New Writing Project Coming in January!
All good research begins with a question. My question, in October 2024, was “Who are the Nelk Boys?”
This question hit me as I was teaching a Gen Ed class on American government and politics to students who were a) not Political Science majors and b) really didn’t care about the upcoming presidential election, so I fell out of my heels when a group of young men began talking about how cool Donald Trump was. Another student said, “JD is my boyyyyy” and the “y” did some heavy lifting in that statement. A gaggle of kids started to nod. I was… confused.
The Nelk Boys, as it turns out, are podcasters in the manosphere. The manosphere, as it turns out, is a collection of influencers, podcasters, and streamers on a wide array of media outlets who promote masculinity by talking about manly things and oppose feminism by calling women “chicks” and using the word “woke” quite a bit. During the 2024 presidential campaign, both Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance appeared on this show and on a significant number of other pods, both politically focused and apolitical alike.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the partisan divide, then-Vice President Kamala Harris went on the “Call Her Daddy” podcast, plus several shows hosted by comedians, but the most attention she received was for her TV appearances on 60 Minutes and The View and we all know how those went.
The 2016 presidential election rocked my understanding of American politics, and in 2024 I realized I was (again) at a loss. My role as their professor precludes me from calling my students “low information voters,” but prior to the Trump/ Vance media blitz, these kids didn’t really care about politics. Their sudden engagement, thanks to media outlets that had never crossed my radar, was disorienting. The 2016 election, similarly baffling, propelled me into research and culminated in a book on the changes in political media. It was published in 2019 and is now woefully out of date. Much has changed in one lousy decade.
This blog will examine the most recent transformations in American media, the takeover of the GOP by Donald Trump, and our deep partisan divide that have collaborated to fundamentally change American politics. Politics is now coarser, more aggressively polarized, and less effective. The norms that once held us together are destroyed, as is a common conversation about practically anything. Alternative facts, wildly varying ideas about politics and culture, and a truck-ton of misinformation exacerbate our divisions. A highly fragmented media system only encourages this.
What was once a coordinated system of policy construction and message dissemination has shattered into a pile of choose-your-own-adventure content shards. This demolition disproportionately benefitted Donald Trump and the right-wing media ecosystem that has bent to his will and supports his agenda. It was both electorally successful and financially profitable to tap into the grievance of people who felt betrayed and neglected by elites who had promised more than they delivered.
At the same time, our collective trust in the institutions of knowledge is being wiped out. Polling shows that American trust in the news media has fallen to an all-time low, and chaos is sure to follow when this trust is broken. Left in ruins is a political media system that is distrusted and increasingly abandoned by the public who are increasingly reliant on stories from suspicious sources, in lieu of fact-based news.
In short: a lot is happening.
I know this all sounds incredibly depressing but hang with me. I promise to inject some humor as the work unfolds, and I also swear that you won’t have to digest too much at once. This project was supposed to be a book, but since nobody reads books anymore, I might as well bend to the will of society and serialize the manuscript into bite-sized chunks. Like a fun-sized Snickers bar, but with less potential for cavities.
If things go well, there just might be some videos ahead, maybe even a podcast (because there aren’t enough podcasts, we all know this). So: more “content” to come.
I hope you’ll join me as I analyze the past decade of media, politics, division, and Liberace-styled White House renovations to discover how American politics jumped the shark, and how it all escalated so quickly.