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Logan Paul hasnt posted a new YouTube video in over six months. His last two uploads were titled Im Fighting Floyd Mayweather This Week and My Last Words To Floyd Mayweather. Then, silence. If you didnt know better, youd think he died in the ring.

What else but a fatal boxing incident, after all, could have led one of the most famous YouTubers in the world a controversial but charismatic web presence who helped shape the template for modern e-celebrity to leave his 23.2 million subscribers on radio silence for half a year and counting?

Demonetization; being blacklisted; being shadow-banned, says Paul, 26, rattling off the different ways YouTube and other mainstream social networks have alienated him. Its really demotivating when you are yourself, and the platform that youre on because of the advertisers, because of public sentiment, whatever it is no longer wants to support you.

In search of a corner of the internet where he can be his full, unfiltered self, Paul has traded in YouTube for Subify, the company that runs the back-end tech for his boutique fan network the Maverick Club. Part of Subifys pitch is that there are almost no restrictions on what Paul can post in the Maverick Club, or what other celebrities can post through their own Subify-enabled channels.

It really feels like free speech is dead in America right now, because a platform can literally shut you down and take away your microphone, co-founder Zak Folkman said. At Subify, we will literally never do that to a creator unless they are promoting terrorist acts or child pornography.

In an era when social media censorship is a top-of-mind concern for everyone including content creators and members of Congress, its a vision with appeal to some. But its also one that raises a lot of messy, ethically fraught questions as a recent discussion between Paul, Folkman and Subify co-founder Chase Hero showed.

If we had a Nazi on the platform that just wanted to talk about their beliefs, Folkman said at one point during the Zoom call, I personally would have a very hard time telling them Youre not allowed to do that, unless theyre inciting violence.

This, apparently, was news to Paul.

Look, I love your sentiment, he said. But as another creator on the platform, youd be hearing from me.

The real answer is, I think that we just take everything as it comes, Hero said. All these people are gonna have different beliefs and giving them a platform to communicate with their people is really all we care about. Right? And obviously, Im kind of with [Paul]; Id be really hard-pressed about someone whos a Nazi.

Obviously we dont support , Folkman said, before Paul cut him off, saying it was a terrible example.

Folkman continued: Well take it on a case-by-case basis. But I really cant see too many creators that we wouldnt feel comfortable with supporting their right to freedom of speech.

Paul didnt seem convinced. I will f up a Nazi, he said.

Bad example, Folkman said. Bad example.

After the call, the company told The Times that Folkman had misspoken. We absolutely do not allow hate speech of any kind for example no Nazis or anything of that nature, an email statement attributed to Folkman read. We take pride in giving a platform to creators of all kinds. We believe that everyone is entitled to have their voice and opinions heard.

If Subifys leaders are conflicted about what running a haven for free speech actually entails, theyre not alone. The internet has long been seen as a refuge for untrammeled expression, but as large social media platforms have come to dominate the web, that ideal has run up against concerns about extremism, misinformation and user safety. What moderation steps tech platforms do take have become controversial and highly politicized.

Subify isnt the first tech company to build a brand around the promise of near-absolute free speech, but it does differ from many such apps in its focus on influencers creative freedom rather than Trump-era culture wars.

The simple fact is that no company in its right mind would ever throw its hands up and cede control of its product solely to the users of that product, said Sarah T. Roberts, an associate professor at UCLA and co-founder of its Center for Critical Internet Inquiry.

Because social media companies in America enjoy wide legal immunity to moderate what their users post, Roberts added, this therefore becomes a question of tolerance from a business perspective. Thats why I consider content moderation to be primarily a tool of brand management for firms; the firms themselves have to assess what risk theyre willing to take by having distasteful, abhorrent material on their site.

For Paul, these arent abstract questions. Back when he was primarily known as a YouTuber, that platform demonetized him or took away his ability to make money from his videos after he posted a series of controversial clips in which he tasered dead rats, endorsed the Tide Pod challenge, and, most notoriously, filmed a suicide victim in Japans Aokigahara forest.

Other scandals have found Paul saying he would go gay for a month; using women as a human bicycle; and, in one video, appearing to lasso unsuspecting women.

