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11 tweets,
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1. This piece is from January of last year, but it's worth revisiting in light of Bret Stephens' latest invocation of a coded version of "ordinary America "that is presumably alienated by the sound of Spanish words. publicbooks.org/the-invention-…
2. The WWC, @AndrewJPerrin argues, is not some static entity to be discovered, but rather something that is always in flux and in formation; a product of media and politics as much as subconscious "economic anxieties." 
3. This has implications for how national media tells (or doesn't tell) the story about what happened in Portland this weekend.
4. Is the assault of a single person during a protest really a story worthy of national attention? How many assaults happened this weekend that did not make CNN or Fox? Why is this story trending, getting tons of eyeball time in conservative and centrist media?
5. My parents live in small town central PA. First thing my dad texted me this morning was "so, did you get caught in the riots yesterday?" You know what I did yesterday? I went to a movie. For 98% of Portlanders it was just another Saturday.
6. The depiction of cities as dangerous, inauthentic places has deep roots. It's long been a feature of right wing & fascist political cultures. Who benefits from exaggerating the extent of this rural/urban gulf? Don't we all swim in a shared stew of TV, music, and films?
7. Media narratives are powerful things. There's no escaping the narrativizing nature of all media...but our media can be more or less self-conscious about the empirical grounding of the stories they tell, and the signals such narratives send to their audience.
8. The President of the United States has decided that his path to reelection depends upon rural and suburban white Americans being scared to death of "dangerous Socialist Democrats and their friends, the antifa thugs, all of whom hate you and hate America."
9. The assault that happened in Portland yesterday is catnip for a certain segment of the WWC who want to believe that this one event tells them everything they need to know about Portland, about "the left," about cities, about Democrats.
10. As the old show used to say, "There are 8 million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them." Why is the story of this one assault, one of 8 million, the one that is getting so much attention?
11. Here's a thread from last year where I develop these ideas about media, culture, identity, and politics a bit more fully.
