Signal vs Noise, American Serial Outrage, and the Law of Large Numbers
Hey folks, thanks for making July our most popular month since we started the newsletter. We had more readers and more new subscribers last month than ever before. I think that’s cool. If you shared the newsletter with someone, thanks. And if you haven’t shared it with someone, you should. To new subscribers, I say “Welcome and Kia ora.”
It hit me this week while reading an article about recent kidnapping charges against one of the major backers of the child rescue movie, The Sound of Freedom, that we’re collectively being held hostage by noise. Our politics have ground to a halt largely because journalists, and consequently people in the US can’t seem to contextualize numbers and distinguish between signal and noise.
We constantly hear noise like “the US is deeply divided” when the plurality of Americans voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020. Before the 2020 election, we were noisily told the country is highly-polarized, but the forty-fifth president of the United States only received 74 million votes in his 2020 bid for re-election—that’s less than a quarter of the total population.
Yes, millions of Americans support the thrice indicted former president but the number is not half the country—nor close to it—nor has it ever been.
The Political Noise - There are 340 million people in the US. That means if as few as 3% of the population falls into a fringe belief, you will have a group of people the size of Greece, Portugal, or Hungary within the country eating horse paste, rejecting basic science, or spreading anti-semetic conspiracies about the wildfires in Maui being created by energy weapons from space (I wish I was making that up).
On issue after issue, our politics and future are held hostage by tiny numerical minorities.
America is so big that a small, committed, coordinated group can effectively hijack our entire political apparatus and scare up outrage campaigns, boycotts, and moral panics. The most recent example of this is the Florida based group Moms for Liberty. The ironically named organization is a crew of free-speech hating, book banning, outrage manufacturing, reactionary, Pat Buchanan culture warriors. The group's leaders have the haircuts of Fox News anchors, the politics of Francisco Franco, and the cultural taste of the parents in the movie Footloose. They are behind a wave of school book bans that started during the Critical Race Theory moral panic but they’ve now moved on to the queer community.
According to the organization, they have about 100,000 members, the population of the San Francisco suburb of Daly City. Because they are a 501c4, rather than 501c3, they are not required to disclose the details of their funding. Reporting shows most of their funds come from unnamed GOP affiliated mega donors. But because money is speech in the US system, a group the size of Lynn, Massachusetts is driving social policy on school boards across the country.
Let’s look at the signal on these book bans - For context, it’s useful to contrast the traction the group has gotten with their book bans with recent polling data about the collective views of the country:
91% of voters strongly or somewhat agree with the statement “If you don’t like a book at a library, don’t check it out. Other people shouldn’t be able to control what me or my family can read”;
Nine in 10 voters (90%) and parents (92%) have a favorable opinion of librarians who work in local public libraries and school libraries;
65% said it was important for public school libraries to represent a variety of perspectives about controversial issues — even if it makes some people uncomfortable;
Just 12% of Americans agree that books should be removed from libraries if a parent objects.
These views aren’t even shared by a majority of Republican identifying voters. But in the name of neutrality and objectivity in reporting the ideas of groups like Moms for Liberty are covered like they’re within the political mainstream.
We’ve seen this dance before. People smarter than me have discussed and cataloged the various outrage spasms to rip through US politics but here’s some recent greatest hits:
The Bud Light, Dylan Mulvaney kerfuffle
Burning Jordans because they hate Colin Kaepernick
You can’t take away my gas stove
XBox low power mode is “woke”
Kitty-litter for kids who “identify as cats” in schools
Carhart requiring their employees to be vaccinated
Destroying their Keurigs after the company pulled their ads from Fox News
The aforementioned Critical Race Theory moral panic
I could go on… for hours. None of these outrages or panics had any staying power because they were never designed to. They’re each constructed outrages manufactured by people who will do anything to avoid running on and publicly defending their deeply unpopular views. That’s what these serial outrage cycles are about. No one will vote for more tax cuts for the richest Americans or the proposed gutting of Social Security but they’ll sure as hell vote against the people they’re told want to ban Dr. Suess.
Recommendations and Bits for the Week
First off, I am not a huge video game fan. I fell deeply in love with Red Dead Redemption 2 during the lockdown period here in UAE and haven’t really enjoyed playing much else since. That was until this week. Firewatch is a story about a broken man from Boulder who, searching for a new beginning, goes into the woods to be a fire lookout in a Wyoming national park. Instead of finding peace, he finds trouble. The game is beautiful. The story is tear-jerking and the graphics are engrossing. It’s supposed to be a four-ish hour game but it took me longer because I kept getting lost in the woods. I plan to replay it and try some of the alternate dialog options and further explore the map.
Next, I know I have pitched the Brian Panowich’s Bull Mountain Trilogy here before. But I revisited the books while we traveled through New Zealand. Bull Mountain, Like Lions, and Hard Cash Valley. They are imperfect but they are wonderful. Panowich prolly needs a coach on writing authentic Black characters but that’s true for most writers out there right now.
Lastly, I closed last week’s newsletter by asking folks about what social media apps they currently enjoy using. I got a few responses but not as many as I was hoping for. I really want to hear your takes. Tell me how you’re navigating the post-Twitter world. Admittedly, I am also still finding my way.
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See you next week!
As always, if you have any thoughts or feedback about the newsletter, I welcome it, and I really appreciate it when folks share the newsletter with their friends.