Calm down, everyone. The White Dudes are here!

Here's a parable about a farmer to help you surrender to the universe

Well, I’m fresh back from a family vacation to Seattle and Washington state. It was our last family vacation before my older child departs for college, yikes, sob. We had delightful weather, and we got to visit the real Twin Peaks. Say hi to the Great Northern Lodge.

My other big news is that I got a job, and I’m very excited about it. I’m not sure exactly how this will impact Rangelife production. I guess we’ll see! Speaking of the unknowable future…

Thanks to everyone who sent me emails about the last issue, especially about why we need to stop catastrophizing about a future that’s destined to look very different from whatever we’re imagining. In the 48 hours after I published that, Joe Biden stepped aside, and Kamala Harris instantly unified the Democratic Party! Within a week, she had obliterated Biden’s swing state polling gap. Did you see that coming?

Getting back to the folly of despairing about the future: I took a particularly good emotional leadership class at work a few years ago, and it included a parable that hit me pretty hard. I’ve since seen or heard this story a few more times, usually referenced as a 2,000-year-old Taoist parable about a farmer. It goes something like this:

One night a farmer’s horse ran away. The neighbors all said, “Oh, that sucks for you.” And the farmer said, “Maybe.”

Then the next day, the horse came back, and brought home a whole herd of wild horses. The neighbors all said, “That rules! You’re so lucky.” And the farmer replied, “Maybe.”

Then the next day, the farmer’s son tried to tame one of the horses, but the horse threw him and broke the young man’s leg. The neighbors said, “Oof. That sucks, bro.” And the farmer replied, “Maybe.”

Then the next day, the local warlord showed up to conscript all the able-bodied young men for his dumb turf war. He took one look at the gimpy son and hard-passed. The neighbors said, “Thank goodness.” And the farmer replied, “Maybe.”

I think about this parable all the time whenever anyone tries to play Monday Morning Quarterback. Yahoo should have bought Google. Hillary Clinton should have campaigned in Wisconsin. You should have expressed your feelings to your high school crush. Any of these actions would have unleashed multiple unpredictable chains of events. But also, there were important reasons why none of these things happened in the first place!

(On May 22, 2010, a man in Florida placed the first ever Bitcoin payment transaction. He purchased two pizzas for $41 in Bitcoin at the time. He posted about this purchase online, where he explained that he bought two pizzas for himself because he likes having leftovers to eat the next day. Those Bitcoin today are worth $646 million. Those were some fancy-ass leftovers. Would he have been happier or otherwise better off not buying those pizzas? Who knows?)

Accepting that the past is for learning, not regrets, is tremendously healthy. But the real power is applying this model to the future. I wrote last week’s piece about this topic, because I’d had so many recent conversations about various dark and scary — but imagined — futures.

This type of doomerism seems to spike every four years for some reason. Must be the Olympics.

But we’ve also got a presidential race happening right now. I’m gonna say some things about it, and then talk about White Dudes.

Rap snitches, tellin all their business, sit in the court and be their own star witness

First, the legacy mainstream media (e.g., TV news, the national newspapers) are blowing the real story as they always do. The political landscape has changed so profoundly that they are really struggling to understand what matters. They’re focused on horse race shit, which VP would “balance” the Democratic ticket, the latest “dangerous” thing that Trump said, and other stuff that probably doesn’t really move voters.

It may not matter. We just don’t really have much awareness of the information that people are seeing and hearing these days. We’re now decades removed from most Americans getting their information from the nightly TV news, the local paper, and a weekly magazine or two. A lot of traditional news consumers didn’t fully realize this until 2016, when it manifested as hysteria about “misinformation on Facebook,” as if traditional media could restore its power if only Zuck would just “fix fake news.”

Last week, millions of people saw a four-year-old article by John Eastman questioning Kamala Harris’s eligibility to be Vice President. People saw this old piece because Trump and his acolytes re-shared it. You may know that VP Harris is the daughter of immigrants, who were faculty at UC-Berkeley when she was born in Oakland. The Constitution is extremely clear that she’s a natural-born citizen. Eastman says, you know, it was only like 100 years ago that courts ruled that US-born children of non-citizens weren’t automatically citizens. Even Newsweek, which published the piece, determined that they’d shared a piece of racist birtherism, and they included a long note at the top of the piece explaining how awful the author’s intent was. (This is an extraordinary effort by a news site that I think more should try.)

Anyway, more people saw tweets and posts about this malicious article than watched CNN or read the New York Times last week. This is significant. A lot of folks still haven’t fully grokked how drastically our information environment has changed. When you hear them saying “this will make great fodder for ads” or how the candidates might match up in a televised debate, they’re projecting a media context that no longer exists. They’re remembering seeing TV commercials in a past decade, maybe even ones they never saw but saw stories about.

They’re remembering presidential and VP debates presided by the Commission of Presidential Debates, broadcast on every network that people watched. They’re not thinking of 2024 when Trump has effectively boycotted the bipartisan Commission out of existence, and 40% of TV watching is streamed on demand, not live.

Even if Joe Biden in 2024 were still able to communicate clearly, he would have been wildly inadequate to run this race. Presidential politics has always been about vibes and the big narrative. Biden’s brand of normalcy and decency proved a nice contrast after four years of Trump’s chaos and confrontation. It certainly won back older voters.

But information only breaks through when it offers something emotionally, and fortunately Harris’s campaign is saying and doing the things that drive attention. And this time the Lincoln Project isn’t the only organization making breakthrough ads. (Watch this one below.)

Democrats are leaning into branding Republicans as “weird” and “creepy,” and making this election about people’s freedom to have sex without government regulation or the risk of prison. This feels like a pretty salient messaging strategy. Why are you in my bedroom?

Is the pervy, sex-obsessed dude a fair archetype of most American conservatives? Probably not, but the people at Trump rallies are very strange. The citizens showing up to city council meetings to angrily oppose school vaccine requirements are generally off-putting to others. AR-15 warriors cosplaying as Army Rangers don’t seem like the kind of folks who should choose (or especially be) our leaders. And the January 6ers? C’mon.

There are no Democratic analogs to Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn, George Santos, or Ron Johnson. Most normal people wouldn’t even want to be in the same room with them. (Actually, Santos seems like a lot of fun.)

The “Rise” of White Dudes

Finally, in the wake of wildly successful “Black Women for Harris” and “Black Men for Harris” virtual rallies, I attended a “White Dudes for Harris” virtual rally Monday night. It raised $4.2 million for the Harris campaign, and Elon promptly kicked them from Xitter because he loves free speech.

I’m absolutely certain that this is the first deliberately “white” event I’ve ever been a part of. This feels significant, less for me than for society at large.

Yeah, I’m not wearing that

Whiteness is a relatively new concept. In its limited lifespan, it’s been almost universally leveraged for the purposes of grievance and white supremacy. (For an excellent exploration of this, I highly recommend Alex Edelman’s hilarious HBO comedy special “Just for Us,” which is about him infiltrating a white supremacist organization.)

Now I’ve been in plenty of situations that are implicity for whites — for example, I’ve been to a Vampire Weekend show. But I’ve never been to an event that was explicitly for whites. As a Jewish guy married to a woman of color, with multi-racial kids, I didn’t think I’d be welcomed or even want to be welcomed to one of those.

Whether Nazis would give me a pass or send me to the Camps is immaterial to this concern. As someone who lives in Society, I enjoy the white privilege that I never asked for. Cops generally don’t harass me, I usually get the interview, and nobody thinks I’m about to rob them. My high school AP classes were de facto “for whites” clubs, in a school where white students were a clear minority. I am the beneficiary of centuries of advantage. I still have to play and win the game, but I’m playing it on Easy mode.

So being part of White Dudes for Harris makes me really uncomfortable, because acknowledgement of one’s whiteness has traditionally been the first step on the journey to Nazi. For example, another “white dudes” event took place a few years ago in Charlottesville. That was a bad one.

The inherent struggle of anti-racist whites is using our whiteness for the purpose of expanding its benefits. Quite often this feels like a manifestation of white savior complex. “Good news, everyone. The white people are here to fix everything!”

I asked several non-white friends and family members how they felt about White Dudes for Harris, and I got mixed reactions. Some were really annoyed about this. “Don’t you guys already have Society?” Others were impressed with the effort, and they were happy to see white guys organize to elect a woman of color to be President of the United States.

The event itself was fun, and it was a tactical win. They smartly started by addressing the elephant in the room, which was the validity of a White Dudes event that wasn’t intended to be racist or sexist or even exclusionary. (It was livestreamed on YouTube, so anyone could watch.) They introduced the problem of Trump winning 60% of the white male vote in 2016 and 2020, and MAGA co-opting American masculinity. The second speaker was a Black man, which seemed to help put people at ease. Many of the rest of the speakers joked about the nature of the event. Brad Whitford started his segment ironically praising “the diversity of whiteness on display. What a wonderful rainbow of beige.”

