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Even Nobodies Have Fans Now

Even Nobodies Have Fans Now

by | Jan 6, 2020 | Psychology, Society and Culture, Technology/Internet | 0 comments

Outstanding piece by Jamie Lauren Keiles.Well worth your time.

By Jamie Lauren Keiles, via NYTimes

Nick Walters listens to a bunch of different podcasts, but none speak to him the way “Failing Upwards” does. The weekly show, hosted by the men’s-wear enthusiasts and self-proclaimed “grown dirtbags” Lawrence Schlossman and James Harris, undertakes to navigate the “millennial male zeitgeist.” Mostly, they talk about clothes and New York.

Walters, a 24-year-old commercial banker, lives in Cleveland. He first heard about the show from a friend and recognized himself not just in the hosts but also in its community of listeners — mainly guys on Instagram who share his perspective on fashion and life. “If I know that another guy listens to ‘Failing Upwards,’ we’re going to talk about it,” he says. “It’s kind of like a TV show, like if you’re into ‘Game of Thrones.’ ”

Much like “Game of Thrones,” “Failing Upwards” claims its own extended universe. Fans are known to one another as the Fail Gang. They worship the same streetwear god (Jonah Hill) and a sartorial ritual known as “the fit check,” hypebeast-speak for “Who are you wearing?” Walters fantasizes about going on the show and already knows what he would wear: a pair of Yeezy Boost 700 Wave Runners, a John Elliott hoodie and Eric Emanuel basketball shorts. He likes these clothes, but just as important, he believes that this outfit would impress Schlossman and Harris. “I want to meet the hosts so bad,” he admits. “I want to be friends with them.” He plans on moving to New York someday, and he told me that if they cross paths, he believes that could happen. “We have enough similar interests and a similar sense of humor that, yeah, I think we would hit it off.”

All across the podcast realm, from the heights of self-help to the depths of true crime, imagined relationships are blossoming. Listeners may press play for the content, but many of them eventually come to nurture something like a one-way friendship with the hosts. This kind of daydreaming is an in-joke of the form, best articulated by a popular meme: On first glance, it appears to be a picture of a kid eating ice cream with his friends. Upon closer inspection, he’s actually alone; the three laughing women are models printed on a billboard advertising ice cream. The caption: “How it feels to listen to podcasts.”

Among sociologists and armchair theorizers, this unique type of pining is known as a parasocial relationship — a term coined in 1956 to describe the connection between television viewers and a new class of entertainment personalities, including announcers, game-show hosts and anyone else who spoke in direct address to the camera. “The spectacular fact about such personae is that they can claim and achieve an intimacy with what are literally crowds of strangers,” the sociologists Richard Wohl and Donald Horton wrote in Psychiatry. “This intimacy, even if it is an imitation and a shadow of what is ordinarily meant by that word, is extremely influential with, and satisfying for, the great numbers who willingly receive it and share in it.”

Parasocial relationships are, by definition, one-sided, but like normal friendships, they can deepen over time, enriched by the frequent and dependable appearance of the charming persona on the television set. Podcasts, with their own unique set of formal quirks, are perhaps even better poised to foment this kind of bond. An ideal complement to multitasking, the podcast is ingrained in daily household chores, the morning commute, the bedtime routine. A two-way conversation can be taxing. Podcasts allow us to get to know someone else without all the stress of making ourselves known. If listening demands anything at all, it’s only a bit of imagination. As hosts chatter on, we might picture their faces, their posture, their clothes, the empty cans of seltzer on the table, perhaps even their off-air lives beyond the show. “The host is this disembodied voice that is pervading your intimate spaces, so there’s kind of that room for imaginative bonding between the listener,” says Gina Delvac, producer of the friendship podcast “Call Your Girlfriend,” hosted by Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow. “You have to remember that there’s no fourth wall. When you’re talking to someone, you’re whispering in their ear. You’re in the shower with them. You’re on their commute to work.”

Over hours of listening, the asymmetry increases. Hosts begin to feel like dear friends, while listeners remain eternal strangers. For the hosts themselves, and other figures who exist within the extended universe of a show, the lopsidedness can feel awkward or uncanny. When Delvac — a silent but known character in the “Call Your Girlfriend” universe — meets fans on the street, she’s often consumed by a feeling of amnesia. “They’re like: ‘Oh, my God. We know each other. We know each other so well!’ And I’m like, ‘Did we go to school together?’ Was she, like, my sister’s friend? ‘How do I know you?’ I’m, like, racking my brain,” she explains. “It can seriously feel sometimes, from the producer or podcaster end, like having a brain injury or some weird sci-fi disease.”

This sense of connection to a distant stranger begins, unsurprisingly, with religion. Fanaticus, the Latin origin of “fan,” was used to describe female temple attendants driven into frenzy by devotion to the gods. This type of chaotic piousness, as a secular behavior, might be traced to the mid-1800s, a time when mass culture was on the rise. In a recent New Yorker article, “Superfans: A Love Story,” the writer Michael Schulman finds early examples in the concert-hall frenzy known as Lisztomania and the protests in England that followed the fictional death of Sherlock Holmes. The shortened word “fan” first appeared around 1900 in reference to the enthusiastic crowds at baseball games. Throughout the 20th century, the term would grow in scope to include worshipers of any entertainment figure — from matinee idols to Elvis to the Beatles. At that point, such devotion was a personal affliction, enjoyed alone in an adolescent daydream. Though fans might write letters, attend concerts or join clubs, the ability to band together as a group was still somewhat limited by the bounds of time and space.

Our modern sense of “fandom” — not just 50 million Elvis fans, but a community of 50 million Elvis fans — most likely began with the Star Trek conventions of the 1970s, which helped create a new infrastructure for fan engagement. These early gatherings of a few thousand people in a rented hotel ballroom would eventually give rise to phenomena like ComicCon, enormous gatherings that have reconceived fans not just as passive viewers but as active, and highly integral, participants. They are no longer merely worshipers of a top-down product but creators and stewards of a shared, bottom-up identity.

