Bad Boys, Mean Girls and Normies

Despite not knowing what it was for, I joined Twitter a few months ago. I don’t tweet much, but I follow people I respect, and read a wider variety of articles. Aussie progressive gadfly Caitlin Johnstone tweeted that, except as concerns Russia, President Trump seems to be caving to the establishment agenda. I decided to circle back to John Robb at Global Guerillas, and in an article from a few days ago, The OODA loop of Trump’s Insurgency has been Smashed, he agreed. OODA means Observe, Orient, Decide, Act:

 … the real uniting goal of Trump’s insurgency was “opposition to a failed establishment.”

That goal held the insurgency that put him in office together, despite gaffes, scandals, leaks, etc that would have ended the political career of any other candidate.  It was also a goal that allowed the insurgency to continue after winning the election.  In most cases, once the goal has been accomplished (i.e. remove Mubarak), the insurgency evaporates.

The reason it didn’t: the media. …

It was maddeningly clear that the establishment media was in the bag for Hillary Clinton over Sanders, then over Trump. In the world according to Robb, that was enough to keep resentment of Clinton stoked, but it hasn’t been enough to maintain a Presidency aimed at dismantling the Deep State. Steve Bannon, the architect of that goal, was ushered out weeks ago, and now:

 … senior military staff running the Trump administration launched a counter-insurgency against the insurgency. …

•Former generals took control of key staff positions.
•They purged staff members that were part of the insurgency and tightly limited access to Trump.
•Finally, and most importantly, they took control of Trump’s information flow.

That final step changed everything. General Kelly, Trump’s Chief of Staff, has put Trump on a establishment-only media diet.  Further, staff members are now prevented from sneaking him stories from unapproved sources during the day (stories that might get him riled up and off the establishment message). … by controlling Trump’s information flow with social media/networks, the generals smashed the insurgency’s OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act).  Deprived of this connection, Trump is now weathervaning to cater to the needs of the establishment (as seen with his new stance on DACA and the Wall).

Robb broke down his view of the Trump political climate further back in August in, American Politics: Bad Boys vs. Mean Girls. I’ve quoted but rearranged his descriptions:

The political parties and the media aren’t the primary actors in the US political system anymore.  Increasingly, politics is being waged online by networks.  A fight between two powerful and very different online social networks:

Robb claims that the ‘Bad Boys’ “(similar to a gang or tribe) network grew in support of Donald Trump,” but I think they’ve been growing as long the middle class has been collapsing and have long flourished on certain corners of the internet. In Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle sets a possible beginning of transgression for it’s own sake in 2003 on 4chan, but I encountered the same sort of misanthropic and misogynistic ‘transgressors’ in usenet in the 1990s. Eventually, as explained by Ta-Nehisi Coates recently, they and Trump were bound to find each other.

 [Bad Boys] has one organizing principle: disrupt the status quo.  This network fights like an open source insurgency composed of many small groups and individuals acting independently.  It disrupts from the shadows.  It’s opportunistic, disorganized, and aggressive.  It misleads, angers, and intimidates.  It scores victories by increasing fear, uncertainty, and distrust.

Robb calls Trump’s opponents the ‘Mean Girls’ “(similar to a social clique or ruling aristocracy) network solidified in response to Trump’s unexpected victory.” Again, I believe that some sort of establishment or Deep State has been around for decades, but found a more compelling common cause in opposing Trump.

[Mean Girls’] cohesion and single mindedness neutered the Trump administration even before he took the oath. … It has one organizing principle: repel the barbarians.  This network fights like a ruling clique, albeit vastly larger than we have seen historically due to the scaling effects of social networking.  This network openly connects people in authority across every major institution (from education to the media to the government to the tech industry) and leverages it and the politics of identity to establish moral authority.  It fights by categorizing, vilifying and shunning enemies.  It scores victories by manufacturing consensus.

One only has to read my old haunts TalkingPointsMemo or dagblog, or watch Stephen Colbert or John Oliver or Samantha Bee go after Trump, or one of his staff, or even Bernie Sanders to see this clique in action.

