelings, and it's the reason you feel lonely and inadequate. While feminism tells women 'You hate your body and you're constantly doubting yourself because society did this to you and needs to change,' we kind of just tell men 'You're lonely and suicidal because you're toxic.' Stop it. We tell them they're broken without really telling them how to fix themselves. I think what we need--''
In your book, you also point to moments where the political left, the Democratic Party, has missed opportunities to proudly use government to help men. Perhaps, as you argue, because of fear of what celebrating men might signal.
Richard Reeves: President Biden signed the infrastructure bill into law. More than 2/3 of the jobs from the infrastructure bill will go to men, predominantly working-class men, and a little bit disproportionately, working-class men of color it looks. Did the administration say that? No.
Micah Loewinger: Which would have prompted [01:48:00] questions, you know?
Richard Reeves: Yes, but let's have that conversation. On the other hand, student debt cancellation was described as a gender justice issue because 2/3 of student debt is held by women because women go to college much more than men. The college debt thing was going to, by and large, help upper-middle-class women. The infrastructure was going to help working-class men, especially Hispanic working-class men.
It seems to me that it should be possible for an administration to say there's all kinds of problems. Some of these problems affect different groups. Actually, working-class men have not been doing very well in America in recent decades, and the infrastructure bill is going to help working-class men.
SECTION C - WHAT WE CAN DO
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, Section C: What Can We Do?
Why so many have left X, and where everyone is turning to - DW News - Air Date 11-15-24
ANCHOR, DW NEWS: . So, we've got Stephen King. He's joined the Exodus, just like the British newspaper, The Guardian. But, there's nothing new about the concerns over what X has become since Musk took over.
So, why are they leaving so late?
ZEVE SANDERSON: Yeah, it's a good question. So obviously this isn't a trend that's just starting now. Um, that being said, I sort of want to note that there's not [01:49:00] much precedent for an owner of a major social media platform to be as partisan as Musk, uh, and, and to sort of, you know, be as active, you In in the platform and and content moderation as Musk has been, um, you know, likely what we're probably seeing is is an impact from the election and Musk's very active role in trying to shape the information environment around the election in order to to nominate Donald Trump.
Um, now what effect this will exactly have on either X or other platforms is yet to be seen. Uh, but my guess is, you know, it's largely driven by, by Musk's sort of attempt to, to, you know, support Trump during the election.
ANCHOR, DW NEWS: And for those people, unlike Stephen King, who choose to remain on the platform, the terms of use they changed today, um, directing all legal challenges to a conservative leaning court in Texas.
Now that's away from where X is based near Austin, what do you think that's going to mean?
ZEVE SANDERSON: Uh, I mean, in [01:50:00] practically it's unclear what it's going to mean. Um, clearly this is just trying to move, uh, X sort of away from being held accountable, uh, for its, its actions here towards, you know, uh, a legal jurisdiction or with, with a specifically, um, a judge that is going to be, I think a little bit more open, uh, to some of Musk's, um, uh, Um, you know, sort of culture war politics, uh, but you know, my, my background is more in political science and studying the information environment.
Uh, and I've made the mistake exactly once of commenting too directly on, on, on legal dynamics. Um, so I'll sort of end there, but yeah.
ANCHOR, DW NEWS: Let me ask you for your take on this then. Um, Musk is already suing the watchdog media matters in, in this new court for X, because it alleged that advertisements appeared next to pro Nazi Sites.
Have you ever seen anything like this on a social media platform?
ZEVE SANDERSON: No, I mean, certainly not a major social media platform. And right. There is, there's an irony here that [01:51:00] when Musk bought X or at that point, Twitter, um, that in part, you know, his, his, his rhetoric around why he wanted to buy the platform was to make it more transparent.
And an important part of transparency broadly is, is research on the platform that holds the platform accountable for its actions. Um, so, you know, I'm not the first certainly to, to make this point. Um, but, but it is disappointing to see sort of further litigation in this regard. Another important terms of service change that, that occurred recently, um, was that he's, you know, made it increasingly difficult for, for academic researchers like us to be able to, to access platform data either directly from the platform.
Or by by collecting it, the sort of automated means. So I think we're just seeing sort of continued push into less transparency, not more transparency.
ANCHOR, DW NEWS: I got to ask you another question about litigation. Musk is suing companies such as Unilever, Mars, Orsted, and there are others for violating antitrust laws and for keeping billions of [01:52:00] dollars of advertising money away from him.