Today’s fandom is more like a stateless nation, formed around a shared viewing heritage but perpetuated through the imaginations and interrelations of those who enjoy and defend it. When their common cause comes under threat — through chart competition, cancellation or critique — fans can organize to increase streams, denigrate critics and rally executives to right perceived wrongs. Often they even resort to using the tools of politics while seeking redress. After this year’s disappointing “Game of Thrones” finale, more than 1.7 million fans signed a Change.org petition to remake Season 8 with “competent writers.” (So far, no change has been made.)

In an age defined by political dysfunction, the appeal of any sort of democratically secured victory — however small, however pathetic — isn’t hard to understand. Now that the fandom template has been cemented, it has begun to attach to more obscure or arcane media enterprises: indie-pop artists like Charli XCX, faceless meme makers and even podcasts. The profit model of the podcast world is arranged, perhaps serendipitously, to capitalize on this type of fan relationship. Justin Lapidus, vice president of growth marketing and digital products for the direct-to-consumer linen brand Brooklinen, says podcast listeners are a perfect match for the company’s core demographic: 18-to-54-year-olds with “higher household incomes.” When he looks for shows to advertise on, he tends to make “efficient” plays for smaller, but more committed, audiences. “It doesn’t really matter what genre their podcast is in,” he says. “Whatever they buy, their listeners will buy, for the most part.”

Beyond advertising, podcasts that achieve solvency tend to do so through a stitched-together network of social-media hustles, the sum of which serves to cultivate and monetize an audience’s sense of connection. Though large podcasts often enjoy financial support from traditional media companies and emergent podcast networks, many small and midsize shows — arguably those most indicative of the form — have come to rely on Patreon, a membership platform that invites fans to become financial supporters of creative projects in exchange for a tiered benefits package of the creator’s invention. At the lowest membership tiers, usually $1 to $5 per month, podcast supporters receive benefits like bonus episodes or access to V.I.P. chat rooms. As the tiers increase in price, the rewards grow more substantial, often involving direct engagement with the hosts or entry into the universe of the show itself.

Through these high-tier benefits, the parasocial bond can take on a degree of two-sidedness, absorbing qualities of conventional friendship, but only in a partial, commoditized way. For $51 per month, the hosts of “Dumb People Town,” a comic “celebration of dumb people doing dumb things,” will visit your social-media profile, then film themselves reacting to your life in the same way they break down stories on the show. For $100 per month, the host of “McMansion Hell” will make fun of “a building of your choice”; the hosts of “Mueller, She Wrote” will invite you on the podcast to “share your fantasy indictment league picks.”

According to Wyatt Jenkins, senior vice president for product at Patreon, podcasts are the second-largest category on the site, and the fastest-growing. In the past three years, the number of Patreon pages for podcasts has quadrupled, while revenue intake in the category has increased eightfold. “Roughly 40 percent of our members — this is a guess — are probably doing it altruistically,” he says. “As a vertical, podcasting communities retain memberships very, very well. A lot higher than some other verticals. They release regular weekly content, and they create this incredibly strong bond.”

Because both Patreon pages and ads depend on a sense of personal connection, podcast hosts benefit further when an audience corrals itself into something like a community. This most often occurs in Facebook groups, Discord servers or subreddits — online forums that transform isolated passive listeners into active participants. Some podcast tribes even claim their own names: There are the naddpoles (“Naddpod”) and the MBMBAMbinos (“My Brother, My Brother and Me”). There’s the Scoop Troop (“Hollywood Handbook”), the Wholigans (“Who? Weekly”) and Baby Nation (“The Baby-sitters Club Club”). Fans of “Pod Save America” can be recognized by their T-shirts, which proudly proclaim “Friend of the Pod.”

When these online communities are especially successful, they tend to spin off into subsidiary forums. The wildly popular true-crime podcast “My Favorite Murder” supports a vast constellation of unofficial Facebook groups, many only tenuously connected to the subject of the show. Listeners, who self-describe as Murderinos, can now join “My Favorite Curls” (for murder fans with curly hair), “My Favorite Murder Disnerderinos” (for fans who love murder and Disney), “My Favorite Skin Condition” (for Murderinos with eczema and psoriasis) and “My Favorite Free Emotional Labor” (for calling out and educating problematic Murderinos). In one metagroup, called “My Favorite Thunderdome,” members can tag Murderinos from other subgroups and sub-subgroups for the sole purpose of arguing. This group puts out a regular roundup, “The Weekly Thunder,” which summarizes drama from elsewhere in the “My Favorite Murder” Facebook universe. Once you’re this many layers deep, the podcast itself becomes something of an afterthought — just one moving part in the more complex Murderino ecosystem. “Some of them are people who are, like, too into murder,” says Sophia Carter-Kahn, a frequent lurker in the group who listens to the show only occasionally. “I’ve seen people who are like, ‘I bought this tooth online that’s from this, like, murder victim.’ ”

At the furthest end of this fandom paradigm, the community itself is large enough to begin to overtake the very podcast it came from. The subreddit forum for the left-wing comedy podcast “Chapo Trap House” is, at least in name, a forum for discussing the weekly show. In practice, it serves as an erratic clearinghouse for whatever content its fans feel moved to post: socialist memes, cringe-worthy right-wing tweets and, very often, objections to the show itself. Even among fans, such critiques are numerous, prone to rebuking the show’s overwhelming whiteness, its inconsistently calibrated irony and its outsize reputation on the left. (The show takes in about $142,000 per month on Patreon.) Critiques of the show itself are so frequent that they’ve now become a kind of meme on the subreddit.

In one semi-sarcastic post calling for a “Chapo General Strike,” fans joked that they would cancel their subscriptions unless the show met certain demands: a single nonwhite guest, equity for the producer Chris Wade, the host Felix Biederman’s naming four women he likes who aren’t in his immediate family. Among the more serious, and more ubiquitous, demands was a call for the show to cancel, denounce or otherwise divorce itself from the host Amber A’Lee Frost, who regularly transgresses the discursive norms of the online left. (Frost most recently drew flak for giving a flippant interview to the British website Spiked, which ran under the headline “Meet the Anti-Woke Left.”)

Frost, for her part, has called the show’s subreddit an “incubator of smug, joyless, antisocial sanctimony,” which raises the question: What, exactly, are its members really fans of? If a podcast is not its particular content, and the certain set of people who choose to make that content, then what exactly is a podcast at all?

