Welcome back, internet gremlins. As noted in previous updates I’m running around like a crazy person this week for the NLAS conference with the New Liberals so blogging is a bit hectic. But I wanted to share two pieces of juicy midweek content that might interest you.
First: Yours truly was profiled in the Columbia Review of Journalism! It’s an article about my work with the Center for New Liberalism, but touches on a lot of relevant themes from this blog - how to build a movement on social media, and then how to get people *off* social media and into doing things in the real world.
On a Thursday evening in April, Jeremiah Johnson—a writer, podcaster, and political consultant—cracked a beer and settled in to host a two-hour Twitch stream on the “bad tweets” of the day. Behind him were two posters, one from an old political campaign that read “steer clear of the populist tides,” the other commemorating a Carly Rae Jepsen concert. Johnson—who is thirty-seven, with short red hair and fair skin that recall a baby-faced Mark Zuckerberg—is a founder of the Center for New Liberalism (CNL), a political group aiming to provide a home for Zoomer, Gen Z, and millennial voters who feel alienated by the Democratic Party’s progressive tilt. Johnson started CNL with his friend Colin Mortimer in 2020, attempting to forge a “cultural countermovement to political extremism,” as Johnson put it. They hoped to thwart the socialist left’s online dominance; mostly through Reddit posts, tweets, and memes, and to a lesser extent newsletters and podcasts, they aimed to make the term “neoliberalism,” against all odds, cool.
Read the whole article at CJR!
Second, yesterday I published an episode of the New Liberal Podcast with Derek Guy, known by his handle @dieworkwear as the Menswear Guy on Twitter.
It touches on a number of political topics, but also deals with internet fame, virality, and Derek’s social media experiences. It was a great conversation, so check it out below on your preferred platform:
We’ll be back to the regular schedule with this upcoming weekend’s Weekly Scroll.