Washington Monthly – General Political | Politics & Government

Online sensations like Mr. Beast—the YouTuber with nearly 500 million subscribers—have spurred countless imitators with dreams of online fame. More than 127 million people say they work as “creators,” according to the influencer marketing firm NeoReach.  Yet a vanishing few reach the stratospheric heights of Mr. Beast, who reportedly earns $700 million a year, or historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose Substack newsletter, “Letters from an American,” is estimated to bring in $5 million in annual revenues. According to a 2025 survey by NeoReach, 70 percent of creators report earning less than $49,000 a year, and more than half earn less than $15,000 annually. (YouTube, meanwhile, reported $60 billion in revenues in 2025.) As veteran podcaster Matt Robison argues, media has become a “superstar economy” where a small number of players dominate the market. Their incumbency is secured by platforms like YouTube and Substack, which have every incentive to promote their superstars as a way to compete against each other. Algorithms that favor popularity make things worse for smaller creators trying to break in. The result is that no one who isn’t already big can make it big because the big guys are insulated from competition. Robison, who worked for years as a senior staffer on Capitol Hill, is the author of the Substack, “Worth Knowing,” and the host of the podcast, “Beyond Politics.”  This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The full interview is available at Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes.  No video found at URL *** Anne Kim:  Social media platforms and platforms like Substack have really created this mythology around the unknown creator who hits it big. And you do have successes like Mr. Beast, Heather Cox Richardson, and Barry Weiss’s “Free Press,” which sold to Paramount for $150 million. Success stories like these create the perception that anyone can become a publisher, and it’s true that back in the day, not everyone could put out their own newspaper. At the same time, I think there’s a pretty strong argument that these platforms that are allegedly intended to democratize influence aren’t really fulfilling their promise. You’ve done this for years now and have quite a bit of experience on the economics of how all these platforms work. Who’s really benefiting? Is it the platforms or are they being fair to the creators? Matt Robison: I’d say that they’re being fair within the limited economics that these platforms offer. It’s not that the promise of these platforms is hollow. It’s just highly curated. They’re businesses, and like every business, they’re selling something. … [TheTopNews] Read More.

When I was 11 years old, I wasn’t one of the 100 million people who watched the apocalyptic movie The Day After when it aired on ABC in November of 1983. I’m pretty sure I was tuned into CBS, watching Vera the waitress get married on Alice. But the societal impact of the movie’s depiction of nuclear war and radioactive fallout in the American heartland was inescapable, not just to a child but to the White House.  One month earlier, President Ronald Reagan screened an advance copy, then confessed his reaction to his diary:  It has Lawrence Kansas wiped out in a nuclear war with Russia. It is powerfully done—all $7 mil. worth. It’s very effective & left me greatly depressed … Whether it will be of help to the “anti nukes” or not, I cant [sic] say. My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war.  Reagan’s in-house biographer, Edmund Morris, later wrote the diary entry was “the first and only admission I have been able to find in his papers[] that he was ‘greatly depressed.’”  When the movie aired nationwide, ABC News immediately followed it with a roundtable discussion hosted by Ted Koppel, featuring Henry Kissinger, Elie Wiesel, Carl Sagan, William F. Buckley, Jr., Brent Scowcroft, and Robert McNamara. Koppel began with an interview of the current Secretary of State George Shultz, who sought to be reassuring: “Nuclear war is simply not acceptable, and that fact and the realization of it has been the basis for the policy of the United States for decades now—the successful policy of the United States.” But as noted by Frances FitzGerald, the historian who wrote Way Out There in the Blue about Reagan’s foreign policy, “Unfortunately, the appearance of the real-life secretary of state talking somberly about nuclear weapons gave the movie even more verisimilitude.”  Perhaps fortunately. Despite Reagan’s reputation as a reckless saber-rattler and warmonger, he was serious about working with the Soviet Union to avert the threat of nuclear war. Reagan infamously derailed the hastily arranged 1986 Reykjavik summit with Mikhail Gorbachev by refusing to give up his then-implausible “Star Wars” space-based missile defense plan, but an initial agreement was made to ban intermediate-range nuclear weapons, and such a treaty was finalized the following year. The director of The Day… [TheTopNews] Read More.