A few years ago you might have said podcasting was just radio for the internet. Today, the audio is almost beside the point. Today’s podcast hosts are not just on-air personae, but community managers, designers of incentives, spokespeople for subscription toothbrushes and business-to-business software. The worth of a podcast is no longer just its content, but rather the sum of the relations it produces — fan to host, fan to fan, fake friends eating ice cream on billboards together.

Jamie Lauren Keiles is a writer who lives in Ridgewood, Queens. She last wrote about Mike Gravel’s presidential campaign. 

Illustrations by Mrzyk & Moriceau. Photo illustration by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

How to Manipulate Young Minds

How to Manipulate Young Minds

by | Jan 6, 2020 | Politics, Psychology, Society and Culture | 0 comments

I’ve heard many times how the young new age minds and voters ultimately triumph over the anachronistic old guard trying desperately to maintain power and political influence.

This may be true, in concept, without the substantial presence of other interference to subvert those younger minds.
But, as you read this article, consider how powerful a focused, deeply mission-based subversive campaign can actually be against any audience, from either direction. Most especially when that audience is the younger minds themselves at their most impressionable.

Sure, the young thinkers can, and could ultimately direct future trends, of all thoughts. But if those developing, newly growing thoughts are shaped by contrarian adults, aggressive enough to manipulate others by any means necessary, then, those young minds will not, in fact, direct future trends. They will merely be pre-conditioned messengers of the stauts quo old guard.

Young hearts and minds tend to have a promising outlook and view on life and humanity. Until they are messed with by adults who can’t imagine them growing up without following the same dogma and narrow, fear-based belief systems they did. In the past, the main reason for conservative triumph has been due to lack of resources and concerted financial backing behind mobilized young progressive voters. Recently, that metric seemed to be shifting with the advent of powerful social media technology at the hands of anyone, of any age. But, witness how that same technology can now be used by the same powers who have always resisted progressive thoughts in the past.

A cynic’s view of all this could very well be, that while youth can make a lot of noise and drama in the political and social arenas, and even affect some changes in large urban areas, they rarely affect “significant” full landscape change in politics or religion.  Great swaths of this country, if not all the great lands on our planet earth, are painted by adults. For better or worse, they are still holding the biggest paint brushes.

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Right-Wing Views for Generation Z, Five Minutes at a Time

Dennis Prager believes teenagers are more open to conservative ideas than millennials. With PragerU, he’s making a play to get around their professors.

Will Witt of PragerU conducting an interview at the University of California, Berkeley, on the topic of gender.

By Nellie Bowles
Jan. 4, 2020

BERKELEY, Calif. — Will Witt walked through the University of California campus doing what he does professionally, which is trolling unwitting young liberals on camera.

He approached students who seemed like good targets: people with political buttons on their bags, androgynous clothing, scarves. It was safe to say that the vast majority here in the heart of progressive culture would be liberal. Mr. Witt, whose bouffant and confident smile make him look like a high school jock from central casting, told the students that he had a question for them. If they agreed to answer, and they usually did, the game was on.

“How many genders are there?” Mr. Witt asked before turning and staring deadpan at the camera. Some people laughed and walked away. Most, knowing the camera was rolling, engaged.

“As many as you want?” a recent Ph.D. student responded, a little confused to be confronted with this question.

After some of the footage was edited in the back of an S.U.V. in a parking lot nearby, the video headed to Prager University, a growing hub of the online right-wing media machine, where Mr. Witt is a rising star and the jokey, Ray-Ban-wearing embodiment of the site’s ambitions.

Last year PragerU videos racked up more than one billion views, the company said. The Prager empire now has a fleet of 6,500 high school and college student promoters, known as the PragerForce, who host on-campus meetings and gather at least once a year for conventions. And this year, the company is expanding its scope. PragerU executives are signing stars of the young new right to host made-for-the-internet shows to fuel 2020 content, including a book club and a show geared to Hispanics called Americanos.

The goal of the people behind all of this — Dennis Prager, the conservative talk show host and impresario of this digital empire, and the venture’s billionaire funders — seems simple: more Will Witts in the world. More pride in American history (and less panic over racism), more religion (specifically in the “Judeo-Christian” tradition), less illegal immigration, more young people laughing at people on the left rather than joining them.

Mr. Witt, 23, said he was raised in a relatively liberal home by his mother, and when he arrived at the University of Colorado in Boulder, he was already leaning conservative. But he found his zeal for the culture war on campus. One of his classes offered students extra credit for going to a political protest. Mr. Witt submitted that he would go to a nearby speech hosted by the right-wing star Milo Yiannopoulos. The teaching assistant told him that would not count, he said.

He was frustrated, feeling lonely and at home watching videos on YouTube. The site prompted him with a bright animation made by PragerU. He can’t remember the first video he saw. Maybe railing against feminism, he said.

“I must have watched every single one that night,” Mr. Witt said. “I stopped going to class. Pretty much all the time I was reading and watching.”

He did not graduate from college.

The videos are five minutes each, quick, full of graphs and grand extrapolations, and unapologetically conservative. Lessons have titles like: “Why Socialism Never Works” (a series), “Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy,” “Where Are the Moderate Muslims?” and “Are Some Cultures Better Than Others?”

To the founders and funders of PragerU, YouTube is a way to circumvent brick-and-mortar classrooms — and parents — and appeal to Generation Z, those born in the mid-1990s and early 2000s.

Mr. Witt dropped out of college after watching PragerU videos that railed against campus politics.

Mr. Witt dropped out of college after watching PragerU videos that railed against campus politics.

Mr. Prager sees those young people as more indoctrinated in left-wing viewpoints than any previous generation, but also as more curious about the right. For these teenagers, consuming conservative content is a rebellion from campus politics that are liberal and moving left.

“We find more of them are open to hearing an alternative voice than many of their elders,” Mr. Prager wrote in an email. “Many suspect they have been given only one view, and suspect that view may often be absurd.”

The way PragerU presents that “alternative voice” is in the measured tone of an online university, carefully avoiding the news cycle and President Trump. That is part of its power.