These days, Paul hasnt entirely abandoned YouTube his podcast Impaulsive has its own channel, with 3.53 million followers, that still updates regularly but he has moved much of his creative output, including his signature autobiographical vlogs, over to Subify.

Youre creating it for an ecosystem of people who really like you, Paul said of the Maverick Club. Its not for the masses to judge or make assessments or make mean comments. As someone who in the past has been polarizing, theres people who dont like me; theres people who do like me. I really love the idea of leaning into people who do like me.

An Oops! All Logan Pauls social network might sound hellish to those who find Pauls patent mix of stunts and self-documentation obnoxious. But super-fans are willing to pay $19.95 a month for access, and Paul is happy to oblige them.

Behind the safety of a paywall, on a platform all his own, Paul said hes able to post a bit more explicit content; a bit more risque content.

Its that 10% of me, he said, that whether for legal reasons, whether for public sentiment, whatever, Im unwilling to show the world.

Subify declined to say how it wouldve handled the suicide forest and rat-tasering videos, instead pointing to adult related content, conservative and other alternative viewpoints and hunting and firearms content as areas where its more permissive than YouTube.

As Paul was growing disenchanted with mainstream social media, Subify offered him an out. Folkman and Hero, who have a background in e-commerce, had initially built a proto-Subify for personal use: It was so that we could power our own brands, Hero said.

But while hanging out with Paul one day Hero and Pauls manager are longtime friends the YouTuber suggested they open it up more widely.

Hes like, Man, I think this would be really good for a person. What do ya think? Hero recalled. I was like, If youre willing to be that person, wed give it a shot.

The result was the Maverick Club, Subifys first entry into celebrity fan platforms; its now been up and running for about a year and a half, Paul said. (Paul is one of Subifys top creators, but according to a spokesperson, he has no other financial stake in the company.)

In the meantime, Subify expanded its suite of features and began finding new celebrities to work with: rapper Flo Rida, Jackass stuntman Steve-O, NASCAR driver Hailie Deegan. Hero said that tens and tens of thousands of creators have applied to join, and that he and Folkman are constantly vetting, asking questions, and then doing our due diligence to filter out poor fits.

Despite Subifys promise of near-absolute free speech, not everyone makes the cut.

Theres a guy who wanted to come in and revive the old bum fights, if you remember that make homeless people fight, Hero said. Were like, Yeah, thats just not gonna work here. I love you to death, but thats just not something that we really condone.

The companys laissez-faire attitude also doesnt extend to its nonfamous subscriber base. Celebrities may get wide latitude to post things they couldnt put up elsewhere, but in the interest of building an environment that the co-founders describe as a safe space and an echo chamber for content creators, their fans are subject to more rigorous scrutiny.

We have moderators so if we see anybody whos being actively negative or anything like that, its actually a violation of the terms and conditions, Folkman said. Well usually send a warning if its pretty mild, and then from there, if they violate it again, theyll be banned and blacklisted.

Entry into that walled garden isnt free. In exchange for building each client a stand-alone platform with support for multimedia posts, livestreaming, tipping, direct messaging, mobile apps and push notifications, the company which a spokesperson said has been valued by third parties at approximately $100 million takes a cut of everyones earnings. The specific percentage depends on the individual platform size and functionality, the spokesperson said.

As the internet becomes more and more paywalled, its an increasingly popular business model. Startups such as Patreon, Substack, Cameo and Bandcamp now help influencers, artists and other online entrepreneurs mint a buck off of content they might otherwise put out for free. The company Fanfix offers monetization tools similar to Subifys but according to co-founder Simon Pompan adheres to more traditional moderation policies, including not allowing nudity.

OnlyFans is another such competitor. Although its best known for selling amateur and independent pornography, the platform has feinted at ambitions of becoming a more generic content-monetization platform; this summer it briefly moved to ban sexual content, only to reverse course days later.

While Subify allows pornography too, its co-founders hope to avoid being pigeonholed as an overtly sexual platform.

Ive been recruited to OnlyFans, Paul said. The business model is great. But the platform has this stigma I have no interest in being a part of.

