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No… it’s a dystopian society

This piece by Mark Sumner at DKos summarizes our current dilemma and it’s horrifying:

The aphorism “an armed society is a polite society” is a frequently used saying among gun supporters on the right. It’s also been featured on banners, buttons, and T-shirts from the National Rifle Association. But no one ever seems to ask what it really means.

This is what it means. All of this. It means in a society with more guns than people, even the slightest provocation ends with someone getting shot.

The origin of the phrase, usually described as “a Robert Heinlein quote,” is actually the dystopian novel “Beyond This Horizon.” The antihero of his novel is a privileged product of eugenics who happily shoots people for the slightest infraction, real or perceived.

The context of the quote—which ends with the character saying, “We do not have enough things to kill off the weak and the stupid these days, but to stay alive as an armed citizen a man has to be either quick with his wits or with his hands, preferably both”—rarely makes a T-shirt or bumper sticker. Neither does the novel’s lavish praise of eugenics, telepathic powers, and general weirdness.

But even if it were a fictional quote taken completely out of context, the saying turns out to be true, in a way. In a sufficiently armed society, any small transgression is met with bullets. America is sufficiently armed.

The shooting of Kinsley White and her family—that’s the 6-year-old who tried to chase down a basketball—illustrates this perfectly.

As reported by The Guardian, several neighborhood children were playing basketball when the ball bounced away and rolled into the yard of 25-year-old Robert Singletary. Singletary responded by screaming and cursing at the children. The ages of all the children weren’t given, but this included screaming and cursing directed toward at least one kindergarten-aged girl. In response, one of the fathers told Singletary he needed to stop yelling at children, and that if he had a problem, he needed to come over to the adults and work it out. Instead, Singletary went into his house, got a gun, came back outside, and began shooting.

Somewhere in this process, Kinsley White’s father also grabbed a gun and returned fire. Singletary unloaded at least one full clip, hitting Kinsley’s father, the father of another child present, and leaving Kinsley with bullet fragments in her cheek.

“Why did you shoot my daddy and me?” Kinsley said into the camera in an interview with a local television station. “Why did you shoot a kid’s dad?”

If you were ever a child in this country, or likely any country, you’re bound to have run into a situation like this at some point. The neighborhood asshole who yells at any kid who steps on his perfect grass, or who has some utterly nuts feelings about the inviolability of his patch of earth. The guy who, old or not, screams, “Get off my lawn!” or something worse at the first provocation. Maybe that’s the end of it. Maybe it comes down to two neighbor guys squaring off across the invisible boundary between one patch of green and the next and glaring at each other. Oh yeah? Yeah! That’s not how things work in an armed society.

As USA Today reported in March, the United States is also seeing a sharp increase in “road rage” incidents that lead to shootings. Among the more than 550 incidents last year were a man who was shot while driving kids to a birthday party when he asked another driver to slow down, and a man who was shot while driving his son home from a Little League game. As states drop requirements on concealed carry, these incidents continue to rise.

In an armed society, the perceived insult of being asked not to cuss at a child is a shooting offense. Opening someone’s car door is a shooting offense. Pulling into a driveway where the owner was tired of people using their little stretch of blacktop to turn around is a shooting offense. Asking someone to slow down is a shooting offense. Anything that might have ended with an exchange of fists, or just hot words, a raised finger behind a window, or even with one person just mumbling under their breath is a shooting offense.

That’s the point of the saying. In an armed society, you don’t dare offend anyone, at any time, about anything. Because everything, no matter how trivial, is a shooting offense.

America … is an armed society. We’ve reached that dystopia where a child fetching a basketball, or a cheerleader touching the wrong car on her way back from practice, or a kid stepping onto the wrong porch doesn’t get words or glares. It gets bullets.

Forget for a moment the big shooting sprees, those in which someone decides to show that their wonder weapon is capable of wiping out a school full of children, or a crowded nightclub, or an office packed with former coworkers. These incidents aren’t about plans drawn up by people who spent weeks making those final adjustments to their manifestos.

These are such tiny, ordinary, everyday events that they should be forgotten in a moment. That guy next door? Sorry, I don’t remember. What was his name again? Except they turn into trauma, or injury, that can last a lifetime. Or they cut that lifetime hugely short. The guy who thought you turned in front of him at the stoplight becomes the most important figure in your life, and the life of your family. Because, when you add a gun, every momentary loss of control is a murderous rage.

This is what gun culture has brought us and the people who love their guns more than their children are happy about it. They’ve turned every disagreement into a potentially lethal encounter. How can we live among these people?

NYT:

At a town hall in New Hampshire on Thursday, Chris Christie cited a long list of promises that former President Donald J. Trump failed to deliver on while in office. Above all else, however, he expressed disgust at the idea that Republicans would consider renominating Mr. Trump after he “undermined our democracy” by lying about the 2020 election and inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

The event took place on the campus of New England College. After several gray-haired attendees asked Mr. Christie about Medicare, prescription drug prices and the like, a 15-year-old audience member named Quinn Mitchell — who had also heard Mr. Christie strike similar themes a month earlier in New Hampshire — spoke up.