“They take old arguments about the threat of immigration but treat them as common sense and almost normative, wrapping them up as a university with a neutral dispassionate voice,” said Chris Chavez, the doctoral program director at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication.

PragerU’s website has a fine-print disclaimer that it is not an actual academic institution.

“PragerU’s ‘5 Minute Ideas’ videos have become an indispensable propaganda device for the right,” the Southern Poverty Law Center warned on its blog, citing videos like “Blacks in Power Don’t Empower Blacks,” hosted by the Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, who is black.

Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said he has noticed an impact from PragerU’s content. “It sits at this border between going off a cliff into conspiracy thinking and extreme kinds of prejudices in the name of anti-political correctness,” he said.

On PragerU’s website, there is little differentiation between its video presenters. So the late Pulitzer-prize winning Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer appears on the same page as Michelle Malkin, the commentator who has defended overtly racist elements of the right. There’s Bret Stephens, the New York Times Op-Ed columnist; Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host; George F. Will, the anti-Trump conservative commentator; and Nigel Farage, the Brexit Party leader. For a teenager approaching the site, each headshot in the same size circle, it would be hard to tell the difference between them all.

‘Give us five minutes’

PragerU began in 2009 as a nonprofit to promote the conservative religious values of Mr. Prager, a popular talk radio host and author of books on Judaism. Originally, the idea was to build an actual physical university. Allen Estrin, his producer, would spearhead it.

But a physical building was prohibitively expensive.

“Just to get started would be $250 million,” Mr. Estrin said recently while driving through Los Angeles. “You have to buy property, a building, do a faculty, years to start, years to raise money, and then at the end what do you have? One thousand students in the first graduating class?”

Allen Estrin getting his makeup done before taping a show at PragerU.

Allen Estrin getting his makeup done before taping a show at PragerU.

Mr. Estrin had another idea. He was obsessed with internet video. Mr. Estrin taught screenwriting, but the conservative content he saw online was rambling and baggy. The sets were bad (a lot of old men at whiteboards). He pitched the early PragerU group: They could make a right-wing university online, in tight five-minute courses.

“We used to say in the early days, ‘Give us five minutes, and we’ll give you a semester,’” Mr. Estrin said.

Marissa Streit, who had been a Hebrew tutor for another PragerU backer, joined as the company’s chief executive in 2011, and videos started going out.

“We released a video and had 35,000 views,” Ms. Streit said, “and I still remember Allen looked over to Dennis and said, ‘Can you imagine a classroom of 35,000 people?’”

Dan and Farris Wilks, hydraulic-fracturing billionaires from Texas, came in with donations. The conservative-leaning Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation joined, too — their goal in funding education is, in part, to “promote the teaching of American exceptionalism.”

PragerU started to spend on marketing on Facebook and YouTube.

“We just kept throwing more coal into the furnace,” Mr. Estrin said. “And we realized that we had created a distribution platform.”

In 2019, PragerU raised $22 million; next year, it estimates it will raise $25 million. Its budget comes almost entirely from donor contributions.

The ‘macro values’ of President Trump

PragerU has expanded Dennis Prager’s reach, but it has not fundamentally changed his days.

One recent morning, Mr. Prager was recording an “Ultimate Issues Hour” radio segment. He’s written eight books (one is “The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code”), and since 1999 has hosted “The Dennis Prager Show” on the conservative Christian radio syndicate Salem.

Mr. Prager is 6-foot-4 and imposing, in a white button-down shirt, hunched over the microphone.

He read some promos for his sponsor Blinds.com. He took calls from listeners. He talked about the importance of children respecting parents (very important) and about how parents should not want their children to be the smartest in the class, but rather the most moral.

He carefully threaded the needle for listeners as he made the argument for Mr. Trump as a values leader. There are two types of values, micro and macro, he argued. One seems to do with the minutiae of one’s life (marital fidelity, religiosity, respect); the other, he says, is more important and relates to the general effect of one’s life.

“Donald Trump may not have terrific micro values, but I think he has terrific macro values,” Mr. Prager said.

When it comes to politicians, he said he marks a sharp divide between political life and personal life, and he argues that the president’s personal behavior is irrelevant to his public message.

This is a new line of argument for Mr. Prager, who spent much of his career focusing on those micro values. He is a longtime opponent of same-sex marriage, which he considers an effort to “destroy the foundation of our Judeo-Christian civilization.” An episode in his “Same Sex Issues” collection is titled, “Love Is Not Enough.”

Former fans of Mr. Prager’s work say they are confused by his Trumpist turn.

“In terms of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ of watching people become more Trumpian, these moral icons becoming shills, he is way up there,” said Charlie Sykes, the author of “How the Right Lost Its Mind,” and a former radio host who used to occasionally substitute on Mr. Prager’s show. “Now you have to put PragerU in the category of other very successful meme machines and low-rent conservative grifting.”

Mr. Prager’s desk is stacked with items including a refrigerated lunchbox, open and showing a slice of lemon cake, but he cannot eat it. He often fasts 20 hours a day. His back is bad, and he is in considerable physical pain as he moves through the world.

As he prepared to leave, he unzipped a large rolling suitcase. It was almost entirely full of old newspapers. He added the day’s Wall Street Journal and headed to the airport. He does not want to do an interview in person. He wants to email, and so he does. His answers are long and lucid and full of biblical references.

Mr. Prager, who is Jewish, sees his mission as spreading the message of one God, which he articulates as a cure for humans who are “basically not good.” He measures success in how well he spreads this cure.

“Radio, writing, and now the internet have made making this cure known beyond my dreams,” he wrote. “Only God knows how successful I will have been; Moses did not get into the Promised Land, nor will I. But I am not naïve. I obviously recognize that a billion views a year means more influence than a million views.”

A billion views

The people chasing those billion views are in the PragerU headquarters in Los Angeles.

The office is typical millennial chic, full of midcentury modern sofas, standing desks and just a few hints at what’s made there, including a portrait of Ronald Reagan.

The team is about 50 people. The average staff member is about 30 years old. The site’s rapid growth puts desk space at a premium, but with a reporter visiting, few people were in the office.

“A lot of people stayed home because they were scared of being identified as working for Prager,” said the company’s chief marketing officer, Craig Strazzeri, laughing as he showed off another empty room.

