Gen Zero
Coming of age in post-Trump America // Sane rogue intellects against the world // Andrew Callaghan and journalistic integrity in the age of the internet
I often hear my favorite bloggers and podcasters reminisce on a time when America’s institutions were perceived largely as functional and legitimate. Apparently, it’s somewhat abnormal for large swaths of the country to be convinced that our elites are – as a class – predominantly decadent and/or deranged. When I hear such reminiscence, I think: “Huh. Can’t relate.”
You see, I was born on August 9, 1997, which means that when Michael Brown was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri – the ambiguous tragedy that gave rise to the unambiguously deceptive protest chant “hands up, don’t shoot” – I was a blissfully ignorant high school jock celebrating my seventeenth birthday. I would cling to blissful ignorance until the election of Donald J. Trump, which left my urban college campus feeling like midtown Manhattan on September 12, 2001 (forgive me the hyperbole; I know not of what I speak; I was four). After Trump, I decided I’d better start paying attention to the world at large, instead of just my little corner of it, which before then I’d been perfectly content with. In other words, I was trying to get my political bearings for the first time. Quickly I discovered my timing was poor, because America’s entire media ecosystem was, as the kids no longer say, “spazzing out.”
What Martin Gurri calls our crisis of authority, I call a basic description of American political life as I’ve always known it. I’m a member of Generation Zero: the cohort that entered political maturity in a post-Trump world dominated by effete elites and that’s tasked with turning around a culture long in decline. For us, time before the fall is history, not memory. News of tragedy evokes from us not mere sadness or outrage, but a complex cocktail of such emotions masked by a multilayered dread. Because, yes, it’s despicable that Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd during a brutal display of shoddy policework, for example. It’s also contemptible that rioters burned black-owned businesses across the nation in the name of racial justice after a viral police-killing for which for there was never any evidence that race was a factor. And it’s deflating to see no meaningful police reform come from such a destructive “racial reckoning.” Hence the multilayered dread: heart-wrenching tragedies spark cycles of skewed media coverage, which feed directionless demands for change, which wreak havoc but fizzle out before accomplishing anything worthwhile. Sure, we can find fleeting comedic relief in the absurdity of the whole spectacle, but dark humor alone can’t sustain a generation, and mostly it’s just demoralizing to be a young person in a world where this is the best your elders can do:
Then, right as apathy starts to take hold, we’re reminded that not all elders are so lame – just the ones who get elected and/or paid to fill roles that, until recently, carried an aura of legitimate authority. Fortunately, if you spend enough time scouring the internet – as most young people do – it’s possible to find the occasional voice of reason. And today that’s what it takes to piece together a media diet that provides a relatively accurate picture of the world: years spent sifting through an ocean of propagandistic babble in the hopes of splicing together a modest assortment of sane rogue intellects. My own hard-won assortment now includes the Fifth Column fellas and the Red Scare ladies, Freddie deBoer, Contrapoints (Natalie Wynn), Astral Codex Ten (Scott Alexander), Pirate Wires mastermind Mike Solana, and Bari Weiss and company over at Common Sense. All of the above have managed to circumvent traditional media and amass large followings who crave nuanced, clear-eyed content delivered with some semblance of intellectual integrity – and thank God for their success.
But sane rogue intellects aside, I’m uneasy about where all this is headed. The obvious and much-discussed question is the long-term viability of a fragmented media landscape comprised of hundreds of independent journalists and commentators, each the master of their own corner of the internet, none with anything approximating universal reach. The question that haunts me more is the long-term cultural impact of an entire generation coming of age with the sense that our media institutions are fundamentally unreliable. I may have come to rely on the names listed above, but frankly that’s because they all appeal in some way to my idiosyncratic intellectual sensibilities. To those of a different frame of mind, Common Sense reporting and Fifth Column commentary may seem *problematic* or dispensable, and in all likelihood, that’s not changing anytime soon. “Paper of record” is a fairy tale phrase to today’s youth, and it’s hard to imagine any of these rogue forces rising above the social media din to forge a reputation that transcends internet subcultures. As is, we’re increasingly inhabiting individually curated information niches, each with its own heroes and villains, and more worryingly, its own reality.
At this point I imagine many of my peers asking… so what? Who cares if Ibram X. Kendi or Chris Rufo acknowledges the legitimacy of the news sources I rely on? As long as the good guys (i.e., my team) have access to reliable information, is it really a problem for everyone else to operate on different sets of information that they consider reliable? To which I reply: It’s only a problem if you weren’t fond of (1) cities being destroyed by folks who spent an entire summer chanting in earnest that black people in twenty-first century America have nothing to lose but their chains, and/or (2) Capitol buildings being stormed by folks who believed the election was stolen from an incumbent president who’d been working in secret to purge a deep state riddled with cannibalistic pedophiles.
Perhaps I overestimate the number of Americans who believe that neither all-pervasive white supremacy nor baby-eating elites are public enemy number one. In any case, I think the rest of us can agree that the health of the republic is in no small part dependent on the credibility of its fourth estate. And in that case, is it sane rogue intellects against the world, or have we prematurely pronounced legacy media institutions dead?