A Question for Chris Christie

“I heard you say that one of the reasons you endorsed Trump is that you really did not want Clinton to be president in 2016. And now, based on recent knowledge that Trump was arrested — Trump was prosecuted on criminal charges — do you think that Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton would have been the better bet for democracy in 2016?”

The Subtext

Mr. Christie, who is exploring a 2024 Republican presidential bid, has positioned himself as the one G.O.P. hopeful willing to attack Mr. Trump. But a well-crafted question from Mr. Mitchell got to the heart of a contradiction in Mr. Christie’s posture, forcing him to own his support for the man he had just forcefully denounced.

Chris Christie’s Answer

“Hillary Clinton, in many, many ways, was a huge detriment to our democracy too. The American people had in 2016 the biggest hold-your-nose-and-vote choice they ever had. And so, look, philosophically, some of the stuff that Trump did accomplish is more in line with what I believe than what Hillary would have tried to accomplish. So I still would’ve picked Trump.”

The Subtext

Mr. Christie’s answer was revealing. As much of a threat to democracy as he had just declared Mr. Trump to be, Mr. Christie, the former New Jersey governor, could not bring himself to say that Hillary Clinton would have been the better choice to preserve democracy.

Story continues below advertisement

Mr. Christie’s unwillingness to declare that he would have voted for a Democrat if he had known what was coming gets to the heart of the dilemma for anti-Trump candidates. It’s why true Never Trumpers don’t trust candidates like Mr. Christie, who endorsed Mr. Trump in 2016 and in 2020 and served as an outside adviser while Mr. Trump was president. At the same time, Mr. Christie is making the straightforward political calculation that a would-be 2024 Republican who acknowledged that Mrs. Clinton would have been the better president would be dead in any G.O.P. primary.

The moment also highlighted the challenge that almost every current or potential Republican primary candidate faces against Mr. Trump: Almost all of them, some of whom served in his administration, have a history of praising or supporting Mr. Trump during his presidency — words that can be expected to come back to haunt them.

Hillary Clinton was not a threat to democracy fergawdsakes. And why didn’t they ask if he voted for Biden? Is any Democrat just as much of a threat to democracy? Please.

This is all just Christie posing as a tough guy again when we all know he’s just a second rate bully who is too scared to tell the truth to Trump’s slavering mob. Say what you will about Liz Cheney but she has much bigger balls than this fool.

Here’s another from Mark Liebovich:

“How many different ways are you gonna ask the same fucking question, Mark?” Chris Christie asked me. We were seated in the dining room of the Hay-Adams hotel. It’s a nice hotel, five stars. Genteel.

Christie’s sudden ire was a bit jolting, as I had asked him only a few fairly innocuous questions so far, most of them relating to Donald Trump, the man he might run against in the presidential race. Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, was visiting Washington as part of his recent tour of public deliberations about whether to launch another campaign.

Color me dubious. It’s unclear what makes Christie think the Republican Party might magically revert to some pre-Trump incarnation. Or, for that matter, what makes him think a campaign would go any better than his did seven years ago, the last time Christie ran, when he won exactly zero delegates and dropped out of the Republican primary after finishing sixth in New Hampshire.

But still, color me vaguely intrigued too—more so than I am about, say, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson. If Christie runs again in 2024, he could at least serve a compelling purpose: The gladiatorial Garden Stater would be better at poking the orange bear than would potential rivals Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, and Nikki Haley, who so far have offered only the most flaccid of critiques. Over the past few months, Christie has been among the more vocal and willing critics of Trump. Notably, he became the first Republican would-be 2024 candidate to say he would not vote for the former president again in a general election.

Christie makes for an imperfect kamikaze candidate, to say the least. But he does seem genuine in his desire to retire his doormat act and finally take on his former patron and intermittent friend. Which was why I found myself having breakfast with Christie earlier this week, eager to hear whether he was really going to challenge Trump and how hard he was willing to fight. Strangely, he seemed more eager to fight with me.

It was a weird breakfast. Shortly after 8 a.m. on Wednesday, Christie strolled through the ornate dining room of the Hay-Adams, where he had spent the previous few nights. He was joined by his longtime aide Maria Comella. We sat near a window, with a view of the White House across Lafayette Square, and about 100 feet from the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, where Trump had staged his ignominious Bible photo op three springs ago.

I started off by asking Christie about his statement that he would not vote for Trump, even if the former president were the Republican nominee. “I think Trump has disqualified himself from the presidency,” Christie said.

So what would Christie do, then—vote for Joe Biden? Nope. “The guy is physically and mentally not up to the job,” Christie said.

Just to be clear, I continued, this hellscape he was currently suffering under in Biden’s America would be as bad as whatever a next-stage Trump presidency would look like?

“Elections are about choices,” Christie said, as he often does. So whom would he choose in November 2024, if he’s faced with a less-than-ideal choice? “I probably just wouldn’t vote,” he said.

Interesting choice! I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a politician admit to planning not to vote, but it’s at least preferable to that cutesy “I’m writing in Ronald Reagan” or “I’m writing in my pal Ned” evasion that some do.