Subify has proved to be a suitable alternative. By combining OnlyFans monetization features, YouTubes more flexible branding and a free-speech ethos all its own, the company has helped Paul build his own little internet oasis, free from the censors, haters and trolls who soured him on the open web.

Subify has kidnapped me from YouTube! he exclaimed at one point during the Zoom call.

Its been a great abduction, Hero responded.

See the article here:
Logan Paul tries to build the perfect free speech platform - Los Angeles Times

Across the globe, we are seeing a renewed focus on the role of elites in political life. Rising inequality and the rebirth of populism, embodied by movements like Brexit and Donald Trump, have shone a light on the gap separating highly educated liberals from the Right, whose leaders cast the Left as an out of touch elite. But while populist parties like the new GOP claim to speak for the working-class, liberals are quick to point that their economic agenda is still built around tax cuts for the rich and trickle-down economics; they are the real elites, the Left contends.

The truth is, both sides are right. Because there are two elites in the West, one cultural and one economic. And though both sides like to call themselves the side of the working class, both elites are pursuing their own economic interests behind their moral posturing.

The French economist Thomas Picketty was one of the first to point out the two elites, coining them the Merchant Right and the Brahmin Left. The Merchant Right is what used to be called the capitalist class, or what Marx called the petty bourgeoisie: small farmers, small business owners, small landlords. And while they are often culturally similar to members of the working class, their interests are not the same; the opposite, in fact: They are in tension with each other. A small business owner's interests are opposed to a 15 dollar minimum wage for the same reason landlords are against rent protection.

There is a big economic gap separating electricians and contractors from warehouse workers and waiters. And there is a gap in power and autonomy, too: Electricians don't have bosses, while wait staff and warehouse workers do. Many skilled laborers make a good living at work that gives them dignity, making their lives very different from the precarious lower parts of the working class who are answerable to the whims of middle management. And yet, the capitalist class in America frequently refers to itself as "working class" or postures as their champions.

It's political theater, but one that serves the economic interests of Right wing elites. After all, confusing wage earners with the Merchant Right only staves off the kind of class-based politics that would help those who most need it.

But the Right is not the only side doing this. On the Left, you'll find what is increasingly called the "professional managerial class," a top 10 percent made up of highly credentialed white collar office workers. But though their labor is remunerative, many in the PMC also see themselves as the side of the working class. And some go even further, seeing themselves as the "real" working class. For example, you frequently see appeals made for the government to pay off the student loans of millennials with graduate degrees on the grounds that they are the real beleaguered class, with earnings not up to the cost of living in the cities they populate.

Between these two elites, you find the mass abandonment of the working classby two highly paid sides claiming to be the real working class. And it's onto this economic divide that all of the culture wars get superimposed.

Thus, white men without a college degree in the Rust Belt will hear Republican elites shaming them for not being real men after they lost their jobsand they will hear Democratic elites saying that they don't deserve any compassion since they are white men and have had every advantage.

The Democratic elite pushes climate change as an existential threat, completely dismissing the poor in rural America who depend on their cars and gasoline to reach the nearest hospitalwhile the Republican elite argues that climate change is not real and that those hurricanes that are devastating Central America and the South are not a serious issue at all.

The economic Right and the cultural Left have destroyed social relationships and replaced them with the market or the state respectively, creating the loneliest civilization that has ever existed. Neither churches nor labor unions exist to nurture relationships between workersonly social media.

What both elites are hiding in cosplaying as champions of labor is that they have taken away the power of the working class, making them vulnerable to an increasingly hierarchical state or to the whims of corporations and the stock market. And they are able to do this because workers don't interact with each other anymore and can't organize, making it easy to redirect their justified rage at the elites of the other tribe.

The only way forward is to reconnect with our common humanity. We should be validating the feelings of the working class, not regulating them. Only through human interactions, real economic security can occur. It's only through labor unions, multiracial and international alliances of the working class, and a politics that redirects income towards the "essential" workers who actually do the labor, that we can heal what ails us.

At the end of the day, we only have each other. There is no one else.

