Aaron Rodgers went on an extended rant about Anthony Fauci on ESPN Monday. “What are you going to say about me now?” he shrugged. The day before, one of ESPN’s on-air personalities lauded a coach for pushing back on Sophie Cunningham who recently said “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.” For this, The Guardian described Cunningham as “anti-black.

Earlier in the summer, UFC came to the White House lawn and affluent pundits took issue not merely with the event’s excesses, but with Donald Trump’s embrace of the sport itself. (Flashback to 2017: “If we kick [foreigners] out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts — which are not the arts,” said Meryl Streep at the Golden Globes.)

When Charles Murray wrote Coming Apart in 2012, he pointed out that affluent Americans were clustering geographically in the most powerful zip codes. This, he argued, meant cultural tastes were increasingly sorting along class lines as well. Murray’s fictional Belmont and Fishtown were less able to understand one another, which is most egregious for the denizens of Belmont who disproportionately exert control over Fishtown.

In addition to economic haves and have-nots, America is now a land of cultural haves and have-nots. If you’re mad at Fauci or pleased with Cunningham you do not “have” much representation in legacy media, elite cocktail parties, or other non-political centers of power. With few exceptions, it remains fashionable at CNN and ESPN and in their overlapping social circles to muse about Caitlin Clark’s white supremacy and marvel at Fauci’s ability to withstand MAGA.

This is an enormous source of tension, which Trump recognized early. Now, though, democratized media is creating a lane for the cultural have-nots, and Belmont’s cultural class traitors (including Trump) have found audiences outside their own bubbles. On ESPN, Rodgers was greeted with rowdy cheers from the live audience as he mocked Fauci. In 2026, he won’t weather the same level of controversy he weathered in 2021 because his opponents have less power and his boosters have more.

This is an awkward time for the Democratic Socialists of America to surge, but Zohran Mamdani blazed a trail that allowed DSA candidates to start finding receptive audiences outside Brooklyn: Tone down the identity politics and focus on economic disparities. Bernie Sanders swept states like Kansas and Wisconsin and Nebraska this way in 2016. It’s obviously more complicated now for candidates like Francesca Hong who posted through 2020, and the general election will focus heavily on pitting her claims to support the “have nots” with her prior opposition to Thanksgiving.

The scope of Trump’s personal corruption and a flagging economy will give Hong and others a boost in November, undermining Republican claims to represent the downtrodden. But for as much as we’re bound to hear about the class war, bear in mind taxes and redistribution are often the tip of the iceberg.

Cultural class traitors are reflecting back trends Murray picked up on more than a decade ago. This representation could prove to be a relief valve or a hefty dose of gasoline on the fire.

And away we go.

Not long ago, my feed delivered a post from a right-wing man I once respected gleefully referring to a high-profile woman as a “cunt” on social media. It was a one-line insult, not meant to be profound or persuasive. It was written, though, by a smart person who is capable of deep thought.

Men should generally not refer to women this way, and I generally should not cuss or eat Dominoes, but these things happen. It’s not morally defensible. What’s much more interesting than a dude calling a woman a cunt is that a smart person who uses their X account for professional purposes clicked “publish” on a tweet like that. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue in a bar, it was intentionally meant for public consumption.

There was a time in Web 2.0 when social media felt much more ephemeral. I remember using Twitter to literally plan nights out during college. Hitting “post” didn’t feel like publishing. But it always was. A social media post is a public statement under your byline, whether it’s text, video, or audio.

I don’t believe this man would have ever published an article in 2005 referring to a woman whose foreign policy he disliked as a cunt, let alone a major media figure. So why publish that on social media?

This where Marshall McLuhan would explain the medium of algorithmic social media does not merely change the delivery mechanism of a given message, but changes the message itself. If this man needed to send a message about this woman in 2005, it would be packaged in a cable news hit, a blog, an op-ed, or perhaps even a private email. It almost certainly would have more closely resembled, “This person is wrong for reason A, reason B, and reason C,” than “This person is a cunt.” Neil Postman’s “television-based epistemology” is now the “algorithmic-social-media-based epistemology” and the results are all around us.

I’m curious about social media conditioning some of us to exhibit an emotional incontinence that would have been seen as discrediting in prior eras. It seems emasculating, actually, for grown men to publish that kind of goofy insult on a professional channel for posterity.

As we know, algorithmic social media incentivizes 1) the act of publishing and 2) extreme emotions. It seduces us into writing and recording when we otherwise might have remained silent. (When you log onto X, a blank box asks, “What’s happening?”) We are also trained to write and record more extreme versions of our reactions, arguments, and thoughts. (Think: “I hate this” or “I love this.) Political narratives are forged in a digital casino.

It seems clear the costs are not worth the benefits, real as they are. One easy fix would be to revert Facebook, X, and Instagram feeds back to literal timelines. I like to regale Gen Z friends with tales of actually reaching the bottom of my Twitter feed when it was a minute-by-minute list. One negative incentive at the time was speed over substance, but that’s preferable to today’s system. This won’t happen, of course, because the revenue losses would be impossible to stomach.

It’s still an incredible statement on the rapid devolution of our professional conduct in public life that we’ve so quickly succumbed to these pressures. But the pressures are intentionally designed to maximize our time in front of these screens, so it’s no surprise.

To brings things full circle: This is exactly why I’m planning to scribble off more thoughts here on Substack in the near future.