From a Midwit to all the Cranks,

The Trump years have brought some very curious voices into the national conversation. Trump baffled so much of the pundit class it was useless to listen to mainstream voices like Slate to explain him. They never had much more than ‘Trump’s a racist… so I guess everyone who likes him is racist’.

So let’s look at some figures who got a quite a career boost from explaining Trump to the rest of the world. Michael Malice’s book on the Alt-Right boosted his profile, further fueled by his iconoclastic wit. I had forgotten Scott Adams created Dilbert until he explained how Trump’s unhinged word salads were Galaxy Brain chess moves. Bridget Phetasy is a writer and actor who started a podcast & Youtube channel for the politically homeless.

They all had insights into the Trump phenomenon that seemed much more perceptive than anything else from the usual talking heads. In the past 4 years, all have been interviewed on mainstream media and appeared on the wildly popular Joe Rogan Podcast. They have burgeoning media empires and undoubtedly book contracts to fulfill.

So what now, with a Biden win being declared on Fox News? I write this the morning of Sunday, November 8th 2020 and Adams, at least, is sounding the ‘Biden cheated, Trump’s gonna win!’ call. Malice doesn’t seem to have taken that approach, but clearly Michael will miss Donald. Phetasy has recently pointed out the madness of calling Trump a dictator if you can vote him out of office.

Can you blame Adams? The pundit field seems pretty cut-throat these days, with about a billion new substacks/podcasts/Youtube/TikTok offerings. But if we are returning to a more normal time, do we tune out the weirdos? Isn’t everything back to normal?

I hope not! For one thing, the cultural climate created Trump, not the other way around. The fault lines have shifted and the mainstream media is just as clueless. We see this in the number of progressive pundits saying the Black vote defeated the racist White vote, despite Trump’s huuuuge gains among Black voters.

I also saw on Saturday, November 7th 2020 video of a BLM supporter getting into a fight with a Biden supporter. So the celebration lasted about 1 second. It’s good, I think, for Trump to leave office. He so dominated people’s thinking they could only focus on him personally. With him gone, we can more easily see the wider patterns.

But Adams, Malice and Phetasy have already started to see those patterns. Not to take their every word as truth; Malice and Adams are two people I vehemently disagree with on many issues. Phetasy doesn’t seem to take hard political stances. But when the familiar pathways are gone, the person with the different perspective might have the most insight.