#Presidential Fan Sites
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What do you make of some of the tumblr presidential fan accounts and their activities? Shitposting, fanart, bizarre headcanons, etc?
There are A LOT of those fan sites about the Presidents and the Presidency on Tumblr! I'm shocked at the sheer number of them that have been popping up over the past few years. I don't follow very many other Tumblrs, but they are frequently recommended to me on my dashboard and I often see my stuff being reblogged by them, so I do notice them and know what you are referencing. I usually don't follow them, but it's not because I'm some sort of history snob. I've just never followed all that many blogs here on Tumblr. Some of those Presidential fan sites on Tumblr can be weird and seem to have some goofy posts and reblogs that I just don't "get", but that's normally just due to the fact that I'm old and boring and socially incompetent. Even though I'm probably one of the OGs of Presidential history blogs on Tumblr because I started Dead Presidents in 2008 (!!!), my site has always been pretty normal, straightforward history for those 15+ years. For the first few years, I even tried to steer away from being too political because I worried it would interfere with the credibility of the history writing I was publishing on Tumblr. That all changed in 2015 when I couldn't stay on the sidelines as Trumpism started taking over. But my Tumblr has always been mostly conventional, and a lot of those Presidential fan sites are very much unconventional.
I think because of that the assumption would be that I'm annoyed or dismissive of the Presidential fan Tumblrs that you mentioned because of how unconventional they can be. However, that's not the case at all. I actually think it's really fucking cool that so many young people -- and most of those Presidential fandom Tumblrs belong to really young people -- are into history, especially Presidential history, so much that they've shaped their own little universe about it. There's some really creative stuff that I've seen when sites are recommended and pop up on my dashboard. I'm particularly impressed by the Presidential fan art that a lot of these kids are posting. They are having fun and they are finding unique ways to expand history literacy, which has always been one of my main goals for creating Dead Presidents in the first place, posting original writing, and answering questions over the years.
Again, some of the stuff goes completely over my head and I don't understand the memes because I'm old, but I still think it's really cool that people are finding their own path into the field of Presidential history -- a subject I've spent most of my life interested in and hopeful that I might be able to interest others in. And, despite what a lot of those fan sites might look like at first-glance or appear to be while quickly skimming through dashboard recommendations, a lot of these kids who are curating the sites genuinely know their shit! It's great and I'm excited by the idea that there are creators finding new ways to introduce these subjects and these endlessly fascinating stories to diverse new audiences.
At its core, history is always just a collection of connected stories about people, and with so many talented young folks finding and creating original ways of telling those stories I want to support and encourage those efforts. From what I can tell, there are a lot of these Presidential fan sites that follow me on Tumblr because I've been around forever and it's pretty easy to remember that I write about the Presidency because of my blog's name. This might make me sound even more ancient than I already am and nobody needs my validation to keep doing what they are already doing well and successfully, but I'm proud to see the work that those young people are doing to further their own interests in Presidential history and inspire history literacy through their own creativity. Those memes and fan art can animate and energize far different -- and newer -- audiences than my 3,000-word essays about Presidential history and that's so important. They are appealing to demographics that I can't reach as easily and in ways that I never would have thought of, and I'm always going to be an advocate for that (even if I never understand the memes!). And the most important part is that they are having fun exploring history and making history fun for new explorers.
#History#Presidents#Presidency#Presidential History#Presidential Fan Sites#Presidential Tumblr#Presidents Fandom#Politics#Political History#Presidential Politics#POTUS#Tumblr#deadpresidents#History Literacy
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Like Trump, Ross is also no stranger to controversy. Heâs hosted Nick Fuentes, the antisemite and white supremacist, and Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer facing charges of rape and sex trafficking in Romania. Trump too has hosted Fuentes, at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 (Fuentes was a guest of fellow antisemite Kanye West, who is now being sued for mistreating workers and for sexual harassment, yet whom Trump described to Ross as having âa good heartâ). But the biggest overlap is their respective fan bases: predominantly white, aggrieved, disaffected young men with Gulf of Mexicoâsize reserves of anger toward women. As Jonathan Haidt discusses in his recent book, The Anxious Generation, many of these young men grew up attached to screens and never developed the social skills to communicate with employers or women. Many are incels, addicted to porn and video games. (Ross himself was banned from Twitch after visiting the site PornHub while livestreaming the Super Bowl.) Threatened by diversity and the elevation of women in the workplace and society, they yearn for a return to a world of male domination. Many are also racist and antisemitic and hold extreme right-wing political views. So it is no surprise that they gravitate toward the only presidential ticket that represents their views. We might take inspiration from Tim Walz and call them âweirdcels.â
Trump Is Going All in on Weird, Lonely Young Dudes Who Hate Women
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I'm sharing this because I think it's kind of atrocious. Hasan Piker *and* Richard Reeves?! And it gets worse from there.
By the time I landed at LAX and switched my phone out of airplane mode, Hasan Piker had been streaming for three hours. I put in an earbud and watched as I filed off the plane. Visible behind him were walls of framed fan art, a cardboard cutout of Bernie Sanders sitting in the cold, and Pikerâs huge puppy, Kaya, taking a nap. Piker had already shown off his âcozy-ass âfitâ (sweatpants with kitschy bald eagles, a custom pair of platform Crocs), and recounted his experience the previous night at the Streamer Awards, a red-carpet event honoring A-listers on Twitchâthe popular live-streaming site where he is one of the biggest stars, and the only prominent leftist. Heâd begun the dayâs broadcast by rattling off a standard opening monologue: âFolks, weâre live and alive, and I hope all the boys, girls, and enbiesâânonbinary peopleââare having a fantastic one.â To anyone listening for shibboleths, this would have pigeonholed him as a progressive. Also within view, though, were three towers of Zyn cannisters, and a âMake America Great Againâ hat, which he sometimes wears ironically. He has the patter of a Rutgers frat bro and the laid-back charisma of a Miami club promoter, both of which he was, briefly, in his early twenties. Now heâs thirty-threeâso old, in streamer years, that his fans call him âunc.â
I ordered a Lyft, then flipped back to Pikerâs stream. By then, he was talking about the overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria, which had happened overnight. I watched as he cycled from BBC footage to Wikipedia, pausing every few seconds to add a diatribe or a joke. The angle he was developing was that Western journalists seemed too eager to portray the leader of the Syrian rebel forces in a heroic light. âIâm very skeptical of the fucking former Al Qaeda guy,â Piker said. A little while later, his doorbell rang, and he leaned over to buzz in a guestâme. I looked up from my phone to see him standing in his doorway. He doesnât run ad breaks, so whenever he needs to do something off-camera, like answer the door or use the bathroom, he plays a video and attends to his business quickly, before his viewers can get bored. âIâm live right now, but we can talk when Iâm done,â he told me, already walking away. âTry and stay out of the shot.â
In last yearâs Presidential election, Democrats lost support with nearly every kind of voter: rich, poor, white, Black, Asian American, Hispanic. But the defection that alarmed Party strategists the most was that of young voters, especially young men, a group that Donald Trump lost by fifteen points in 2020 and won by fourteen points in 2024âa nearly thirty-point swing. âThe only cohort of men that Biden won in 2020 was eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds,â John Della Volpe, the polling director at Harvardâs Institute of Politics and a former adviser to Bidenâs Presidential campaign, told me. âThat was the one cohort they had to hold on to, and they let it go.â
Candidates matter; so does the national mood, and the price of groceries. Yet some Monday-morning quarterbacks also noted that, just as 1960 was the first TV election and 2016 was the first social-media election, the 2024 Presidential campaign was the first to be conducted largely on live streams and long-form podcasts, media that happen to be thoroughly dominated by MAGA bros. The biggest of them all, Joe Rogan, spent the final weeks of the campaign giving many hours of fawning airtime to Trumpâand to his running mate, J. D. Vance, and his key allies, such as Elon Muskâbefore endorsing Trump on the eve of the election. âAt no point was I, like, âOnly I, a dickhead on the internet, am qualified to teach these kids why we need a functioning welfare state,â â Piker told me. âI just felt like no one else was really in these spaces trying to explain these things. Certainly not the Democrats.â
Piker has almost three million Twitch followers, and, as with most guys who talk into microphones on the internet, his audience skews young, male, and disaffected. At the peak of his Election Night stream in November, he had more than three hundred thousand viewers. He broadcasts seven days a week, eight to ten hours a day, usually from his house in West Hollywood, and he doesnât use visual pyrotechnics to hold his viewersâ attention. Most of the time, what you see on his stream is an overlay of three things: a fixed shot of Piker sitting at his desk; a screen share of whatever heâs looking at on his computer; and his chat, where fans supply pertinent links, caps-lock shit talk, and puppy emojis, all surging in real time up the right side of the screen.
Although Piker hates Trump, heâs hardly a loyal Democrat. At bottom, heâs an old-school hard leftist, not a liberal. (On his bedside table he has some protein Pop-Tart knock-offs and a copy of âThe Communist Manifesto.â) Many of his opinionsâfor example, that the âAmerican empireâ has been a destructive force, on the wholeâwould surely be off-putting to the median voter. But he is just one of many independent media creators with an anti-Trump messageâin recent weeks, the political-podcast charts have included âThe Bulwark,â âThis Is Gavin Newsom,â and even a show called âRaging Moderates.â For a couple of weeks last month, a liberal show called âThe MeidasTouch Podcastâ beat out âThe Joe Rogan Experienceâ for the No. 1 spot. âCorporate media, too often, has a both-sides perspective,â Ben Meiselas, one of the âMeidasTouchâ co-hosts, told me. âWe do not mince words about the threat to workers, the threat to democracy.â
One piece of fan art on Pikerâs wall is a cartoon of him operating a day-care center, shielding a roomful of lost boys from the malign chaos of the open internet. âYou gravitate to him because heâs just a voice you find relatable,â Pikerâs producer, who goes by Marche, told me. âA lot of people donât even put a political label on it, at least at first.â Piker gets up early every morning to work out, posting his daily stats so that his fansâhis âcommunityââcan follow along from home. He gives dating advice and motivational speeches. At a moment when there seems to be an ever-shortening algorithmic pipeline from bench-pressing tips to misogynist rage, Piker tries to model a more capacious form of masculinity: a straight guy, six feet four and movie-star handsome, whoâs as comfortable wearing camo to a gun range as he is walking a red carpet in split-toe Margiela boots. Once viewers have come to trust him, they may be more open to his riffs on the rights of the poor or of trans peopleâdelivered not as a primer on Judith Butler but in the register of âBro, donât be a dick.â
I pulled up a chair, just out of frame. Kaya ambled toward me, vetting my scent. Piker talked, almost without interruption, for four more hours, holding forth about recent internet drama, a documentary about the history of NATO, and the UnitedHealthcare C.E.O.âs assassin, who had not yet been identified. Within reach of his rolling desk chair was a mini-fridge full of cold brew and Diet Mountain Dew. Some of his takes were too unpolished for prime time. (âBro, these guys are so cucked,â he said, critiquing a clip from a rival podcast on the right.) Then again, a live stream isnât supposed to be a tight, scripted lecture. Itâs supposed to be a good hang.