The New Right, where contempt for outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN is most concentrated, seems counterintuitively to be leaning toward the latter. In the words of Nate Hochman – perhaps the New Right’s foremost rising star and fellow member of Gen Zero – “institutions are in decline because they’re dominated by insane people. They would not be in decline if they were dominated by sane people.” The goal, then, is not to displace legacy media institutions altogether, but to bend them to the will of sane people (like Hochman). Between Chris Rufo taking on public schools, Aaron Sibarium taking on elite universities, and Ron Desantis taking on woke corporations, the New Right hopes to affect a national culture shift by shaming and legislating the left into submission. In ten years, if they get their way, we might be living in a mirrored version of our present reality: the fourth estate is still beholden to party interests, but primarily to the New Right instead of the Democratic Party.
Given that the New Right is increasingly post-liberal, my own preference is to avoid that future. I don’t see the republic thriving if the media is beholden to a party for which the phrase “Blessings of Liberty” is a cringe-laden cudgel used to troll ostensibly soft-spined process-liberals like David French. I suppose that means it’s sane rogue intellects against the world. But creating reputable institutions from scratch is a daunting task, especially in our age of internet-fueled irreverence. That said, it makes sense that someone who formed their instincts in this unhinged media environment would understand how to thrive in it. So perhaps we can learn a thing or two from another Gen Zero rising star who, at 25, has already amassed a bigger platform than any of the other rogues I’ve mentioned thus far.
Andrew Callaghan first blew up as the face of All Gas No Brakes, a YouTube channel where he posted video journalism documenting the most bizarre regions of America’s cultural underbelly. We’re talking flat earth and furry conferences, an unfortunately futile attempt to raid Area 51, bigfoot hunters – you get the idea. Callaghan would dress in a baggy beige suit, go to these events with a microphone and camera crew, and let his subjects show their colors. Before long, he had over a million subscribers and budding a reputation for funny but fair coverage. Callaghan has a knack for asking just the right question at just the right time, for tactically partaking in the shenanigans he’s covering – anything to get his subjects to let their guards down and display their full, authentic selves for the camera. And, most importantly, Callaghan never shies away from relaying that full authentic self to his audience.
Eventually he grew tired of exclusively interviewing belligerent drunks and alien dildo salesmen, so Callaghan began wading into more serious waters, like the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis. He made the transition seamlessly, producing holistic footage that captured the essence of the event, not just the parts that fit neatly into a preconceived narrative (his coverage of the Minneapolis protests, for instance, puts CNN’s “fiery but mostly peaceful” chyron to shame). But that kind of no-holds-barred reporting – aka, stellar journalism – is a recipe for blowback from ideologues who are more concerned about harm caused by unseemly truths than they are about harm caused by suppressing them. So, in fear of fucking the money up, the company that owned the rights to All Gas No Brakes told Callaghan to stick to the lighter, safer content he started off with. Callaghan, not one to sacrifice his vision to corporate cowardice, told them to shove it. He broke off on his own, bought a van, rebranded as Channel 5, and got back to work. Before long, he was back to posting premium content – like this forty-five-minute prison interview with the infamous Q Shaman – and Channel 5 was surpassing All Gas No Brakes’ peak subscription numbers.
The main keys to Callaghan’s success, it seems to me, are: (1) a good mix of funny and serious content, (2) mastery of multiple media platforms – in his case YouTube, Instagram, and Tik Tok – (3) an ethic of unconditional respect to his subjects, and (4) a refusal to reveal his own political biases. Of course, the future of rigorous journalism needs to include the written word, which is a medium Callaghan hasn’t shown much interest in. But alternative media outlets like Common Sense should absolutely consider supplementing their written content with video journalism, which is much easier to spread across platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok, which is where the young people are. And anyone with paper-of-record ambitions should study Callaghan’s measured avoidance of taking a clear position in the culture war trenches.
As Freddie deBoer puts it, the sheer volume of egos clamoring for attention on the internet means that “everyone must be a type.” Further, because the internet is a graceless place, types have an unstoppable inertia: “I already clocked you, [people] seem to think, and I cannot invest the energy to clock you again.” This dynamic poses a problem for those looking to cultivate a reputation for journalistic integrity. Callaghan, by way of silence, has refused to let anyone clock him for anything other than his journalism. He rose to prominence by mastering a new style, and now anyone who emulates it will be compared to him. If your work merits the comparison, you’re doing something right.
Those who doubt the efficacy of Callaghan’s approach need only look at his 2.02 million subscribers, his $100,000 per month in Patreon revenue, and the comments sections of his videos. Normally internet comments sections are toxic waste dumps, but for Channel 5, they’re strikingly wholesome. In fact, they sometimes bring tears to my eyes by illustrating just how intensely the public is craving high-quality journalism that refuses to sacrifice integrity at the altar of our dominant narratives. As one commenter put it, “y’all are literally the most important journalists in the country. God Speed Soldiers.”
Andrew Callaghan is giving his peers a little taste of balanced, nuanced reporting that they may once have thought was smoldering on the ash heap of history. Judging by his success, their appetite is far from satiated.
Godspeed indeed.