I mean, he says that they Now we have the ear of president elect Donald Trump. Should those companies, should they be worried?
ZEVE SANDERSON: So I think that they could, you know, when it comes again to litigation itself, it seems pretty well established that companies have First Amendment protections. Um, and where they spend advertising dollars falls under corporate speech.
So I would be very surprised if, if this actually went very far in the courts. Um, I think what we're going to see here, uh, is just another four years. of sort of direct engagement with, with culture war issues, uh, and, and with trying to hold institutions, um, sort of from, from the right accountable for, for speech that, um, that contradicts, um, uh, their perspective.
So, you know, again, when, when it comes to direct impact of litigation, um, [01:53:00] I'd be relatively surprised if there was an effect. But I think that this is just going to be part of, of what, you know, the next four years of, of a second Trump administration looks like.
ANCHOR, DW NEWS: Yeah. We started with Stephen King. Let me wrap this up with Stephen King.
He's asked his followers to migrate to threads with him. Blue Sky is currently the most downloaded app on the app store in the United States. Number two right now is threads. I mean, there once was a migration to Mastodon that fizzled out. Do you see any of these emerging as the dominant? Twitter X replacement.
ZEVE SANDERSON: Yeah. So, um, you know, in, for, for studying social media platforms, we refer to this as network effects, where the value of a platform is essentially because everyone else is there. And the more people are there, the more valuable it becomes, you know, um, it's, you know, it's tough to prognosticate, as you said, this has happened before.
I think what we're likely to see. Is not a single X or Twitter replacement, we're not going to see a single sort of short form [01:54:00] text based, uh, platform that replaces what Twitter was a few years ago, but I think what we're likely to see is the social media environment continue to look more like the traditional media environment where it's heavily fractured, and you see a number of different platforms, um, you know, end up becoming relatively robust and permanent, um, but I think it's, you know, It's probably unlikely, especially given how many right leaning accounts are going to remain on X for there to be a wholesale replacement of what Twitter used to be.
The Role of the Press in This Moment with Matt Pearce Part 3 - Why Is This Happening - Air Date 11-19-24
MATT PEARCE: I mean, the real question here is, are we talking about the Internet as it's likely to be or the Internet as it ought to be? Because
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: Well, let's establish what "ought" is like, what would the "ought" be? What do you want if you can make the world?
MATT PEARCE: So I think that we have at least a couple trillion dollar internet companies that we need to break up. I think Google is a monopolist probably many times over [01:55:00] to the point that It's like infrastructure of the internet when people are just looking at something, they just mindlessly go to Google to try to find it. And I think having monopolies has been bad for innovation. I mean, it's so ironic when we talk about tech companies because they do represent in many ways the forefront of the economy and they're developing new things.
But like in the media space, like what's remarkable about the homogenization of media? It's not a homogenization of content, it's like a homogenization of form. Where Google has a certain way that like, it likes your websites to look if you want to be featured on their algorithm. Which again is a black box and people fight about it and you know they want to be on the top of the 10 blue links like Google's you know, overwhelming force over connecting people with web pages has shaped what web pages look like, and I think that's given us like an extremely narrow idea of even [01:56:00] what a web page should look like.
Meta, it's own, you know, hostility to linking these days is gonna result in people trying to create a bunch of native content on an app that is never gonna surface it. Unless you, you know, are engaging in engagement bait to try to like troll people into having responses on sort of like nonsensical issues.
You know, TikTok, it's going to require you to shoot your videos in a certain way to get people's attention in the first, you know, literally half second of a video before people move on. Like all these things are, it's the classic Marshall McLuhan, the form produces the content and the content produces the form, which is that, you know, we have this existing ethic and journalism of going out there and telling the truth and getting in people's faces, even when it's not very popular.
And even when it's not very commercial, and we're trying to shove it into these, you know, text sized boxes that weren't really made for us. And it's very, and I want to be clear that like, you can totally do journalism on TikTok or [01:57:00] YouTube or Instagram or whatever.
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: And there are people are, I also don't want to be like, I don't want to be like annoyingly disparaging about influencers. Like there's lots of people doing fantastic stuff in all those places. Like genuinely, there is great stuff, smart people, conscientious people, people surfacing and bridging stuff. Like, I don't want to sound like you're not doing real journalism, which people, what people used to say to us when we were like writing blogs, like there are tons of people doing great stuff.