Alan Matas Givr is a writer based in Argentina. He is a PhD Student in Physical Sciences (Biophysics) and has spent years volunteering in some of Buenos Aires' poorest neighborhoods. He is passionate about science and practices Nonviolent Communication.

The views in this article are the writer's own.

Read more here:
Elites On Both Sides Are Claiming the Working ClassWhile Abandoning Them | Opinion - Newsweek

An academic golden boy, Ohmann raced in the early 60s from Harvards Society of Fellows to the Wesleyan faculty, advancing from tenured professor to provost and chancellor in record time. He proved equally adept at political protest, which he felt the nations intensifying involvement in Vietnam demanded. He wrote private letters to members of Congress, signed a public one to the president, withheld his income tax, turned in his draft card and organized support for draft resisters. After his name was mentioned on a CBS Evening News report about a rally at the Justice Department, he received a visit from the FBI.

His activism conflicted with his institutional role. Not reform, he said, but radical change was my agenda. Yet at work I was charged with holding things together against radicals like me, and as editor of College English, with sustaining the dignity of a profession whose structure and practices I now thought carceral. He ran articles on feminism, Marxist criticism and gay liberation.

His early uneasiness with the conventional relationship between teachers and students deepened with his political commitment. He had come to see the university as implicated in the nations imperial project. An inflexible and inequitable grading system not only determined a students likelihood of professional success but was now, when a high GPA conferred exemption from the draft, a matter of life and death. The racial and ethnic homogeneity of the faculty and student body perpetuated the class system. Every customary procedure that our professional training had naturalized now seemed laden with political relations, chiefly undemocratic, he wrote in a 1998 essay.

At the 1968 Modern Language Association convention, Ohmann raised the political consciousness of the profession. He smuggled a printing press into his hotel room and ran off fliers to publicize a series of anti-war resolutions he was proposing. Hotel security tried to stop his colleague Louis Kampf from posting the fliers in the hotel lobby. A scuffle and police arrests ensued. Despite resistance to politicizing the conference, the resolutions passed. A New York Times editorial denounced the groups activism: Anti-intellectualism is getting an energetic assist these days through the irresponsible behavior of a noisy fringe group of academics.

Ohmann wasnt cowed. If you are going to judge attempts at intellectual, professional, and educational reform by such frivolous standards, he wrote in reply, you will totally misunderstand the uneasiness now expressing itself in all academic organizations. A major part of that uneasiness is precisely about our professional gentility, our attempt to insulate our academic selves from real conflict and from serious educational and social issues.

Under Ohmanns aegis, Wesleyan was either the first or among the first universities to create departments of Womens Studies and a center for Afro-American Studies. A course he designed and oversaw in the late 70s called Towards a Socialist America became a model of student-directed education.

In 1976, a couple of years after the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, Ohmann published English in America, an impassioned consideration of universities inability to resist a government that was crushing the values of human freedom and of pursuit of truth, values that are the primary allegiance of the liberal university. Selling Culture, about how magazines and magazine advertising created the American mass market at the turn of the 20th century, appeared to great acclaim in 1996, solidifying his reputation as a theorist alive to complexity and able to slice through it in a lucid, genial style.

When I had a new project, Id tell [Dick] about it, University of Oregon professor and Wesleyan graduate Daniel Rosenberg said. When I was mostly done, hed chuckle and not that gently reduce a good part of my idea to rubble. He wouldnt suggest that I was wrong about anything. What he did was to spin out the often-uncomfortable implications of my argument were it right.

As a Wesleyan student, CUNY Professor Joseph Entin walked into Ohmanns office one day, found himself working with Ohmann on a reading project, and never looked back. Entin marveled at Ohmanns profound openness. The teacher shall always be taught that was Dick, he said. He respected everyone, without pretense, and had a truly democratic approach to knowledge and culture.

By the time I got to Wesleyan, in the early 80s, the momentum that Ohmann had done so much to create seemed to have slowed. There were sit-ins over divestment from South Africa and the threat from the Reagan administration to end student loans, but the happenings had mostly happened. Nationally, an ascendant political right found multiculturalism to be a convenient target in the culture wars. The persistence of the conservative backlash testifies to the durability of Ohmanns and his colleagues legacy. In a 1996 Wall Street Journal column, Lynne Cheney characterized Ohmann as a dangerous radical.

