The Chapo Guide to Revolution
Page 15
Though Sullivan still clung to dumb, Third Way, Simpson-Bowles–style domestic politics, he’d become a vocal opponent of everything from the drug war to interventions in Libya and Syria to support for Israel. He never did kick that race science, though, even as Obama’s #1 fan. And sure enough, recent years have once again soured Sullivan’s brand as he dispenses five-thousand-word essays about how Plato would likely blame Donald Trump’s election on college kids who want to assign pronouns to your yogurt.
As you can probably tell, the blog era was a shot in the arm for the conservative commentariat. But there were still some lefties and liberals in the mix—least of all the progressive hub Daily Kos, founded by a young clone of Gilbert Gottfried named Markos Moulitsas. Kos was, for its time, a firebrand site that raged not only against the nightmarish Bush machine but also the weak Democrats who enabled barbarism at home and carnage abroad. The bottom-up “Netroots Nation” was hailed as the liberal answer to the resurgent right-wing media embodied by Fox News and their newly recruited army of bloggers like RedState’s Erick Erickson, Town Hall’s vaudeville dummy Ben Shapiro, and the Gateway Pundit, aka the Dying Pundit, a racist invalid who refused to let his myriad terminal illnesses affect his output of xenophobic tirades. Daily Kos fought fire with fire and spoke not for the liberal party elites but for the ponytailed, guitar-owning grassroots.
But once Obama took office, Kos went soft. By the 2016 primary, the site had been completely assimilated by the Borg of the Democratic Party, launching illiterate polemics against anyone who dared to endorse or support the tepid New Deal Democrat Bernie Sanders over the bloodless, focus-grouped, corporate-approved campaign of Hillary Clinton. His brain broken by the 2016 primary, Moulitsas himself now spends his days screaming in the street about “the alt-left” and writing screeds against the distinctly progressive goal of universal health care so as to more effectively exterminate the lumpenproles who voted for Trump: “Be happy for coal miners losing their health insurance. They’re getting exactly what they voted for,” he wrote in December 2016.X
THE YOUNG TURDS
Once the template had been erected by pioneers like Drudge, Sullivan, and Moulitsas, the gate swung open and the children of Yog-Sothoth were now able to pass through into our realm. Thus a fresh generation of unnameable, social-climbing heels were free to parlay their vile ambition and Internet savvy into full-blown careers promoting war and the interests of the unspeakable Elder Gods that spawned them. The New Blogs had arrived.
Perhaps the most successful of these has been the dynamic duo of Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein, who have gone on to found one of the most influential and infuriating new media properties, an entity you know as Vox.com. Ezra and Matt were liberal wunderkinds who used the nascent medium of blogging to talk about serious issues in “a post-9/11 world” in a hip, cool way, while still getting a pat on the head from teacher. For instance, Ezra would always make sure to lard his blog with Manchurian Candidate–style recitals of how “kind,” “talented,” “smart,” and “reasonable” people like David Brooks were. And why wouldn’t these mooks look up to someone like Brooks? Ezra once described his fellow wizard wonks as “free-traders, interventionists, fiscally conservative, market-friendly peeps.” How do you do, fellow kids?
