Hello and happy Saturday! A big chunk of our work The Dispatch involves covering the day-to-day goings on of our political era: what the Trump administration is up to, how Democrats are responding to whatever that is, who’s running for this or that congressional seat or governorship, what’s going on in Ukraine or Israel. This week, however, we had a couple of pieces that call to mind the Talking Heads’ classic “Once in a Lifetime.” Namely, “And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’”
President Donald Trump has spent the last decade upending our politics. The scandals and chaos of his first term are somewhat forgotten, usurped in our memories by his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the craziness on all sides during the 2024 election, and the relentless firehose of controversy that has defined his second term. But all that disruption has been possible only because American voters elected him president. Hence, that Talking Heads song now stuck in your head. (You’re welcome/I’m sorry.) How did we get here?
The many answers to that question will someday cause library shelves to sag, and more than a few of those volumes will explore the role of our online culture. People cocoon themselves with information and discourse that confirms our priors, they lose their inhibitions when communicating via keyboard rather than in person, and—despite having nearly limitless access to historical records and scientific research—they fall prey to misinformation. And the consequences can be severe.
X, formerly Twitter, in particular has become a gathering site for right-wing trolls to promote negative stereotypes about women and minorities. Contributing Writer Jeremiah Johnson wrote an in-depth essay on the “gender war roots of MAGA,” in which he pointed to the Gamergate controversy of 2014 —“a misogynistic, right-wing backlash against perceived feminism in the video game industry”—as a driver of Trumpism. Johnson notes, “Steve Bannon was one of the first people to realize that angry young men online could be harnessed as a real political force, saying, per a 2017 book: ‘You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.’”
Spend a few minutes on X these days, and you’ll see quickly that Bannon’s prediction came true. Johnson writes about the “RETVRN” movement (spelled with a Romaesque “v,” he notes, “to emphasize how ‘trad’ and ‘based’ the poster is”) that longs for the days of post-World War II America. Johnson notes one big problem with that nostalgia.
That narrative that America is worse off now than we were in generations past is, of course, nonsense. America is a vastly richer country than we were in the 1960s. We have more wealth and larger homes; we drive cars that are simultaneously faster, bigger, and safer; we live longer lives; we experience less violence; we breathe cleaner air and drink cleaner water; and we have better technology across every dimension of our daily lives. Median income has dramatically increased. Median income specifically for blue-collar workers has increased. But the relative position of many men has decreased as women have joined the workforce and America has accepted more immigrants.
Twitter, or X, is just one part of a larger ecosystem that cultivates misinformation and anger. Contributing writer Claire Lehmann wrote about how the technology upon which that ecosystem rests contributes to the problem. We’re listening to a lot of podcasts and watching a lot of video, and, in short, that’s bad for our brains. She argues that we need to be reading more.
As an example, she cites an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast featuring Douglas Murray, a British author. Murray criticized Rogan for interviewing Daryl Cooper, a Holocaust denier who says that Winston Churchill was the villain of World War II, and he sparred with comedian Dave Smith, who was featured in the same episode, over Smith’s comments about Israel: “Murray brought his norms of journalistic rigor into a largely postliterate culture, where information is consumed via aural and visual formats as opposed to the written word,” Lehmann writes. “It was a clash of cultures between an author and journalist who primarily lives in the world of printed text, and those who primarily live in the world of conversation and storytelling.”
That clash is not being won by people like Murray. She continues:
When an audio-visual narrative culture—which lacks the precision and permanence of written documentation—combines with amateur methods, our collective ability to discern the truth simply deteriorates.
The problem with armchair experts like Daryl Cooper and Dave Smith isn’t what they claim but how they reach those claims. Their conclusions may occasionally align with reality, but they arrive there without the rigor that ensures reliability. When someone forms theories about Churchill or Israel without consulting primary sources or visiting the region, they’re charting territory blindly.
Thank you for reading, and happy Mother’s Day to all the moms out there.