No small part of Ohmann's radicalism lay in his ability to listen, the danger he posed that of higher understanding. In a splendid Greek Revival building, Ohmann ran a series of lectures historians, theorists, critics; also poets and writers. Id usually arrive too late to get one of the few dozen spindle-backed chairs, and walk around a staircase and through the scullery to a doorway with a side view of the lectern and, when my eyes strayed, of audience members in half- or quarter-profile. There, shadowy in the chandelier-lit parlor, the corner of a wide black plastic eyeglass frame, a blue button-down collar, a broad shoulder swiveled by a crossed arm there, listening hard, was Dick Ohmann, living proof, through the reach of his own work and that of his students, of the possibility of change. I couldnt see it then any better than I could see him, but I can now.

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Richard Ohmann: The Radical Professor Who Enraged the Right - POLITICO Magazine

Nikole Hannah-Jones is aNew York Timesjournalist and architect of the 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prizewinning series of articles that recontextualizes the central roles that slavery and racism played in America's founding. Those articles are now being taught in some public schools, even though numerous critics of the project have raised questions about very basic factual issues in some of the pieces.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that Hannah-Jones is uncomfortable leaving curriculum decisions to people who are not district officials and would thus be less inclined to teach her work. In a recent interview on Meet the Press, Hannah-Jones confessed that she did not "understand this idea that parents should decide what's being taught."

Her statement echoed widely panned comments made by former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, during the 2021 gubernatorial race against Republican challenger Glenn Youngkin. McAuliffe's statement denying that parents should play a paramount role in the education of their own children is rightly seen as a realigning momentone that allowed Youngkin to run (and win) on a platform of making the public education system accountable to families. But Hannah-Jones seems to believe that McAuliffe had it right, even if his comments were unpopular.

During theMeet the Pressinterview, Hannah-Jones made an attempt at consistency, taking the position that neither she nor other non-educators have the relative expertise to decide what should be taught in schools. "I'm not a professional educator," she said. This is a somewhat confusing claim coming from someone who is currently a tenured professor at Howard University's School of Communications; she is, quite literally, a professional educator.

As it turns out, the idea that parents should broadly surrender their rights to public school officials is both unpopular andmisguided. Yes, it's possible for parents to become too involved in school affairs, getting individual books removed from library shelves. But much of what parents have found objectionable in the past year is truly eyebrow-raising: As I wrote last January in "An Anti-Racist Education for Middle Schoolers":

Fairfax Public Schools in Virginia invited Ibram X. Kendi, an activist and author of the booksHow to Be an AntiracistandAntiracist Baby, to have a virtual conversation with principals, administrators, and teachers. Kendi, who was paid $20,000 to speak for one hour, believes that the Constitution should be amended to create a federal Department of Anti-Racism with the power to censor public officials who make racist statements. The district also bought $24,000 worth of his books, which argue that any arrangement producing unequal results along racial lines is racist by definition.

The National Education Association (NEA), for instance, wants schools to offer a critique of "empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society." It doesn't matter whether you define this sort of thing as critical race theorythough the NEA certainly doesit matters that activist educators are working to include it.

The best solution to the education culture wars is to give parents the best kind of choice:school choice. Instead of engaging in venomous, all-consuming battles over what schools should teach to students, families should be empowered to take their education dollars and find a schooling option that best fits their children. "The critical race theory debate wouldn't matter if we had more school choice," notedReason's J.D. Tuccille. "Guide your children's education and let your opponents teach their own kids."

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Nikole Hannah-Jones Doesn't Understand 'The Idea That Parents Should Decide' What Schools Teach - Reason

Tis the holiday season and the heroes of Fox News are valiantly arraying their forces in the War On Christmas, even as ICU beds are filling up and a new strain of COVID has arrived.

In the spirit of the season I am making a special plea to Rupert Murdoch to deliver a Christmas miracle: stop killing us.

Thats it, thats the tweet.

Wait, this is an article? I have to write more. OK then.