“In America today, age is the modality in which class is lived,” writes Samuel Moyn, the Yale University professor of law and history, in his new book, Gerontocracy in America. As he acknowledges, the phrase is a riff on Marxist cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s famous statement that class is lived through race. The repurposing is pithy and striking—though it’s also quietly evasive. Is Moyn saying that age is another modality through which class is lived? Or is he saying that age has superseded race and other factors as the mode in which class is lived? If he is borrowing an important analysis of white supremacy for his analysis of gerontocracy, then doesn’t he have an obligation to make the relationship between the two clear, rather than simply rhetorically gesturing to Hall’s authority—especially now, as Donald Trump’s Republican Party attempts to reverse the Civil Rights gains of the 1960s, and of the 1860s as well?   Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It by Samuel Moyn, Macmillan, 288 pp.  Moyn, who has been celebrated by some leftists for his scathing critiques of liberalism, never really confronts these questions. That’s because while Gerontocracy in America draws arguments and framing from the long-standing and ongoing American fight for multi-racial democracy, its heart is elsewhere. Moyn believes that certain people are entitled to more rights than others; his argument is not a call for equality for all but rather a demand to restore a natural order that he believes science and modernity have usurped. As a result, though the book claims to stand on the side of youth and progress, it often seems oddly conservative—and oddly disconnected from our current crises.  Specifically, Moyn argues that the crisis engulfing us is not a long-simmering fascist backlash, but a demographic time bomb caused by extended life spans. The infamously dour 18th century English economist Thomas Malthus worried that a growing population would outrun the food supply. Moyn, instead, argues that improved health care has “lengthened our years and increased the proportion of elders in our society, eventually and unintentionally empowering a caste that has slowed progress.”   Older people, Moyn says, have long enjoyed reverence and the financial advantages of age: higher salaries, accumulated wealth. But now that people regularly live into their 70s and 80s, he argues, they can hoard ever more money and status.… [TheTopNews] Read More.

This is a tumultuous time for American Jews. Start with the documented rise in antisemitic attacks in North America, Europe, and Australia, even in locales where Jews felt safe. In December, two gunmen shot up a Hanukkah ceremony at Bondi Beach near Sydney; in March, a gunman rammed a truck full of explosives into a Michigan synagogue while dozens of children were inside. (The explosives never detonated.) All this comes amid the fallout from October 7, 2023, and Hamas’s attack on Israeli soldiers and civilians. Many of the families slaughtered lived in liberal kibbutzim, inside a part of 1948 Israel that is undisputed unless you believe any Israeli state is illegitimate. What followed the Hamas pogrom was the Jewish state’s violent, deadly response, continued fighting on the Gaza moonscape—and now the entire Persian Gulf—dividing Jews in Israel and the diaspora.   So, Nicholas Lemann’s terrific, researched account of his Louisiana family’s history in America and his own Jewish evolution lands at an important time for American Jews. Returning is the Lemann family story of assimilation and material success in America, and the author’s engagement in middle age of rich Jewish observance. It is told with historical rigor but also novelistic detail. Don’t think of this as a Jewish book, but as an American story with relevance beyond the 2 percent who call themselves Jewish. It is a case study in how, in a free country, Americans choose to wear their religious and ethnic identities, and how the majority culture also influences, even bludgeons, those decisions. It’s right up there with memoirs as diverse as Margo Jefferson’s Negroland, her account of growing up Black and privileged in Chicago, or Richard Rodriguez’s very different Hunger of Memory, about his underprivileged childhood and Mexican American identity. It invites comparison with broad Jewish histories, such as Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers or Stephen Birmingham’s Our Crowd, but I’d say, also with Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Frank McCourt’s memoirs, even Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father. We all decide how ethnic or religious we’ll be, just as the outside world sets its parameters about how it sees us and cajoles us.  Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries, by Nicholas Lemann. Liveright, 416 pp. Returning is not a book about current politics. The emeritus dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, Lemann, illuminates a constant in Jewish life over the three… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Renowned child psychiatrist Robert Coles, who died June 4, is being lauded as a moral giant and a voice of liberal conscience, which he surely was. But the Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Children of Crisis was much more than that. He was a liberal without elitism—someone as concerned with the fate of working-class white people as he was with disadvantaged Black Americans. His life illuminates a better path for today’s Democratic Party.  In the early 1980s, as an undergraduate at Harvard, I was mesmerized by Coles’ lectures in his course, “The Literature of Social Reflection,” in which we read Charles Dickens, Ralph Ellison, George Orwell, and Flannery O’Connor. Other students and I were particularly taken by Coles’s moving eyewitness account of school desegregation in the South. Coles lectured about his interactions with a courageous six-year-old Black girl, Ruby Bridges, who helped integrate the New Orleans schools in the face of virulent white hostility. Astonishingly, Coles said, Ruby reacted to taunts and death threats from hateful white segregationists by silently praying for them. The turn-the-other-cheek ethos of Christianity and the power of nonviolent resistance were familiar to all of us cocky undergraduates. But this wasn’t Gandhi or King, but a six-year-old.  The course that Coles taught, dubbed “Guilt 101,” was easy for campus cynics to ridicule, but students flocked to it. I well remember the class during which a member of The Harvard Lampoon burst into the room and, as part of an initiation rite, began imitating the professor’s intense style of lecturing. Coles asked the student to leave, which he did, and then the scholar stood, in pained silence, clearly distressed. After a few moments, a student yelled out from the back row, “We love you, Doc.” Four hundred students jumped to their feet and began to clap furiously.   We Harvard students did love him, but he challenged us, not just academically but by confronting the standard liberalism of Harvard students. I learned this during long conversations with him as part of my research for an undergraduate thesis on Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. Coles served as an informal adviser to RFK and was fascinated, as so many were, by how Kennedy simultaneously connected with Black Americans, who appreciated his passionate support for civil rights, and with working-class whites, some of whom backed Alabama Governor George Wallace for president four years earlier when he made a surprisingly strong… [TheTopNews] Read More.