MATT PEARCE: No, and I completely agree because, you know, basically having been a content creator myself as a journalist who was also like big on Twitter for a while, like I get it. The problem is, is that The people who should be replacing us in these new mediums, are basically far more exposed to the massive power of these companies and they don't have the ability to push back because they're not attached to these existing institutions like newspapers and publishers and broadcasters that at like, a firm level and at like, the sectoral level had some kind of bargaining power to essentially like negotiate with companies over like 'Hey, it would be great if your platform featured news. Like, here's what that would look like, and here's how you could place [01:58:00] it, and here's what compensation would look like.' There was some countervailance when tech companies were smaller that I think has totally broken down in this sort of monopoly era. And that's just, that's not, non existent at all for users.
Like, users have no bargaining power whatsoever with the platforms that are serving their stuff, and the algorithm change can destroy your entire, your entire livelihood.
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: Yeah. So, one thing is there's too much power concentrated in these big tech firms. The platforms have this kind of monopoly or oligopoly, I guess it would be because there are a few of them and you think they just need to be broken up because there's no way for like, I mean, it's interesting in some ways it's the same when you, when you're talking about how all the internet now looks like websites that Google will rank, how stultifying the formal constraints of the big platforms is.
It's almost like, it's almost like its own version of "central planning" versus "free market," you know, where there's these, there's this kind of central planning of the algorithms of the big tech firms, and [01:59:00] you can't allow like flourishing experiments and genuine entrepreneurship, which is like different things to happen because everything's happening within this fiefdom, whereas what you need, and one of the things I care deeply about is like some return to what we would call the open non commercial internet. Like the whole point of the World Wide Web originally was that no one controlled it. It was all there. Anyone could put up a website, anyone could respond to a website. Like that ethos, I feel like okay, break up the big tech firms, but then recreating or creating a new version of the open internet, the non commercial internet where the platforms don't control what you see and how you connect. That to me is the next step as well.
MATT PEARCE: Yeah, I think. I think it has to be, I mean, to bring it back to Louis Brandeis, who's one of the early and great champions of antitrust in this country. I mean, this was actually a version of a conversation that was happening during the trust era, you know, in the United [02:00:00] States more than a century ago.
It's like whether the trusts and having massive, gigantic companies that essentially control each feature of the economy, you know. Maybe that was more efficient. Maybe that was a good thing. And then people realized, I mean, in Lina Khan, the paper that made FTC chair Lina Khan famous, the Amazon Antitrust Paradox, I think is one of the skeleton keys to this conversation. Because it really kind of gets at this problem that Brandeis mentioned, which is 'the curse of bigness,' is that there is a point where companies get so massive that, you know, the real antitrust problem isn't necessarily like price gouging their customers, which is the common standard that we use to evaluate whether something's a monopoly or not that's breaking the law.
But it does all sorts of other things. It influences our politics in a way that's really nefarious and bullies other companies and kind of just creates this private sector kingship that seems anathema to the way that we live as Americans, which is to be free people in theory. And [02:01:00] like Brandeis thought was that, you know, maybe we should have this kind of wilder, more, you know, 'yeoman, small business person' economy where people had the freedom to run small businesses and maybe they weren't giant, productive firms. But they were something that gave people more freedom closer to ground and let the country be a more interesting place to flourish. And, you know, for people to practice their civic virtues rather than just being, you know, captured by giant companies. And I think the internet's in the same place too, because I think that there are all these people who are capable doing so much more interesting things with the technology that we now have.
CHRIS HAYES - HOST, WHY IS THIS HAPPENING: Yes.
MATT PEARCE: That, I think if you broke up these companies, some really interesting stuff would start happening. And we wouldn't even, we wouldn't even realize it until then what we've been missing for all these years.
Credits
JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991, or simply [02:02:00] email me to [email protected].
The additional sections of the show included clips from Why Is This Happening?, In The Thick, Gettin' Grown, It's Been A Minute, VICE, CNN, On The Media, and DW News. Further details are in the show notes.
Thanks everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our Transcriptionist Quartet—Ken, Brian, Ben, and Lara—for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today bestoftheleft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular [02:03:00] podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with the link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion. And don't forget to follow us on any and all social media platforms you may be joining these days.
So, coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show, from bestoftheleft.com
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