Craig Strazzeri, PragerU’s chief marketing officer, in his office.

Craig Strazzeri, PragerU’s chief marketing officer, in his office.

By the reception desk is a bowl of Prager-themed buttons. One features the outline of a man’s hair, glasses, wide tie and cigar — enough to indicate it is Mr. Prager. Another features a small American flag. These few in the bowl are the last of the pins.

“The pin maker won’t make more,” said Ms. Streit, the chief executive. “Economic protest.”

This is an example of what the staff would call the intolerance of the left, a common theme of PragerU videos. But Prager leaders maintain that they are unfazed by it. For them, the work happens online, and it happens with people younger than the pin makers, younger even than their staff’s friends. The target audience is Generation Z.

“I feel somewhat sorry for millennials,” said Mr. Estrin. “They truly were indoctrinated. Now kids have access to a different point of view. It’s as close as their computer or their phone.”

He is right that Generation Z is a wary group. Young people are significantly less trusting of institutions and one another than older generations. About half are categorized broadly as “low trusters,” according to a 2018 survey by the Pew Research Center, while only 19 percent of adults 65 and older fall into that category.

“Our generation is whiny,” said Candace Owens, who is 31 — a millennial — and one of the right-wing stars who has found a home with PragerU. “We’re constantly complaining. Our generation is suffering from peace. We create meaningless problems.”

“Gen Z has a better sense of humor,” she said. “They love the memes.”

And the meme battle — the culture war — is where Ms. Owens sees her chance.

“If conservatives don’t jump into culture headfirst, we’re not going to make much of a difference,” she said, “and PragerU understands that.”

How Prager works

Prager leaders say many of their young fans come from liberal homes, and the key for their mission is to reach these people and rescue them from what they describe as liberal indoctrination.

Leaders in the Prager universe describe the current landscape like this: Young people in America today are being told that they need to learn to “check your privilege” — a phrase popularized by progressives. They are taught the bad parts of American history before the good parts.

Crew members preparing to film a new show at PragerU.

Crew members preparing to film a new show at PragerU.

The PragerU viewer is a young American who is vaguely annoyed by all of this — the trigger warnings or the female “Star Wars” heroine — and is sick of being told to apologize. PragerU validates those feelings.

“What they’re trying to do is get away from this narrative that’s really out there that America’s bad, and it’s just this negative thing,” said Trevor Mauk, a 19-year-old Cal-Berkeley sophomore from Barstow, Calif., and a fan of PragerU. “They give the reasons why it’s good to be proud of the country and proud of where you’re from and who you are.”

He added, “They’re talking about things I was never taught.”

Until PragerU came along, some of the biggest platforms for young conservatives looking for content were Fox News and online message boards, where fringe conspiracy theorists reign.

PragerU’s own experience with Big Tech has only fueled its fans’ perceptions that conservatives are the losers of the culture war. The company is suing Google, which owns YouTube, arguing that the platform is suppressing its content by marking some of its videos as restricted — and in doing so, lumping videos about the Ten Commandments in with violent or offensive content.

In PragerU’s corner is Zach Vorhies, a former YouTube employee turned whistle-blower who says liberal employees at YouTube had the ability to censor conservative content creators.

Mr. Vorhies has promoted conspiracy theories like QAnon and spread anti-Semitic messages, a pattern first reported by The Daily Beast. He is not an employee of PragerU, but they count him as a supporter, an example of the soft barrier between PragerU’s mainstream conservative allies and fans and the vast land of right-wing conspiracy.

“PragerU was one of the reasons I blew the whistle on Google,” said Mr. Vorhies, who attended a recent hearing in PragerU’s ongoing court battle against Google, which has said the allegations in the suit are without merit.

The campus fight

In the physical world, the battlefront of the culture war is almost always the quad. PragerU’s leaders hope to turn the PragerForce, their college clubs, into an on-the-ground college outrage content machine, making videos and working to organize on-campus conservative counterprogramming.

Those on the left at a place like Berkeley are largely unfazed by these skirmishes.

“Billionaires have spent a fortune to promote this group, and yet it’s completely marginal, at most an annoyance,” said James Kennerly, the Cal Young Democratic Socialists of America co-chair.

But PragerU is gaining traction.

Cody Thompson is a 26-year-old undergraduate at Augsburg University in Minneapolis. He considered himself such a strong social justice-oriented leftist, he said, that when he once saw someone walking around campus wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat, he alerted student affairs, saying he felt unsafe.

As he tells it, Mr. Thompson was with a conservative childhood friend who showed him a 2017 PragerU video, “The Inconvenient Truth About the Democratic Party,” hosted by Carol Swain, who at the time was a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University and is now retired.

Mr. Witt rallying with PragerU supporters after a hearing at the Santa Clara Superior Courthouse.

Mr. Witt rallying with PragerU supporters after a hearing at the Santa Clara Superior Courthouse

“The Democratic Party defended slavery, started the Civil War and opposed Reconstruction,” Ms. Swain, who is black, says in the video. She speaks slowly and straight to the camera as graphics flash by in the usual Prager style.

“I don’t know what it was, but when I watched that video I wanted to watch more,” Mr. Thompson said.

He talks about PragerU videos like a religious revelation. He said they opened his mind and repaired his relationship with his parents, made him anti-abortion and supportive of a border wall.

And when he went to see Mr. Witt speak, that sealed his new politics.

A few days after the Prager journey through Berkeley, the student Mr. Witt had buttonholed — the one who said there could be as many genders as he wanted — was still confused about the encounter.

“I was just hanging out on campus, getting the Berkeley energy,” said Pau Guinart, a 36-year-old from Barcelona who recently completed a doctorate in Latin American literature at Stanford. “When I started to sense what they were getting at, I was like, ‘Dude, you’re in the wrong place.’”

He hoped he had said the right thing, then asked: “Do you know where the video goes?”

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Americans Trust Local News. That Belief Is Being Exploited.

Americans Trust Local News. That Belief Is Being Exploited.

by | Oct 31, 2019 | Politics, Society and Culture | 0 comments

Americans express greater trust in news from local television and newspapers than national outlets, research shows. Credit: Etienne Laurent/EPA.