âI gotta end the broadcast here,â he said, shortly after 8 P.M. âIâll see you tomorrow.â After turning the camera off, he seemed to deflate a bit. Comments were still floating up one of his monitorsâthe thousands of fans in the chat had dwindled to a few hundred, the inner circle who were devoted enough, or lonely enough, to keep one another company after the feed had gone dark. âThe Democrats are smug and condescending, and everything they say sounds fake as shit,â Piker said. âTrump lies constantly, yes, but at least people get the sense that heâs authentically saying what heâs thinking.â
He put his feet up and reached for a fresh Zyn pouch. âYoung men, like a lot of Americans, feel increasingly alienated,â he continued. They canât afford college or rent, they canât get a date, they canât imagine a stable future. âThe right is always there to tell them, âYes, you should be angry, and the reason your life sucks is because of immigrants, or because a trans kid played a sport.â And all the Democrats are telling them is âNo, shut up, your life is fine, be joyful.â â No one has ever accused Piker of being a moderate, but in this case he is trying to forge a compromise. âMy way is to go, âLook, be angry if you want. But your undocumented neighbor is not the problem here. Youâre looking in the wrong direction.â â
In 2015, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton wrote that âwhite non-Hispanics without college degreesâ were experiencing an anomalous spike in mortality from opioids, alcohol, and suicide. They later called these âdeaths of despair.â In 2016, J. D. Vance, then an anti-Trump conservative, published a memoir, âHillbilly Elegy,â about the struggles of white rural families like his own. Promoting the book on PBS, he explained (but did not yet excuse) why such voters were drawn to Trump: âI think that the sense of cultural alienation breeds a sense of mistrust.â The first Trump Administration didnât deliver many material gains to the rural poorâdeaths of despair continued to rise, and wages continued to stagnateâbut at least Trump spoke to their anguish and seemed outraged on their behalf. In retrospect, the question may not be why so many non-urban non-ĂŠlites became Trump Republicans but what took them so long.
Around the same time, social scientists started to notice an overlapping crisis. The statistics were grimâtwenty-first-century males were, relative to their forefathers and their female contemporaries, much more likely to fall behind in school, drop out of college, languish in the workforce, or die by overdose or suicide. The title of a 2012 book by the journalist Hanna Rosin declared âThe End of Men.â The following year, the economists Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan published a paper called âThe Trouble with Boys.â In one survey, more than a quarter of men in their teens and twenties reported having no close friends. When Covid hit, men were significantly more likely to die from it.
âIn the fifteen years Iâve been looking at the statistics, the outcomes for men have not changed,â Rosin told me. âWhat did change, tremendously, is the culture.â The last Democratic Presidential candidate to win the male vote was Barack Obama. When Bernie Sanders ran for President, he had a zealous male following, but many top Democrats treated the âBernie brosâ less like a force to be harnessed than like a threat to be vanquished. A âWhite Dudes for Harrisâ Zoom call raised millions for Kamala Harrisâs campaign, but it would have been anathema to her base if sheâd given a speech about what she planned to do for white dudes. This was, meanwhile, a key part of Trumpâs appeal.
In a 2022 book, âOf Boys and Men,â Richard Reeves, a social scientist and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, blasts Republicans for exploiting âmale dislocationâ and misogynist fury at the expense of womenâs rights. But he also lambastes Democrats for âpathologizing masculinity.â He gives an example from his sonsâ high school in Bethesda, Maryland, where boys passed around a spreadsheet ranking their female classmates by attractivenessâbehavior that Reeves describes as âimmature,â even âharmful,â but not worthy of an international incident, which is what it became. He writes that âindiscriminately slapping the label of âtoxic masculinityâ onto this kind of behavior is a mistake,â likely to propel young men âto the online manosphere where they will be reassured that they did nothing wrong, and that liberals are out to get them.â
At some point between Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on âThe Arsenio Hall Showâ and Hillary Clinton describing potential voters as âdeplorables,â the Democrats came to be perceived as the party of scolds and snobs. Liberals used to be the counterculture; today, theyâre the defenders of traditional norms and institutions. This may not have been the best political strategy at any time; it certainly isnât now, when trust in institutions has never been lower. Itâs impossible to know how many young men fit into this category, but there is clearly a kind of guyâthe contemporary donât-tread-on-me type who demands both the freedom to have gay friends and the freedom to use âgayâ as an insultâwho resents the idea of his morality being dictated by the family-values right or his speech being curtailed by the hall-monitor left. When pressed, many of these young men seem to have bought the pitch that, of the two parties, the Republicans were the less censorious. This may have been a miscalculationâthe current Trump Administration has already banished dozens of words from government websites and, just last week, arrested a former Columbia student for what seems to be protected speechâbut you canât convince voters that theyâve been misinformed simply by lecturing them. The lecturing is part of the issue.
âDemocrats got used to speaking about men as the problem, not as people with problems,â Reeves told me. âBut of course men do have problems, and problems become grievances when you ignore them.â He knows a lot of well-connected Democrats in Washington, and for years he has urged them to campaign on menâs issuesâânot in a zero-sum way, certainly not taking anything away from women, but just to show boys and men, âHey, youâre also having a tough go of it, we see you.â And the response I always got was âNow is not the time.â â
Rosin told me about a husband and wife sheâd met in Alabama, in 2010. The husband lost his job, and the wife became the breadwinner, an arrangement he experienced as deeply shameful. âShe would put the check down on the kitchen table, she would sign it over to him, and he would cash it, and nobody would speak about it,â Rosin said. âBut then âman-victimâ became a viable identity.â As Rosin stayed in touch with the man, he started exhibiting a more âmischievousâ expression of menâs-rights sensibilities, wearing a T-shirt that read âMy Cave, My Rules.â This coincided with the rise of Trump, the man-victimâs patron saint. He didnât offer detailed policy solutions to any of the underlying sociological problems, but, again, he addressed them directly. (âIt is a very scary time for young men in America,â Trump said in 2018.)
Like most internet terms, âmanosphereâ is vague and protean; it has been applied to Ben Shapiro, a father of four who delivers conservative talking points in a yarmulke, and to Andrew Tate, a Bugatti-driving hustler who has been charged with human trafficking. In 2016, after a reedy Canadian professor named Jordan Peterson refused to use gender-neutral pronouns, he was taken up as a folk hero, like Galileo standing firm against the Inquisition. Peterson has almost nothing in common with, say, Dave Portnoy, another mascot of the bro-sphere, who mostly just wants to be left alone to eat pizza and drink beer by the pool. Yet they all seem to be meeting a demand in the cultural marketplace, one that could be as simple, at its root, as a dorm-room poster of Marlon Brando on a motorcycle or Johnny Cash flipping off the camera.
Last month, Richard Reeves was a guest on a popular podcast hosted by Theo Von, a formerly apolitical comedian who recently went to Trumpâs Inauguration. Von, an infectiously affable guy with a mullet, presents himself as a curious goofball with essentially no prior knowledge on any topic. At one point he spokeâwithout much nuance, but also without apparent maliceâabout the plight of the white man. âIâm not speaking against any other group,â he said. âIâm just saying . . . you canât make white males feel like they donât exist.â Von grew up poor in a small town in Louisiana. âYes, I know thereâs privilege, but if you grew up with nothing you didnât fucking feel any privilege sometimes.â
If Von had made this observation at a Trump rally, or on X, he might have been led from just-asking-questions guilelessness to more overt white aggrievement. If heâd made the same point in a liberal-arts seminar, or on Bluesky, he might have been shouted down. (When I got to this part of the podcast, I have to admit, my own inner hall monitor was on high alert.) But Reeves, looking a bit trepidatious, tried to thread the needle, introducing some academic caveats without coming across as a scold. âThe U.S. has a uniquely terrible history when it comes to slavery,â he said. But he also noted that low-income white men were at particularly high risk of suicide. âTwo things can be true at once,â he said.
The hallmark of social media is disinhibition born of anonymity. On the internet, no one knows whether youâre a dog, a Macedonian teen-ager, or the Pope wearing a puffer jacket. Podcasts, on the other hand, are built on parasociality: Michael Barbaro isnât your friend, but, after making coffee with him in your ear a hundred times, you start to feel as if he were. And then thereâs the world of always-on streaming, in which the temptations of parasociality are even more acute. The inputs are both aural and visual. The hosts respond to your comments in real time, at all hours. You can remind yourself not to bond with the pixels on the screen, but you may fall for the illusion all the same, like a baby chick imprinting on a robot. Piker treats fans in a way that can be confusingly intimate, giving them avuncular life advice one minute and thirst-trap photos the next. His Twitch handle is Hasanabi, âabiâ being Turkish for âbig brotherâ; his fans are called âHasanabi heads,â or âparasocialists.â
Even as most of his fellow-streamers have drifted to the right, Piker has remained a staunch leftist. His explanation for this is that he is from Turkey, where âthe idea that American economic and military power runs the worldâthat was, like, âYeah, duh.â â He was born in New Jersey and grew up mostly in Ankara and Istanbul, in an upper-middle-class family, spending summers with relatives in the U.S. and watching a lot of American TV. (He speaks English with an American accent.) His father, an economist, is âmore of a neolib, World Bank-loving type,â Piker told me. âWe argue about it all the time, but itâs not heated.â His mother, an art-and-architecture historian, is more aligned with his politics. âThe inequality is just so blatant,â she told me. âIt was never fair, but now we have the internetâeveryone can see it.â
Despite Pikerâs brand as a brash outsider, he is, in an almost literal sense, a nepo baby. After graduating from Rutgers, in 2013, he moved to Los Angeles and got a job with his maternal uncle, Cenk Uygur, who happened to be the founder and host of âThe Young Turks,â one of the biggest left-populist talk shows on the internet. The show had a considerable footprint on YouTube, but Piker helped it adapt to punchier formats that were better suited to Facebook and Instagram. âYouâve got to understand, I remember when this was a pudgy kid and I was changing his diapers,â Uygur told me. âNow, suddenly, heâs this handsome man, heâs dynamic, heâs killing it in front of the camera.â Piker hosted a recurring video segment called âAgitprop,â and picked fights with the right-wing influencers of the day, such as Tomi Lahren and Representative Dan Crenshaw. He got himself in troubleââAmerica deserved 9/11â was not a particularly good take, even in contextâbut he also expanded his name recognition. In 2017, BuzzFeed dubbed him âwoke bae.â
Although he made some of the outletâs most popular videos, he didnât own the I.P. (Even when the boss is your uncle, you can still be alienated from the means of production.) So, in 2020, he decided to go solo, on Twitch. His mother joined him in Los Angeles, and they formed a pandemic pod in a two-bedroom apartment. âHe was on there non-stop, shouting about video games or sex advice or whatever,â she told me. âHis fans would see me in the background, cringing, and they would send me earplugs in the mail.â That year, he spent forty-two per cent of his time live on camera. (Not forty-two per cent of his waking hoursâforty-two per cent of all the hours in the year.) In a call-in segment called âChadvice,â Piker coached men through the small terrors and triumphs of daily life. One twenty-eight-year-old from Finland described himself as having an Aspergerâs diagnosis and an âabject fear of rejectionâ; Piker, with solicitude and just enough amiable ribbing, spent half an hour talking him through the social mechanics of a first date.
