Trump’s ballroom should be the least of the left’s worries
Calls for deportations, firings, exorcisms, and more
You’re here because you’re watching politics get body-slammed by digital culture and content creators. I’m here to guide you through it.
UFC’s Dana White thought sheltering under tables hoping a bullet doesn’t find you was “fucking awesome.”
His is the only rave review I’m seeing of this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, for obvious reasons. There are so many different angles of analysis worth pursuing to get a sense of what really went down last night — I guess that’s the upside of having over 1,000 members of the media in the room where it happened.
The ballroom back-and-forth erupted as the definitive breakout story on my left-leaning feeds. By now, you’ve probably seen one of the collages of right-wing posts flooding the zone advocating for Trump’s ballroom getting back on track. It’s suddenly an urgent matter of national security.
I have to say I’m somewhat surprised that the ballroom bit is taking up so much oxygen. I’ve called out many occasions when right-wing influencers seem to get shared talking points, as recently as the AI Jesus acceptability campaign on April 14. Ashley St. Clair, who came up in the TPUSA pipeline, has been yapping about the messaging group chats to anyone who’ll listen.
I worry sometimes that people on the left don’t have a strong enough understanding of their perception on the right — and that is, easily baited into focusing on the wrong thing. So, I’m going to show you what MAGA hardliners are saying in response to the shooting. You’ll see quickly how the ballroom starts to feel like a shiny object meant to distract the left. Plus, a brief ode to journalism.
You’re right, I don’t usually publish on Sundays … duty calls! I can’t get into everything I dug up today, but if you’re itching for more at the end of this, you can find my content tracker for this topic here. A rare look into how the job is done.
WHAT COMES AFTER RAGE?
My oxygen levels tend to stay pretty steady when I’m diving deep into the reactions to violent, traumatic, or scary news. Trust me, it wasn’t always this way, but any journalist will tell you exposure therapy unfortunately works.
There have been two occasions in the past few years when the fear broke though as a result of what I was reading: My second-ever time writing this newsletter — the day Charlie Kirk was assassinated — and today. Both times I saw what I interpret to be irrational, foaming-at-the-mouth rage. The president said:
These influencers and loyalists said no <3
Isabel Brown | 1.3M: “We cannot survive as a society when a growing faction of our country wants to violently murder anyone they disagree with. … This is no longer ‘fringe’ from the Left.”
Jesse Kelly | 865k: “Communists are demonic and violent. Democrats are communists. No rhetoric will change or be ‘toned down’ [...] Toning them down is utterly destroying their institutions.”
Matt Walsh | 4M: “Leftists are trying to kill our president. They killed Charlie. They’re killing us. People on our own side are running cover for them. Changing the subject. Distracting us. Fuck this. Enough of the retarded bullshit.”
The Rabbit Hole | 1.1M: “Luigi Leftism is a serious problem”
Elon Musk | 239M: “If they’re willing to die to assassinate, imagine what they will do if they gain political power.”
Allie Beth Stuckey | 917k: “We don’t need fewer guns or more therapy; we need an exorcism, an awakening, which can only happen through Christ.”
Bonchie | 157k: “Is this a good time to mention that the Democrats’ new darling, Hasan Piker, said he wanted the blood of his political opponents to run in the streets...?”
Auron MacIntyre | 247k: “Radicalized leftists are a greater threat to the US than a nuclear Iran”
Jack Posobiec | 3.3M: “Enough is enough. They aren’t going to just ‘leave us alone.’ It is time for our federal govt to act”
Kyle Rittenhouse | 100k: “Deport all Democrats!!!”
Sean Strickland | 828k: “If every single democrat was removed from this country it would be a better, safer place… Your kids are either pathetic and gay or criminals....”
Matt Van Swol | 500k: “The left is evil and violent.”
Andrew Isker | 53k: “A major reason a large segment thinks that Israel killed Charlie and has attempted to kill Trump multiple times is because it’s psychologically a lot easier pill to swallow than the idea that the Left is extremely violent and lives right next door to you.”1
This sort of anger is palpable through a screen, to me. To borrow a bit of a blasé thing to say on this occasion (because I’m not sure how else to describe it), it just hits different. The targeted posts from the more establishment right (Jonathan Turley, Bill Melugin) — pointing the finger at Dems for denying funding to DHS and therefore Secret Service — don’t feature the same existential panic.
And it’s hard not to have all of this in the back of my head while watching some of the very brazen content coming out of the left. Jack Cocchiarella posted a YouTube video last night, still in his tux, titled, “Was This Shooting Fake?”
With 800,000 views, the video likely came across the desk of some of the people above, at which point, I imagine, they discovered yet another octave of anger previously unreached before.
JUST HOW FAR APART?
There’s maybe never been a better example than this of how the two parties can see the same thing differently.
The Right Angle: Bethany Mandel’s interpretation — “You can tell a lot about a man about how they instinctively respond when it hits the fan. In this photo, Stephen Miller moves on top of his pregnant wife to protect her.”
The Left Angle: Charlie Goldensohn’s interpretation — Sarcastically says “Republican men are the real protectors,” then adds a thumbs down and fart noise.
FOREVER JOURNALISM-PILLED
Journalism has lost its charm to a majority of America. This will never, ever happen to me. And it’s not just because I chose this field to pursue myself. I was raised to deeply respect the practice, the process, and the institutions. If someone studied my brain one day, I’m sure they’d discover the “60 Minutes” stopwatch as the backing track of my earliest memories.
It’s that lifelong reverence (thank you, mom) that makes me extremely protective over journalism and journalists, even in the moments they fail to live up to what’s needed of them. Seeing so many of them spring into action, narrate a scene with no added information, report sober-mindedly even if not truly sober at all … it will always move me.
I was at a dinner party trying to keep up with developments from my phone (very rude), and I said, “you can always tell who’s covered war before.” Katilan Collins’ video vantage caught someone with hella bounce, reactivity without lag. I knew it was CBS’s Matt Gutman. He is one of the few journalists with decades of legacy media experience who gets how to move mobile.
While everyone cowered (obviously would be me), he basically parkoured around the room following Secret Service. He asked Katie Miller if she was ok, followed the extraction of RFK Jr., trails law enforcement running for a medic bag, gets threatened with arrest multiple times, runs into Steve Scalise, gets threatened with arrest again. All caught in vertical video.
Fucking legendary. Shout out Matt.
This is part of a longer post that is worth reading. It brings up something I'm starting to see a lot: references to 1916 and Russian bolsheviks.
"I worry sometimes that people on the left don’t have a strong enough understanding of their perception on the right — and that is, easily baited into focusing on the wrong thing."
This needs to be read and internalized by every leftist content creator.
I hope you’re correct Nina. I have been on the sidelines for the last 5 years & now get my news from the Times & the Guardian. I suspect the collective WE broke it.