I pressed on, curious to see how committed Christie really was to his recent swivel away from Trump, or whether this was just his latest opportunistic interlude before his inevitable belly flop back into the Mar-a-Lago lagoon. Say Trump secures the nomination, and most of his formal “rivals”—and various other “prominent Republicans”—revert to doormat mode. (“I will support the nominee,” “Biden is senile,” etc.) What’s Christie going to be saying then, vis-à-vis Trump?

We were exactly seven minutes into our discussion, and my mild dubiousness seemed to set Christie off. His irritation felt a tad performative, as if he might be playing up his Jersey-tough-guy bit.

“I’m not going to dwell on this, Mark,” Christie said. “You guys drive me crazy. All you want to do is talk about Trump. I’m sorry, I don’t think he’s the only topic to talk about in politics. And I’m not going to waste my hour with you this morning—which is a joy and a gift—on just continuing talking, asking, and answering the Donald Trump question from 18 different angles.”

I pivoted to DeSantis, mostly in an attempt to un-trigger Christie. Christie has made a persuasive case that DeSantis has been a disaster as an almost-candidate so far, especially with regard to his feud with Disney. But would Christie support DeSantis if he were to somehow defeat Trump and become the nominee?

“I have to see how he performs as a candidate,” Christie said. “I really don’t know Ron DeSantis all that well … I’m going to be a discerning voter,” Christie added. “I’m going to watch what everybody does, and I’m gonna to decide who I’m gonna vote for.” (Reminder: unless it’s Trump or Biden.)

I had a few more follow-ups. “So, I know you don’t want to talk about Trump …”

“Here we are, back to Trump again,” Christie said, shaking his head.

Trump, I mentioned, has been the definitional figure in the Republican Party for the past seven or eight years, and probably will remain so for the next few. Not only that, but Christie’s history with Trump—especially from 2016 to 2021—was pretty much the only thing that made him more relevant than, say, Hutchinson (respectfully!) or any other Republican polling at less than 1 percent.

This was when Christie lit into me for asking him “the same fucking question.” Look, I said, at least 40 or 50 percent of the GOP remains very much in thrall to Trump, if you believe poll numbers.

Christie questioned my premise: “No matter what statistics you cite, what polls you cite, that’s a snapshot in the moment, and I don’t think those are static numbers.”

“It’s been true for about seven years,” I replied. “That’s pretty static.”

“But he’s been as high as 85 to 90 percent,” Christie said, referring to Trump’s Republican-approval ratings in the past. There will always be variance, he argued, but those approval ratings would be much smaller now. Christie then accused me of being “obsessed” with Trump.

At this point, Christie was raising his voice rather noticeably again, an agitated wail that brought to mind Wilma Flintstone’s vacuum. I was becoming self-conscious about potentially disturbing other diners in this elegant salle à manger.

A waiter came over again and asked if we wanted any food. Christie, who was sipping a cup of hot tea, demurred, and I ordered a Diet Coke and a bowl of mixed berries. “What a fascinating combination,” Christie marveled.

I told Christie that I hoped that he would in fact run, if only because he would be better equipped to be pugilistic than the other milksops in the field. Obviously, it would have been better if Christie had taken his best shots at the big-bully front-runner seven years ago instead of largely standing down, quitting the race, and then leading the GOP’s collective bum-rush to Trump. But he has grown a lot and learned a lot since then, Christie assured me.

“I certainly won’t do the same thing in 2024 that I did in 2016,” Christie said. “You can bank on that.”

“Well, I would hope not,” I said. This seemed to reignite his pique.

“What do you mean, I hope?” Christie snapped. He took umbrage that I would question the sincerity of his opposition to Trump: “How about just paying attention to everything I’ve said over the last eight weeks?”

I told him that I had paid attention to what he said about Trump over the past eight years. Christie nodded and seemed to acknowledge that maybe I had a point, that some skepticism might be warranted.

I asked Christie if he had any regrets about anything.

“I have regrets about every part of my life, Mark,” he said.

Whoa.

“And anybody who says they don’t is lying.”

That said, Christie added, he would not change anything about his past dealings and relationship with Trump. He is always reminding people that he and Trump were friends long before 2016; that they went way back, 22 years or so. Christie told me that he and Trump have not spoken in two years. Did he miss Trump?

“Not particularly,” he said.

Do you think he misses you?

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“I do,” Christie said.

“Has he called, or tried to reach out?”

“No, that wouldn’t be his style,” Christie told me. “That would be too ego-violative.” (I made a mental note that I’d never before heard the term ego-violative.)

“But I do think he misses me, yeah. I think he misses people who tell him what the truth is. I think he misses that.

JFC. He’s just trying to get some attention in a world that no longer finds him relevant. He’s pathetic.

The right has on a full-court press to suppress the votes of black, brown, and young voters, voting rights attorney Marc Elias told Nicolle Wallace Friday afternoon. For the left, this is not an organizing or a messaging problem, Elias continued.

Not to put Jeff Sharlet’s words in Elias’ mouth, but the right is waging a cold civil war against voting rights. Against democracy itself. He was reacting to statements by GOP attorney Cleta Mitchell about targeting college students for suppression tactics.