Still, united by their mutant neoliberal politics, he and Matty had different styles: where Ezra was always a soft touch, Yglesias started his blogging career as a liberal hawk, trying to get the coveted Instapundit link, which meant shitting on weenie human rights types, fantasizing about a war between Islam and the West, and daydreaming of Gitmo prisoners being shot while trying to escape. (Wink, wink.) But for both Ezra and Matt, supporting the Iraq War was never a moral failing on their part but an analytical one. For them, the main question was not “Should the United States invade a country that poses no threat to us and had nothing to do with 9/11?” but was “If we oppose a war every reasonable person supports, how could we possibly look ‘Serious’?” In a 2004 blog post, Ezra explained his support for the war like this:
As Matt and I have both noted in the past, part of what sent us towards the hawk camp was that, without much historical context for what war means, we simply evaluated the arguments (and sadly, that means the spokespeople) for the two sides. In that calculus, becoming a hawk seemed not just warranted, but unavoidable. That’s not fair to the doves and not fair to the Democratic party, and while we (hopefully) won’t make the same mistakes again, it’s really incumbent that the anti-war wing funds a media savvy opposition (instead of protests organized by subsidiaries of Maoist groups [read: ANSWER]) so future generations aren’t turned off by the absurdity of their spokespeople.XI
In their own words, they really had no choice. Camp Hawk was where all the “serious” jobs were! You see, if the antiwar side had developed a “savvier” media shop in 2002—instead of simply turning out millions of ordinary people into the streets, all over the world—there’s a good chance they could have given Matt and Ezra the “historical context” that war involves mostly senseless cruelty and slaughter. People like M&E generally regard everything to be a matter of “optics,” and at the time, being against the War on Terrorism would look very, very bad! To their finely calibrated moral and aesthetic compass, the hippies and dopey Marxists shouting in the street looked absurd and clueless, whereas Donald Rumsfeld, Fred Barnes, Bill Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz looked dignified, smart, and fuckin’ hot to boot.
His credentials as a smooth-brained cretin established, Ezra went on to write for legacy progressive publications like the American Prospect (where he wrote in favor of single-payer health care),XII became WaPo’s resident “wonk,” and finally founded Vox.com (where he wrote against single-payer health care).XIII Matty, meanwhile, managed to con editor after editor into allowing him to write books about things he knew less than nothing about. Reinventing himself as a business expert, a foreign policy expert, a Bangladeshi factory expert,XIV and a housing policy expert, he eventually joined Ezra to found a website whose purpose is to “explain the news.”
Of course, along the way, they both wrote lukewarm mea culpas for their Iraq days. Ezra came up with this rather novel excuse: “Rather than looking at the war that was actually being sold, I’d invented my own Iraq war to support—an Iraq war with different aims, promoted by different people, conceptualized in a different way and bearing little resemblance to the project proposed by the Bush administration. In particular, I supported Kenneth Pollack’s Iraq war.” XV In other words, Ezra was like the autistic boy in the finale of St. Elsewhere, the war he supported existing only inside his little snow globe. Meanwhile, Yglesias also blamed Kenneth Pollack’s 2002 book The Threatening Storm—the Turner Diaries for the liberal-hawk set—as just being too damn convincing! In 2017, Yggy smugly announced that he is now “against all war,” having had this elementary moral breakthrough at thirty-six years old.
It can’t be stressed enough that Matty and Ezra’s subsequent media careers were direct rewards for their shallow, dim-witted support of the biggest foreign policy disaster of our lifetimes (so far). To join the op-ed industry, like La Cosa Nostra, you become part of an elite brotherhood of murderous sociopaths who dress like shit and eat too much. You have to “get made,” and in This Blog of Ours, you pledge your support to a disastrous and completely unnecessary war the same way mafia thugs burn the likeness of a saint, except instead of a card it’s a city full of people.
But enough about the wonder twins: their friend on the right, Megan McArdle, provides an even more nauseating portrait of the upward trajectory of those who fail in all the right ways. McMegan began her blogging career writing under the pseudonym “Jane Galt,” named after one of the characters in Ayn Rand’s dystopian classic Atlas Farmed: 1984. As a recent college graduate in 2001, Megan—like most of us—figured out if you couldn’t get the job you wanted on Wall Street or in “management consulting,” you could at least spend your hours at the shitty job you do have posting on the Internet.