Which leads to my question: Where does the progressive citizen who wants things to get better for everyone fit in? Clearly the Bad Boys want to toss out anyone who isn’t white (or doing a pretty good imitation of white) and start over in a pastoral America that never really existed. There’s no place for the Normies there.

Just as clearly, the Mean Girls profess a world where everyone can be equal and get ahead based strictly on merit. That’s great if you are one of those who can swing a tech job, but not much comfort when those tech firms are transferring the few remaining blue collar jobs to immigrants, foreigners or robots. The Mean Girls become much more pragmatic when asked to support the more progressive reforms proposed by Bernie Sanders.

Are the Bad Boys and Mean Girls just the loudest part of the electorate? Could we create a populist network to rival either of them?

Kord-Kutting & Kaepernick

A few days ago on Facebook, one of my brothers “liked” an article showing empty seats during the first week of NFL football. Why? Because he feels that people should stand for the national anthem instead of protesting like Colin Kaepernick and a growing number of players and fans. The article implied that attendance is down because people who think like him are angry, and boycotting the games.

Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King has also proposed a boycott of NFL football but for exactly the opposite reason. Like Hank Aaron and a lot of people, King believes that Kaepernick is getting blackballed by the NFL owners for taking a public stance against police killings of black people that in many cases presented no obvious threat. For example: Tamir Rice, a boy playing with a toy gun, John Crawford, a man holding an air rifle he had just picked up in a WalMart; Philando Castile, a man who properly told the police he had a permit to carry, Walter Scott, who was shot in the back eight times as he was slowly running away from a traffic stop, and many, many others.

Today, Shaun King tweeted a link to this Bloomberg article, NFL TV Ratings Slump Again, with the comment, “Our boycott is working.” But the article, and the embedded video interview with Leo Hindery, Jr tell a different story:

Fewer people watched the opening week of National Football League coverage than they did last year, a decline TV executives chalk up to Hurricanes Irma and Harvey.

Cable news and the Weather Channel almost tripled their audiences in prime time and grew fourfold during the day, according to data from the networks, drawing fans away from football. Thursday Night Football was down 13 percent, and Sunday games on Fox and CBS also declined. Sunday Night Football on Comcast Corp.’s NBC, featuring the arch-rival New York Giants and Dallas Cowboys, was a rare bright spot.

A drop in viewing last year caused consternation at league offices and the major media companies that count on the NFL to deliver the biggest audiences on TV. Executives blamed several factors, led by interest in the presidential election and a poor slate of games. Pro football drew $4.2 billion in regular season ad sales last year, according to Kantar Media and SMI Media Inc.

Eager to get off to a good start this year, the league responded by scheduling more appealing match-ups early in the season. That didn’t work last week, and networks are now pointing to the weather.

King rejects the weather excuse, and I’m sure some people are boycotting the NFL both in support of and against Kaepernick, but if you watch the video, media investor and businessman Leo Hindery, Jr makes a case that cord-cutting among the younger generations is a looming disaster for all sports programming.

“You have a youth generation coming up whose attention spans are shorter, and the devices they use are different, they don’t sit on couches and buy bundles of programming. … The young person today looks at the NFL as over-commercialized, too many advertisements, too little relative action vs alternative, 3 1/2 hours to watch an NFL game tonight that didn’t start until 8:30, most of us can’t stay up until 11:30. … Once you give viewers a choice of a la carte or voluntary programming, only watch what you want to watch, only pay for what you watch. We grew up in an industry that for decades was, ‘you ate what I serve, you pay what I charged’.”

Hindery notes that ESPN has dropped from 100 million households to 88 million in ten years. He expects a crash in sports revenue.

I’m not sure if there is a satisfactory outcome for either of these boycotts. The NFL can’t afford to lose their white apologist viewership or their woke black viewership, and sadly the police aren’t likely to stop shooting people of color. Add in the growing concern over concussions and lasting brain damage in football, and I frankly wonder whether the NFL may be doing Kaep a favor in the long run.