"One of the most prominent Republican lawyers, talking at the RNC about how they can go about preventing college students from voting…the 26th Amendment was passed precisely to ensure the right of young voters to vote" – @marceelias w/ @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/ft0L4eEgGT

— Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) April 21, 2023

Frank Schaeffer, son of the late evangelical mover and shaker, Francis Schaeffer, appeared later on The ReidOut with a rant against Christian nationalists. I can’t find the video just now, but it was chilling.

These people are true believers, Schaeffer said emphatically. They want to turn the U.S. into an evangelical version of Iran. I’ve lived among these people. Do not doubt it.

The problem for the left is that too few of us lack their conviction and commitment. Our deer in the headlights approach will end only one way.

LIVE NOW: On The ReidOut with Joy Reid talking about the Supreme Court ruling and Christian Nationalism. pic.twitter.com/rVDgqYuvFQ

— Frank-STOP-Christian-Nationalists-Schaeffer (@Frank_Schaeffer) April 21, 2023

Whiteness is a free pass, ain’t it?

This police story died a quick death because no one else did (Raw Story):

A Jan. 6 defendant opened fire on cops who had been sent to check on him hours after he was told he’d been charged with participating in the storming of the Capitol, the Department of Justice said in a news release.

Nathan Donald Pelham, 40, of Greenville, Texas, was taken into custody after a standoff that lasted nearly three hours. He was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm in connection with the April 12 incident.

No injuries were reported in connection with the shootings.

The previous day he had been charged with four misdemeanor counts in connection with the attack on the Capitol. An FBI agent told him of the charges hours before the shooting and told him he had been given until April 17 to surrender.

Pelham was facing misdemeanor charges for a) Entering and Remaining in a Restricted Building or Grounds; b) Disorderly and Disruptive Conduct in a Restricted Building or Grounds; c) Disorderly Conduct in a Capitol Building or Grounds; and d) Parading, Demonstrating, or Picketing in a Building.

Over that, Pelham allegedly fired on sheriff’s deputies from inside his house, then walked out onto his porch an hour later and allegedly fired more shots, threatening harm to police and risking death for himself. Police drove off after midnight. He was arrested later, although news accounts disagree on how or when.

NYT and AP differ on whether it took cops a whole day or nearly a week to return and arrest the Jan. 6 defendant who OPENED FIRE ON THEM. Admirable restraint. They should try it on brown people sometime. https://t.co/L69WrAb2dw https://t.co/LAyuTkG5cM

— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) April 20, 2023

Dan Froomkin and Spocko are as flabbergasted as I am.

Yep. Remember this white man who pointed his gun at federal officials? He got away with it.
"The jury found Idaho resident Eric Parker, 34, not guilty of 6 charges, & hung on 4 counts, including brandishing a firearm & assaulting a federal officer."https://t.co/XzFqqGPcCG pic.twitter.com/ek8PRMN8mh

— Spocko (@spockosbrain) April 21, 2023

Where’s the standard-issue “I felt threatened” excuses? Ah, the police didn’t kill anyone.

Is it whiteness alone or is there a secret hand signal that the brothers exchange between gunshots? I’m not criticizing the deputies for driving away and not calling in a SWAT team to gun down Pelham on the spot. Avoiding bloodshed was the mature, sensible thing to do. But does anyone believe the cops would have allowed a Black man who fired on them to leave in anything other than a body bag?

Pupper edition:

This week, authorities from Colorado’s Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office announced the hiring-on of two adorable new officers — K9 Otis and K9 Bear — who’ll be serving as therapy animals at local schools.

To mark the occasion, the handsome pups were even asked to sit for an official portrait, complete with their own littles vests and badges.

But apparently getting in on the job can sure tucker one out.

Of the two new officers, black Lab Otis appears to be the more spirited pup.

Chocolate Lab Bear, meanwhile, comes across as a tad more subdued.

Otis and Bear’s contrasting energy levels were on full display during the pair’s official swearing-in ceremony.

In front of the assembled crowd and amid the heraldry of that grand occasion, Otis looked bright-eyed and bubbly, pausing just long enough to offer his paw while being read the oath.

Bear, on the other hand, seemed a bit drowsy — struggling at times to even stay awake on his and Otis’ big day.

(To Bear’s credit, though, he did perk up enough in the end to lead a fun puppy play-fight.)

Politico Playbook has an item like this every day now:

NEW 2024 POLLS — “Donald Trump Tops Ron DeSantis in Test of GOP Presidential Field, WSJ Poll Finds,” by WSJ’s Alex Leary: “DONALD TRUMP has gained command of the GOP presidential-nomination race over RON DeSANTIS. … Mr. DeSantis’s 14-point advantage in December has fallen to a 13-point deficit, and he now trails Mr. Trump 51% to 38% among likely Republican primary voters in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup.“ Read the full results

… “Poll: Biden 2024 splits Dems but most would back him in Nov.,” by AP’s Seung Min Kim and Emily Swanson: “Only about half of Democrats think President JOE BIDEN should run again in 2024, a new [AP-NORC] poll shows, but … 78% of them say they approve of the job he’s doing as president. And a total of 81% of Democrats say they would at least probably support Biden in a general election.”