When Twitch first launched, it was a niche platform where bored adolescents could watch other adolescents play video games. In 2014, Amazon bought it for nearly a billion dollarsâan eye-popping amount, at least back thenâeven as mainstream analysts knew almost nothing about it. âMy demographic hem is showing,â the columnist David Carr admitted in the Times; still, he concluded, âthere is clear value in owning so much screen time of a hard-to-reach demographic of young men.â One article referred to Twitch as âtalk radio for the extremely online.â
I first met Piker in February of 2020, on Boston Common, while covering a rally during Bernie Sandersâs Presidential campaign. Most of us travelling correspondents were youngish reporters from oldish outlets, wearing blue button-downs and carrying notebooks in the back pockets of our Bonobos. Piker wasnât much younger, but he dressed as if he were from another planet, in black nail polish and cargo pants that, at the time, struck me as incomprehensibly wide. He carried an âI.R.L. backpack,â a portable camera setup that streamers use (I learned) when they venture out into the world. Admirers in the crowd kept interrupting him and asking for photos, a nuisance that, for whatever reason, didnât afflict the rest of us. I still didnât get why viewers would hang around on his stream all day when they could get an unimpeded view of Sandersâs speech on YouTube. Obviously, my demographic hem was showing. You might as well ask why a fan would watch a football game at a bar when he could concentrate better alone, or read a summary of the game in tomorrowâs paper. Pikerâs followers wanted to watch the rally through his eyes because they wanted to be his friend.
In October, 2020, Piker spent a couple of hours playing the group video game Among Us with some special guests, including the congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They occasionally mentioned the ostensible purpose of the eventâgetting out the voteâbut mostly they made easygoing small talk. On Election Day, Piker streamed for sixteen hours straight, chugging energy drinks. His mother made several onscreen cameos, delivering him plates of home-cooked food. âI wouldnât do it for this long if it wasnât for you,â he told his viewers at the end of the night. âLove you bro!â a commenter typed. âSee you tomorrow.â
After the 2024 election, Democratic strategists argued that what the anti-Trump coalition needed was a âJoe Rogan of the left.â There once was such a person. His name was Joe Rogan. âIâm socially about as liberal as it gets,â Rogan said earlier this month. He has a live-and-let-live attitude about sex, drugs, and abortion. (He is also extremely open to conspiracy theories about 9/11, J.F.K., and Jeffrey Epstein, an inclination that was left-coded until very recently.) In 2014, when Rogan was a fan of âThe Young Turks,â Piker met him at the Hollywood Improv, and they sat and talked for two hours. (The topics included âweed, psychedelics, the state of media and girls,â Piker wrote at the time. âTop ten coolest moments of my life.â) During the 2020 Democratic primary, Rogan interviewed three Presidential candidatesâTulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, and Bernie Sandersâand concluded that Sanders was his favorite. âI believe in him,â Rogan said. âHeâs been insanely consistent his entire life.â
Itâs hard to fathom now, but Roganâs support was then considered a liability. âThe Sanders campaign must reconsider this endorsement,â the Human Rights Campaign wrote, citing transphobic and racist remarks from Roganâs past. In retrospect, this was the height (or perhaps the nadir) of a kind of purity-test politics that was making some swing voters, including Rogan, feel less at home in the Democratic coalition. In 2022, Neil Young removed his music from Spotify to protest Roganâs vaccine skepticism; Rogan took ivermectin, which CNN mocked as a horse dewormer. âI can afford people medicine, motherfucker,â Rogan told CNNâs chief medical correspondent, adding that the medication had been prescribed by his doctor. âThis is ridiculous.â
In 2016, every one of Trumpâs baby steps toward normalizationâdoing a goofy dance on âSaturday Night Live,â getting his hair ruffled by Jimmy Fallonâwas treated as a scandal. But by 2024 anyone with access to Spotify or YouTube could find hours of flattering footage of Trump looking like a chill, approachable grandpa. While interviewing Trump at one of his golf clubs, Theo Von used his free-associative style to great effect, prompting as much introspection in Trump as any interviewer has. (Von: âCocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie.â Trump: âAnd is that a good feeling?â) Trump invited the Nelk Boys, prank-video influencers with their own brand of hard seltzer, to eat Chick-fil-A on his private plane. He sat in a Cybertruck with the baby-faced, fascist-curious streamer Adin Ross, testing the stereo. âWhoâs, like, your top three artists?â Ross asked. âWell, we love Frank Sinatra, right?â Trump said. Ross invited him to pick a song, and Trump, âthinking that itâs gonna come back under proper management,â picked âCalifornia Dreaminâ.â
Collectively, these shows reached tens of millions of potential voters. Most were presumably young men, many of them the kind of American who is both the hardest and the most crucial for a campaign to reach: the kind who is not seeking out political news. Trump ended his parasocial-media tour by sitting in Joe Roganâs studio, in Austin, for three hours. Thatâs too long for anyone, even a champion of rhetorical rope-a-dope, to go without gaffesâwhich was part of the point. While repeating his timeworn case that the 2020 election was rigged, Trump let out a shocking Freudian slipââI lost by . . .ââbefore quickly trying to recover: âI didnât lose.â Rogan laughed in his face. No one cared. On YouTube alone, the episode got more than fifty million views, and the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. âUnedited/uncensored interviews should be required of all candidates,â one of the top comments read.
Harris tried. She appeared on a few big podcastsââClub Shay Shay,â whose audience is primarily Black, and âCall Her Daddy,â whose audience is mostly femaleâbut she never made inroads with the comedy bros. (The closest she got was an interview with Howard Stern, a former shock jock who now seems wholesome, like Little Richard in the era of Lil Baby.) Harrisâs staffers tried to get her booked on âHot Ones,â the YouTube show on which celebrities answer innocuous questions while eating sadistically spicy chicken wings, but even âHot Onesâ turned her down. Her campaign staffers insisted that she wanted to do Roganâs show, but that it fell through for scheduling reasons. Rogan claimed that he was eager to interview her, and that he was even willing to keep certain topics off-limits. âI said, âI donât give a fuck,â â he told Theo Von. âI feel like, if you give someone a couple of hours, and you start talking about anything, Iâm going to see the pattern of the way you think . . . whether youâre calculated or whether youâre just free.â
Imagine the set of a prototypical man-cave podcast, and âFlagrant,â co-founded by the comedian Andrew Schulz, wouldnât be far off: four dudes lounging around, with a few plastic plants and a shelf of brown liquor behind them. Trump sat with them in October, and Schulz and the other hosts buttered him up, asking him about his kids. âBarron is eighteen,â Schulz said. âHeâs unleashed in New York City. Are you sure you want to reverse Roe v. Wade now?â An hour in, they cut to an ad break. âHard-dick season is upon us, and you gotta make sure that youâre stiffed up,â Schulz said. âBlueChew has got your back.â
âFlagrantâ is taped weekly at a studio in SoHo. I visited one Wednesday in February. Schulz arrived just after noon, opened a fridge stocked with cans of tequila- and THC-infused seltzer, and grabbed a bottle of water. He sports a mustache and a chain necklace, and his hair is tight on the sides and slicked back on top. (During a show at Madison Square Garden, a fellow-comedian described Schulzâs look as âthe Tubi version of Adolf Hitler.â) Heâs a throwback to an old New York archetype: the melting-pot white guy who tells hyper-specific ethnic jokes with a sly smile and, for the most part, gets away with it. He did a crowd-work special that included sections called âMexican,â âColombian,â and âBlack Women.â His newest special, about his wifeâs experience with I.V.F., includes moments of real tenderness, but he still insists on his right to do old-fashioned bits about the battle between the sexes. âWe all have feelings that are a little bit wrong,â Schulz said. â âTake my wife, pleaseââthatâs a fucked-up premise, but thereâs a seed of a feeling there thatâs real. Itâs the comedianâs job to make you comfortable enough to laugh at it.â
Schulz grew up in lower Manhattan, where his parents owned a dance studio and he went to public school. âMy family was super liberal,â he told me. âThis was in the nineties, when being a liberal, to me, just meant âI donât hate gay people or Black peopleâânormal shit.â He now thinks of himself as apolitical, and he acknowledged all the reasons to distrust Trump, but the word he kept using, whenever Trump came up, was âenticing.â âI still appreciate a lot of the policies Bernie talked about, universal health care and all that,â he said. âBut culture-wise? Vibe-wise? When all you hear from one side is âThatâs not funny, thatâs over the lineâârealistically, where are people gonna feel more comfortable?â
Trump is known for his bloviating, but Schulz suggested that his greater talent may be a kind of listening. âDemocrats are tuned in to what people should feel,â he said. âTrump is tuned in to what people actually fucking feel.â Schulz noted that, as a boundary-pushing performer, this was also one of his own key skills: gauging micro-fluctuations in an audienceâs reaction. When Trump appeared on âFlagrant,â he talked about being taken to a hospital in rural Pennsylvania after he was shot, and how impressed he was with the âcountry doctorsâ whoâd treated him. âI laughed at that, âcause I just thought âcountry doctorsâ was a funny phrase,â Schulz told me. âHe clocks me laughing at it, and in the next sentence he immediately says it again, and he watches me to make sure I laugh again.â
âFlagrantâ bills itself as âTHE GREATEST HANG IN THE UNIVERSE!â I spent the rest of the day watching Schulz and his co-hosts tape an episode (and then an extra segment sponsored by an online betting platform, and then an extra extra segment for Patreon), and I could imagine some places in the universe that would have been greater. One of the running gags in the episode was that the hosts kept pronouncing the word âprerecordedâ as âpre-retarded.â At one point, a host volunteered how many times heâd masturbated in a single day, and his record was so formidable that the others looked worried for him. In fairness, though, even a solid hang canât be scintillating all the time. One function of a long-standing friendship, including a parasocial one, is simply to while away the hours, even when there isnât much to say.
