"The Podcaster Asking You to Side With History’s Villains/Darryl Cooper is no scholar. But legions of fans — many on the right — can’t seem to resist what he presents as hidden truths."

A long NYT article. Free-access link: here.

I don't listen to Cooper's podcast, but I heard a lot about it on the recent Joe Rogan podcast — this one — with Dave Smith and Douglas Murray. Snippet:

SMITH: Darryl is incredibly knowledgeable.

MURRAY: He's not, he's, he's not... when he was offered to debate the current greatest living biographer of Churchill, he said, I can't because he knows much more than me and I admire his work and I've learned from it, but I can't possibly debate him....

ROGAN: Right. But you don't have to be able to debate people to have opinions on things....  That's not your thing.

Treading the boards on a perfect set.

Well, I don’t know about you guys but I am completely buying this with no further questions. https://t.co/Y92gosc4vZ

— Dave Smith (@ComicDaveSmith) January 3, 2025

"This week, the notion of Trump as the leader of a distinctively white movement became harder to defend...."

"Although exit-poll data can be unreliable... [his coalition is] unusually nonwhite.... For instance, Trump became the first Republican in more than a century to win Starr County, along the Mexican border in Texas, which is almost entirely Hispanic; he did similarly well throughout the state’s majority-Hispanic border counties.... Late in the campaign, during a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, one of his opening acts, the antagonistic comedian Tony Hinchcliffe... made a joke about Puerto Rico being a 'floating island of garbage,' which for a time became the campaign’s top story.... But... Osceola, a majority-Hispanic county in Florida with a large Puerto Rican population, swung from a fourteen-point Biden victory in 2020 to a narrow Trump victory this year.... [P]erhaps Trump’s coalition will help Americans rethink the assumption that 'white' and 'Hispanic' are mutually exclusive categories, and will boost a new version of the old white identity. But, as far as we can tell, Trump’s America is a place that is more polarized by education than it used to be and less polarized by whiteness and non-whiteness—by race, broadly understood...."

I'm reading "How Donald Trump, the Leader of White Grievance, Gained Among Hispanic Voters/In 2016, the idea that Trump was a cloaked white supremacist made him seem like a fringe character. What does it mean that his popularity has increased?" by Kelefa Sanneh, in The New Yorker.

I don't know how much postmortem I'm willing to read. If your perception and analysis are so good, why didn't you see this before the election? I guess that's another way of saying hindsight is 20/20. But I chose this little essay to quote because it's not purporting to understand what happened and it is pretty modestly conceding confusion. That's appropriate. I would like to see much stronger criticism of Democrats. They were boosted by mainstream media, which either pretended not to notice how awful they were or just didn't see.

By the way, is "antagonistic comedian" a standard term? I've heard "insult comedian."

Anyway, to escape from elite media for a moment — I mean for 3 hours — I listened to Joe Rogan and Dave Smith talking about Tony Hinchcliffe (go to 00:04:00):

"What happens on this show is so much more intelligent and thoughtful and deep than anything that's going on at CNN."

"You just can't... tell me that you sitting down with Elon Musk for 3 hours and then compare that to like Wolf Blitzer with all his graphics behind him talking for 30 seconds before he goes to a pharmaceutical commercial and then coming back and having the dumbest left winger yell at the dumbest right winger. Really? And you guys are going to act like you're the grownups in the room? It's just, it's too ridiculous.... So the entire young generation has, they've all turned that off.... None of them are getting their news from from CNN anymore. And look man, that's I think the most beautiful part of this election is that mainstream media's dead.... I don't think [CNN has] a show that regularly cracks a million views....."

Said Dave Smith to Joe Rogan (actually the words "mainstream media's dead" are inserted by Joe):

Compare this bit from the NYT "Daily" podcast this morning. The episode is "Inside Trump World as the Next Chapter Begins." Jonathan Swan says:

"The news media in the eyes of many Americans is discredited. More than half the country have tuned out the mainstream media. We are now in little information silos, so it's almost impossible to overstate how much Donald Trump has defeated the system and how favorable the current composition of the system is for Donald Trump."

Did Swan even consider that mainstream media could be the "little information silos" and people are breaking out?

"There are these rare moments of honesty"... like Chuck Schumer's "6 ways from Sunday."

The referenced Schumer clip:

"Dave Smith Breaks Down the Reasons Russia Invaded Ukraine."