DON’T SAY ‘HEY’ — This week, we’ve brought you stories about DeSantis’s off-putting social skills and lack of personal relationships with fellow Republican elected officials (including those from Florida).

Yesterday, we got a surprising email from a reader who had his own DeSantis story to share. We at Playbook get all types of scoops, tips and announcements but for obvious reasons, this one caught our eye.

“I sat right next to DeSantis for two years on the Foreign Affairs Committee, and he never said a single word to me,” it read. “I was new to Congress, and he didn’t introduce himself or even say hello.”

It was from former Rep. DAVID TROTT (R-Mich.). We called him up to talk about it.

“I go to my first [House Foreign Affairs Committee] hearing early, and DeSantis showed up right at the gavel time and didn’t say hello or introduce himself,” Trott said. “And then the next hearing, the same thing happened. I think the third time it happened, I thought, ‘Oh, this guy’s not ever going to say hello to me.’”

Eventually, Trott took the initiative and introduced himself to DeSantis. And he could see that the Florida congressman had a certain something.

“He’s got an ability to size up the electorate and figure out what issues and hot buttons he needs to press to advance his political ambitions,” Trott said. “There’s no question there’s a talent there. No taking that away from him.”

But equally apparent to Trott was what DeSantis was missing.

“If you’re going to go into politics, kind of a fundamental skill that you should have is likability. I don’t think [he] has that,” Trott said. “He never developed any relationships with other members that I know of. You’d never see him talking on the floor with other people or palling around. He’s just a very arrogant guy, very focused on Ron DeSantis.”

Given that, Trott isn’t surprised that so many members of the Florida delegation are opting to endorse Trump over their own governor.

“He wasn’t really liked when he was in Congress. And now it’s coming home to, you know, prove out as some of the Florida delegation endorsed Trump and and some of the donors, you know, think he’s kind of awkward in terms of how he interacts with them,” Trott said. “If his pre-presidential campaign was playing out differently, then I’d say, ‘Well, maybe he just didn’t like me.’ But I think there’s something more at work here.”

In short, said Trott, “I think he’s an asshole. I don’t think he cares about people.”

This narrative is really starting to take hold. And it’s coming from Republicans who know the guy. Sure, they might be Trump supporters (that’s the smart move) but this is very personal stuff.

I believe it. He’s an asshole.

JV Last has an interesting disquisition on the demise of Buzzfeed news. I’m pretty sure he’s right about this.

Yesterday BuzzFeed announced that it was killing its News division. This is bad for readers, because BuzzFeed News was very good. But it’s also instructive. Because the story of BuzzFeed isn’t really about BuzzFeed. It’s not even really about journalism. It’s about aggregation, monopsony, and the power of platforms.

To explain it, we’re going to have to talk about Wal-Mart. And pickles.

So buckle up and take a journey with me.

Two weeks ago we talked about what the slow-motion decline of Twitter meant to the news business. The death of BuzzFeed News is another part of that story.

The advent of social media seemed like a boon for for journalism because it introduced a new pathway for readers to discover news stories. The big mover here was Facebook, obviously, and the premise was that social could deliver more eyeballs to an individual piece than your publication ever could have gotten, as an institution, on its own. The theory was that these eyeballs would lead to revenue.

The idea at the bottom of us this was that news stories should be unbundled from their publications, both as a matter of distribution and revenue generation. Instead of having 10,000 people subscribing to the South Saginaw Gazette so that they could read the pieces it published, the Gazette would publish a piece on the internet and Facebook (and to a much lesser extent Twitter and Instagram) would deliver 5 million readers to it.

These new readers would never read the Gazette again. Hell, they wouldn’t even know that they had read it. The Gazette’s piece was just another glob of content sliding down their feed.

But 5,000,000 >>> 10,000.

And there were ad dollars attached to those page views. So publishers put aside their subscription businesses and chased the social media spigot.

Unlike legacy news organizations, BuzzFeed was designed specifically for the social media spigot. In fact, they pioneered a new form of advertising: house-written sponsored content. For a while, the joke about BuzzFeed was that it was the only ad agency in America with a news division.¹

Yet from where I sat during this period in the business, the entire social-media model for the news looked like a terrible mistake.

It reminded me of The Wal-Mart Effect.

2. Pickles

If you haven’t read Charles Fishman’s book, The Wal-Mart Effect, you should. Like, right now. It’s an incredibly powerful story not just about the specific power of Wal-Mart, but about the general power of aggregation in networks.

The basic precis is this:

If you are a company that sells pickles, and Wal-Mart comes to you and offers to sell your pickle jars, that seems very good for your business.

Wal-Mart is the biggest retailer in America. Ovenight the total number of pickle jars you can sell annually increases by a very large factor. With this new revenue you can hire more workers and build more pickle factories, which should increase your economies of scale and therefore increase your profits.