By Brendan Nyhan, Via NYimes
Oct. 31, 2019

The nature of the news misinformation problem may be changing. As consumers become more skeptical about the national news they encounter online, impostor local sites that promote ideological agendas are becoming more common. These sites exploit the relatively high trust Americans express in local news outlets — a potential vulnerability in Americans’ defenses against untrustworthy information.

Some misinformation in local news comes from foreign governments seeking to meddle in American domestic politics. Most notably, numerous Twitter accounts operated by the Russian Internet Research Agency were found to have impersonated local news aggregators during the 2016 election campaign.

A recent Senate Intelligence Committee report found that 54 such accounts published more than 500,000 tweets. According to researchers at N.Y.U., the fake local news accounts frequently directed readers to genuine local news articles about polarizing political and cultural topics.

Domestically grown dubious outlets are also proliferating. Last week, The Lansing State Journal reported the existence of a network of more than 35 faux-local websites across Michigan with names like Battle Creek Times, Detroit City Wire, Lansing Sun and Grand Rapids Reporter.

These sites mix news releases and town announcements with rewritten content derived from other sources, including the Mackinac Center, a conservative think tank in the state, and the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington.

All of them originate with a company called Locality Labs L.L.C., which created similar networks of questionable local websites in Illinois and Maryland, and state and local business and legal sites around the country. There’s little information about these sites. They typically lack mastheads, local addresses and clear disclosure of their ownership or revenue sources.

Voters could easily become confused about the origins of information from these seemingly innocuous local-sounding outlets. In 2016, for example, websites in the Illinois network interviewed Republican candidates favored by a conservative state political committee, which then paid to mail print newspaper versions of the sites to voters without identifying them as political advertising.

A similar pattern cropped up in Tennessee, where a website called the Tennessee Star began publishing political news in 2017 without disclosing its funders or staff. One headline was featured in an ad by a member of Congress running for re-election. Readers and viewers had no way of knowing the Tennessee Star was actually a conservative site run by commentators and activists. This group has since started companion sites called the Minnesota Sun and Ohio Star; each draws heavily on syndicated content from conservative sources like The Daily Caller.

These three sites now attract substantial engagement on Facebook. CrowdTangle data shows they are frequently linked on public pages with millions of followers and have generated more than 100,000 interactions. In August and September, President Trump’s official Facebook page linked three times to the Minnesota Sun, which had published commentaries by the leader of the state’s Republican Party and the chief operating officer of the Trump re-election campaign.

As the tactic has become more common, political leaders have also created or promoted seemingly independent local websites. For instance, a website called the California Republican, which appeared in 2018, describes itself on Facebook as providing “the best of U.S., California and Central Valley news, sports and analysis.” But it was paid for by the campaign committee of Devin Nunes, a Republican congressman from California. Kelli Ward, a Republican representative from Arizona, promoted an election endorsement from the Arizona Monitor, another pseudo-local site. And in Maine, a website called the Maine Examiner, which published leaked emails from a Democratic candidate, was revealed to have been created by the state Republican Party’s executive director.

Covertly ideological local sources aren’t exclusively online. The media giant Sinclair has similarly blurred the lines between local and national journalism in television news. When local stations are acquired by Sinclair, a recent study shows, their news content becomes more nationally focused and more conservative. The company often issues so-called must-run national segments, such as a recent commentary that sought to blame illegal immigration for sexual violence against children. And in March 2018, Sinclair directed local stations to air a promotional clip in which anchors read a company script denouncing “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news” as if they were using their own words, a tactic that was exposed in a viral clip.

All of these outside groups seem to be trying to capitalize on people’s trust in local news. In the 2018 Poynter Media Trust Survey, the political scientists Andy Guess, Jason Reifler and I found that Americans express greater trust in news from local television and newspapers than from national outlets. This is especially true of Republicans, the partisan group that is most skeptical of the national media.

The differences in trust we observe translate into differences in interest and consumption preferences. First, a Pew survey found that three in four Americans say they follow local news somewhat or very closely — the same fraction as those who report following national news closely.

Moreover, what people say in surveys tracks their behavior under controlled conditions. In the 2019 Poynter Media Trust Survey (which found similarly high levels of trust in local news), we asked a representative sample of Americans to repeatedly indicate which of two articles they would prefer to read.

Each article summary included a randomly assigned headline, date, author and source type, which varied between a local television station, radio station or newspaper; national newspapers and broadcast networks; and national online-only outlets. This approach allowed us to account for differences in topics between national and local news.

Over all, we found that people preferred to consume local news most. Holding other factors constant, Americans were 11 percentage points more likely to choose articles from local news sources than ones from online-only national outlets — precisely why dubious websites might impersonate local news sources. This differential was largest among Republican identifiers and people with a negative view of the news media.

The prevalence of these impostors is likely to increase as the 2020 election approaches, threatening to mislead more voters and to promote greater skepticism toward all news media, including the local outlets that so many Americans rely on and trust.

Brendan Nyhan is a professor of government at Dartmouth College.

Seagulls: Birds of Consumption Made In Our Own Image

Seagulls: Birds of Consumption Made In Our Own Image

by | Aug 16, 2019 | Environment & Ecology, Nature, Society and Culture | 0 comments

You’d be forgiven to not believe rumors before reading this article, but this actually happens a lot. One angle that is missing from this coverage, however, comes from the American preoccupation with providing food at every turn of real estate where any sizable crowds converge.

I know it’s unrealistic to peg this all on food concessions, but if American mainstream culture wasn’t so steeped in limitless food consumption at every special event, occasion, celebration, physical area where any gatherings in general occur, the over saturated food vendor operations of every stripe, and growing, wouldn’t exist in the first place.

So much food is wasted in this country, whether directly from unbalanced crop management, commercial buyers, and dispensation to the public, or by sheer disregard for food portioning and value on a individual basis. Whole nations starve, or at best, struggle, while getting aid in the form of low quality carbohydrate staples, and/or, access to junk food, while we scare off seagulls so we feast and drink on a whim, at any moment, wherever we are, and then throw out half our food anyway.

