The Bluestocking 354: Frat Tube and smol bean conservatives
Stash Acquired Beyond Life Expectancy
Happy Friday!
Jonathan and I have just returned from a holiday in Florida, which I promised him would be beautifully sunny. Instead, it hosed down the whole week, allowing us to see Sarasota in the rain, some manatees in the rain, and The Villages in the rain.
To cheer myself up, I began a competition to take the most American photo possible. Behold the two winners:
and:
Until next time,
Helen
PS. On March 18, David Runciman and I are hosting a screening of Network at the Regent Street Cinema, and then recording a live episode of Past Present Future afterwards. Tickets here.
The Second Trump Presidency, Brought To You By YouTubers (Bloomberg)
With the podcasters’ audiences skewing about 80% male on average, according to people familiar with the shows’ listener demographics, the hosts connected directly to a voting bloc that helped propel Trump back to the White House. Of the 903 podcast guests tracked by Bloomberg in the past two years, only 106 people, or 12 percent, were women.
Men, and particularly white men, have long made up Trump’s core support base. But in November’s election, young men swung especially hard to the right. More than half of men under 30 supported Trump, according to the AP VoteCast survey of more than 120,000 voters, though outgoing President Joe Biden won the group in 2020. Exit polls have shown that Trump received more support from young men than any Republican candidate in more than two decades.
“We definitely helped with the young male vote,” Kyle Forgeard, a member of the Nelk Boys, said in an interview. “On the podcast, we just speak our mind, try to be true to ourselves and say what we think.”
Above all, the broadcasters described American men as victims of a Democratic campaign to strip them of their power — a comforting message to a disspirited audience. These days, young men are lonelier than ever, with those aged 18 to 23 the least optimistic about their futures, and having the lowest levels of social support, according to Equimundo’s 2023 State of American Men report. Trump and his allies showed up for young men in the places where they were already spending their time — and supplied them with answers.
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This analysis of popular “non political” podcasts, and the friendly environment they provided for Trump, will not be news to regular Bluestocking readers, or anyone who listened to my BBC documentary on the manosphere, Gigachads and Sigma Wolves. But I did enjoy seeing the stats laid out so plainly (and I don’t envy the reporters who had to consume thousands of hours of these podcasts).
This piece echoes something I discussed there—that the podcast boom and the male solitude trend are closely linked. No shade to the Nelk Boys, but young men would be happier if they had real friends, rather than relying on parasocial relationships for a synthetic version of intimacy.
How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley into Trump’s Arms (NYT, gift link)
Marc Andreessen: . . .So you’re in this sandwich from all of your constituents, and then you’ve got the press coming at you. You’ve got the activists coming at you, and then you’ve got the [federal] government coming at you.
Ross Douthat: But wait, the federal government is run by Donald Trump in this period, right?
Andreessen: Not really.
Douthat: I mean, this is the peculiar thing about the narrative, right? You’re saying everyone is possessed by all these fears, and I grant you, they’re powerful fears, but they are in an era when, officially, the Republican Party and Donald Trump are in the White House and have not complete but real power in Washington, D.C.
Andreessen: Well, did they? Like sitting here today, would you describe that Donald Trump ran the federal government between 2016 and 2020?
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Good example of what Duncan Robinson has called UwU smol bean conservatism in this interview with the newly Trumpist venture capital tycoon Marc Andreessen1. Even when Donald Trump was in charge of the government, argues Andreessen, he wasn’t really in charge—that was humanities academics from Pomona, or radicalised twentysomethings agitating for a four-day week, or the deep state, or whoever. This is the same theme from Peter Thiel’s oped complaining that there wasn’t a proper debate about the origins of the coronavirus because of the DISC2, even though Covid hit while Trump was still president.
It’s a beautiful way to hold power without responsibility: anything good that happens is because Trump is amazing (or even, to reference the newly evangelical hedgie Bill Ackman, better than God). Anything bad that happens during his presidency is because he wasn’t really charge. UwU smol bean.