When it comes to parasocial media, MAGA has had a long head start. Before Dan Bongino was Trumpâs deputy F.B.I. director, he was a popular, blustery podcaster; after Matt Gaetz withdrew from consideration as Attorney General, he announced that he would host a TV show and a podcast (his third). During the Biden Administration, about a dozen Republicans were both active podcast hosts and sitting members of Congress, while most Democrats hardly seemed interested in trying. Before the âFlagrantâ taping, Schulz and I had been discussing which qualities the Democrats should look for in their next crop of leaders, and afterward he returned to the question. âThey need someone who can really hang,â he said. âObama could hang. Clinton, for sureâBill, not Hillary. Trump can hang.â I ran through the shortlist: Pete Buttigieg? Schulz wrinkled his noseâtoo polished. A.O.C.? âWhen sheâs being the working-class chick from the Bronx, I could see it,â he said. âBut when she starts going on MSNBC and doing âWe have an orange rapist in the White Houseââthen you start to lose people.â
Schulz said that heâd invited Kamala Harris and Tim Walz to appear on the show ânumerous times,â to no avail. (The Harris campaign says that Schulz never sent a formal invitation.) He couldnât be sure why Walz had stayed away from podcasts like his, but he had guesses. âIf weâve got on a guy who was in the military for twenty years, at some point Iâm gonna go, âCut the shit, Tim, you know how guys really talk,â â Schulz said. âAnd then letâs say we start busting balls, making gay jokes, whateverâdoes he laugh? If he does, he pisses off his people. If he doesnât, he loses our people.â Walz was added to the Presidential ticket because he was able to talk like a regular person who could make the opposition seem âweirdâ by contrast. But, things being as they are, Schulz said, âthe Democrats canât let a guy like that loose.â
When Trump was on âFlagrant,â Akaash Singh, a co-host who refers to himself as a âmoderate,â encouraged him to consider practicing self-restraint. âWhat we love about you as comedians is you shoot from the hip,â Singh said. âIf you get elected, would you be a little more mindful of how powerful your words are?â
âI will,â Trump said. âAnd Iâm gonna think of you every time.â
âLetâs go!â Singh said, jumping up and pumping his fist. âI might actually vote.â
Piker starts streaming at eleven every morning, so everything else has to happen before then, or at night. At 7 a.m. one day, he drove Kaya to a nearby park, to take her for a walk, then played basketball for half an hour. He saw me eying his car, a Porsche Taycan. âItâs not the flashiest model I could afford,â he protested, before I could say anything. âBut yes, admittedly, it is a fucking Porsche.â When Piker is criticized by the right, itâs usually for soft-pedalling the brutality of Hamas, or the Houthis, or the Chinese Communist Party. (Piker is such a relentless critic of Israel that, last year, the advocacy group StopAntisemitism nominated him for âAntisemite of the Yearâ; when asked his opinion of Hezbollah, he once shrugged and replied, âI donât have an issue with them.â) By the left, he is more likely to be dismissed as a limousine socialist who lives in a $2.7-million house. He has his own clothing brand, called Ideologie.
While driving home, he took a call from his manager. A major production company wanted to discuss a potential TV show, hosted by Piker, in the vein of âBoratâ or âNathan for You.â His manager asked if he wanted to be interviewed by Megyn Kelly on her radio show. âNo.â A daytime show on Fox News? âNo.â Buttigiegâs people had asked if Piker would interview Buttigieg on his stream. âProbably not, but Iâll think about it,â Piker saidâtoo centrist. âIf heâs thinking about running for President, I donât really wanna be giving him clout.â In his kitchen, he took a few fistfuls of supplements: creatine, fish oil, Ashwagandha. Still on the phone with his manager, he sat at his desktop, skimming stories he might cover. Then, a few minutes before he went live, he started seeing news alerts: Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the UnitedHealthcare assassination, had just been arrested. Whatever else heâd been planning to talk about was now irrelevant. âHoly shit, they got him,â Piker told his manager. âI gotta go.â
âMamma mia!â he said, on air. âThis is the first day where there will be no Italiophobia on this broadcast.â Already, his chat was full of spaghetti emojis and âFREE LUIGI!â Piker walked a fine lineâcelebrating Mangione as âhotter than meâ and speaking in generally exalted terms about âthe propaganda of the deed,â but trying to stop short of overtly glorifying murder, which is against Twitchâs terms of service. âWe, of course, do not condone,â he said repeatedly. âWe condemn.â (Recently, he was suspended from Twitch for twenty-four hours after musing that someone may want to âkill Rick Scott,â the Florida senator.)
In fact, he reserved his condemnation for the finger-wagging from the âcorporate media,â as exhibited everywhere from Fox News to CNN. âBro, they canât let anybody have anything,â he said later. For six hours straight, his chatters sent him links to new information as it emergedâMangioneâs Goodreads account, his Twitter history, his high-school valedictorian speech. On my own, I would have been tempted to spend the day following the same bread crumbs, struggling to retrace Mangioneâs path to radicalization. But it was easier to let Piker and the forty thousand internet sleuths in his chat make sense of it for me.
Many of Pikerâs viewers come to him with inchoate opinions. He aims to mold them. But, he told me, of the stream, âat the end of the day, it still has to be relatable and entertaining.â One of his maxims is âRead the room.â In his case, this means posting many hours of content about nothing in particular. Stavros Halkias, a comedian and a friend of Pikerâs, told me, âHeâs built up enough trust with his audience that, if heâs being boring and academic for forty minutes, theyâll stick with it until he starts doing something more interesting, playing a Japanese dating simulator or whatever.â Some days, he puts on a Trump hat and streams as Hank Pecker, a âColbert Reportâ-style satirical character updated for the MAGA era. In another room of his house, Piker records a weekly podcast with three buddies, an apolitical chat show on which one of the most heated topics of recent debate was proper manscaping technique, and another was whether one of them farted. Marche, the producer, was proud to tell me that the podcastâs audience is about sixty per cent maleââwhich sounds like a lot, but actually most shows in this space are eighty-twenty male, or eighty-five-fifteen.â One theory for this lopsidedness is that, given all the âEnd of Menâ statistics, women have better things to do with their time, such as holding down meaningful jobs and cultivating lasting relationships, while men are stuck playing video games with their imaginary friends.
Recently, on a MAGA-bro podcast, Piker reached across the aisle, adapting âeight hours for what you willâ to the current decadent moment. âDeep down inside, most people just wanna be comfortable,â he said. âThey wanna have a roof over their heads, they want a fuckinâ nice meal, get some pussy . . . play Marvel Rivals.â In recent years, Piker has stopped using the word âretarded,â but he still uses the word âpussy,â even though it may sound misogynist, and âlame,â despite fans who consider the term ableist. âI donât give a shit,â Piker said. âIf you canât handle it, then I guess Iâm not for you.â When his commenters try to tone-police him, Piker will often single one of them out and say, âCongratulations, chatter, youâve won Woke of the Day.â Itâs not a compliment.
The day after Mangioneâs arrest, Piker had back-to-back interviews with Lina Khan, then the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, whom Piker called âthe LeBron James of regulators,â and with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, promoting his new book. In the chat, a user named PapiJohn36 wrote, âNot to be parasocial, but I love this man.â Pikerâs mother stopped by during the Coates interview. âHasan, check your messages!â she shouted from the kitchen. Piker, grudgingly but dutifully, read his motherâs message aloud: âI got his book for the content and fell in love with his writing.â
âThank you, Hasanâs mom,â Coates said. In the living room, Pikerâs father was sprawled on the couch watching âLove Actually.â
Halkias, the comedian, showed up later that afternoon, with a bag of dirty laundry and a calendar featuring photos of himself posing in the nude. While many of Halkiasâs comedian friends have taken a reactionary turn, he has stuck to his progressive principles, but he has never been a hall monitor. (He got his start on a podcast called âCum Town.â) âLadies and gentlemen, boys, girls, and enbies,â Piker said, âweâve got the leftâs Joe Rogan here in the building!â In the âRogan of the leftâ discourse, both Piker and Halkias are frequently mentioned as top prospects. Even if they were secretly flattered by the designation, the least alpha thing they could doâthe least Roganesque thing they could doâwould be to thirst for it. âFree Luigi,â Halkias said, taking a seat. âHeâs too sexy to be behind bars.â
As a model for the future of progressive media, Piker checks only some of the requisite boxes. A while back, he was a guest on âFlagrantâ; when I asked one of the showâs staffers about Pikerâs performance, he gave it a middling review. âGood guy, clearly knows his shit, but he sort of comes off like he thinks heâs the smartest guy in the room.â Piker sometimes succumbs to the socialist broâs cardinal sin of pedantry, and he can seem like a jejune know-it-all trying to reduce any societal problem to a one-word culprit, usually âcapitalismâ or âimperialism.â Some segments of the Democratic coalition would find Piker to be edgy, or crass, or even despicable. But, if âRogan of the leftâ is to mean anything, it would surely mean a higher tolerance for controversy, even at the risk of alienating parts of the base.
On the scale of âwhether youâre calculated or whether youâre just free,â Piker is freer than most Democratic surrogates, Ivy League overachievers who sound like chatbots trained on stacks of campaign brochures. But he is less free than the average MAGA bro, who is unconstrained by the need for any consistent ideology. âHeâs funny, but not that funny,â Halkias told me. âYou can tell him I said that.â Halkias has his own podcast, on which he gives advice to callers. On the normier part of the spectrum are liberal influencers like Dean Withers and Harry Sisson, who have transferred the âdebate me, broâ spirit of early YouTube to TikTok Live.
One afternoon, in L.A., I visited the office of Crooked Media, which was decorated with some Yes We Can iconography and had glass-walled conference rooms with cheeky names such as âSeditionâ and âConspiracy.â When the company began, in 2017, its three founders, former Obama staffers named Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor, and Jon Favreau, were treated as audacious upstarts challenging the media hierarchy. Now they are middle-aged bosses in Henleys and tapered jeans. We sat in âLegitimate Political Discourse.â A long table had been laid with LaCroix and PopCorners. âWe have become the out-of-touch lib establishment,â Vietor said. Lovett added, âMy, how time flies.â
Crooked now has more than a dozen podcasts, including its flagship show, âPod Save America.â Vietor recounted a time, a few years back, when a friend invited him to appear on a show put out by Barstool Sports, a bro-y podcast network that leans right. Vietor, worried about guilt by association, turned it down. âLooking back, that was so stupid,â he said. âThe âhow dare you platform someone you disagree withâ era is over. Fuck that.â (He has since appeared on the show.) In 2018, Favreau was hosting a show called âThe Wilderness,â about how the Democratic Party lost its way, and wanted to include a clip of Obama reaching out to the white working class. âA younger producer listened and went, âIâm not sure this plays well today,â â Favreau said. âAnd I went, âThatâs part of the problem!â â After the 2024 election, Piker appeared on âPod Save America.â Lovett got pushback from moderate fans, who objected to Pikerâs anti-Zionism, and from progressive fans, who objected to Lovettâs next interview, with a Democrat who wants restrictions on trans women in sportsâbut he shrugged it off. âItâs a big tent,â Lovett said. âItâs got Dick Cheney in it. Itâs got Hasan Piker in it.â
The âRogan of the leftâ formulation isnât entirely vacuous, but itâs easy to misinterpret. Rogan-like figures canât be engineered; they have to develop organically. Their value lies in their idiosyncrasiesâtheir passionate insistence on talking about chimps and ancient pyramids, say, rather than the budget ceilingâand in their authenticity, which entails an aversion to memorizing talking points. Many Democrats assume that what they have is a messaging problemâthat voters donât have a clear enough sense of what the Democrats are really like. But itâs possible that the problem is the opposite: that many swing voters, including Joe Rogan, got a sense of what the Democrats were like, then ran in the opposite direction.