Flying Assassins Are Called In to Combat Aggressive Gulls

A Jersey Shore town has come up with a creative but costly way to tame its marauding gulls.

Eric Swanson, the owner of East Coast Falcons, released a falcon, one of the birds of prey that are being used to frighten gulls in Ocean City, N.J.

 

By Nick Corasaniti, NY Times

OCEAN CITY, N.J. — They are deft predators of the French fried potato, able to pluck a fresh wedge in the milliseconds it takes a single fry to travel from its container to a human mouth.

Though gulls are as core to the Jersey Shore as a stereo blasting “Born to Run,” the birds that have been hunting the food stalls lining the boardwalk in Ocean City possess an extra level of voracious hunger, a fever pitch of aggression that stands out even in a state where pugnacity is considered a plus.

Their behavior has turned this popular oceanfront destination into a Hitchcockian dystopia of divebombing birds.

“I’ve seen them take on an entire pizza,” said Tom Baglini, 71, who lives in Ocean City with his wife, JoAnn. “I saw the guy and he had the box, and he took one slice out, and the bird came down, hit the slice, then hit the box, and the pie hit the ground, and then, like hundreds of birds just swarmed.”

Deciding it had had enough, Ocean City turned to an army of winged bouncers.

The city unleashed a posse of raptors — four hawks, two falcons and an owl — to take on the unruly gulls.

“It’s reached a point where you can’t eat on the boardwalk or beach without birds flying at your hands and face. It truly has become a safety hazard,” said Ocean City’s mayor, Jay A. Gillian. “I remain committed to doing whatever it takes to make sure the boardwalk and beach experience in Ocean City is safe, family friendly and enjoyable.”

Diana Juleg and her grandchildren listened as a falconer explained how the birds patrol the skies over the boardwalk. Credit: Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times

One of the few towns along the Jersey Shore where alcohol is not sold, Ocean City attracts roughly 150,000 visitors every summer to a beach idyll: a wide boardwalk filled with ice cream and pizza stands, fudge shops and salt water taffy stores, where the chatter of conversation is occasionally drowned out by the squeals from nearby amusement rides.

The squawk of gulls circling potential meals is a less welcome part of the background noise. But these days, the gulls must also keep an eye out for the sharp-clawed raptors roaming the skies.

Using birds of prey to control avian populations is a common tactic — deployed not just at beaches, but at airports, among other places — and is praised by many environmental groups as a humane way of taming out-of-control behavior.

“The best way to put nature back into balance is to bring back predators,” said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club. “Whether it’s hawks or falcons in urban areas to reduce pigeon populations, or sea gulls along the coast, it makes a lot more sense.”

Ocean City is paying $2,100 a day through Labor Day for the use of the trained raptors, which are provided by East Coast Falcons. Though the raptors are certainly capable of killing gulls, these have been trained just to frighten the gulls away. The program, which started in early August, has been effective enough that the hours the raptors are on duty each day has been extended.

“It’s reached a point where you can’t eat on the boardwalk or beach without birds flying at your hands and face,” said Jay A. Gillian, the Ocean City mayor. Credit: Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times

Erik Swanson, the owner of East Coast Falcons, has been training birds of prey for nearly 30 years. His animals have helped to clear out geese and other birds from flight paths near Kennedy International Airport, reduced a starling population that was threatening a blueberry farm and scattered pigeons and other birds away from landfills.

But the belligerence of the gulls in Ocean City surprised even this veteran bird expert.

“If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I don’t know if I would have even believed it,” Mr. Swanson said. “We were sitting there talking with the town manager and this girl walked out with a bucket of chicken or something, and she literally had more than 20 birds just start mobbing her.”

Fueled by the constant availability of food, Mr. Swanson said the gulls have developed advanced tactics.

Some of the gulls have learned to attack people, who drop their food once bitten.

“And then when the one does that, you have about 40 of them that all run in and try to eat the food,” Mr. Swanson said.

Though falcons can kill gulls, the birds from East Coast Falcons have been trained not to do so. Credit: Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times

Just about every regular visitor to Ocean City seems to have a gull story.

Darcy Krause, who lives in Philadelphia and has been visiting Ocean City for about 10 years, said a gull swooped down between her hand and her face and snatched a Wheat Thin cracker from her fingers without leaving a mark.

Ellen Ilconich, who lives in Marlton, N.J., had a gull hover over her sandwich and pluck out the deli meat inside.

The Baglinis watched the other day as a few gulls huddled under a beach umbrella, dug into an open beach bag while the owners were away, pulled out a bag of chips and enjoyed a feast on the sand. Two weeks earlier, a gull clutching an entire hero sandwich landed near their lawn.

Sue Lyons-Joell, who has been coming to Ocean City for more than 30 years, has developed a gull-proof system when she orders anything at the boardwalk: Cover the food, stay close to the stalls and never eat anything out in the open.

“A couple of years ago it got so bad we had to put a sign up at the register basically warning customers of the sea gulls stealing their food,” said Randy Levchuk, an owner of Jilly’s, a family-run business in Ocean City that manages a popular French fry stand, as well as several T-shirt shops.

 

 

Ocean City is paying $2,100 a day through Labor Day for the use of the trained raptors. Credit: Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times

His T-shirt business has also been affected by the gull invasion.

“People are coming because they got pooped on by one of the birds, and they have to buy a new shirt now,’’ Mr. Levchuk said. “It’s not a good experience for the person in Ocean City with how bad it’s gotten.”

The summer crowds will be gone after Labor Day, but the gulls are not just seasonal visitors.

Eric Stiles, the president and chief executive of New Jersey Audubon, said focusing on the summertime is a short-term “winnable solution.”

“But it’s not a perennial solution,” he said. “It’s not something you do for 30 days and the problem is solved forever.”

Still, so far, the introduction of the raptors seems to have improved the conduct of the gulls.

Families were enjoying soft-serve cones near a Kohr Bros Frozen Custard shop on a recent day, and the few gulls perched on the edge of the store roof were leaving them alone — for now.

Nearby, P.J. Simonis, a falconer who is part of Mr. Swanson’s team, was carrying a 17-week-old Harris hawk on his arm. The bird had just finished eating food left inside a cage, which was placed in clear view of the gulls.