The problem is that Wal-Mart is an activist retailer—they are constantly pressuring their suppliers to lower prices. Sometimes their demands of suppliers lead to helpful innovations: As Fishman reported in his book, the reason deodorant no longer comes in a cardboard box is because Wal-Mart told deodorant makers to stop putting the sticks in boxes so they could save money and lower the price. This also lowered paper consumption and was good for the environment.

But sometimes Wal-Mart’s demands are catastrophic for suppliers. Fishman has a number of case studies in the book: companies which make lawn mowers, or orange juice, or pickels, who were pushed into extinction because Wal-Mart demanded that they cut costs so often that their businesses became unsustainable.

Why did these suppliers go along with Wal-Mart’s demands? Because Wal-Mart was such a large portion of their sales that they had no choice. Once your product is being sold in Wal-Mart, you cannot afford for it not to be sold in Wal-Mart. If you walk away from Wal-Mart, there is no alternate retail pathway on which to unload the excess volume you now make.

And from Wal-Mart’s perspective, even if your pickle company goes bankrupt trying to meet their pricing demands, that’s fine. Because there are 20 other pickle companies who will jump at the chance to 10x their sales when they’re summoned to Arkansas.

As one CEO told Fishman for his book, the experience of agreeing to let Wal-Mart sell his company’s product was like getting in bed with the mafia. He got squeezed and squeezed until his business died. And then Wal-Mart moved on to the next supplier.

As an economic matter, Wal-Mart and Facebook are the same. Both are aggregators. Wal-Mart of retail products; Facebook of content. Both have such massive scale that they have the power to supercharge any supplier who gains access to their platform. If you sold pickles at Wal-Mart, your business grew. If you published articles that succeeded on Facebook, your business grew.

But neither Wal-Mart nor Facebook have any economic interest in the health of their suppliers. They need suppliers in the aggregate—they need goods on the shelves and articles in the feed. But if any specific supplier (your pickle company, BuzzFeed News) goes out of business—that doesn’t matter to them. Because there are a million others waiting to take their place.

And that is the story of the social media age of news.

Media companies became so beholden to the massive power of social platforms that they had to optimize their content for them. Even if optimizing content for social was bad for your core business. Once you got on the social media crack pipe, there was no getting off.

This dynamic was replayed thousands of times over the last 15 years in American media, from the South Saginaw Gazette to BuzzFeed News.

One of the things these media outlets learned over the last decade is that while they evolved so that they needed Facebook in order to survive, Facebook didn’t need them. At all.

Just like Wal-Mart.

3. You Are a Platform

I have always resisted getting in bed with aggregators. In my days running digital for The Weekly Standard, I liked everyone I met at Facebook and thought that they were very smart. But their interests clearly did not align with my interests. And I wasn’t going to let my publication’s survival get tethered to an aggregator.

At one point circa 2012 Facebook offered to give the Standard a very large amount of money to help us pivot to video. I declined because it was clear to me, even at the time, that “pivot to video” would eventually become a macabre joke.

The fundamental problem with aggregators in the news business is that the publications themselves are supposed to be the aggregator.

What is the New York Times, or the Atlantic, or The Bulwark, but an aggregation of news content? Once you, as a publication, disaggregate your content so that other platforms can aggregate it along with content from everywhere else, then you have begun to give away your economic power.

There is an absolute version of this: Imagine a print publication that never appears online. This is the ultimate moat against disaggregation. And while such an arrangement is still possible in a networked world, it’s not ideal.

The goal for media companies is to titrate the optimal point where your institution allows enough disaggregation of content to seed wider interest in the whole—but not so much that it gives away the greatest part of its economic power.

The key concept is that every media organization should see itself as a platform. Which means prioritizing a direct relationship with the audience over everything else.

That’s the future of the media business. Period.²

We’re already underway in this shift.

That’s what over-the-top streaming services are. Disney owns its relationship with you through Disney+ in a way it never could when the Disney Channel was part of your cable bundle.

That’s what podcasts are.³ People tend to think about podcasting as an alternate form of radio, but that’s not right. A podcast is a direct feed from creator to listener that prevents the station manager or the network executive from aggregating the creator’s work with others’.

That’s what the New York Times and the Atlantic have done by prioritizing their subscription audiences and getting away from Facebook.

And that’s what Substack and the newsletter revolution is.⁴

And that’s what blogs like this are too.

And they aren’t trying to hide it

Here’s one of them:

“If you take a man and they dress up as a woman and you tell me I have to accept that they’re a woman, then you're asking me to be complicit in a lie,” @RonDeSantisFL tells @bennyjohnson.

“I refuse to do that.”

pic.twitter.com/NAf59F7zDA

— DeSantis War Room 🐊 (@DeSantisWarRoom) April 18, 2023

Yep. I have no doubt there were plenty of men just like him who used to say about Black people, “if you take a Black man and tell me I have to accept that they’re equal then you’re asking me to be complicit in a lie. I refuse to do that.” They probably also said, “If you take a woman and tell me I have to accept they’re equal to a man then you’re asking me to be complicit in a lie.” I’m sure they said, “If you take a homosexual and tell me I have to accept that they have a right to marry just like a normal person, you’re asking me to be complicit in a lie.” They refused to accept all those obvious realities until they had to. But even now, they still believe they are lies.