Matt Yglesias says that the 2028 Democratic candidates should “throw Biden under the bus.” Strong agree.
Quick Links
‘Harry wanted to host a series where he interviewed powerful men with complicated stories, like Mark Zuckerberg, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. The concept wasn’t just that the men shared challenging early lives; it was that their experiences made them into sociopaths, or so Harry envisioned, one person familiar with the ideation process says. (The person who worked in media confirms there was a “sociopath podcast.”) The person who worked closely with the couple on audio projects recalls Harry saying, “I have very bad childhood trauma. Obviously. My mother was essentially murdered. What is it about me that didn’t make me one of these bad guys?” To implore a season’s worth of world-famous sociopaths to talk about how they developed sociopathy would be what is referred to in access journalism as “a booking challenge.”’ (Vanity Fair)
“Still, Mr. Musk defended his gaming aptitude, and said in the messages to Mr. Hayes that boosting is commonplace among elite players in Diablo. And two of the mothers of his children have come to his defense. . . [Shivon Zilis] recounted a memory of when he gamed for 17 hours on Christmas Day in 2023.” (NYT)
“Sharp-eyed observers arriving at the airport might notice something else that appeals to those appalled by our devastating loss of national identity: a message from the leader of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum.” Isabel Oakeshott, partner of Reform’s Richard Tice, has relocated to Dubai to avoid creeping sharia, and the VAT on private school fees (Telegraph, archive)
“Richard likes skinny men, so that’s me. But we both have a recent history of younger partners. I am open to the possibility of dating someone in their 50s, but it is probably a bit of a challenge for him and for me.” For some reason (don’t ask) I found this 2010 Celebrity Blind Date from the Guardian, of Richard Fairbrass from Right Said Fred, and Peter Tatchell.
“A member of the Shedunnit Book Club recently introduced me to an acronym that is popular in the fibre arts community: SABLE, which means ‘Stash Acquired Beyond Life Expectancy’.” Caroline Crampton is no longer buying new physical books (No Complaints).
Andrew Sullivan makes the point here that the US is about to have its first (openly) gay Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent: “He was there with his husband and kids in the Congressional hearing: a staggering leap for gay visibility and cred.” And the country also just got its first female White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.
“The current habit of trying to rewrite every princess as a stifled girlboss results in princesses who are genuine moral monsters. But that’s not the only option besides Cinderella.” Thanks to Henry Oliver for tipping me off to this piece about how modern films try to rewrite princesses to be empowered, and instead create hateful girlbosses (Substack).
AI is already all over Hollywood: it was using to Hungarianify Adrien Brody’s dialogue in The Brutalist, and to extend the vocal range of Karla Sofía Gascón, a trans woman, in the musical Emilia Perez. Part of my genius book is concerned with the idea of struggle—we want art, or innovation, to have cost something. That gives it meaning. So I’m surprised that the film-makers here have been open about their use of AI, which some people will feel intuitively is somehow “cheating” (even though everything in a film is kind of cheating). (The Guardian).
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“The cutesy emoticon is a staple of a certain corner of the internet, in which grown-ups speak to each other in an infantile tone (“I’m just a smol bean”) and adopt feigned helplessness. What is grating enough online is much worse coming from a g7 government. The Conservatives, who have spent 14 years running Britain, increasingly subscribe to a narrative that they were a mere bit-part player, rather than its main actor. . . That the errors of each era—undermining public services via austerity, leaving the European Union or putting Mr Johnson in charge during a time of national emergency—were Conservative-made is ignored. UwU.” (The Economist)
The Distributed Idea Suppression Complex.
The first photo is the best. Captain America would never wear clogs!
"And two of the mothers of his children have come to his defense. . . [Shivon Zilis] recounted a memory of when he gamed for 17 hours on Christmas Day in 2023.”
hahahahahaha! Well that's a stand-up defense. Oh the difficulties of trying to not look terrible when you kind of are.