The Realignment: Last Call for Supercast, Debating Twitter & Student Loans, and More..
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Last-Call to Subscribe to Paid Our Supercast Soft-Launch
One quick thing before we get into the newsletter.
This is the last week of our soft launch for our Supercast subscription. If you can, we’d really appreciate your support. The amount of money we bring in this month will shape how we decide to approach the show moving forward.
We have three price points: $5 a month, $50 a year, or $500 for a lifetime membership (aka ten years of subscription paid upfront).
The general rule with subscriptions is that 3-10% of your overall audience will pay for a membership. Last month, hundreds of thousands of unique listeners tuned in, so one can do the math. If only 3% of that number subscribed, even at the $5 rate, we’d be off to the races.
We’re almost two weeks into the soft launch, and we’ve already raised 1/5 of what we wanted to bring in over the next year (April 2022-2023).
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Welcome Back to The Realignment
Hey everyone, today marks two milestones for the show.
We’ve officially kicked off The Realignment’s expansion with a biweekly discussion between me and Saagar. Check it out below if you missed it. Relatedly, we’re expanding the number of interviews we do a week, so expect three rather than two next week.
This is the last day of our soft launch of our Supercast. Up until now, our pitch has been entirely-mission focused. Starting next week, we’ll be expanding our content/and offering direct subscriber benefits. Thank you so much to everyone who signed up so far.
That said, we’re excited to get going and would love to hear any thoughts and feedback on how our expansion should work/is going. For example, what days does it make sense to drop content on? What topics should we hit? Etc…
Either reply/comment on this Substack or email us at realignmentpod@gmail.com
What’s Coming Next Week?
As part of the show’s expansion, we’re increasing our production schedule to ideally hit three interviews a week.
We’ve booked two interviews so far. Still figuring out the third.
The first guest will be AEI’s Matthew Continetti making a return to the podcast. He has just released a new book: The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. We’ll obviously discuss the future of the right/conservative movement in America. We also plan on doing an episode focused on the future of the Democratic Party/left to complement this one.
Our second guest is another return guest, retired Air Force Gen. Robert Spalding to discuss his new book: War Without Rules: China's Playbook for Global Domination. Marshall and Gen. Spalding discuss China’s grand/military strategy to challenge the U.S. and what the war in Ukraine means for Taiwan.
Both upcoming guest’s books are available in our Realignment Bookshop.
This Week’s Episode
236 | Saagar and Marshall Discuss Musk & Twitter, How Saagar Became Part of the Story, and Biden's Student Debt Forgiveness Decision
(PODCAST AUDIO) (YOUTUBE VIDEO)
Producer Aaron’s Response
Aaron Visser, The Realignment’s producer/researcher, contributes his perspective on a topic of the week.
It’s A Private Company, It Can Do What It Wants
In 2016, 12 year old me found his new role model. Unlike most Americans, I encountered Elon Musk the man before Elon Musk the idea, meeting him not through his Twitter account or Joe Rogan appearance, but through a biography. I loved Musk because he was brilliant, fiercely optimistic, and wanted to change the world: everything I wanted to be. And unlike other biographies I had read, it was unfinished; Musk had more to do, though how much more I had no idea. Tesla has grown to one of the top corporations in the world and Musk is the world’s richest man. A rocket ship company is worth over 100 billion. But some things have gotten worse for Musk. He used to be a figure praised on all sides, by the Right for his made in America entrepreneurship, by the Left for his help against climate change, and by the visionary in all of us for daring to look towards the stars. A few criticized him for his overzealous promises, wearing out his workers, and a penchant for showmanship, but overall for someone who wants to be perceived like a Tony Stark (even appearing in Iron Man 2), times were good. But with his entry into the culture war, commenting on Twitter and Joe Rogan on Cancel Culture and Covid, views about Musk have polarized. Nowadays, “controversial billionaire” is Musk’s prefix and one side’s love for him is equaled by the other’s hatred. Then Elon Musk bought Twitter.
I’ve had to repeat that sentence to myself many times over the last few days, not because it wasn’t possible, but because it just feels like the most expensive meme of all time. This is Musk’s biggest gamble yet, not in a financial sense, but to see whether he can actually establish something new for social media. The task is extremely difficult, but many have wrongly doubted Musk before. Many have tried to extend the vision of constitutionally protected free speech online and have failed miserably, because the first amendment just isn’t the proper way to think about social media.