These people are just so cruel. It’s grotesque.

Representative Zooey Zephyr took to the floor of the Montana Legislature on Tuesday to make an impassioned plea for her colleagues to reject a bill that would ban transition care for transgender minors, saying that denying such care would be “tantamount to torture.”

“This body should be ashamed,” Ms. Zephyr, a first-term Democrat and the Legislature’s first transgender member, said. “If you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.”

The Montana Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative lawmakers, responded by accusing Ms. Zephyr in a letter of “attempting to shame the legislative body” by using “hateful rhetoric.” The letter, which misgendered Ms. Zephyr, called for her to be censured.

On Thursday, however, the House adjourned without taking that step. It was unclear if they planned to take up the matter on Friday.

I would ask why in the world these people care so much but we know why. They’re frightened of anything they don’t understand and that fear determines their whole worldview. Being bullies toward vulnerable people makes them feel powerful. For a moment. Here’s one now:

Junior says trans people are terrorists, and Democrats “won’t even call them the terrorists that they are. They won’t call them the most privileged class in the country. Because if you’re trans, you can do whatever you want!” pic.twitter.com/amx6YR8O0M

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 21, 2023

It’s like something out of a dystopian novel. It’s a nightmare. And you can’t say that it’s just because they don’t know anyone who is trans. They are doing this right to this woman’s face, without any compunction. To misgender her, the way the Great White Hope of the GOP establishment Ron DeSantis, is the equivalent of white legislators calling a Black membr of the body the “N” word back in the day and then censuring him for daring to object.

It’s always something with these bigots. They are such small, empty, soulless people that they simply can’t accept living in this world with people who believe they have a right to exist and thrive as equal citizens.

Folks need to absorb the fact that Meatball Ron is hitting Marco and Jeb! levels of dignity loss and it's only just starting. https://t.co/N26vQd9J2t via @TPM

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 20, 2023

Tallahassee lawmakers are frustrated with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) as he tries to use this year’s legislative session to score political points with MAGA voters ahead of his expected presidential run, Politico first reported.

Republicans in Florida’s state legislature, which currently has a GOP supermajority, have reportedly begun stalling some of the governor’s legislative priorities, like taking aim at Disney, as their own bills languish in the background. 

“We’re not the party of cancel culture,” an anonymous GOP legislator told Politico. “We can’t keep doing this tit for tat.”

“I think our Republican colleagues are done,” state Sen. Jason Pizzo (D) told the outlet. “I think they are fed up. There’s obviously still some true believers and there’s some very loyal and allegiant individuals and groups … They would like him to hurry up and announce and start focusing exclusively on other stuff other than here.”

The governor has used the legislative session to usher through bills that could bolster a future presidential platform: Bills banning abortion after six weeks, letting people conceal-carry guns without a permit, and loosening death-penalty requirements have all passed in recent weeks. 

Former state senator Jeff Brandes (R) told the outlet that legislators are “deeply frustrated” by Desantis’ zeal for using his party’s supermajority in the statehouse to make headlines and get attention at a national level ahead of an expected 2024 announcement.

“They are not spending any time on the right problems,” he said. “Most legislators believe that the balance of power has shifted too far and the Legislature needs to re-establish itself as a coequal branch of government.”

But House Speaker Paul Renner (R) rushed to the governor’s defense. “We’re doing the very things we campaigned on, we’re governing as we campaigned,” he told Politico. “If people are frustrated it’s probably because we had a ton of bills that the governor’s put forward that we in House and Senate leadership have put forward… There’s going to be a ton of other bills that are coming forward.”

DeSantis’ waning popularity isn’t just isolated to the statehouse. As Trump began notching endorsements from Florida’s GOP congressional delegation, the governor’s team contacted a handful of House Republicans to ask them to hold off on any endorsements in the near future.

The tactic hasn’t been super effective: So far only one of the targeted Republicans, Rep. Laurel Lee, has endorsed DeSantis while two of them, Reps. Greg Steube and Vern Buchanan, have opted for Trump. According to TIME, Reps. Gus Bilirakis and Carlos Gimenez are planning to join them. At least one other Florida Republican, Rep. Brian Mast, has announced that he plans to endorse Trump and on Thursday morning, Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) released a statement declaring he’s backing the former president as well.

He’s soon to be reaching Chris Christie levels of humiliation.

There's just one question on Chris Christie's mind. #SuperTuesday pic.twitter.com/sSDnCXgxBE

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) March 2, 2016

Christie, by the way, is considering entering the 24 race but he says he won’t be a “paid assassin.” Hookay…

Same as the old Republicans

There’s a lot of chatter right now about Florida Governor Ron Desantis’ presumed presidential campaign sputtering before it’s even started. Donors are going public with complaints and he’s sinking in the polls while Donald Trump is rising after his indictment in the porn star hush money case. I’m old enough to remember primaries when Bill Clinton was political roadkill, John Kerry was dead in the water and Donald Trump couldn’t possibly win so I wouldn’t count anyone out just yet. But if there’s one thing we do know already, it’s that if DeSantis doesn’t decide to take his ball and go home, the battle will be ferocious.

