This reminds me of a long conversation I had with a therapist about moving out to Ohio. The basic idea is that there are certain parts of the country branded "bad" and others branded "good" and these brands distort the way people both in and outside those places feel about them. Ohio is bad. If you are successful you are not supposed to live in Ohio. You are supposed to make fun of Ohio. Moving to Ohio is failure. Seattle is good. You WANT to move to Seattle. Moving to Seattle is success. The more you hear these labels the harder it is to shake them, and you end up totally and completely unable to differentiate what you genuinely like or want in a location and what you don't. This works both ways - for young liberals it leads to a kind of self-loathing about where they come from. They have fond memories of Butte county, of Ohio, of the South, but know they are SUPPOSED to hate it. They end up in this perpetual competition trying to disown a place they genuinely enjoyed in a way that convinces their peers from other places that they actually hated it all along, all the while hating themselves for not truly hating the bad place. If they don't fall into that spiral they fall into the opposite one - they treat their home as magic and sacred, a place totally immune to bad-ness. Then the other becomes the enemy. Seattle becomes an unlivable hellhole full of sharks and demons whereas Omaha is the REAL America.
Place has fully been consumed in the all-consuming culture war. You can't merely like something - a city, a home, a family - you have to make them part of who you are as an individual. If you enjoyed a bad thing well congrats, you are bad now. If you are from a bad place welcome to bad-ness. Aaron Rodgers is Butte, but that's only because the stain of the bad place sticks with you forever. No amount of calling it a racist hellhole unfit for life can ever cleanse the stain of Butte from a child of the filth.
I don’t know if the idea of “Red Zoning” is an original idea of yours but it gives a name to something I’ve noticed in media over recent years. Great post
Serious question - why does the media feel the need to react this way? Is it purely virtue signaling? Do they think the general public is that stupid and thus needs the media to guide them?
No one’s opinion on the vax has changed because of this. Those who are pro-vax are most likely already vaccinated and not affected by Rodgers comments. Those who were already anti-vax are not going to be swayed by snarky quote-tweets from blue check marks. Do we really think there is a group of people out there who are on the fence and waiting for their favorite athlete to tell them what to do?
I really appreciate how you see the whole story on these things and are willing to point it out. The line "Wrong at points, weird at others, but some of that made sense.” stood out to me and is something that I think people need to acknowledge more often. This is why I will always read your writing and listen to your podcasts.
Great article. Extremely on point. People have different opinions, but the smug arrogance of some SF columnists is really distasteful. As a teacher, I really recoil against the view that if some one disagrees with you they are “stupid, uneducated, or redneck”.
You really brought a perspective to this discussion that I had not fully considered. The nuance in these issues/debates definitely gets swept away by the broad blanket red brush/blue brush politics associated with the macro talking points. Well done, you made me think a little harder.
Prestige media’s obsession with “platform” and your general premise reminds me of Jack Gleeson’s speech (Actor who played Joffrey from GOT) at Oxford (I think) from years ago where he conveyed a bewildered stance on why Americans needed celebrities to validate their opinions. It’s all connected to this platform idea. Also reminds when Eminem released a track or something of the sort attacking Trump - and I literally saw blue check Twitter salivate at it with “this is huge! Angry white boys are going to listen to this…” It did nothing of course. I take some blame in all this as a PR pro - we’ve set the table for all this. (Sorry!)
"But I can make things worse, probably by an order of magnitude. Years ago, I realized that I really can’t be the guy who shits on the customer, overtly. If I started tweeting at sports fans that I’m better than them, or that I look down on them, or anything in that range, I’m screwed. It’s a weakness compounded, like if a slow quarterback kept trying to scramble."
You might want to forward this to the insufferable Grant Wahl.
Rogers is wrong about vaccines and lied. Should have just said I don't want it. He said he was allergic to Pfizer and Moderna and was concerned with J& J side effects. Johnson and
Johnson's very rare side effects are concentrated in women 30-39 with coagulation issues. So , no , he did no research. Now as to Chico, he was was extremely generous and saved several businesses with his largesse during the pandemic. So, selfish personally but EXTREMELY generous locally. His good has very much outweighed any perceived bad. He has done other things for the community I know of that are just as helpful. I will not comment on Ethan "getting over his skis" on vaccine knowledge. The info is there on safety, decrease of death by vaccine uptake, and what is the best way to immunize a populace. This week in virology podcast is excellent and the Curbsider podcast #304 just released gave data and facts on how to look at vaccines. It took 5 years of Polio vaccines to eradicate polio and the populace was not inclined to get it initially- despite what people say- it hasn't been a year and we are at 60 to 70 % and now oral meds are coming. Biden did win Butte County but by a far less % that the state as a whole and voted to recall the democratic governor and voted more republicans for state office than democrats. It is a diverse county that skews more conservative than other areas.
I know this isn’t the point of the article, but since everyone struggles with this - it is safe to say the following.
We have strong evidence that: getting vaccinated makes it extremely rare to have serious health outcomes if you get Covid. It makes it much less likely you’ll get infected in the first place. And most importantly, if you get infected, it reduces the likelihood that you’ll spread Covid while asymptomatic.