Every system of discourse falls somewhere along the free speech ladder which leads from the ground of complete free speech up to complete censorship. Our constitution places our democracy close to the ground, censoring incitement to violence, libel, and child pornography while allowing most other forms of speech, while China doesn’t allow speech that threatens CCP power. The same applies to social media. The top has forums on Reddit, where each contains a long list of rules which are enforced with frequent bans. At the bottom of the ladder are free speech platforms such as 4chan, 8chan, Gab, and Parler. These platforms often fell to the lowest common denominator of speech, dominated by trolls and harassment. The question isn’t free speech or no free speech, but where to draw the line.
Let’s start from the bottom and climb up. We start with the clear cases, the child abuse material and the ISIS decapitation videos. No one objects to these beings being banned. Next on the continuum are the obscenities and harassment, trolls spamming the N-word, doxxing, and attacking people in dms, which make the site too unpleasant for use. We’re already running into hairy cases. What constitutes harassment? When does criticism by a sufficiently large user become an invitation for harassment, cancellation, or doxxing? The same applies to misinformation. Most people would agree false news stories should be taken down, such as antisemitic conspiracy theories or libelous material. Do we ban accounts who spread those lies? What percentage of falsehood is acceptable? What if people don’t trust us to determine what is false, perhaps because we don’t share their political biases? Each reader will have the place they want to draw that line, where moderation becomes censorship. I propose that the question is fundamentally unsolvable. Any social media site that goes all in on free speech will collapse into the base vileness of the internet, while censorship will eliminate its role as a public square. In reality, it will be stuck forever in between, pleasing no one.
There’s a more realistic view among some conservatives behind all the rhetoric of free speech and the jubilation around Musk’s purchase. On some level they realize that arbitrary regulation of speech is inherent to social media, but they object to those who have power over that speech. They know the hard questions, but wished that the people thinking about them shared their values. In this sense, the battle over social media was about power, not more or less free speech.
Enter Elon Musk. Musk is only a conservative in the post-Trump sense of the word where a conservative is anyone hated by liberals. He used pure financial power to purchase the entire corporation and implement his free speech vision. I admire attempts to make change in an industry in dire need of it. I’m just pessimistic.
The Realignment Bookshop
As a reminder, we’ve created a Realignment Bookshop affiliate store showcasing books by guests, what we’re actively reading this year, and deeper dives into the featured topic of an episode.
If you purchase a book using our link, the show gets a 10% commission, a local, independent bookseller gets support, and you get an awesome book!
We’re reorganizing our book lists over the next few weeks, so for now, check out our primary one:
Let us know what you think about this or any other week’s episodes. Please share The Realignment with anyone who’d enjoy the podcast.
Love the expanded number of broadcasts and the Marshall / Sagaar debate episodes. It is great to hear hosts wrestle with difficult topics and respectfully disagree. It is good to see Marshall and the expanded partnership appearances on Breaking Points, as well. Could we see a "Realignment News Network" in the future? (reasoning: Breaking Points is great, but the Brand power of a single resonant word like, "Realignment" seems too good to pass up - awesome logo too!). Keep up the great work, Marshall is my favorite podcast voice in the biz (both audio and interview style)!
Regarding student loan debt, it is a losing proposition to look at it in isolation without full context. And agreed, it also makes little common sense to "deal with it" without also structurally addressing the higher educational system.
To put it in context, (federally guaranteed) nondischaregable debt should never have been set at an interest rate above the rate of back taxes (3%). They are functionally equivalent forms of debt obligation. And even when the government became the direct lender during the Obama administration, the rates were set at 6.8% and have remained unchanged since. The premium charged above the rate on back taxes has, going on a decade and a half, been illegitimate and indefensible.
Include also the context of FED largesse, QE infinity, and manipulated interest rates across the spectrum. And also include other financial realities. Mortgage forbearance was also available for nearly two years during Covid. Today, the FED still owns roughly 1/3 of all mortgage bonds on its balance sheet. The collapsed those interest rates to their lowest levels in history. Nearly 50% of home owners refinanced their mortages during this artificial suppression of interest rates. Doesn't this contituency skew older, more wealthy, more suburban/rural, and more Republican? This was probably the single biggest windfall from fiscal stimulus of the Covid period, and yet, most of these people will likely get angered by any attempt to address student or credit card debt.
There are defensible ways to deal with the debt burdens. Unfortunately, neither party, nor the FED, has a decent track record of producing universal policies or seems to have much interest in doing so. All economic policy is basically class warfare, yet is subsumed into the incoherent cultural warfare. At the very least, Democrats could tie the interest rate on student debt to the interest rate on back taxes (perhaps with a credit for the excess over so many years). It is a defensible position. It might be good policy to try to make good on more than one or two of their previous electoral promises.
But it is still not going to save them in the midterms.