The good news for Democrats is that the right does not have a monopoly on relatability. A week before his interview with Trump, Theo Von conducted an interview with Bernie Sanders while wearing a Grateful Dead shirt. âYou ever see the Grateful Dead?â Von said, as an icebreaker. Sanders, apparently unfamiliar with the concept, frowned and said, âUm, no.â From any other politician, this would have been malpractice, but with Sanders the crankiness is part of the crossover charm. (âHe literally just talks common sense,â one of the top YouTube comments read.) A few months later, Rogan interviewed Senator John Fetterman. âTrump is not polished, but you get a sense of who he is as a human being,â Rogan said. Fetterman agreed, alluding to a line from âScarfaceâ: âAll I have in this world is my balls and my word.â
Reeves, the social scientist, told me, âThere is a strong correlation between which Democratic lawmakers are in my inbox and which ones have the year 2028 circled on their calendar.â Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, read Reevesâs book in 2023 and praised it on X; many of Murphyâs constituents, including his fourteen-year-old son, took issue with his post. Nevertheless, he persisted, writing a follow-up on Substack: âWe should try to do two things at onceâfight for the equality of women and gay people, while also trying hard to figure out why so many boys are struggling and why so many men are feeling shitty.â Sanders and Fetterman share what could be described as populist instincts, but ideologically they are leagues apart. On the level of pure affect, though, they may represent elements of a style that other politicians could crib from. âPersonally, I find the performance of masculinity to be totally boring,â Hanna Rosin told me. âBut if thatâs what fifty-one per cent of Americans needâsomeone who reads as some version of âgruff, manly dude,â but whose heart is still in the right placeâthen Iâm willing to go along with it.â
Twitch stars often appear on one anotherâs streams, hoping to pick up some new fans. One afternoon, Piker headed to Zoo Culture, a gym in Encino owned by a streamer and fitness influencer named Bradley Martyn, to do a âcollab.â It would also feature Jason Nguyen, a twenty-year-old Twitch star from Texas who goes by JasonTheWeen. âBradleyâs a big Trump guy, and we talk politics sometimes, but mostly we just talk about gym-bro shit,â Piker told me. âJason probably leans Trump, if I had to guess, but his content isnât really political at all.â (âI dont lean towards anyone,â Nguyen wrote when reached for comment. âI dont want anything to do with politics đ.â)
By the time we got to the gym, Nguyen was already there, performing for the camera by flirting with a woman on a weight bench. âIs Jason rizzing right now?â Piker asked Martyn, who nodded. âIs it working?â Piker asked the woman. She replied, âA little bit.â Before she left, she gave Nguyen her Discord handle.
âBradley, Iâve got something for you,â Piker said, removing his long-sleeved shirt. Underneath, he was wearing a tank top with a Rambo-style cartoon of Trump and the words âLETâS GO BRANDON.â âI was coming into hostile territory, so I had to fit in,â Piker said.
âItâs perfect,â Martyn said.
Martyn, who is six feet three and two hundred and sixty pounds, looks vaguely like Bradley Cooper on steroids. (Martyn has taken testosterone supplements, which Piker once brought up in a jocular debate about trans rights: You do hormone-replacement therapy, so why canât they?) Nguyen is much smaller. âMy chat just said, âThereâs three muscleheads in the gym right now,â â Nguyen joked, not even pretending to look at his phone. Piker roasted Nguyen with a fake comment from his own chat: âJason looks like a twink.â They wandered from station to stationâfirst bench-pressing, then deadliftingâas their cameramen followed. âWeâre just here to have fun,â Piker said. Then, dropping into a mock P.S.A. voice: âAnd also reach out to the young men out there who are lostâwho feel anchorless, rudderlessâby lifting some heavy weights.â
One flat-screen TV showed Joe Rogan interviewing Elon Musk, on mute, with no captions. Two shirtless guys, between reps, compared crypto wallets. âDuring Covid, they let liquor stores and strip clubs open, but they shut us down,â Martyn told me. âAnd then all the inflation, all the warsâitâs not like I trust any politician, Trump or Kamala or anyone, to be a perfect person. Itâs justâif we never try anything new, how can we get a different result?â Last fall, when Martyn interviewed Trump, he brought up âthe deep stateâ and asked, âHow would you actually make an effective change there?â It wasnât a specific question, and Trump didnât have a specific answer. âWeâre changing that whole thing around,â he said. Apparently, this was good enough for Martyn.
The day after the 2024 election, Martyn appeared on Pikerâs stream to explain his support for Trump. They started with small talk. âWhy do you have so many Zyn containers behind you?â Martyn said.
âI fucking slam those bad boys daily,â Piker said.
âLook at us relating, bro,â Martyn said.
When they got around to politics, Piker said, âOne side at least acknowledges that people are angryâthe Republicans.â The Democratsâ proposed solutions were inadequate, he said, but Trump would only make things worse. Martyn smiled and replied, âYouâre gonna have to say sorry when he does what he says heâs gonna do.â
They ended the gym session by daring each other to take turns sitting in Martynâs cold plunge. Piker resisted at firstââI didnât bring a towel, a bathing suit, nothingââbut he went in anyway, in his gym shorts, and his commenters went wild. âHey, Hasanâs chat, I hope yâall are happy he took his shirt off,â Nguyen said, facing Pikerâs camera. Then he checked his phone: the woman from the weight bench had already sent him a message.
âWait, she did?â Piker said, with a grin. âYouâre about to lose your virginity, I think.â
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FiveThirtyEight is gone. Its legacy will endure.
Nate Silverâs website suffered because of Trump and changes in political news coverage.
Opinion | Perry Bacon, Jr. | March 7, 2025
FiveThirtyEight became famous for its âforecastsâ from founder Nate Silver. But the website (where I worked from 2017 to 2021) was trying to do much more than predict presidential election results. FiveThirtyEight was an attempt to improve and reimagine journalism. I think it succeeded â even though the website is now defunct. ABC News, which owned FiveThirtyEight, this week laid off the siteâs 15 remaining staffers. The network had already made drastic cutbacks two years ago, with Silver himself departing back then. We are in the midst of staff reductions throughout the journalism industry. That said, ABC News is not a newspaper in a declining city in the Midwest. If the network wanted to keep the site going, it could have. This decision probably wasnât just about money. [...] Political journalism has changed in ways that have made FiveThirtyEight less essential. Silver started the website during the 2008 presidential campaign. (There are 538 votes in the electoral college.) He correctly saw a flaw in American political coverage. Journalism professors and many within the news industry had for years argued that political news was too focused on the âhorse raceâ (who was going to win the next election) instead of policy issues. What Silver argued was that horse-race coverage, while extensive, was often quite bad. It was overly fixated on a single poll or arguing that a candidate appeared to be surging after delivering a strong speech, without any other evidence. Averaging polls, scrutinizing demographics and voting histories of states â that all seems obvious now. It wasnât 17 years ago. [emphasis added]
I will miss FiveThirtyEight. It was always a reliable source of aggregate polling data. It also provided a lot of background information about the potential bias and reliability of individual polls.
R.I.P. FiveThirtyEight March 7, 2008 - March 5, 2025
_________________ Collage sources (before edits, starting in center, then moving top left to right clockwise, ending bottom left): 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07
[See more excerpts from the column under the cut]
In 2010, the New York Times hired Silver and starting hosting FiveThirtyEight on its website. A few years later, ESPN hired him to create a FiveThirtyEight that would cover not only politics but also sports, science and other topics with statisticians and more traditional journalists working in a combined newsroom. The site grew in size and influence. And other news organizations started borrowing its methods, averaging polls and producing statistical models to analyze elections. [...] The site often had political scientists and scholars write pieces. Fact-checking was extensive, adding to the siteâs reliability and reputation. But I knew FiveThirtyEight was in trouble when I saw not only stories similar to ours published in the Times and The Washington Post but also those larger organizations poaching our staffers. Another factor that made the website less relevant was Trump. He made politics more about tweets, firings and other drama that the data canât really capture. [...] But for me, FiveThirtyEight staffers and its devoted fans, the site was about much more than election predictions and even Silver. It was an alternative, higher form of journalism. It was also a lovable community of nerds, wonks and junkies. Our readers were Democratic-leaning, but they werenât people watching MSNBC just to hear how terrible Republicans are. They wanted us to tell them if a Democratic politician was going to lose. They loved that every article seemed to involve the writer examining election results down to the county level and producing three charts to support their thesis. Silver now has one of the most popular political Substack newsletters; former managing editor Micah Cohen is now politics editor for Apple News; reporter Anna Maria Barry-Jester has moved on to cover public health for ProPublica. But from my vantage point, FiveThirtyEight is everywhere in more subtle ways. The amount of charts and data in stories about politics in particular is much larger than it was two decades ago. The chief political analyst at the New York Times is a data whiz named Nate (Cohn) who joined the paper essentially as Silverâs replacement. If you tell someone about a poll, they will often ask whether other surveys show the same result. There is still too much horse-race coverage. I hate when I see polls of the 2028 Democratic primary. Can we wait a minute? But FiveThirtyEight made that coverage smarter and more rigorous â creating a legacy that will endure.
#rip 538#five thirty eight#abc ended 538#nate silver#political polling#perry bacon jr#the washington post#my collages#my edits
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Ed Luce: It is not just Donald Trump who dodged a bullet. Half an inch to the left and the cartridge that grazed Trumpâs ear would have turned him into a martyr. There is no telling what his death would have unleashed. As it is, the reprehensible attempted assassination of Trump will have profound reverberations for US democracy. Within seconds of being blanketed by secret service agents, Trump was yelling âfight, fight, fightâ to the crowd. The instantly ubiquitous photo of him pumping his fist against the backdrop of the stars and stripes will become the emblem of his campaign.
A high-trust society would have awaited the facts of the shooting before leaping to conclusions. By that yardstick, America is close to the edge. Two of the Republicans auditioning to be Trumpâs vice-presidential running mate blamed Democrats for inciting hatred of Trump. The favourite, Ohio senator JD Vance, said the Biden campaignâs rhetoric âled directly to President Trumpâs attempted assassinationâ. Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator, said Democratsâ âinflammatory rhetoric puts lives at riskâ. Elon Musk, owner of the site, X, on which these statements were posted, was quick to weigh in on a conspiracy about how the shooter could have got so close: âEither extreme incompetence or it was deliberate,â Musk wrote.