; However, unlike normal people stealing time for wholesome things like playing fantasy football, downloading music on LimeWire, or watching pornography, Megan spent her time as “Jane Galt” on her even more insufferably named blog, Asymmetrical Information, where she was free to share thoughts such as why she had no opinion on gay marriage, even though it’s still bad:
This should not be taken as an endorsement of the idea that gay marriage will weaken the current institution. I can tell a plausible story where it does; I can tell a plausible story where it doesn’t. I have no idea which one is true. That is why I have no opinion on gay marriage, and am not planning to develop one. Marriage is a big institution; too big for me to feel I have a successful handle on it. . . . Is this post going to convince anyone? I doubt it; everyone but me seems to already know all the answers, so why listen to such a hedging, doubting bore? I myself am trying to draw a very fine line between being humble about making big changes to big social institutions, and telling people (which I am not trying to do) that they can’t make those changes because other people have been wrong in the past.XVI
And why the Iraq War will absolutely not cost “trillions of dollars”:
Anyone who’s sat through a budget meeting knows that almost everyone overestimates their successes, underestimates their costs; it’s easier to go back for money later, when you can wave a nice hunk of sunk costs around, than say up front that you think whatever it is you’re proposing will be expensive as hell. But trillions? US GDP is roughly $10 trillion. [Eric Alterman] is saying that over the long run, this war is going to cost us at least 20 percent of GDP. That’s nuts, and it’s not the first time I’ve seen those sorts of numbers around. Reality check: the entire US military budget is in the range of $350b.XVII
In the same post, Megan estimated the death toll to be in the “hundreds” and also blamed critics like James Galbraith for not taking into account the “positive effects” of a war such as increased consumer confidence. As J. Galt, Megan cultivated a unique blogging style that perfectly matched being stupid with thinking your readers are stupid. She would loudly announce her disinterest and lack of expertise in a given subject, and then opine on it at length. Her specialty was laundering hard right-wing free-market ideology behind bullshit “on the one hand, on the other hand” hedging in an unbearably twee writing style.
None of this would be particularly noteworthy amid the sea of mediocrity that was the early blogosphere. However, Megan truly distinguished herself when she called for Iraq War protesters to be literally beaten in the streets:
I’m too busy laughing. And I think some in New York are going to laugh even harder when they try to unleash some civil disobedience, Lenin style, and some New Yorker who understands the horrors of war all too well picks up a two-by-four and teaches them how very effective violence can be when it’s applied in a firm, pre-emptive manner.XVIII
Damn, that is some asymmetrical information! When she was eventually called out for these ghoulish sentiments, Megan claimed she was only talking about violent protesters and then brought up the volunteer work she did at Ground Zero and her high school boyfriend who was killed on 9/11 by Saddam Hussein.
After a few years of arguing that poverty is caused by inner-city types not getting married and skewering all forms of social welfare, government regulation, consumer protection, child labor laws, and anyone who opposed the Iraq War with her snark-tastic wit, McMegan got the call: she was leaving the minors to join the Economist as a professional blogger. Like Yglesias, she would then go on to blog at the Atlantic, covering “business and economics” amid personable, relatable digressions about the dangers of using a Kindle in the bathtub, the problems caused by being tall, having a cold, and waiting on line for Apple products. As in her Iraq War days, she used her Criswell-like powers to advise readers “not to panic” about the sudden contraction in the financial markets in 2007. When the entire market collapsed a year later, she dutifully churned out post after post absolving bankers of any criminal or moral wrongdoing and blaming the crisis on government regulation and the individual avarice of greedy homeowners and borrowers.
Following her stint at the Atlantic, Megan fused with the Kuato-like mutant that was the Daily Beast/Newsweek, where her biggest hit was a four-thousand-word meditation post–Sandy Hook on why we should condition children to do human wave attacks on mass shooters:
I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8–12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once.XIX
Her writing was so smart and good that she got a massive salary boost at Bloomberg View.XX There, she now shares Patrick Bateman–style reviews of kitchen appliances in between columns about how hundreds burning to death in an inadequately regulated firetrap isn’t really anyone’s fault because they could have eventually died some other way.
