There’s a Whole Lot of Crazy People in America

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Years ago the political blogosphere became overwhelmed by the growing popularity of Outrage of the Day™ blogging. These days there are usually four or five of these stories each day, all of them covered by the usual suspects before they move on to the next day’s outrages and all of them following a familiar pattern. Basically, somebody somewhere said something dumb/outrageous/offensive/whatever, which means we’re all going to spend the day explaining exactly why the remark was dumb/outrageous/offensive/whatever and why we’re personally outraged/offended/whatever by it.

I do some of this myself, so it’s not like I’m purer than Caesar’s wife here, but for the most part I find it pretty tiresome. However, via Dave Weigel, I learn today that David Wong has solved a problem for me: what to call this phenomenon. “Outrage of the Day” has never felt quite right, but I’ve never taken the time to figure out a better handle for it. Here’s Wong, in his listicle of “5 Ways to Spot a B.S. Political Story in Under 10 Seconds”:

#2. The Headline Is About a “Lawmaker” Saying Something Stupid

In every single group of human beings, you have a certain percentage of crazy shitheads. Find me an organization of a million charity workers who have devoted their lives to saving homeless golden retrievers, and I’ll bet my life that within that group I can find a faction of crazy shitheads.

….So if you see a headline citing something a “lawmaker” said, the first thing you should know is if it’s someone with actual power with implications on policy (i.e., a senator stating how he or she is going to vote on upcoming legislation) or if it’s simply a nobody who’s being held up as the Crazy Shithead of the Week (CSotW).

For instance, in the headline earlier about the CSotW comparing rape to a flat tire, the crazy shithead was a member of the Kansas state legislature — one of 165 members of the body that makes laws in Kansas. This guy is so hugely important that it took a whopping five thousand votes to elect him. You could fit every one of his supporters in a high school gym. Which is to say, he has just slightly more power to enact law than you do. And none outside of Kansas.

Wong’s point in the first paragraph is one that I usually refer to as the “300 million person problem.” The United States has a population of over 300 million, and that’s a number so vast that you can always find a large number of people doing some particular thing, no matter how stupid it is. Interest groups take advantage of this all the time, filling their monthly newsletters with outrages against common decency even though most of these outrages are, in fact, vanishingly rare. But in a population of 300 million, even 0.0000001% of the population amounts to 30 separate people doing 30 separate outrageous things every month. That’s plenty for a newsletter.

As for the rest, my only change would be to replace week with day. Or maybe hour. So the acronym probably ought to be CSotH. Welcome to modern politics.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate