Some Scattered Thoughts On A Very Bad Week

It’s hard to know what to say but, lucky you, I’m going to take a crack at it

Hello, Readers. Does it feel like an honor when I capitalize it like that? What about if I call you R E A D E R S to better capture your exalted status?

A couple administrative items first. The current draft of my book is due at the end of the month. It’s consuming my life, as it should, because this book is very important to me. This newsletter is also very important to me, but over the last couple weeks my attention has been elsewhere. I’m going to do my best to get you your full allotment of content this month, but things are very hectic. To help fill the gap, I’m strongly considering doing a live video chat for paid Singal-Minded subscribers, where I give a quick update on the progress of the book and then answer any questions you have about it. So keep an eye out for that — premium subscribers will be able to join live, post questions, and so on, but will also have access to the full video afterward if you can’t make it for the event itself.

Along those same lines, I’d like to start thinking about what this newsletter will look like after my book is done and once I’ve (hopefully!) moved on a bit from youth gender issues. What kind of stuff would you like to see here? Are there subjects I haven’t touched, or have only barely touched, that you’d like to see me discuss more? What about Q&As or exchanges like the one I had with Mark Stern? I’m really open to any ideas. I’ve mentioned this before, but sometimes I feel like it would be better to be on more of a set schedule, have some more semi-regular features, and so on. On the other hand, this newsletter has become surprisingly successful in its more random, publish-when-I-have-stuff-to-publish form, so who knows? The point is, if you have thoughts on the future of Singal-Minded, you have a better shot of catching my attention now than at other times, so shoot me a note with “the future” in the subject line if you have thoughts.

And with that, let’s get to the sad subject of today’s actual newsletter.

Scattered Thoughts About the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

1. The vast majority of mainstream, establishment figures in politics and other positions of influence denounced Kirk’s murder swiftly and without stutter. This is really important. We are backsliding, but things can always get worse. I understand the desire to seek out and focus on the worst actors in a situation like this, but they do represent a minority.

2. Part of what’s scary about the current age is that the assumption has always been that there was this thing called “the mainstream” or “the establishment” that has a particularly noteworthy top-down influence. Anyone in the mainstream or the establishment is well-educated, highly filtered, and compelled, by socialization and professional incentives, to meet a certain level of decorum. In the past, the sort of person who would cheer a shooting or seek to egg on more shootings would not have been welcome in “the mainstream” or “the establishment.”

While there are perfectly valid critiques of “the mainstream” and “the establishment,” it would be hard to come up with a better example of “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”

3. These days, the boundary between the mainstream and everything else is. . . well, there just isn’t one anymore. Maybe the castle wall has one tiny section left, but everything else was overrun long ago. There are many millions of Americans who get their news from other sources every day. Charlie Kirk, in fact, helped build a movement that sought, in part, to bypass old sources of mainstream authority and expertise, and he was wildly successful in doing so. Millions of young Americans — mostly young ones — had their news filtered through Charlie Kirk. While aspects of his presentation and delivery were, of course, different, they saw him as infinitely more trustworthy and relatable than mainstream media superstars, which is how they turned him into his own kind of superstar.

4. Traditional mainstream media authority is in hospice care right now. I just can’t emphasize this enough. This isn’t a situation where the networks simply need to replace older anchors with younger ones and make some tweaks to older ones.

These entire models are dying, full stop:

The political media landscape is undergoing a dramatic shake-up. CNN and MSNBC, two of the biggest cable news networks, are facing historic ratings declines, with their viewership slashed nearly in half since the recent presidential election. Both networks struggle to retain their audiences, collapsing to levels not seen in nearly 30 years. Meanwhile, Fox News has held steady, dominating the cable news space.

But “dominating the cable news space” isn’t worth very much anymore. In January, Fox News touted that it “delivered 2.8 million viewers and 353,000 in the 25-54 demographic, growing its audience 40% year-over-year in total viewership and 61% in the 25-54 demo.”

There are about 350 million Americans. So the biggest cable news channel gets less than 1% of them to tune in. How do things look at the networks?

Here’s how they look:

According to live-plus-same-day data from Nielsen, ABC World News Tonight averaged 6.882 million total viewers and 915,000 Adults 25-54 demo viewers for the week of August 4.

That’s a bit under 2%.

During the era of Walker Cronkite — I feel like everyone makes this comparison — he pulled about 18.5 million viewers a night. And the country was much smaller back then; it depends on which estimate you trust, but about 15% of Americans were watching Walter Cronkite on a given evening. We’re just never going to ever have anything like this again, when it comes to news or punditry.

Just to put some of these numbers in perspective, Nick Fuentes — a single online influencer, and one who happens to be a(n actual) white nationalist — got 200,000 people concurrently tuning into his stream the other night. He had beef with Charlie Kirk, you see, so naturally, viewers were curious. But this wasn’t some one-off: Despite multiple attempts to “deplatform” Fuentes, according to The New York Times, “Since his X account was reinstated by Elon Musk 16 months ago, the number of his followers appears to have grown from roughly 140,000 to more than 750,000. His ‘America First’ streaming show viewership on Rumble has quintupled to around 500,000.” Yes, that’s right: A white supremacist Zoomer now has an audience about half the size of ABC’s nightly 25–54 pull. This isn’t an apples to apples comparison, but. . . wow.

5. Fuentes views Trump as too far to the left and too soft on his key issues, like opposition to Israel. Kirk was an ardent MAGA supporter, and a (very successful) political organizer on top of being a pundit.

There has been a bit of an attempt to sanitize him since he died. I understand that, because his murder was completely unacceptable, and in the wake of a political assassination, people don’t want to speak ill of the dead and they definitely don’t want to be seen as condoning or supporting the act. This leaves anyone attempting to understand what’s going on in the United States in a difficult position.