Many on the left were equally quick to claim that the shooting was a staged or false flag operation to boost Trumpâs election prospects. It is notable, however, that no senior Democratic official has yet fanned those rumours. The identity of the suspected shooter, a 20-year-old man called Thomas Matthew Crooks, offered little help. Though he was a registered Republican and an enthusiastic gun owner, he had made a small donation to a pro-Democratic group. It is plausible that like most US assassins, Crooks was acting alone and delusional. That will not stop political entrepreneurs from blaming the shooting on their ideological enemies.
The biggest question is what Trump will do with it. No honest accounting of Americaâs fetid climate can ignore the fact that the former president himself is the countryâs most influential exponent of political violence. He described those who stormed Capitol Hill with knives and nooses on January 6 2021 as âunbelievable patriotsâ. He mocked an attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of former Democratic speaker, Nancy Pelosi, after one of his own supporters smashed his head with a hammer. And he encouraged extremist militias to âstand byâ shortly before the 2020 election. In calmer democracies, an incident as lethal as the near murder of a party leader with a AR-15-type semi-automatic rifle would lead to bipartisan calls for gun control. There is no chance Trumpâs party will change its mind on that subject. The number of AR-15s in America has been estimated to be as high as 44mn, which puts comparisons with earlier periods of US political violence into perspective.
Whether Trump gets a lasting sympathy boost remains to be seen. But three conclusions can already be drawn. The first is that the Republican national convention in Milwaukee this week will be dominated by his near miss. Trumpâs campaign is enormously skilled at choreographing optics to enhance his message. The iconic fist-pumping imagery of the candidate rising courageously from his near death will suffuse the convention stage. Trump is expected to name his running mate in the next two days â probably on Monday. Expect the nation to be riveted by admiration or dread at the use to which Republicans put Trumpâs near martyrdom. At Trumpâs first presidential convention in Cleveland in 2016, the streets around the main hall teemed with private militias brandishing arms. Policing the streets of Milwaukee this week will be an unusually fraught challenge, even by Americaâs standards.
[Financial Times]
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I had a dream a couple days ago that there was this meme going around on Bluesky of a photo of Kevin from Ed Edd & Eddy with a gay pride flag background. Somebody ended up making it a video with "welcome to the cum zone" playing in the background as well as occasionally adding pop ups of Edd at random points, which caused it to blow up on tiktok and turn into a rickroll-type meme. It very quickly spread to all social media sites and somehow made it into the presidential campaign of some nonbinary stoner named Bethesda Crow, which caused them to gain insane popularity among younger voters.
Christians very quickly started believing the video was demonic in nature and started throwing solid silver crosses and bibles at anyone they saw watching the video or listening to the song. Churches started organizing protests for members to attend as well as computer rooms for tech savvy members to start taking the videos down.
The president, being an EE&E fan, quickly issued martial law and ordered the military to stop any protests ASAP, even if it means killing hundreds of protesters.
Eventually, the girl that made the photo and video was found and asked to make a speech for Crow's campaign. She was assasinated by an Archbishop send directly by the pope seconds after she got on stage, starting a domino effect that led to the president nuking the Vatican off the face of the earth and declaring christianity to be a terrorist group.
Christianity soon ceased to exist due to the loss of the Varican as well as churches being forcefully dispanded by the police, which led to the rise in a new religion called Keveddism. People prayed to the girl that made it, they worshipped the video itself, and they constantly watched EEnE when they were at home.
Bethesda Crow ended up winning the Presidential election with 69% of the popular vote, the only thing they said after hearing the result was "nice." The first thing they did as president was change the national anthem to "welcome to the cum zone" as well as legalizing weed in all 50 states.
The mother of the girl then revealed to the world that her daughter was making a sequel to the video with the song "heir to the cum throne" before she died
The revelation that there was gonna be another video sent the whole world into chaos, eventually resulting in the entire country of Italy being bombed out of existence
I then woke up to my cat, also named Kevin, forcefully shoving his face into my mouth, here's my recreation of the video.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that Bethesda Crow looked exactly like Sejanus Plinth with a slutty waist and a BBL, dressed like Him from the powerpuff girls, and sounded like Rupaul. Truely an icon and the cuntiest president the U.S would ever see!
#ed edd n eddy#eene#eene kevin#eene double d#kevedd#god dammit kevin#dreams are strange#dreams are weird#dreams#purple they cinematic universe#purple they#fever dream#chaos#goofy ahh dream#Sejanus Plinth with a BBL
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The increasing weirdness of Donald Trump 𤤠đż â˘ď¸
While news media in the US often get blamed for "normalizing" Weird Donald, the Washington Post looked at the recent craziness in plain sight exhibited by the GOP presidential nominee.
Some excerpts...
As that saga first unfolded publicly Tuesday night, Trumpâs interview with TVâs Dr. Phil aired. The friendly conversation Trump filmed last week turned into another venue for him to air inflammatory claims about his opponents without presenting evidence. âI think to a certain extent itâs Bidenâs fault and Harrisâs fault,â he said of the attempted assassination against him last month, adding, âThey werenât too interested in my health and safety.â There is no public evidence that Biden or Harris were personally involved in decisions about Trumpâs security protections. With pressure mounting to drive a sharper message against Harris, the Republican presidential nominee is delving into distractions and delivering a mix of incendiary and false statements. While such tactics have been on regular display in his third run for the White House, he is now pushing them further, running the risk of alienating key voters. [ ... ] Trump spent Wednesday morning venting on Truth Social, his social media site. He let loose a flurry of reposts just after 8 a.m. There was an image of Biden, Harris,Hillary Clinton, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, former White House medical adviser Anthony S. Fauci and others in prison uniforms. There was a call to jail members of the congressional committee that investigated Trumpâs supporters over the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol after Trumpâs election loss. Another repost used a QAnon slogan: âWWG1WGA! RETRUTH IF YOU AGREE.â Just after noon, Trump began to claim â without evidence â that Harris was exaggerating her online footprint. âITâS ALL FAKE,â he wrote. Soon he turned to resharing a video of himself promoting digital trading cards for $99 a piece: Buy enough, he said, and you could get a physical card with bits of Trumpâs outfit from the June debate that helped push Biden out of the race.
He's desperately trying to reignite QAnon. We haven't heard from QAnon (except for one probable fake) since Trump left office. Trump is like an aging rock star reminding fans of his greatest hits.
Trump's demented rantings are not difficult to provoke. He will toss aside prepared comments on policy to respond to something unrelated with an unhinged fact-free tirade.
With Trump trying to put QAnon back in the spotlight, maybe he could get some fashion tips from the QAnon Shaman.

#donald trump#weird donald#trump is weird#qanon#qanon shaman#trump dementia#election 2024#vote blue no matter who
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The naming of the space shuttle Enterprise involves one of the funniest presidential orders of all time.
Enterprise, the first space shuttle orbiter, was originally to be named Constitution, in honor of the Constitution of the United States. However, "Star Trek" fans started a write-in campaign urging the White House to instead select the name of the starship that James T. Kirk captained in the original TV series. Although President Gerald Ford did not mention the campaign, he directed NASA officials to change the name, saying he was "partial to the name" Enterprise.
In recognition of their namesake, "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry and most of the principal cast of the original series were on hand when the shuttle Enterprise was rolled out of Rockwell's Air Force Plant 42, Site 1, Palmdale, Calif., assembly facility on Sept. 17, 1976.
Enterprise was built for NASA to perform test flights in the atmosphere; lacking engines or a functional heat shield, it was not capable of actual spaceflight. NASA planned to eventually outfit Enterprise for spaceflight and to make it the second space shuttle to fly, after Columbia, but final design plans for the fuselage and wings of the orbiters changed during the construction of Columbia, and refitting Enterprise in accordance with the new plans would have required significant effort: Entire sections would have to be dismantled and shipped across the country to subcontractors. Instead it was deemed less expensive to build the space shuttle Challenger from existing materials.
And she now resides in New York City at the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum :)
#and I share a birthday with the first nasa orbiter. sick#nasa#space shuttle#aerospace#space program
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Anna Merlan at Mother Jones:
In recent days, a number of news sites that rely heavily on aggregation have posted stories about Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz, reporting âallegationsâ that he sexually assaulted a minor while working as a teacher and football coach. The clearly false claims stem from the prolific work of one man, a Twitter conspiracy peddler who goes by Black Insurrectionist. After previously pushing a lie about a presidential debate âwhistleblower,â heâs at it again, and even his clownish mistakes havenât kept the claims from taking off on Twitter, or being promoted by automated sections of the news ecosystem. Black Insurrectionist, who tweets under the handle @docnetyoutube, is a self-professed MAGA fan who says heâs based in Dallas. Heâs paid for his Twitter account, meaning his visibility is boosted on the site; heâs also followed by a number of people in the MAGA and right-leaning fake news spheres, including Donald Trump Jr., dirty tricks specialist and Trump adviser Roger Stone, Pizzagate promoter Liz Crokin, and conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones.
In September, he promoted an obviously fake story about a âwhistleblowerâ at ABC News anonymously claiming the presidential debate hosted by the channel had been biased in favor of Kamala Harris. To back up the claims, he published a purported affidavit by the whistleblower, a poorly formatted and typo-riddled document that, among other things, claimed that Harris had been assured she wouldnât be questioned about her time as âAttorney General in San Francisco,â a job she never held, as it doesnât exist. The clumsy story still received immense pickup, including from hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who began tweeting at various entities to investigate the claim; Elon Musk also shared some of Ackmanâs posts.Â
Black Insurrectionist (aka âDocNetyoutubeâ), a fake news-peddling far-right conspiracy theorist X account, was the culprit behind the lurid lie about Kamala Harris VP pick Tim Walz by falsely accusing him of âsexual assault.â
#Black Insurrectionist#Tim Walz#X#Liz Crokin#Donald Trump Jr.#Roger Stone#Alex Jones#Bill Ackman#Elon Musk#2024 Presidential Election#2024 Elections#Fake News#DocNetyoutube
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EXPOSED: SUPPORT FOR KAMALA HARRIS ON @tiktok_us AND INSTAGRAM IS FAKE AND PAID FOR
The social media support for Kamala Harris is paid for astroturfing.
@KamalaHarrisâs Presidential campaign appears to be paying for social media influencers to post videos and posts in support of her, which is further evidence that her online social media support is fake and paid for. It has been discovered that a company by the name of LAUNCH VIRAL is running advertisements for social media influencers who are interested in a âPAID POST OPPORTUNITYâ to get paid to post in support of @KamalaHarrisâs Presidential campaign.
The advertisement below which is offering $150 CASH, plus a paid incentive per postâŚ
The ad says: WE'RE ASKING YOU TO...
