We’re talking to Joe Katz from Rogan's List at 2:30 PM ET today. Join us to find out how to get into the game for the midterms.
Noah Berlatsky writes Everything Is Horrible, a newsletter name that ages like wine, unfortunately. He’s one of the sharpest culture and politics critics around, and he thinks through film and music with a clarifying sense of how art works that you wish you could access. At least, if you’re me.
I brought him on to disagree with me. He did!
My going-in theory: Musk bought the 2024 election. Noah walked me through why political scientists he trusts — G. Elliott Morris chief among them — don’t credit Musk with much. As Brookings found, Harris underperformed most in places where neither campaign bothered to show up, and overperformed in swing states, exactly backward from what a working Musk operation would produce. I came in with a theory. I left with a more complicated one.
But the piece that set up the whole conversation was about Musk’s blitzkrieg over Lupita Nyong’o being cast as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey — a fictional woman whose race was not recorded, because she did not exist. Noah made the argument nobody else was making: the rage at a Black actress on screen and the USAID shutdown are not two separate Elon Musks. They’re the same impulse, with the cultural erasure as the justification, and the killing is the act. Hitler didn’t just murder Jews, he purged Jewish artists from German film first—something you only do if you love fascism more than film.
But here’s a key point the world should all be repeating: You don’t get to treat the tantrum about Helen of Troy as a distraction from the genocide. It’s part of it.
A peer-reviewed Lancet study projects 14 million deaths by 2030 from the USAID cuts — 4.5 million of them children under five. Even people who despise Musk (Ezra Klein), who catalog what he did to Twitter or how he treats workers (Ezra Klein), almost never mention that people he engineered the deaths of are dying right now (Ezra Klein). Noah points out that there are a lot of practical reasons for this: the killing is diffuse, spread across multiple continents, not photogenic. No bombs. It’s the kind of atrocity the news environment was almost designed to lose.
We also got into Republicans, specifically why you should still demand they act even when you’re sure they won’t. Cassidy lost his primary, then voted against Iran funding, almost immediately. YOU’RE FREE, BILL!
NOAH MAKES AN ESSENTIAL POINT: Murkowski, Cassidy, Cornyn, Tillis: four people who could caucus with Democrats and end this. Every day they don’t is a day they decided not to. You can’t release them from that by deciding in advance they’re demons. They’re not demons. They’re partisans making a choice, and somebody has to make the argument directly to them that they could make a different one.
Noah made me smarter, which is both humbling and why I wanted to talk to him. I appreciate his time and yours!
Subscribe to Everything Is Horrible on Substack.
