A world of cartoon villains
What about being rich or super-rich infantilizes people? President Donald Trump “ultimately was a child,” Senate Majority Leader told CNN’s Jamie Gangel in a joint interview with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
On Thursday, Trump premiered as a “major announcement” a line of eponymous trading cards of himself costumed as a child’s idea of what to be when they grow up (including a superhero). In the launch video, Trump, “hopefully your favorite president, better than Lincoln, better than Washington” offered the collection of digital cards for $99 each. Not even a Bond villain is this full of himself.
Thursday night, Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, pitched an online tantrum and ejected over a half dozen national journalists from his site.
Reporters from CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post, and video-clip impresario Aaron Rupar had accounts suspended. Musk accused them of posting “basically assassination coordinates” for him and his family. The Washington Post refutes that claim:
The suspensions came without warning or initial explanation from Twitter. They took place a day after Twitter changed its policy on sharing “live location information” and suspended an account, @ElonJet, that had been using public flight data to share the location of Musk’s private plane.
Many of the journalists suspended Thursday, including Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell, had been covering that rule change, as well as Musk’s claims that he and his family had been endangered by location sharing.
Musk also suspended a Twitter account encouraging users to move to Mastodon. The site gained over one million new accounts in the two weeks after Musk acquired Twitter and laid off half the staff.
Twitter did not directly respond to questions about the suspensions. But Musk suggested on Twitter, without evidence, that the journalists had revealed private information about his family, known as doxing. “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” he tweeted late Thursday.
Harwell, whose most recent stories covered the ban of @ElonJet and the rise of baseless claims on Twitter, discovered he was unable to log into his account or tweet around 7:30 p.m. Thursday.
Musk claimed the suspensions would last a week, but Twitter told some reporters their bans were permanent, the Post adds. Later Thursday night, “he took a Twitter poll on when he should reinstate the accounts — but restarted it after a plurality of respondents said he should do so immediately.”
Some are born infantile, some achieve it, and great wealth infantilizes others. How and why requires more time (and research) than a blogger can muster in short order.
Brian Klaas in his newsletter ponders why so many of our political figures resemble cartoon villains:
Trump, of course, is ridiculous, but think about the other scions of Trumpworld. Matt Gaetz, with his big, vampiric hair, coiffed with one bottle of gel per outing into the sunlight; Roger Stone, a septuagenarian dandy who dresses like Batman’s Penguin, complete with a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back; Steve Bannon, who clearly thinks showers are a deep state plot; and Lauren Boebert, who would marry a gun if Colorado law allowed it.
In the attention economy flamboyance — being a misfit or weirdo — is the fast track to fame. Earning it through hard work and accomplishment is old school in a world of internet “influencers.”
You probably would recognize Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi, and both of them dress normally. They are well-known not because they’re weirdos, but because they’re legitimately powerful through the ordinary channels of politics: they were elected to influential roles within Congress. They followed the Put Your Time In path to power, in which they worked their way up through the ranks, patiently, over decades.
But people like Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert (or Marjorie Taylor Greene for that matter, who is another level of crazy), aren’t patient. They’re not about to spend decades waiting their turn, because they’re political influencers, not politicians. Marjorie Taylor Greene had her committee assignments stripped from her in the last Congress, which would normally be disastrous for a politician. Not so for her, because it amplified her ability to speak as an outsider. She became a national darling of the MAGA right.
They’ve recognized how the attention economy works and used it to hack democracy, to infantilize and degrade it.
The problem, then, is that our modern system is designed to attract these people. Some of them already were cartoon caricatures, and they’d just be larger-than-life villains and crooks if they hadn’t entered politics. Others have come into the system, realized the rewards system, and slowly become cartoon versions of themselves. But either way, it’s disastrous, because what’s being rewarded is the opposite of competence. It’s all flash, no substance. And being crazy—and looking like it—can help you win elections.
The country elected a game-show host and con man as president in 2016 over perhaps the best-qualified candidate ever to run for the office. America was not buying competence and it shows, doesn’t it?
Happy Hollandaise everyone! If you’d like to throw a little something in the old Hullabaloo stocking, it would be most appreciated.