The Problem: The Outrage Machine

Probably the biggest problem with politics is the outrage machine. It has killed conservatism and liberalism and replaced it with irrelevant outrage, a mob mentality, rumor acting as fact and conspiracy acting as wisdom. How did this happen? Well, interestingly, sports explains it.

I don't know how many of you follow sports, but it provides some fascinating parallels to politics. This is one instance. If you look back at the sports media (writers, newscasters, game announcers) from a couple decades ago, what you would find is people who learned the craft of sports analysis. That involved gaining a solid understanding of the sports which they covered and then applying that knowledge to what happened on the field. But that's no longer true. Today, sports analysis is a wasteland of hate, rumor and idiocy.

What happened is that with the advent of talk radio, ratings became the biggest driver of analysis. The meant the value of shock and hype rose and the value of thoughtful analysis fell. After all, it's a lot easier to get ratings when you say obnoxious things that play on people's negative emotional needs than it is to entertain people with a treatise-like discussion of formations and skills. "If it bleeds, it leads," they used to say; today they just say "scream it."

Naturally, those who could shock better did better, whether they knew anything about the sport or not, and those who could not shock floundered. Making this worse, shock is like an addiction: it requires constant feeding to maintain its appeal and it requires greater shocks every time for the same effect. Thus, things devolved to the point everyone is just spending the day trying to shock people with the most outrageous opinions and going off the deep end about rumors. Actual analysis no longer matters. Basically, they replaced the sports William F. Buckleys with drunks arguing at the bar.

The media, acting rationally in the pursuit of ratings, started giving bigger contracts to the shockiest, whether they knew anything or not -- in fact, it's better if they didn't because facts usually get in the way of outrage. So they slowly dropped the guys who knew what they were talking about because people weren't listening to them anymore and they replaced them with the loudest hate-mongers they could find. And the most successful were promoted from radio to television, given their own shows, and moved up to sports shows like ESPN Sports Center. Soon, they were all that was left.

The perfect example of this is Skip Bayless. Bayless is a human turd who specializes in sports talk. He got famous suggesting that Dallas Hall of Fame Quarterback Troy Aikman was a homosexual. He was essentially a rumor monger. This drew a huge audience, so eventually Fox (which employed Aikman at the time) actually hired him to bring his garbage to their television. Once there, he got show after show, started appearing on sports recap shows, and was soon considered one of the top sports analysts. The joke is, he doesn't know anything about sports. He just knows how to attack people! A team lost? Well, it wasn't because of a bad strategy, it was because the coach is a moron who needs to be fired because he "lost the locker room!" The quarterback is too told! The running back is after a new contract! Etc. His most recent "outrage" is that LeBron James is switching to No. 23. He literally used the word outrage. Nevermind that LeBron has switched between 6 and 23 several times before. This time, "it's an outrage!"

Guys like Bayless and Stephen A. Smith and a dozen others turned sports into a hate-filled world of sheer idiocy. All they know is anger. And that has filtered down to all levels. You no longer need to know sports to write about it, you just need to know how to gossip and scream.

How bad is it? Let me give you an example. As I watched the NBA finals, the Miami Heat made a decision in one of the games to shoot three point shots instead of twos. I recognized this because I saw the pattern where they managed to easily get the ball to a player under the net over and over, but he never tapped the ball in - an easy 2 point shot. He forswore the easy two point shot and instead passed it out to the three point line. Based on that, I knew they would lose. Why? Because the odds of shooting threes is so much lower that they could not compete with the Nuggest who were simply putting in two point shots every time (around 40% versus 90+%). Thus, I realized that the Nuggets would score 4 points on every two possessions (shooting 2 of 2) whereas Miami would score only 3 points on their two possessions (shooting 1 of 2). The Nuggets knew this too and moved their guys away from the net to try to block the three point shots, basically leaving the player under the net free to score if he wanted... because they knew he didn't want to. The result was that Miami got killed and had to change strategies at halftime.

That's really good analysis (sorry for the lack of modesty). It was predictive of play after play, it explained what each team's strategy was and why Miami's wasn't working, and the final result. It even explained why certain players were acting the way they did.

Do you know what though? No one mentioned it. Not the announcers. Not the post-game analysts. None of the writers the next day. None of the talk radio guys. They all hammered away with tropes ("The Nuggets are too tall for the Heat!" or "the home crowd gave the Nuggets energy") and then went on the outrage bandwagon: Miami's Jimmy Butler "disappeared!" He's washed up! He was never good enough! Trade him for picks and start over!! They drafted wrong!!

Do you understand the problem here? These people are the people who tell the public what to think. None of them understood what had really happened. Miami chose a risky strategy and it failed. That was all. Miami knew it, they changed at the half. Denver knew it, they practically dared Miami to do it. But the paid announcers (the supposed cream of their crop of basketball knowledge) didn't recognize it. The half-time analysts, all former players and coaches, didn't recognize it. The talk radio guys who claim to live and breathe this stuff and talk for three hours a day about it didn't get it either. All we heard was personal attacks on coaches and players, conspiracy theories about the refs, and pie in the sky garbage about fantasy player swaps and messiah-like demands for draft picks ("he's the next LeBron").

Think about that. That is why sports analysis is utter garbage today. It offers zero actual analysis. Instead, it involves outrage, hyperbole, misdirection to gossip all hidden under the thin veneer of meaningless statistics to make opinion sound supported. They've even invented a conspiracy-theory style of thinking called the "hot take" to excuse being wrong time and time again and stepping over lines: "That was just a 'hot take', you can't hold that against me!"

Politics has gone the same route.

Talk radio learned that selling outrage, rumors and conspiracy is the key to getting listeners. It feeds people's anger and frustration, and that sells. So the same thing has happened. These people don't care about the ideology and wouldn't understand it if they did, all they know is that outrage sells... so sell outrage. This trickled out to places like Fox and MSNBC and then print and finally politicians themselves. The end result is that liberalism has gone from "problem solving through government" to hate-filled identity politics that borders on Nazism. Conservatism has gone from "encouraging the responsible use of freedom and the value of traditional values" to lunatic conspiracy and hating whatever they don't like.

Think about this sentence above:

All we heard was personal attacks on coaches and players, conspiracy theories about the refs, pie in the sky garbage about fantasy player swaps and messiah-like demands for draft picks ("he's the next LeBron").

Now ask yourself if that sounds familiar with a few changes

All we heard was personal attacks on political opponents, conspiracy theories about government and the powers that be, pie in the sky garbage about having sufficiently pure party leaders, and messiah-like demands for a political savior ("he's the next Reagan").

It's the same thing. This is what has happened. Talk radio, media and our politicians have destroyed conservatism and liberalism and replaced them with hate, rumor and conspiracy. Remember that the next time some "conservative" tries to whip you into a frenzy over some irrelevance like Biden not acknowledging his illegitimate grand daughter, or the government's up-coming attempt to take your riiiights, or he attacks an ally for lack of purity, or tells you that only the messiah can save conservatism, even as he represents nothing even close to conservatism. Liberals have the same problem, but it doesn't make it better. And sadly, there is nothing we can do about this. We are surrounded by idiots and suckers now and they are only getting worse. To borrow a quote, they are f-ing up fast and picking up speed. But you can at least keep your sanity by understanding this and learning to see through it.