I recently had a conversation on my high school group text chain (class of 2000) about dems losing VA and seeming to lose all political "momentum." Think this piece is spot on as to why. Nice work.
I think a lot about who I was as a young adult in the mid 2000s vs who I am now. The parallels of me scoffing at CDs from Walmart because of their policy on selling only edited CDs to me now defending Chapelle’s right to make jokes about nuanced topics to my Fiancé. The missing parallel is who is enforcing (or at least trying to enforce) the edit. Before Chapelle I was a big George Carlin fan. I would watch his almost yearly specials with my bleeding heart liberal mother. Recently his special “You are all Diseased” popped up on Netflix and I decided to take a trip down memory lane. By the end of the hour I realized two things. The first being, if George Carlin was still alive today he’d be apologizing to the same people he was making laugh 20 years ago and second the TSA still hasn’t found any bombs.
I'm a diehard Chicago Bears fan. There is no one I root against more than Aaron Rodgers. When I first heard that Rodgers lied about being vaccinated, I laughed my ass off. Finally, everyone else can join me!
But now, well, things are complicated.
These elitist media Bluechecks are awful. For all the reasons you mentioned in your article, I hate them more than anything else in the world right now. The sheer classism makes my blood boil. Yes, Rodgers made an ass of himself by invoking the "woke mob" (fwiw I don't see wokeness and vaccines as being related here), but the reaction from all these media types and hyperpartisans looks even worse. EVERYTHING is the culture war now, and nuance is not allowed.
So congratulations, elitists. Looks like Aaron Rodgers and I really do have common cause now. I never thought in a million years I'd see the day.
Wait, so Rodgers and Rogan get COVID, seek alternative treatments, and recover in a couple of days? Nothing else about his story matters. At all. Good read though.
I think you and others are maybe overestimating the influence of Joe Rogan. He’s a big deal, no doubt, but calling him the number one podcast really inflates his stature.
Rogan gets about 11 million downloads per episode. Globally.
Because of auto-download being the norm, lots of downloads don’t turn into listens. In the realm of 30%.
If he gets something like 8 million listens per episode, the vast majority of those will be repeat listeners.
Most of those listeners are in the US, but not all.
So while he’s a big deal, he’s got at best 1.5% of the country listening to him - some smaller number actually consider him influential.
You’ve rightfully said how the media dramatically overestimates the influence of twitter. But twitter has something like 20x the reach of Joe Rogan.
He’s not quite a fringe lunatic. But his audience is closer in size to Alex Jones than it is to the twitter hive mind.
This reminds me of a long conversation I had with a therapist about moving out to Ohio. The basic idea is that there are certain parts of the country branded "bad" and others branded "good" and these brands distort the way people both in and outside those places feel about them. Ohio is bad. If you are successful you are not supposed to live in Ohio. You are supposed to make fun of Ohio. Moving to Ohio is failure. Seattle is good. You WANT to move to Seattle. Moving to Seattle is success. The more you hear these labels the harder it is to shake them, and you end up totally and completely unable to differentiate what you genuinely like or want in a location and what you don't. This works both ways - for young liberals it leads to a kind of self-loathing about where they come from. They have fond memories of Butte county, of Ohio, of the South, but know they are SUPPOSED to hate it. They end up in this perpetual competition trying to disown a place they genuinely enjoyed in a way that convinces their peers from other places that they actually hated it all along, all the while hating themselves for not truly hating the bad place. If they don't fall into that spiral they fall into the opposite one - they treat their home as magic and sacred, a place totally immune to bad-ness. Then the other becomes the enemy. Seattle becomes an unlivable hellhole full of sharks and demons whereas Omaha is the REAL America.
Place has fully been consumed in the all-consuming culture war. You can't merely like something - a city, a home, a family - you have to make them part of who you are as an individual. If you enjoyed a bad thing well congrats, you are bad now. If you are from a bad place welcome to bad-ness. Aaron Rodgers is Butte, but that's only because the stain of the bad place sticks with you forever. No amount of calling it a racist hellhole unfit for life can ever cleanse the stain of Butte from a child of the filth.
I don’t know if the idea of “Red Zoning” is an original idea of yours but it gives a name to something I’ve noticed in media over recent years. Great post
Serious question - why does the media feel the need to react this way? Is it purely virtue signaling? Do they think the general public is that stupid and thus needs the media to guide them?
No one’s opinion on the vax has changed because of this. Those who are pro-vax are most likely already vaccinated and not affected by Rodgers comments. Those who were already anti-vax are not going to be swayed by snarky quote-tweets from blue check marks. Do we really think there is a group of people out there who are on the fence and waiting for their favorite athlete to tell them what to do?
Ryen Russillo is one of my favorite sports media voices, and he's definitely been Red Zoned
I really appreciate how you see the whole story on these things and are willing to point it out. The line "Wrong at points, weird at others, but some of that made sense.” stood out to me and is something that I think people need to acknowledge more often. This is why I will always read your writing and listen to your podcasts.
Great article. Extremely on point. People have different opinions, but the smug arrogance of some SF columnists is really distasteful. As a teacher, I really recoil against the view that if some one disagrees with you they are “stupid, uneducated, or redneck”.
