S**********p
发帖数: 331 | 1 https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/why-some-early-maga-adopters-went-
against-trumps-virus-doctrine
“The Coronavirus Crisis Was Built for Insurgent Information”: Why Some
Early MAGA Adopters Went Against Trump’s Virus Doctrine
As Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and much of the GOP parroted the president’
s no-worries line, MAGA originals like Steve Bannon and Mike Cernovich
sounded the alarm.
When my coronavirus monitoring first kicked into high gear, it happened to
be thanks to an alarmed thread of tweets from pro-Trump blogger Mike
Cernovich in late January. Because I’d spent several frightening weeks in
China and Hong Kong during the SARS outbreak in 2003, I needed no further
encouragement to obsess over something reminiscent of it. In the weeks that
followed, I began to look for the pronouncements of others who were most out
in front of the pack in expressing concern. These included angel investor
Balaji S. Srinivasan, geneticist Razib Khan, Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams,
Trump White House veteran Steve Bannon, Ars Technica cofounder Jon Stokes,
Quillette editor Claire Lehmann, entrepreneur Jeff Giesea, author Matt
Stoller, and Fox host Tucker Carlson. All of them, I noticed, stood at least
a little outside of the mainstream. And a fair number of them were
associated with the grassroots energy of Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016.
Here’s what was curious about this final point. Donald Trump, as we all
know, spent several weeks downplaying the coronavirus problem and two
crucial weeks, starting on February 26, when he suggested the number of
cases was soon “going to be down to close to zero,” in outright denial. A
whole host of Trump supporters joined the president in pooh-poohing the
problem. “Healthy people, generally, 99% recover very fast, even if they
contract it,” offered Fox’s Sean Hannity on March 10. Lots of man in the
street Trump supporters were just as dismissive. But people like Bannon and
Cernovich were not at all on board with Trump’s sinking ship of a message,
and in some ways they’re more Trumpist than Trump. What, then, was the
difference between Trumpists who followed the president into denial and
Trumpists who, 180 degrees to the contrary, were in a vanguard of alarm?
It took me some thought and conversations about this question before I came
up with an answer that turned out to be simple: It was Trump’s early
adopters, the ones who supported him before he looked like a winner to the
rest of the world, who were ahead of the average in expressing alarm over
the coronavirus. It was Trump’s late adopters, the ones who would have
lined up behind any Republican in power, who carried water for the message
of denial. Early Trump adopter Tucker Carlson (who has compared supporting
Donald Trump to rooting for “the old Chicago Cubs,” because of the
embarrassment that goes with it) began making coronavirus coverage a staple
of his show in late January, something that made him unique in cable news.
Late Trump adopters like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh first ignored the
problem and then amplified Trump’s losing message. As late as March 11,
Limbaugh was insisting that “this virus is the common cold.”
For Trump’s early adopters, the issue of the coronavirus was a perfect fit.
“If you were an early Trump adopter, then this China coronavirus is a
vindication of everything you’ve said,” says Cernovich. “Like, hey,
supply chains are a problem. Let’s bring back massive manufacturing.
Everything we’ve been screaming about, warning about, for five years is
right there.” If your preoccupations have been over manufacturing capacity,
border control, or globalism, then coronavirus hits on all three at once.
“I think the people who understood the Party of Davos cynicism, and about
Chinese factories and all that, were early to understand that this was going
to be a massive issue,” says Bannon, who began devoting his podcast, War
Room, to the coronavirus already in late January.
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And though there was lots of newspaper coverage of the coronavirus as it
crippled China and spread to the rest of the world, the early Trump adopters
tended to be in the crowd of people who were ahead of the conventional
wisdom in their sense of the threat level. “In many ways the coronavirus
crisis was built for insurgent information and sense-making networks,
regardless of which side of the spectrum you were on,” says Jeff Giesea, a
2016 Trump supporter who began tweeting about coronavirus in early February.
“There’s a lot more noise and a lot more signal” in those alternative
networks, says Giesea, “but many of the people who went through the 2016
cycle have developed antennae for filtering signal from noise.”
Now, to be sure, you didn’t have to be an early adopter of Donald Trump—or
a supporter at all—to be ahead of the curve in your alarm over the
coronavirus. Plenty of people who worry about China or pandemics or public
health or global economics, of which there are people of all sorts of
professions and political persuasions, monitored the coronavirus with as
much concern as, say, Tucker Carlson. Two of the writers I found most useful
and prescient over the past several weeks were Matt Stoller and Jon Stokes,
who are not Trumpists but populists on the left. Both have thought a lot
about our systems of production. Stoller’s recently published book, Goliath
, warns that “our industrial supply chains are fragile, concentrated and
full of dangerous and hidden risks.” And both stood out for the prescience
of their predictions, some of which were mocked as far-fetched when they
were made. (In early February, Stokes was already warning at The Prepared,
where he is deputy editor, of the possibility of “severe disruption” that
might involve school closings, remote work, voluntary lockdowns, and
internet slowdowns because of simultaneous streaming.) But populism and
concern over outsourced production meant that an especially high share of
early Trumpists were going to be early coronavirus criers.
If it makes sense why Trumpists would find such a resonant issue in the
coronavirus, then the real mystery is why Donald Trump, for whom the issue
was built, wound up playing the role of leading denialist, costing what will
become many lives. “I was surprised China lobbed Trump a softball and he
didn’t hit a home run,” says Cernovich. “And I was also furious.” Giesea
calls Trump “an unfit character for this situation” (although he says
that Trump has been improving). And Bannon, albeit more reserved in his
criticism, speculates that the White House blanched at the prospect of a
market crash.
But the simplest answer may be that Trump, if he was ever Trumpist to begin
with, became something else once he came to Washington. It was Trump’s late
adopters who came to prevail in most of the power struggles in the White
House. Cutting taxes, worrying about Iran more than China, easing up on the
border hawkishness, and siding more with business than workers—these are
some of the preferences of the later adopters. By contrast the early Trump
adopters are mostly on the outside today. Whether you think that’s a good
or bad thing overall will depend on your ideology—whether you find the
outlook of the early supporters or the late supporters easier to take. What
’s clear is that on the issue of this pandemic, though, we’d all have been
better off if Trump had listened to the former. | d******e
发帖数: 2265 | 2 聚聚两个月梦游这个锅太巨。背不起，这是要上史书的。
【在 S**********p 的大作中提到】
: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/03/why-some-early-maga-adopters-went-
: against-trumps-virus-doctrine
: “The Coronavirus Crisis Was Built for Insurgent Information”: Why Some
: Early MAGA Adopters Went Against Trump’s Virus Doctrine
: As Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and much of the GOP parroted the president’
: s no-worries line, MAGA originals like Steve Bannon and Mike Cernovich
: sounded the alarm.
: When my coronavirus monitoring first kicked into high gear, it happened to
: be thanks to an alarmed thread of tweets from pro-Trump blogger Mike
: Cernovich in late January. Because I’d spent several frightening weeks in
|
|