OK, tactical win. But what’s next? The Republican Party has to be careful about this stuff because they are not a multi-ethnic coalition. While opinion-makers like Tucker Carlson have engaged in actual white supremacy on TV, Trump himself has always been careful not to, at least in public. It’s easy to see how White Dudes for Harris gives conservatives new permission to recognize and celebrate their white identity for the purposes of white nationalism, now explicitly instead of implicitly.

On the other hand, the strength of White Dudes for Harris — and speakers expressed this multiple times during the event — is not that it validates Harris’s campaign via the approval of white men, but that it validates white men for supporting Harris. This feels like the big deal here. Trump’s not like us.

But most white men aren’t the TV stars and US senators whom we saw at this virtual rally; they’re working people just trying to pay the bills. For many of them, Society’s white male privilege machine doesn’t seem to operate consistently.

What’s more attractive? “You’re privileged, so shut up and get out of the way”? Or “You’re being discriminated against. I’ll fight for you”? It’s easy to understand how white men can be tribally attracted to Trump and MAGA without considering themselves to be racist or sexist. (And also because science says that voting for a woman transforms a man into one.)

Young men in particular may be the most conservative, even fascist, demographic in America now. We can blame the YouTube algorithm or video game culture or whatever, but blaming doesn’t fix anything. Joe Rogan’s and Ben Shapiro’s ideas and expressions seem to be working for young dudes, across race and ethnicity. Young men have real grievances. More than 60% of men under 30 are single, almost twice the rate of women. Even before pandemic, more than 30% of men under 25 had no sexual partners in the past year. And their economic prospects? Men comprise only 42% of four-year college students.

Liberals don’t worry too much about men given the aggregate wealth and privilege of manhood, but we should. America currently has the conditions in place for a fascist takeover. And historically, these takeovers are driven by aimless young men without meaningful work, economic prospects, and romantic/sexual partners.

What are Democrats offering them? That’s the real Dude problem we have to solve.

Rangelife Shorts

Why do new cars look like putty? You may have noticed that a lot of new cars are painted in colors that look a bit like clay. It’s not a “matte finish” — they’re still shiny. Well, Hank Green gets to the bottom of why new cars look like putty in this delightful video. Once you watch this, you’ll see them everywhere.

The scammers are victims, too. Like you, I’ve enjoyed “I scammed the scammers lol” videos over the year. Text, email, and social media scams are annoying at best, and potentially devastating at their worst. But the unsexy truth about crime is that it tends to be perpetrated by poor people who are stuck in bad situations. This WSJ piece (gift link) delves into one of these global phone scam operations, where the scammers aren’t scoundrels but slaves. Just mark as spam and move on.

A real imitation of uncanny AI. America has avoided the really bad deepfakes that help swing an election or send innocent people to prison. (I mean, as far as we know.) AI images, audio, and video are still uncanny enough, that most people can discern the phony slop from the real thing. (Maybe less so in the Philippines.) We’ve been asking ourselves what’s going to happen when deepfakes look real, but maybe we should ask ourselves what happens when people starting imitating AI? This short video hilariously lampoons the AI video aesthetic.

A beautiful tribute to the legendary TV pitchman Billy Mays. Sorry, I meant BILLY MAYS.

Intergenerational comedy. I’ve written here before about how Gen Z humor just makes sense to Gen Xers, because it exploits out-of-context randomness and also works some of the same doomer / slacker themes that our humor did. But now here comes Gen Alpha! As a parent of a Gen Z daughter who’s always bickering with her Gen A brother, this 45-second video literally strikes close to home.

Interview with Dying Company’s Product Manager. I was an over-my-head PM at a big internet company in the mid-’00s that had clearly peaked a few years earlier. We were always trying to figure out how to turn a 15% drop in users into a mere 10% drop in users. (We called that “a 5% lift”!) Employee turnover was so high, that I had one interdepartmental meeting where nothing got done, because new people showed up every single week. (“Hi, I’m Sujeet.” “What happened to Jill?” “She left for a job at Google.”) Anyway, I don’t recommend working at a dying tech company if you can avoid it.

OK, this may be my last Rangelife before my new job starts. Or maybe not! Time is an illusion, and the future is unknowable.