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Move Along: The Car Crash is Fake
Real Americans Don’t Give a Shit About the Culture Wars
I have let myself get too worked up for too long about the culture wars on Twitter and its extensions on cable TV. They are not based in reality, but rhetoric. So this year, I’m ignoring them.
I think we can trace today’s ideological Wrestlemania in part to Donald Trump’s invented facts about Obama’s birth (he’s not an immigrant) or a Mexican invasion (when Trump announced his candidacy, undocumented immigration from Mexico was actually at a fifteen-year low). Likewise, Hilary Clinton’s ill-advised characterization of Trump’s supporters as “a basket of deplorables” unnecessarily inflamed nearly half the country. The rest of what we are living through feels like the reverberation of these original sins.
Of course, none of today’s caustic exchanges would have gained traction were it not for a media industry intent on milking every last penny of engagement from sensationalizing such rhetoric and aggravating as many viewers as possible. And no, I don’t blame social media for this. Social media, particularly when it’s used in politics, is merely a feeder for cable television. Neither a QAnon conspiracy nor a racist slur truly hits the MainStage until it migrates from Twitter to CNN or FOXNews, where it it is either championed or condemned more loudly than any Internet platform can. Social media is just the A/B testing of television content’s ability to polarize.
As a result, we’re contending with a media environment where everyone is supposed to be on one side of an incipient social civil war or another. One channel will have us believe that 40% of Americans are ready for a bloody coup if another democrat wins in 2024. The other insists that people who live in cities are either violent Blacks or elitist urbanites preparing for totalitarian control.
The millionaires and media celebrities who are flown to Manhattan to appear on FOXNews Gutfeld! — the most profitable corporate media show in its time slot — act as if they were the downtrodden, unacknowledged heart and soul of middle America, and uniquely qualified to critique liberals for wearing expensive clothes at the Met Gala. Only they can feel red state pain, and express its humiliation under the boot of The Squad’s…