“Just this bird feeding on the boardwalk,’’ he said, “has freaked them out.’’

The introduction of the raptors seems to have improved the behavior of the gulls. Credit: Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times

The Social And Political Underpinnings Of Health

The Social And Political Underpinnings Of Health

by | Jun 15, 2019 | Health & Medicine, Politics, Society and Culture | 0 comments

Good work here. Well worth reading.

Well-kept parks, clean air and water, safe and friendly neighborhoods: these and many other factors outside our control contribute to health. | WIN-Initiative/Getty Images/WIN-Initiative RM

Book Reviews

Well: What We Need To Talk About When We Talk About Health

Via NPR, Stephanie O’Neill

The typical American conversation about health focuses on personal choice as a key driver — the foods we choose to eat, the number of steps we log each day, the doctors we visit and the medicines we take. But epidemiologist Sandro Galea says that way of thinking is the wrong way.

In his new book, Well: What We Need To Talk About When We Talk About Health, the dean of Boston University School of Public Health says not only does the belief in the power of personal choice fail to fix America’s health crisis, it also diverts us from real issues underlying our nation’s poor health.

“We can choose the food we eat, but our options are limited by what we can afford and by what kinds of food are available for purchase near our home,” he writes. “These factors, in turn, depend on the quality of our neighborhood and the size of our income, which depends on larger social economic forces over which we have little control.”

The notion that one creates good health just by choosing to do so makes it easy to stigmatize obesity, addiction and other chronic conditions as byproducts of laziness or moral weakness, further obscuring their actual causes, he warns.

“Telling you that you should exercise more when you’re worried about getting out of your house and getting shot; when there is no park around you which has a nice place for you to walk; when you’re working two minimum-wage jobs and you can’t afford gym membership is simply absurd,” he tells NPR.

Galea says understanding that our health is a product of the world around us serves to remove “our reflexive stigmatization.”

And that’s important, he says, because stigma itself is known to erode self-esteem and confidence, which in turn causes social isolation that can further trigger other health problems.

Galea says his book, represents a culmination of 20 years of studying and working in public health. He was motivated to write it by the the huge gap between what the U.S. spends on health care and the relatively low return on that investment.

“Part of my job is to make sure that the world understands what it really takes to generate health,” Galea says.

As he discusses early in the book, the United States spends a whopping $3.3 trillion on health care, according to federal figures from 2016. Yet U.S. life expectancy — which is the lowest among all comparable nations — has actually fallen in recent years. He points out that the lifespan of a baby born in the U.S. today is now five years shorter, on average, than it would be if that baby were born in Japan, a nation that spends half of what we do on health, per person.

“There’s no other sector where we outspend all our peers and we get less for it,” Galea says. “Would you buy a smartphone if it cost you 40% more than the next closest competitor and your phone functioned 40% worse? The answer is no, you wouldn’t.”

To improve the nation’s overall physical and mental health, Galea says we need to understand that a slew of factors that may seem to have little connection to health are actually the drivers of it.

“The lens that we adopt makes a big difference in how we invest our resources and how we tackle this problem,” Galea says.

He says we need to start talking more about some neglected factors that shape health. These include some themes familiar to students of public health — poverty, environment and policies — and some more surprising ones, including fundamental human values that Galea believes deserve more attention. Key drivers of health to pay attention to include:

Acknowledging the past

To fix the flaws in the systems and policies we’ve created, we have to recognize powerful influences from the past, Galea writes. On an individual level, a person’s past plays a role in shaping their present-day health, he says. And nationwide, it means understanding how history affects us today. For example, Galea says, we can trace back to slavery some roots of the discrepancies in health and average lifespan of black Americans today, as compared to white Americans. “These health gaps are neither random nor inevitable,” Galea writes. “They are a consequence of history.”

Seeing the power in a place

It’s not hard to fathom that neighborhoods and environment — air quality, water quality, housing, sanitation and infrastructure — affect our health and well-being. But Galea says the influence of place is about more than physical environment. A community is formed of “cultural, economic and political factors” which can have a real impact on health, he says, including “the economic opportunities we have … the extent to which we invest in reducing domestic violence; the extent to which we invest in having equitable opportunities for people of all genders.”

Understanding no one’s an island

Galea writes about the importance of social interactions to combat loneliness and isolation — conditions that increase the risk of depression, addiction and suicide. He says that’s especially true for older and sicker Americans, as age and disability contribute to social isolation. As the world’s population ages, “it will become ever more critical that we create opportunities for social engagement across generations,” he says.

Cultivating humility

Recognizing what we don’t know about health and medicine is just as important as what we do know. Humility, Galea says, reminds us that health doesn’t happen in a vacuum and that improving the conditions of people around us could be just as important to improving health as the next scientific breakthrough. “We need to have the humility to accept that there is not just one thing we should do, there are many things we should do,” he says.

Deepening compassion

Galea wants to replace short-term acts of empathy with compassion that acts on the root causes of suffering — which “envisions and aspires to a better world.” Empathy might inspire us to help cover someone’s medical costs or donate to victims of a hurricane, but we still “leave in place the structures that create disease,” he writes. He advocates viewing collective-well-being as a responsibility we all should share. “It’s centered around the Martin Luther King version of compassion,” Galea says, “which is you don’t just fling a coin to a beggar but you ask why he’s a beggar to begin with.”

Shifting perspective on death

A shift in our attitude toward death could help us live better, according to Galea. We need to embrace death’s inevitability and then strive to “die healthy,” he says. “Because once you and I say we value living healthy for as long as possible, then we’ve got to stop investing enormous amounts of money into end-stage (treatments) that do nothing to prolong quality of life, let alone longevity.”

Galea predicts a shift in the American health conversation will require a grassroots approach that starts with each of us changing how we talk about health with friends and family; with electing local, state and national leaders who better understand what’s necessary for health in the U.S.; and with supporting a private sector that’s responsible not just to shareholders but to “common good in the world …. to generate health both for its employees and for the world around it.”

“I think if we all did that,” Galea says, “transformation of how we talk about health will happen sooner than we think.”

Article Link: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/06/04/728810438/well-explores-the-social-and-political-underpinnings-of-health