My Election Thoughts

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In Today's Email ✍🏻 Serious Thought

My Election Experience

As the polls closed around the country on the Election Night 2016, I sat in a bar in Brooklyn waiting to leave for a party that was being held on the corner of President St. and Clinton Street in Prospect Heights. My wife and I wanted to make sure we got there early so we could still be functional the next day. But as state after state came in red, and the announcers reassured us we had nothing to worry about, we moved the pregame to a friend’s apartment. Around 1:00am I decided to just go home. On my walk, I remember a faulty alarm blaring through the air from a few blocks over. Something was broken and nobody seemed to be attending to it.

The next morning, I checked the news alerts on my phone and turned to my wife. “He won,” I said. “He actually won.” I had spent the previous 6-months or so already addicted to the news, scrolling endlessly through articles in the New Yorker and New York Times, Twitter, and Facebook. So, I was already anxious. It was then and there that I decided to get off Twitter and start finding alternative news sources, less so for any political reasons than for the mere fact that it hadn’t done a thing to prepare me for what must have been obvious to people reading different stuff. I was on a mission to change my diet.

I’m proud to say that my new diet worked, and if you read the content recommendations in this newsletter you may have been, too.  I owe that mostly to the podcast I co-host, and the way it has forced me onto YouTube. Now, a lot of watch is on YouTube and Instagram, which was supercharged by the writers strike, October 7th, and the dirth of good content on the streamers. One thing you can say about YouTube— they’re worth almost $500 billion because they’re really, really, good at keeping you there once they have their hooks in you.

It’s there that Trump and his supporters made their case, and if you were watching you got a sense of how much more popular Trump had become in the last four years– turning previous opponents into vocal supporters at best, and indifferent bystanders at worst. The narrative around him turned inwards on the Democrats, leaving more people than they realized confused about how the parties were all that different. I saw previous skeptics feeling alienated, embarrassed, and uninspired by Kamala, racking up millions of views sharing their frustrations. Put another way, Joe Rogan gets 11-million views per episode, which is more than double the amount of people who watch cable news each night. His viewpoints on institutions and the establishment are no longer subversive; they’re mainstream.

And so, I was ready for Trump winning by a landslide, and the end of “woke” as a cultural movement that could be exploited to get votes. It worked great to sell sneakers for a while, but it creates too many enemies to win a popularity contest. That my candidate– Dr. Cornel West– did not ultimately win, is beside the point. This country has always been full of white men who hate Jazz, and this just proved it. 

MSM Post-Mortem

I first listened to Pod Save America the morning after Hillary lost in 2016, when it was still called “Keepin’ It 1600.” I knew it existed, but never had any interest before. As I searched for it on Apple Podcasts, I remember thinking, ‘I guess I need to know about politics now?’ That post-mortem in the frigid shock of Trump’s first victory was refreshing, honest, and raw, but wouldn’t last very long.

This time around, I savored every bit of it. I watched Election Night coverage on CNN and MSNBC, listened to Jon Stewart, and read Axios. And The Pod Save America guys didn’t disappoint, asking the best question I heard in all of my odyssey thusfar into the afterlife of Harris/Waltz. A question we will never, ever, hear uttered aloud again: Has the entire Left-leaning media ecosystem– including Crooked Media– created in the wake of Trump’s 2016 victory, been an enormous waste of time, money, and talent? Has it accomplished anything whatsoever? And should it be dismantled and reallocated into something that can actually help us win an election?

Maybe?

When Jon Stewart was asked if the Left needs their own version of Joe Rogan, he responded by saying whoever initially asked that question clearly has never listened to Rogan. That is, of course, because The Joe Rogan Experience doesn’t belong to the Right or the Left. The Right has just used him much, much, better than Progressives have. Imagine a world where Fauci, Obama, the editor of the New York Times, and trans-rights groups actively nurtured a relationship with the show and used it as a platform to promote their worldview? If a VC who backed Moderna came on to make the case for vaccines? If George Clooney came on to promote Wolves and explain how Kamala would actually fight inflation?

For the next little while, I’ll be watching how the Left responds (and more importantly, doesn’t respond) to what happened on Election Night, and watching out for some of these:

1. The “bro” podcasters built their audience unbeholden to any institutional support or relationships with elites. Now that they are considered new power centers in politics, will they become the new shills? How do they maintain the trust they’ve built?

2. Will the Free Press become a new unicorn media organization over the next four years?

3. How does the Far Left cannibalize itself even further?

4. Which Democrat leaders will most skillfully elevate themselves by speaking out against the party, without alienating the people in charge?

5. How much influence does the Project 2025/Tucker Carlson/isolationist/Catholic crew really have on Trump? Especially when it comes to Israel.

6. How much worse do the echo chambers become? At least in 2016, a MAGA person was aware others hated Trump. Will they even see that stuff now?

7. Do “success” and “winning” become popular again?

8. Trump’s entrance into the UFC fight was an astonishing moment to me. Does he become a president who does stuff like that??

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Michael Weber is a writer who believes that you’re going to read an opinion about the election tonight, so it might as well be his. If you received this email, you signed up for his newsletter at some point. If you'd like to unsubscribe, you must first find somebody else to replace you. Share a link to subscribe!