You really brought a perspective to this discussion that I had not fully considered. The nuance in these issues/debates definitely gets swept away by the broad blanket red brush/blue brush politics associated with the macro talking points. Well done, you made me think a little harder.
Prestige media’s obsession with “platform” and your general premise reminds me of Jack Gleeson’s speech (Actor who played Joffrey from GOT) at Oxford (I think) from years ago where he conveyed a bewildered stance on why Americans needed celebrities to validate their opinions. It’s all connected to this platform idea. Also reminds when Eminem released a track or something of the sort attacking Trump - and I literally saw blue check Twitter salivate at it with “this is huge! Angry white boys are going to listen to this…” It did nothing of course. I take some blame in all this as a PR pro - we’ve set the table for all this. (Sorry!)
"But I can make things worse, probably by an order of magnitude. Years ago, I realized that I really can’t be the guy who shits on the customer, overtly. If I started tweeting at sports fans that I’m better than them, or that I look down on them, or anything in that range, I’m screwed. It’s a weakness compounded, like if a slow quarterback kept trying to scramble."
You might want to forward this to the insufferable Grant Wahl.
Rogers is wrong about vaccines and lied. Should have just said I don't want it. He said he was allergic to Pfizer and Moderna and was concerned with J& J side effects. Johnson and
Johnson's very rare side effects are concentrated in women 30-39 with coagulation issues. So , no , he did no research. Now as to Chico, he was was extremely generous and saved several businesses with his largesse during the pandemic. So, selfish personally but EXTREMELY generous locally. His good has very much outweighed any perceived bad. He has done other things for the community I know of that are just as helpful. I will not comment on Ethan "getting over his skis" on vaccine knowledge. The info is there on safety, decrease of death by vaccine uptake, and what is the best way to immunize a populace. This week in virology podcast is excellent and the Curbsider podcast #304 just released gave data and facts on how to look at vaccines. It took 5 years of Polio vaccines to eradicate polio and the populace was not inclined to get it initially- despite what people say- it hasn't been a year and we are at 60 to 70 % and now oral meds are coming. Biden did win Butte County but by a far less % that the state as a whole and voted to recall the democratic governor and voted more republicans for state office than democrats. It is a diverse county that skews more conservative than other areas.
I know this isn’t the point of the article, but since everyone struggles with this - it is safe to say the following.
We have strong evidence that: getting vaccinated makes it extremely rare to have serious health outcomes if you get Covid. It makes it much less likely you’ll get infected in the first place. And most importantly, if you get infected, it reduces the likelihood that you’ll spread Covid while asymptomatic.
I recently had a conversation on my high school group text chain (class of 2000) about dems losing VA and seeming to lose all political "momentum." Think this piece is spot on as to why. Nice work.
I think a lot about who I was as a young adult in the mid 2000s vs who I am now. The parallels of me scoffing at CDs from Walmart because of their policy on selling only edited CDs to me now defending Chapelle’s right to make jokes about nuanced topics to my Fiancé. The missing parallel is who is enforcing (or at least trying to enforce) the edit. Before Chapelle I was a big George Carlin fan. I would watch his almost yearly specials with my bleeding heart liberal mother. Recently his special “You are all Diseased” popped up on Netflix and I decided to take a trip down memory lane. By the end of the hour I realized two things. The first being, if George Carlin was still alive today he’d be apologizing to the same people he was making laugh 20 years ago and second the TSA still hasn’t found any bombs.
I'm a diehard Chicago Bears fan. There is no one I root against more than Aaron Rodgers. When I first heard that Rodgers lied about being vaccinated, I laughed my ass off. Finally, everyone else can join me!
But now, well, things are complicated.
These elitist media Bluechecks are awful. For all the reasons you mentioned in your article, I hate them more than anything else in the world right now. The sheer classism makes my blood boil. Yes, Rodgers made an ass of himself by invoking the "woke mob" (fwiw I don't see wokeness and vaccines as being related here), but the reaction from all these media types and hyperpartisans looks even worse. EVERYTHING is the culture war now, and nuance is not allowed.
So congratulations, elitists. Looks like Aaron Rodgers and I really do have common cause now. I never thought in a million years I'd see the day.
Wait, so Rodgers and Rogan get COVID, seek alternative treatments, and recover in a couple of days? Nothing else about his story matters. At all. Good read though.
I think you and others are maybe overestimating the influence of Joe Rogan. He’s a big deal, no doubt, but calling him the number one podcast really inflates his stature.
Rogan gets about 11 million downloads per episode. Globally.
Because of auto-download being the norm, lots of downloads don’t turn into listens. In the realm of 30%.
If he gets something like 8 million listens per episode, the vast majority of those will be repeat listeners.
Most of those listeners are in the US, but not all.
So while he’s a big deal, he’s got at best 1.5% of the country listening to him - some smaller number actually consider him influential.
You’ve rightfully said how the media dramatically overestimates the influence of twitter. But twitter has something like 20x the reach of Joe Rogan.
He’s not quite a fringe lunatic. But his audience is closer in size to Alex Jones than it is to the twitter hive mind.