McMegan is truly the perfect model for new media #successwin: she shows that demonstrating an adequate level of contempt for your readers, the universe, and the human race will get you noticed and hired by people even more evil than you, i.e., the demons who own and run media companies. After all, Matty and Ezra now run their own company at Vox, and why shouldn’t they? They’re smart, serious, know more than you do—and, what’s more, they hold the keys to your new career as an opinion explainer.
The Blogger’s Code
* * *
We’ve been tough on the grand tradition of American media, but honestly, almost any part of its history was probably light-years better than the garbage that emerged in the mid-2000s. A couple good eggs pushed through: Gawker was a genuine example of an independent media company that skewered basically all the right assholes sucking off the political and media establishment. Sprinkled elsewhere were plenty of fresh non-bougie bloggers, many of whom managed to leverage careers out of their writing, and good on them.
But for the most part, the blogosphere was a league of pathetic, repulsive morons who mastered a technology every child knows how to use and used it to become the new generation of talking heads thanks to credulous media executives at CNN and the Washington Post. Don’t take it from us—take it from human toothbrush Ezra himself, reminiscing on his early blog, Tapped: “Without Tapped, there would certainly be no Vox.” As Ben Smith pointed out, besides the radical Left, virtually all factions’ boats were lifted by a tide of shit: led by right-wing blobs like Erick Erickson, smug careerists like Yglesias, and just plain dumbasses like Chris Cillizza, the blog boys piloted journalism into a newer, even more idiotic frontier of toxic hackery.
The fresh, sleek presentation of new media—held together with fictitious venture capital and sponsored content like “Why It Takes a Pregnant STEM Graduate to Build the Perfect Missile” or “What My Poly Triad Breakup in Big Sur Taught Me about the Smooth, Low-Key Independence of the Ford Focus”—is a departure from journalism’s humble past, but no one can deny that it retains the goofiness of its origin. The future may hold horrors for the blogmasters, whether it’s everyone finally figuring out that no one buys stuff from online ads, young people seeking op-eds further left than Steny Hoyer, or a disastrous accidental reply-all e-mail wherein every single editor accidentally sends hentai to senior White House sources. Indeed, the night is dark and full of blog fails, and these thought leaders are waddling into an uncertain world that may spell the end of their line. But as it is written in The Blogger’s Code (2004):
Let ye wander into lands unknown
Let commenter and blogger moan
Post in light, post in dark
From Ebaum’s World
All th’way to Fark
We know not what the road betrays
But only in our blogging ways
Let ye screen illuminate the path
Before ye wife unleas
hes wrath
Blog forever, and in honor
* * *
I. Krugman’s column, disappeared from the regular Internet, can still be found here: http://web.archive.org/web/19980610100009/www.redherring.com/mag/issue55/economics.html.
II. Stolen.
III. Original.
IV. Allegedly.
V. Ben Smith, “My Life in the Blogosphere,” BuzzFeed, January 28, 2015, https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/this-is-my-blog?utm_term=.ufPmlmOWb#.ghlvQv9mY.
VI. Jonathan Dee, “Right-Wing Flame War!” New York Times Magazine, January 21, 2010.
VII. “Fact Check: Johnson’s ‘Saint Pancake’ Comment Stood for Years,” Diary of Daedalus (blog), December 7, 2011, https://thediaryofdaedalus.com/2011/12/07/fact-check-johnsons-saint-pancake-comment-stood-for-years/.
VIII. Andrew Sullivan, “ABC News’ John Miller Likens Bin Laden to Teddy Roosevelt,” Daily Dish, September 19, 2001 (1:59 a.m.).
IX. Andrew Sullivan, “Today,” Daily Dish, September. 11, 2001 (9:46 p.m.).
X. Markos Moulitsas, “Be Happy for Coal Miners Losing Their Health Insurance. They’re Getting Exactly What They Voted For,” Daily Kos, December 12, 2016.