A bit from that piece for those who don’t click through:
The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.
Let me say that again, in case it got lost: Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC. The agenda is set by all the outlets I listed in the above paragraph. Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.
If you read me regularly, you know that I’ve written this before, but I’m going to keep writing it until people—specifically, rich liberals, who are the only people in the world who have the power to do something about this state of affairs—take some action.
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Why can’t people wrap their heads around the idea it’s not either-or?!? WE DO BOTH, DAMN IT… Also, lots of the trans community ARE working class themselves!!! FFS.
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Also, the dems weren’t the ones running on pronouns and purity. They barely mentioned those things 
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Yep, which was enraging… they should have been pushing Walz’s work in Minnesota on trans protections… they should have run on embracing and protecting trans people… But we live in the stupid timeline.
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So how does Dowd, Weiss, Stephens et al confidently assert the identity politics claim? These takes exist because this is a lazy pre-existing narrative to be sold, not because of any actual analysis of the electorate. These are writers who for various reasons have committed to an anti-woke narrative. And once you have committed to that narrative, you are determined to force it into every story, no matter how misleading.
It’s definitely incredibly postmodern and post-liberalism. Or how the far right has taken those ideas and twisted them to gain control of the narratives… but it wasn’t just that, it was how they were able to build a media network in order to further and justify their bigotry and hate of the rest of us. But their narratives aren’t based on facts, but feelings. Postmodernism was never about abandoning truth, so much as it was about seeing how truth can be spun by those in power to justify their global conquest. It was much more about interrogating the enlightenment project for its complicity in the building of modernity at the expense of those deemed expendable…
So, I’m thinking maybe… as much as this might appear to be “postmodern” (if we strip the concept down to just “challenging modernity” and pushing whatever narrative you want), but in reality, perhaps this is just the height of the modern project coming back for some revenge on the critics of the worst aspects of modernity?
Again… I think I’m thinking in half-thoughts right now…
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Sure, and I can conceive of it more specifically as another wave of aggrieved Christian white heterosexual male “backlash.” Let’s hope if that conception of what we’re up against is true, it’s a weaker wave than it seems, and that we can get ready soon to work in ways that ensure it is.
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And they were wrong. They’re just othering people who are part of the coalition. Running to the right or center doesn’t encourage people.
Tell people what you’re going to do for people and keep hammering it. All members of the coalition. But you have to have those forums to get to people and control the coverage. Don’t walk away from anyone.
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Seriously. If White Supremacy isn’t identity politics then what is? If MRA bullshit isn’t identity politics, then what is?
FFS, it’s maddening.
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It’s only “identity politics” when those people do it… /s
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Apparently identity politics is when you say people have some right to their identities. Like LGBTQ+ people want to be themselves but have never tried to force anyone to stop being straight and cis. Whereas the MRA movement is not just built around an identity, but disgust that anyone has a choice. Likewise white supremacy and all their kin. They are much more conformity politics.
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Maybe so, but I still think the irony of their accusing the left of identity politics bears repeating, loud and often.
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It’s all gaslighting.
“You should stop all this identity politics, and be more like us white people.”
“You shouldn’t have talked about trans-rights all the time.”
“But I didn’t talk about—”
“You’re doing it right now. Why are you always going on about trans people?”
“Everyone knows that LGBTQ people are a danger to children.”
“No they’re n—”
“Oh, it’s a scientifically proven fact.”
“I can’t find any studies that—”
“Oh look at this, they’ve uncovered another child sexual abuse ring.”
“But that’s not gay people or trans people, that’s pastors and scout lead—”
“No it isn’t.”
They are making shit up and reversing everything in full view, but doing it with such confidence that everyone is going along with it. For some reason you have to say “that’s incorrect”, or “you’re misinterpreting that”, or “I respectfully disagree”, when the accurate response is “that is a lie, and a reversal of the truth.” If you want to give them a sop, maybe make the point that maybe, maybe, the person who’s making the statement is too ignorant to know it’s a lie… but it’s still a lie.
And the lies are being told to make you unable to trust reality itself. It’s systemic, institutional gaslighting on a societal scale.
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But billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left—whose ad-supported, VC-funded operations started to fizzle out once social media and Google starting eating up the revenue pie.
You know what? This literally never occurred to me, but it’s so obvious: right wing media doesn’t have paywalls. That alone probably explains its popularity and therefore influence to some degree.
Because the far right buy media for the propaganda opportunities, the center right (what these people think of as the communist left) buy it in order to squeeze some money out of a dying industry.
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