Republicans have been more reluctant to get vaccinated and more likely to die as a result. This trend was obfuscated initially because COVID emerged in blue states on the coasts, and because conservatives had at least some stake in dampening the pandemic when Trump was still president. As those conditions have disappeared, the partisan divide has become undeniable.

If you want to follow the evolution of these trends, health analyst Charles Gaba @charles_gaba has been tracking the partisan divide. The differences are very clear. Fewer vaccines and more deaths as a county becomes Trumpier. The most recent data complied by Gaba shows that the death rate in the reddest counties is 5.54 times that of the bluest counties.

As illustrated by Philip Bump, this pattern is not static, but has become worse over time. At one point, there were similar amounts of deaths in blue and red counties, but a very large gap has now emerged.

The partisan divide has hardened as vaccines have become more available, and even as other groups who initially showed hesitancy or faced access issues have increased vaccination rates. The gap between whites and Blacks has declined, and all but disappeared for Latinos. (The Asian-and-everyone-else gap is the only one which has grown!)

In other words, the remaining block of people who are refusing to get vaccinated are Republicans. At this point, knowing someones political identity is the best way of knowing their approach to vaccines. See this graph from NPR: Republicans are 60% of the unvaccinated population.

Why are Republicans so resistant? There is variation even within Republicans that offers insights. Unvaccinated Republicans tend to be younger (which makes sense, since they are least at risk of death), but also less educated and more conservative in their views. They are also more likely to believe that the threats are exaggerated and less likely to believe that COVID is something to worry about.

The most extraordinary difference may be that just 3% of unvaccinated Republicans believe that getting vaccinated is a collective responsibility (compared to 26% of vaxxed Republicans and 81% of vaxxed Dems). The inherent nature of COVID is that it transfers from one person to another. By definition, the choices we make as individuals affect those around us. But almost no unvaccinated Republicans agree that they have some responsibility to their community in this domain. We cant defeat a pandemic as long as so many people refuse to acknowledge their obligations to others.

Republicans are also more likely to believe in conspiracy theories about vaccinations, for example, that they cause impotence, give you COVID, or include microchips. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, almost half of Republicans compared to just 14% of Democrats believe or are unsure about four or more false statements about COVID-19.

So who is to blame for this? Another way of asking this question is: Why do Republicans believe what they believe?

Maybe there is something in the conservative DNA that makes them reflexively opposed to public health measures. Indeed, if we compare attitudes toward COVID across countries we see that political ideology matters. But it matters much more in the U.S. Across other countries there is a 10-20 percentage point difference between the left and right according to one Pew poll.

In the U.S. it is 45 points.

COVID is a novel public health challenge. Therefore it represented a relatively blank slate where people did not have clear prior beliefs. This makes it more likely that people adopted their beliefs based on the cues provided by elites, such as politicians and media.

Which brings us to Fox News.

I could show you a series of screenshots of Fox News talking heads encouraging COVID complacency and vaccine hesitancy. Such content has become a central feature of their programming. Or I could point out that Fox News itself, as an organization, was one of the early adopters of a workplace vaccine mandates that its editorial policy so fiercely opposes.

Instead, I am going to show you causal evidence that Fox News has made things worse. In other words, Fox News is not just catering to its audiences taste for public health misinformation, it is actively cultivating it.

Social scientists obsess about questions of causality, how to show that X (Fox News content) caused Y (viewer public health beliefs), rather than Y caused X, or that other factors drove both X and Y. Ideally, an experimental design is used to sort out causality, identifying some sort of exogenous factor that shapes the outcome.

A standard technique at estimating the causal effect of Fox News is to look at channel positioning. The idea is that the placement of channels is random, but that people tend to watch more of channels placed earlier on the dial, all else equal. Researchers can then examine if that random source of variation is associated with changes in public health behaviors and outcomes, using indicators like local surveys, health measures like deaths, or GPS data to track whether people stayed at home. Researchers have used channel positioning to assess the effect of Fox News on other outcomes, such as estimating Republican vote share in elections, and the rise of the Tea Party.

What did researchers find when researchers used this technique to understand the relationship between Fox News and COVID?

