TK Newsletter: Cautiously Optimistic
Taking the weekend chill-pill.
Years ago, Tarfu Report co-host Alex Pareene and I sat down and made a list of The Only Five Movies. The premise was Hollywood had just five bankable scripts, made over and over. They were: Good Looking Vampires, Heroes in Underpants, Dragons n’ Shit, Old People Fucking, and Liam Neeson’s Revenge.
A reporter I knew in the nineties had a similar joke about newspaper editorials. He said there were five op-eds: Crossroads moment, Seismic shift, Reach across the aisle, Cautiously optimistic, and One thing’s for sure, time will tell.
In the eighties and nineties and early 2000s, punditry was so formulaic, you could spot future stars just by scanning the newsroom for the person least inclined to original thought. One glance at David Brooks or Thomas Friedman had editors thinking, kerching!
A few of us were embarrassed to be pulling paychecks for work this crude — even the proudest blowhard cringes after writing “Concerns mount” for the fiftieth time, and I speak from experience there — but the shame was tempered by the fact that journalists as a group tended to be broke, drunk, and able to laugh at themselves.
This is changing. As we saw this week, the intramural disputes in the sandbox we used to call the liberal media have become comically, insanely toxic. The ongoing spat between Cenk Uygur’s The Young Turks and comedian Jimmy Dore — which saw Uygur accusing Aaron Mate of being “paid by the Russians” and finger-flipping co-host Ana Kasparian threatening to out Dore as a sexual harasser — has been freakish to follow, recalling Sinaloa chainsaw videos or the girl-scout-on-girl-scout bar brawl epic in Airplane!
For ages the joke about media beefs was a variation of Sayre’s law about academic politics, i.e. they’re vicious “because the stakes are so low.” This dynamic is different. People are trying to destroy each other. They’re flinging career-ending epithets like traitor, racist and abuser across cyber-space in the sincere hope they stick.
Our target reader used to be the person sipping coffee at a moment like the present, a cool Saturday morning, lazily turning pages as birds chirped outside the window. Our target reader now is a rage addict who read this morning’s news five times over already last night, furiously scrolling through a phone for “receipts” to fire back at some troll on Twitter… wait, that was me.
We all need a break. Thank God it’s the weekend.
Recently in TK (feel free to wait until Monday, or later, to open):
— An interview with new Substack author Wesley Yang, on the “Successor Ideology.”
— Are Internet platforms using government guidelines to censor content, and is that a First Amendment issue? On “Intellectual Capture.”
— Activism Uncensored: Colombia in Chaos. News2Share footage and commentary from the Colombia protests.
— Review of Robin DiAngelo’s “Nice Racism.”
— Can a drug be “Right Wing?” The travails of Ivermectin.
— Interview with Barry Meier, author of “Spooked.”
— On the meme stock war.
— Fact-checking takes another beating: the lab-leak fiasco.
It's fitting that you refer to Airplane because every time I here someone run through the newest list of approved pronouns I keep waiting for the jive subtitles to pop up on screen.
And seriously Matt, our entire culture is filled with yoohoos who spout cliches & buzz phrases like they were actually saying shit. Every time I hear some wanker blather on about "taking it to the next level" I always assume that they're discussing how they've managed to shove their head deeper into their own asshole.
Commercials are filled with "you got this" or "you can do this" because there's nothing more inspiring than a pep talk delivered by an actor in a commercial.
Hundreds of women take to the internet with bikini selfies & topless selfies under the auspices of promoting some cause or other when what they're really doing is feeding that narcissistic attention monkey that's riding on their little self obsessed & emotionally needy backs.
Geez, we even have "smart" people literally telling us that finding the right answer to a math problem is racist.
So I think it's pretty safe to say that the dumbing down has worked splendidly. Americans have taken to brain damaged idiocy like a duck takes to a fish filled lake or Hunter Biden takes to a crack pipe.
I think we both know that won't be changing any time soon.
Love you and your work, Matt—twenty years running. But now of all times, you don’t get to pull the whole “bemused and somewhat concerned observer above the fray,” another of those “cringy” op-ed tropes you cataloged.
Sure, when it comes to the Maté-Dore-The Young F*cks matter, there are personal beefs at play. But Dore’s doing something long overdue when it comes to the whole left-liberal “progressive movement” that’s been ascendant over the last decade or so. Now that it’s pretty much run its course and self-liquidated, both unwittingly and wittingly bolstering neoliberal and Democratic Party power, there are some (from left libertarians to social democrats to orthodox Marxists) who think it’s important to at least call out the opportunists and fight The New New Left (DNC-sanctioned/subservient) from the left.
That’s what Dore’s doing—been doing since he saw the writing on the wall at least as far back as 2016 and certainly during the BlueAnon Russiagate conspiracy. And you’ve indicated elsewhere that this thing between Maté, Dore, and The Young F*cks isn’t just some internecine “spat.” It’s a symptom of something much bigger, more significant. The people who frame it as a mere “spat” are the same sort who come at you with “what happened to you man” on Twitwit.
This is definitely a time to take sides and duke it out—making it clear who’s got whose backs, making it clear who’s cashing in by running interference for the ultra-powerful few by selling out the majority of everyday people. Dore’s one of the few high-profile lefties doing it.
You have been, too.