1. EXPERIENCE ⢠Encourage your fans to share, like, and follow Kamala
2. CREATE Post one of more memes ONLY using our pre-approved assets Feel free to add your own spin or commentary on your TikTok - IG, too, would be awesome
3. POST Post your content on TikTok, Instagram or both. Mention: @kamalaharris
Hashtags: #kamalaharris#harris2024
The media wants people to falsely believe that the surge of support for @KamalaHarris on Tik Tok and other social media sites by GenZ is organic, but as exposed, itâs being paid for via social media influencer agencies like Launch Viral.
Kamala Harris is so unlikable, her campaign @KamalaHQ literally has to pay influencers to create the illusion and delusion that young people support her.
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âIf it was me IâdâŚâ
âI donât understand why he just doesnâtâŚâ
âwhy doesnât he say/doâŚâ âItâs not enough they shouldâŚâ
âThis person has it so easyâŚâ
Do we understand the members are between the ages of 25 years of age and the oldest is 31?
Do we understand their only JOB is to make music, fulfil their contractual obligations to their company?

Do we understand that they still have to work for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years? They canât just up and quit. They have WAGES, as much as we would like to think, money doesnât go directly from your PayPal to the members accounts.
Fans money doesnât go directly to the idol. It goes from the company. Weâve seen idols who have been in the game for decades (nationally known and lesser known but still known internationally) struggling with their company to even get a look at the figures of how much theyâve earned in their time working. They donât even know how much money theyâve earned! They have gone months without pay from their companies, yet still working and producing content their fans see. Yet still having albums sold, merch sold, tickets sold, fan support.
Even the most popular, richest western celebrity still works when they donât âhave to.â
Why? Because they look after other households, family? Because money gets spent, the more money you have the more you spend? Because what else would they do? They still have a passion, a need to be engaged, work, be occupied.
Do we understand they are watched by MILLIONS all over the world, they every move photographed, discussed online, on the news, by the water cooler.
Do we understand that unlike the regular everyday person, someone wouldnât know your cats name, your hometown, your high school unless you told them, there are actually personal security questions because it shouldnât be that well known. Yet with the members we can find out nearly anything about them, their pets, their families etc. where is their safe zone??
They have become more than singers, not by their choice, it has been thrust upon them.
They have become presidential special envoys, exposition ambassadors, they speak against hate and discrimination in foreign countries, at the White House, the speak of love in all its different forms at the United Nations. They have had soo much weight put in their shoulders, more than any of us could ever dream of AT ANY AGE.
We hated our high school haircuts, we delete the pictures off of Facebook, we hide the years books.
Donât wanna speak at an event, donât have to, or if we do only those present may know about it, maybe LinkedIn or the company site etc, still insular, not international news.

Wanna quit your job, lie on your resume, you are more likely to get away with it, than the members.
Any company they chose to go to, if they ever wanted to, would know EVERYTHING about them, what they accepted in the past, what they would and wouldnât do at a company.
Cheated on your ex, there are ways your current may never find out. Not the members, they canât even be on the same street with someone without it being brought back every 5-10 business days. Canât be in the same event without close up analyses and theories that they blinked too long near someone. Nothing stays in the past for them. Old differences/hurts brought up 7 years later. Millions of people who canât even speak the same language as them dictating who they can have in their home, go to eat with, watch movies with, though theyâve NEVER set foot in their country before.
Fans wishes cannot be directly implemented by the idol. Idols donât call the shots. The wildest things they can do are live everyday human lives. The most autonomy, ârebellionâ they can have is switch on an unscheduled live or *gasp* date (what are they 13??).
Itâs A LOT. We need to catch ourselves. The pressure on them is already immense.
As fans we should be their support, their comfort, their safe zone.
Not another group of people telling them where to look, how to breathe, what to say.
Give them understanding, give them the benefit. Let them act in the ways they can, we donât know everything. We donât know we could do ANY DIFFERENT in their shoes.
đ¤đ¤

#BTS#Jungkook#Jimin#Namjoon#Jin#Yoongi#Hobi#Taehyung#Idols#Celebrities#Young People#Adulthood#We Donât Have All The Answers#Neither Do They#They Are Human#Let Them Be Human#Life is Hard for Everyone#Choices Have Consequences#More Understanding#More Compassion#More Empathy
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Looking Back On: Fall Out Boy, âFolie Ă Deuxâ
April 12, 2020
âFolie Ă Deuxâ came out when I was eight years old. Fall Out Boy (FOB) was a band I enjoyed but it wasnât my favorite yet. That didnât occur until 2010 when I got my first laptop and suddenly had access to play any music I wanted. After countless times listening, I came to think of it as one of the most musically intricate and well-developed albums FOB has ever produced. However, âFolie Ă Deuxâ didnât sell well and ultimately contributed to FOBâs hiatus.
There is a plot in âFolie Ă Deux,â however, it is very hidden and not really understood without the additional âFall Out Toy Worksâ comics, which was published in â09 and continued into â13. The comics are mostly unknown by many which makes talking about them all the more fun.Â
âFall Out Toy Worksâ was created by Pete Wentz of FOB, Darren Romanelli and Nathan Cabrera. It is written by Brett Lewis and illustrated by members of Imaginary Friends Studios. The story is a cyberpunk tale set in futuristic LA centered around a gynoid (female android) named Tiffany, the Toymakerâs perfect creation. Think âPinocchioâ meets âPygmalion.âÂ
Baron is the main antagonist and his company controls the production of pretty much everything in Los Angeles, even the weather but he has no control over his relationships. He asks the Toymaker to create a robot wife for him, named Tiffany. Talking about the story any farther without spoiling the ending is hard.
The trade paperback and webcomic version both had the final page of issue 5 removed, which changed the entire tone of the ending. (It is relatively easy to find online, though.) There are so many things that the comics explain, even the meaning of the albumâs cover art: the bear is a boy robot named Crybaby.
To promote âFolie Ă Deux,â the whole label of Decaydance Records artists did a mixtape of demos and custom songs called âWelcome to the New Administration.â The promotional campaign began on Aug. 18, 2008, when Decaydanceâs website was supposedly hacked by a shady group called âCitizens For Our Betterment.â
The link led to the groupâs website which was red, white and blue. Links on the page were blocked needing specific IP addresses to work. The Decaydance site was normal the following day.Â
The Citizens for Our Betterment web page was updated every day, many posts referring to Nov. 4, the same day as the 2008 U.S. presidential election. The locked links were gradually opened and by Aug. 24, one link led to a page saying âFOB â The Return â November Fourâ in large big bold letters.
This caused some fans to believe that Fall Out Boy would release their new album on Nov. 4. Others theorized that this was another one of Peteâs attempts to raise political awareness as he previously held a rally for then U.S. Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama. Members of FOB members are publicly democrats.Â
Many bands from the Fueled by Ramen label posted on MySpace that same day with the title âWelcome to the New Administration.â Every post contained the word ten. On Aug. 25, the Citizens for Our Betterment website was redirected to the bandâs Friends or Enemies page. On which was an image of a voting booth and ballots with the names of several Decaydance artists.Â
By clicking on each individual ballot, there was an audio clip from the band reading past posts on the Citizens for Our Betterment website. A mixtape was then made available for download. Listen to it here:Â https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUZKSsP8Sdo
As for the album itself, the album âFolie Ă Deuxâ itself is perfectly gapless as every song fades into the next. It starts with a hidden track called âLullabye.â Itâs a charming track featuring just acoustic guitar and Patrick singing. âDisloyal Order Of Water Buffaloesâ is the first official song. The hook goes: âIâm a loose bolt of a complete machine. What a match, Iâm half doomed and youâre semi-sweet.â These lines set the tone of the album with industrial elements and dark storytelling. The world of the Toymaker and how it intertwines with the music.Â
âI Donât Careâ kicks off with a classic rock tone, and the accompanying music video is zany and weird. Gilby Clarke from Guns Nâ Roses starts the video by saying, âwhat the hell happened to rock and roll? Eyeliner? Energy drinks? And no guitar solos? Iâve taken sh*ts with bigger rock stars than them!â
The video is filled with miscellaneous sights. Thereâs the infamous spaghetti cat clip, band members dressed as nuns, Joe flashing people â and it ends with everyone removing a mask and being a different rock star. Clarke himself reveals himself being Sarah Palin in the end, winks.
Itâs an all-round weird video. A reminder that â08 was a different time, but all and all it fit into the political climate.
Next on the album is âSheâs My Winona,â named after actress Winona Ryder. It is a true bop and a slower-paced song with the chorus of âhell or glory, I donât want anything in between. Then came a baby boy with long eyelashes. And daddy said âyou gotta show the world the thunderâ.â Â
This is followed by âAmericaâs Suiteheartsâ with its nightmare carnival aesthetic that really adds to the story of the album and causes a lot of the nonsense to make sense.Â
âHeadfirst Slide Into Cooperstown On A Bad Bet,â in which the beat goes hard but the lyrics go harder, follows. Itâs a song blatantly about infidelity within a relationship. Considering Pete Wentzâs divorce, itâs safe to assume that this was somewhat based in reality.Â
The music video is labeled as âA Weekend At Pete Roseâs,â and is on the old FriendsOrEnemies YouTube channel. In it, Panic! At The Discoâs Brendon Urie and Spencer Smith carry Peteâs dead body around the city.Â
âThe (Shipped) Gold Standardâ is a sad masterpiece about fearing loving another person. This was written before gay marriage was legalized and at a time where the LGBT+ community found safety within emo music and the Fall Out Boy fan base because FOB supported them.Â
â(Coffeeâs For Closers)â is a song about lost faith, and it hits hard especially with its placement behind âThe (Shipped) Gold Standardâ.Â
âWhat A Catch, Donnieâ has a music video and itâs an odd, nostalgic chronicle of the bandâs (at the time of the videoâs creation) seven-year history. Filled with memorabilia for other music videos, the video shows Patrick saving his fellow bandmates, as well as Brendon Urie and Spencer Smith. The end of the song includes lines from Fall Out Boyâs most iconic songs at the time.Â
â27â jumps the pace back up to fast rock and fades into (all songs fade, but this is the best fade on the record) my favorite song on the album, âTiffany Blews.â The song makes almost no sense at all lyrically but musically it slaps. The best explanation I can give is that itâs about a hot girl. Lil Wayne has a spoken section that is my favorite part. âNot the boy I was, the boy I am is just venting â venting. Dear gravity, you held me down in this starless city.â Itâs such a perfect moment of breath in a nonstop album.