A series of sophisticated papers confirm the causal influence of Fox on health behaviors and outcomes. Exposure to Fox News made people less likely to stay at home, more likely to travel, less likely to use hand sanitizer or masks, and more vaccine hesitant.

One paper used a slightly different causal technique to look at variation within Fox News coverage. Hard to believe, but there was a time when Tucker Carlsons messaging was reasonably responsible compared to Sean Hannity. Researchers exploited this variation through a variety of techniques. They could not use channel placement as a source of exogenous variation in this case, since they were looking at variation within the Fox News channel, so they took a different ingenious approach: using variation in sunset times (with the idea that people watch more TV when its dark, and that in places where sunset is later, people will be exogenously more exposed to more Hannity, which runs later).

The results shows that greater exposure to the less responsible version of Fox messaging was associated with more COVID cases and more deaths.

To sum up, a series of sophisticated analyses show that Fox News is leading viewers to take the COVID less seriously, to skip basic public health measures, to avoid vaccines and to greater illnesses and deaths. Fox News talking heads are not just asking questions, they are leading their viewers to their demise. And because COVID is a virus, they risks they are persuading their viewers to undertake are shared, unwillingly, with the rest of us.

The studies Ive highlighted focus on Fox, but they should make you worry about a whole domain of conservative media and politics. Other Murdoch-owned operations, like the nominally high-brow Wall St. Journal and its embarrassing-but-influential cousin, the New York Post, are beating the same COVID-skeptic drum. So is the media Fox is now competing with, like Newsmax and OANN. Such messaging is also employed by many Republican politicians who have shaped coverage and promoted quack cures.

It is not the case that Fox and Co. are wholly responsible for partisan COVID gap. But elite messaging helps us to understand why the gap between left and right is so much wider in the U.S. than in other countries.

Did we really need some fancy analytical techniques with social scientists finding ingenious sources of exogenous variation to persuade us that elite messaging matters? Maybe not. As it is, we have a lot of evidence that conservative media and Republican politicians are encouraging deaths. Its sort of like we have found them over the corpse, bloody knife in their hand. What the analyses do is to remove any reasonable doubt by providing a recording of the crime. It moves the moral culpability for death beyond plausible deniability.

Why kill your own voters or your own viewers? My speculative answer is that there are three overlapping reasons: an addiction to culture wars, conspiracism and anti-science narratives.

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The omniscience of culture war framing on the right means that even basic public health issues are framed through that prism. As soon as CDC officials recommended masks for Americans, Trumps advisers spied an opportunity: In the months that followed, Trump was only seen wearing a mask on rare occasions, instead following the advice of Stephen Miller, Johnny McEntee, Derek Lyons and other trusted aides to think of masks as a cultural wedge issue.

Similarly, a media and party that has fed its followers conspiracies seemed unable to switch modes when it came to COVID: Things are never as they seem. Some shadowy puppeteers are in cahoots with the government or foreign powers to control you! This mode of thinking is also the populist mode, and the line between conservative populism and conspiracism has become increasingly hard to discern. It is not just anti-elitism in general. If you take your cues from Trump, Rupert Murdoch and Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, you have no problem with elites. It is directed rage against a certain type of elite.

Finally, there is the anti-science aspect of modern conservative thought. Science is an imperfect exercise. On the whole the scientific domain has provided the tools to get us out of a deadly pandemic. However, there has been plenty to criticize during COVID regulators moving too slowly, or sending mixed messages. But the nature of human progress depends upon a willingness to modify and update scientific beliefs to reflect new findings. When errors become a basis to punish or distrust science, we are in trouble.

Ultimately, governing depends upon rationality. The use of logic, and evidence about cause and effects, are especially necessary in domains like public health, where irrationality is mercilessly punished. In some fundamental way, U.S. governance is being held hostage by those who are not just unable to fulfill the basic requirements of the job, but also dedicated to salting the earth for anyone else who tries to do better. Thus, the same media that undermined public health guidance will shamelessly blame the Biden administration for not effectively corralling the pandemic.

This article originally appeared in Can We Still Govern?. Published with permission of the author.

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Fox News is killing us: Here are the receipts - Wisconsin Examiner