Even more dismaying is the race to the bottom they’ve already started when it comes to the culture war. DeSantis got off to a strong start with his war against “woke” which consists of attacking everyone from school teachers to teenagers to Disney for failing to be properly cruel to immigrants, transgender kids and Black people. His latest red meat offering to the MAGA base was to sign a bill lowering his previous abortion ban from 15 weeks to 6 weeks and censoring all discussions of LGBTQ issues in Florida public schools through the 12th grade. (This was an expansion of his earlier ban on all such discussions through the 3rd grade.)

Trump has actually been lagging behind on the hatefest but he’s now making some bold moves on that front. Not to be outdone by DeSantis’ all-out assault on trans people, he has promised to “protect children from left-wing gender insanity,” with a series of extreme policy pronouncements including the proposal of a federal law that recognizes only two genders, bars trans women from competing on all women’s sports teams and prohibits all federal money from being spent on gender-affirming health care (which he will ban for minors under all circumstances.)

He also has an innovative plan for the homeless — concentration camps:

Trump says he will outlaw homelessness and arrest everyone who refuses to comply. He will then give them the option to get out of jail to be relocated to new tent cities elsewhere where he will take care of their needs. pic.twitter.com/P5z5ckG8b6

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 18, 2023

Those are just a few highlights of what we can already see are the “issues” that Republicans have decided are at the forefront of Americans’ minds. We have a long year and a half ahead of us as the new generation of authoritarian bigots, DeSantis, demonstrates how he will use the power of the state to attack anyone with whom he disagrees and Trump has finally started to trade in his tiresome Big Lie rant for a forward-looking spiel.

After hearing about Republican donors getting cold feet about DeSantis, Politico reported on a recent RNC donor retreat at which Trump declared that he “single-handedly ‘saved’ the Republican Party from ‘the establishment class’ when he won in 2016” promising that if he were given another term it would make the Republican Party an “unstoppable juggernaut that will dominate American politics for generations to come.” He said the “old Republican Party is gone, and it is never coming back.”

Echelon Insights set out to prove or disprove that last point. Taking a look at some of the underlying trend lines, one of which is whether people consider themselves Trump first or party first, they found that “52% said they are party-first Republicans, while 38% considered themselves primarily Trump supporters.” I don’t know about you but I don’t find that reassuring. 38% of Republicans translates into tens of millions of people, most of whom are clearly radical and extreme if they support a man who wants to put homeless people in concentration camps.

There is some good news. The vast majority of both the Trumpers and Party Firsters don’t want to see Social Security and Medicare cut. Although, according to a newly released Wall Street Journal poll, in which DeSantis’s 14-point advantage over Trump in December has plummeted to a 13-point deficit, “55% of Republicans say that fighting ‘woke ideology in our schools and businesses’ is more important than protecting entitlements from cuts.” 

Trump’s America First foreign policy doesn’t have majority support in the party as a whole and even the Trumpers are almost evenly split. We can, of course, see this divide in Congress on the issue of support for Ukraine.

They all pretty much agree that foreign workers are very bad for America, which means that the GOP’s horrific xenophobia will go uncontested within the party. This does not surprise me. Anti-immigrant fervor has always been a big part of the Republican brand even when the leadership, usually at the behest of some big business libertarian donor types, were pushing their “compassionate conservatism” on the subject. More interesting is where the party is dividing on traditional business issues. More from Echelon:

We asked two questions about the intersection of politics and business and found the party has relatively close divides. When it comes to the topic of “woke capital”, Republicans favor businesses running as they see fit by a 9-point margin. Nor are Republicans necessarily against businesses addressing climate change and taking environmental action on their own…Overall, Republicans say they don’t mind private companies wanting to be environmentally friendly, 54-34.

There remains a lingering muscle memory among Republicans about government interference in private businesses. In this instance, it’s probably a good thing since businesses are responding to their customers’ desires that they be socially responsible. On the other hand, it’s also the sort of ideology that supports the new push among red states to reintroduce child labor into the work force.

As for the culture war issues over which Trump and DeSantis are currently wrestling, the party is actually pretty united:

The social and cultural issues that once defined the GOP in the 2000s and into the 2010s were often ones such as religious liberty and abortion. While both remain live issues today, we wanted to see how those two issues compared to more recent concerns among Republicans today. When we pressed respondents to choose which social challenges concern them most, “radical gender and racial ideologies” are narrowly more concerning to Republicans, whether Trump-first (by a 14-point margin) or party-first (by 10 points.)

What this means, unfortunately, is that any hope that there exists a winning “sane lane” by which some white (of course) knight swoops in and saves the party from the ugly Trump-DeSantis cage match is an illusion. This is the heart of the GOP. They may not agree with Trump on foreign policy or DeSantis on the righteousness of taking on “woke capitalism” but they all agree that teaching kids about racism and allowing transgender people to live their lives in peace is the greatest threat this nation faces. Contrary to popular myth, this bigotry isn’t something they have to push in order to please “the MAGA base.” It’s what binds the whole coalition together. And there’s nothing new about that.