Next is âw.a.m.s.,â which is an acronym that has never had a confirmed meaning. But, the bass in it is so good, and the endingâs stripped vocals are as well!Â
â20 Dollar Nose Bleedâ is about drug abuse. It includes vocals from Brendon Urie and ends with a creepy poem by Pete Wentz. âItâs not me, itâs you, actually, itâs the taxidermy of you and me / Untie the balloons from around my neck and ground me / Iâm just a racehorse on the track, send me back to the glue factoryâŚâ
âWest Coast Smokerâ has the futuristic synth sound that ties the whole album together and that sound is on full display. The vocals pulsing with the music is almost spiritual. Iâm skipping the remixes and acoustic versions off of the deluxe version. Instead, Iâm hopping over to the bonus tracks.Â
âPavloveâ is criminally underrated, and such a good song. The heavy rock cover of Michael Jacksonâs âBeat Itâ is also wonderful.
I love this album because every song in it is amazing â it goes without saying, âFolie Ă Deuxâ is my favorite album by my favorite band.Â
LeAnne McPherson
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Xiumin - 240102 'Boss-dol Mart' Twitter update: "2024ë
2ě 18ěź ěźëł¸ ëěż í ěěPIT ěě ěŹěĽëë§í¸ ëëźë§ íŹëݏí
ě´ ę°ěľëŠëë¤! ěě¸í ë´ěŠě ěŹěĽëë§í¸ ěźëł¸ ęłľě ííě´ě§ëĽź 체íŹí´ěŁźě¸ě~! ěŹěĽë ë§í¸ ěźëł¸ ęłľě ěŹě´í¸ https://welovek.jp/ceodolmart/"
Translation: "On 18 February 2024, the 'President's Doll Mart'Boss-dol Mart' drama fan-meeting will be held at Tokyo Toyosu PIT! For more information, please check the official Japanese website of 'Boss-dol MArt'! The official site 'of the presidential idol mart 'Boss-dol Mart' in Japan: https://welovek.jp/ceodolmart/"
Credit:Â sajangdolmart.Â
#EXO#EXO M#Xiumin#240102#exo im#exo m im#xiumin im#mention#instagram#translation#fs:boss dol mart#fs:sajangdolmart#comeback:Exist
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After months of spewing racist remarks about Kamala Harris and ginning up his base about invasions at the border and the promise to harm millions of immigrants, Donald Trump will once again be the president of the United States. Despite his naked racism and misogyny and attacks on his political opponents, the American people have chosen to send him back to the White House. Candidates use the last days of their campaign to make their final case before the American people. They say the thing you want voters to remember as theyâre casting their votes on Election Day. The last thing Trump wanted millions of Americans to hear from him and his campaign? A cacophony of bigotry. Trump chose to host a rally in New York City that was reminiscent of a Nazi rally held there 85 years ago. He was set to speak in front of thousands of his fans in his hometown â but first, more than two dozen surrogates would get on stage to make the case for him. Comedian and podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe compared Puerto Rico to a pile of garbage, said Black people carve watermelons on Halloween and made crude comments about the sexual habits of Latinos. David Rem, who the campaign said is a childhood friend of Trump, called Democrats âdegenerates.â Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Harris was a âSamoan, Malaysian low-IQâ person. (Harrisâ father is Jamaican, and her mother is Indian.) The only comment the GOP attempted to do damage control on was the âjokeâ about Puerto Rico. Having such explicit racism on stage during a rally for a presidential campaign speaks volumes about the Republican Party and America at large. White conservative ideology, and by extension, Trump, has long been threatened by the sense that full racial equality was just on the horizon. It is not an accident that Trump began his political career after America elected its first Black president. During their own presidential campaigns, famous Alabama segregationist George Wallace promoted keeping the races separate and George H.W. Bush deployed an ad implying his opponent Michael Dukakis would let violent Black criminals out of prison. Ronald Reagan touted his love of âstates rightsâ at a speech in Mississippi near the site of where civil rights workers had been brutally murdered 16 years earlier. Critics viewed it as a wink to racist white Southern voters. Still, no other major-party presidential candidate has embraced explicit racism the way Trump has. Trump entered the political foray during the Obama administration by leading the charge in the false claims that the president was secretly born in Kenya and thus ineligible to be president. A few years later, in a now infamous scene, he would come down the escalator at Trump Tower to announce that he was running for president himself and referred to Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists. His major policy promise was to build a wall along the southern border. As president, Trump instituted a ban on people from several majority-Muslim countries entering the country, told three members of Congress who are women of color to âgo back to where they came from,â and tried to send in the military to squash racial justice protesters. His reelection campaign in 2020 was marked by more of the same. During his speech accepting the GOPâs nomination, Trump said Democrats wanted to release âcriminalsâ into suburban neighborhoods and declared on X that âwhen the looting starts, the shooting starts,â referring to Black Lives Matter protesters. Much of that seems tame compared to the 2024 campaign.
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Apropos of the last reblog... whenever I have had doubts about the 1926 fic being well-received in fandom (I had a crisis about this when S2 was announced, and also again when S2 happened) [edit: also I'm using "well-received" as a euphemism for "I won't get crickets and will not get more than 5 people telling me I don't know canon"], my therapist is just like "Why don't you just publish it [commercially as original fiction]?" And like... I don't want to, that should be enough, but I foolishly make the mistake of saying "I don't want to do that, because I'd hate the result and it wouldn't sell anyway." But it's true.
First off, I'd have to fundamentally change the characterizations of not-Aziraphale and not-Crowley to be comfortable with publishing it, in ways that would make them much less appealing to me, because I like those characters. I could see myself writing origfic about Vehuel and Nisroc, and have posted some stuff to AO3 tagged "origfic" because people who would like it will find it more easily there than in the GO tag, but I don't think I'd feel comfortable publishing it for profit unless I changed the setting completely so it wasn't Comically Bureaucratic Heaven and Hell -- which I'd also want to do with the 1926 fic, because everyone who's read or seen Good Omens is going to instantly recognize it. It's not bad to be influenced by something, of course, but look, if I have to rework both the setting AND the characters that's a lot of work to make a story less itself. Had I had more interesting-to-me ideas for either story or characters I would have written those instead.
The other issue is I do not think she understands how LONG it is. People who aren't writers hear "1000 words" and think "wow that's a lot of words, that's like 20 pages, right?" People who aren't writers hear "400k words" and think "wow that's a lot of words, that's like a hundred pages, right?" People who are writers understand that 1000 words is the point during an average NaNoWriMo day where you're like "I don't think I can do this actually," and then you're annoyed with yourself because you barely wrote a page and a half, and that 400k words is "oh no the idea got away from them, RIP." No traditional publisher wants to publish something that's 400k unless it's by George R. R. Martin and it is specifically the thing they've been waiting for him to finish for several presidential administrations.
So I'd have to self-pub. Which I don't really feel like doing because, bluntly, I would not get anything out of it. I do not know how to market a 400k book that is a historical action/adventure story with a substantial queer romance B-plot, but also a lot of it is torture porn, but not like that, it's not dark romance, the romance is fluffy. There isn't a good marketing niche for this. I'd either have to take out the sex scenes or rewrite them to be more appealing to the market (which means less appealing to me, a person who has found maybe one explicit sex scene in self-published fiction that I was into, and surprise surprise, the author's webpage linked to their AO3 account) and if I rewrote them I'd probably do better condensing the story down drastically to 15-20k of mostly porn with a light dusting of historical fantasy, which is not what I wrote.
But back to the marketing: I'd have to build a social media following, something I am not good at, on a social media site that is doing well and not in crisis (how??? where???) and all my insecurities about posting things online would be magnified a hundredfold if a. I had to do that and b. money was on the line. If I'm posting on AO3, I won't get money, but I will (very occasionally) get people telling me they liked it, which I will probably enjoy much more.
Anyway, I don't want to go into all of this with my therapist because she keeps doubting any of these assertions -- as if I do not keep up with publishing drama, or know self-pub authors, or understand that fans can diagnose "they painted landlord white over my blorbos to publish this" at 50 paces -- so it takes the whole hour.
But when I just leave it as "I don't want to do that, because I'd hate the result and it wouldn't sell anyway" she hears it as "I don't think my writing is good and I think no one likes it [clearly a symptom of depression]" but what I am trying to convey is "I don't want to take a sledgehammer to my favorite things about this story just so I can pitch it to a commercial audience I didn't have in mind when I wrote it, and I do not want to waste my free time and energy for socializing professionally trying to get people to like me on social media, something you know full well makes me deeply unhappy even at a small scale."
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Thoughs on Nixon in DW
I don't think that you could do The Impossible Astronaut/The Day of the Moon today. That is due to the prominence of one Richard Milhous Nixon.
This post is inspired by a discussion that I had with my friend @dalesramblingsblog (who you should follow if you aren't already) on Twitter. And I refuse to call it by the other name.
Steven Moffat did not set out wanting to write a story about Nixon. He wanted to do one set during the Moon Landing which had the White House, due to being a fan of The West Wing. I found this on Shannon Sullivan's site (https://www.shannonsullivan.com/drwho/serials/2011ab.html), recommended if you like looking at the details that went into making DW stories! When he found out who it was he considered a fictional President but went with Nixon. I think that this was the right choice, you can kind of get away with fictional Presidents in a Present-day story but in a historical setting, as in decades ago, it works less well.
Nixon is still mocked for things like Watergate and Vietnam... but the story still ultimately presents him in a positive-ish light.
However... nowadays I doubt that we could do that.
This is partially down to Trump. There hasn't been a President quite like him before... and I do not mean that as a compliment. And there is a lot of re-examination of Nixon now, partially as he feels like the closest thing to some of the scandals around Trump, with impeachment and ideas of Presidential overreach.
Now when TIA/DOTM came out the US was beginning to be viewed a bit better internationally under Obama. The Bush administration was viewed pretty badly around the world, DW even had a caricature of him being killed in a 2007 story. Nixon is still given a sort of... dignity of the office?
He also seems... sort of progressive for the 1960s? In that when Canton Delaware talks of marrying someone who is black Nixon seems ok with it... then when Canton says it's a man Nixon balks a bit. Which is played for comedy in showing progressive for the 1960s attitude.
However, nowadays we are seeing more examination of the horrible things aside from Watergate. The Southern strategy for example, in short using racism to pick up votes in the South, drawing the old Democratic base to the GOP... which has become ever more the GOP platform, with them now pulling in white supremacy.
What Nixon did to Chile, with his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, one of the most notorious war criminals in American history, is horrific as well.
Now the story is aware that Nixon is a pretty despised figure. But I doubt that at a time where the US had a President who is pretty openly a Fascist and who might get in again... well, it would be harder to see this in an amusing light.
I could go on about this and about how Nixon is presented in Futurama is indicative of how he is often seen but in a comical sense as a cartoonish supervillain and whether that can deflect from the true depths of his awfulness.
But that's a topic for another time.
Btw, please vote Democrat if you can. The list of their flaws is long but the alternative is actual Fascism. That is really not an exaggeration. I do not want to look over from Britain and see the US go the way that Germany did in the 1930s and that Russia has gone under Putin.
I hope that this post doesn't become really difficult to look back on next year.
I'll probably think of new things to say later but... well, I'm just putting this down now.
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