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The Intellectualist

@highbrow_nobrow

Nov 3

Rupert Murdoch: The Love of Money Over Everything Else

🧵1/5: For a man whose empire spans continents, Rupert Murdoch’s real legacy may be less the reach of his influence than the harm it has inflicted.

In the relentless pursuit of wealth, he left a trail of misinformation and division that has reshaped democracies and endangered lives. This is the story of one man’s obsession with “the green”—and the cost the world has paid for it.

theintellectualist.com/rupert-murdoch…

2/5: Rupert Murdoch, now 93, has left a global legacy of damage driven by his obsession with hoarding money—something that cannot be eaten, worn, used as shelter, or taken as medicine.

For Murdoch, our modern Scrooge, this wealth obsession justified promoting the Iraq War, which many argued lacked legitimate legal grounds, and spreading misinformation about a deadly virus and its vaccine—all while securing his own place at the front of the vaccination line.

As he admitted under questioning from Smartmatic attorneys, he cares only about “the green.”

theintellectualist.com/rupert-murdoch…

3/5: Self-interest, often the root of moral failure, defines the man. Murdoch’s willingness to fuel wars based on questionable premises and to mislead the public on health matters during a global pandemic marks him among the era’s most morally troubling figures. He has, in a sense, been complicit in the deaths of thousands of Americans who took at face value the disinformation his network intentionally and knowingly broadcasted.

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The Intellectualist

@highbrow_nobrow

Oct 30

The Lies That Killed: How Fox News and Right-Wing Leaders Betrayed America During the Pandemic

🧵1/7: They trusted their television screens more than they trusted their doctors. In the end, it was the disembodied voices of broadcasters—not medical experts—that influenced the choices of life or death for many.

In the spring of 2020, when the world fell into an eerie hush and nations shuttered their doors against an invisible enemy, another contagion, far more insidious, crept into American homes. It wasn’t airborne in the traditional sense.

Instead, it traveled through the cables of television sets, radiated from radio waves, and surged through digital platforms. Its source was not a virus but an industry fueled by profit, politics, and the manipulation of public fear. At its helm was Fox News.

The COVID-19 pandemic, with all its terrifying uncertainty, became the perfect stage for the grand illusion orchestrated by a network that had, for decades, skillfully blurred the lines between entertainment and journalism.

Through their screens, millions of conservative Americans—many elderly and isolated—watched as the global pandemic became a sideshow to a far more captivating drama: the fight to maintain their way of life, their personal freedoms, and, most importantly, their trust in a network that had, for years, become synonymous with their identity.

Fox News’ role in American conservatism is not new. Since its launch in 1996, the network has historically aligned itself with conservative viewpoints and has played a prominent role in shaping the media landscape for conservative audiences.

However, as the pandemic raged across the country, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives, some observers noted a shift in the network’s coverage that raised concerns about public health implications. The need to keep viewers glued to their screens, to sell advertising, and to maintain political influence appeared to outweigh adherence to established public health guidance.

What unfolded over the next two years raised significant concerns about public health communication, as various narratives emerged that seemed to prey on cognitive biases, exploit cultural divisions, and, ultimately, contributed to public health challenges.

theintellectualist.com/fox-news-covid…

A Network Built on Fear and Distrust

2/7: The seeds of Fox News’ pandemic disinformation campaign were sown long before the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan. Decades earlier, with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, a floodgate opened for partisan media to shape public opinion with little regard for balance or fact-checking. For Fox News, this was an opportunity to tap into a conservative audience that felt alienated by mainstream media.

The network didn’t simply report the news; it curated a worldview—one in which its viewers, predominantly older, white, and Christian, were under siege by liberal elites, secularism, and an ever-expanding government.

By the time the pandemic arrived, Fox News had already mastered the art of shaping reality for its viewers. It wasn’t just a television network; it was an ideological fortress, and within its walls, truth became malleable. Science, once revered as a beacon of objectivity, was increasingly viewed by some as a tool of control wielded by an oppressive government.

When the virus first appeared on American soil, the network’s hosts—most notably Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson—were quick to downplay its severity. The pandemic, they insisted, was just another liberal hoax designed to undermine President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.

The early days of Fox’s pandemic coverage reflected a strong skepticism toward public health measures. Mask mandates? A violation of personal liberty. Vaccines? An unproven experiment. The virus? Exaggerated by the left to seize control.

Carlson, in particular, became adept at presenting narratives that may have contributed to fear, painting an ominous picture of a world where government mandates stripped citizens of their freedoms, all while corporate elites and tech moguls grew richer.

What was more concerning was how these narratives played directly into the psychological vulnerabilities of Fox’s viewers. Elderly, economically anxious, and deeply religious, this demographic was already predisposed to distrust institutions.

Fox News didn’t just exploit this distrust; it appeared to weaponize it. In homes across America, the television screen became a portal to an alternate reality—one where the pandemic wasn’t a global catastrophe but a political game, and where the real enemy wasn’t a virus but the doctors, scientists, and politicians trying to save lives.

theintellectualist.com/fox-news-covid…

Cognitive Bias and the Funhouse of Misinformation

3/7: “You can’t trust them, but you can trust us.” It was a message Fox had perfected over the years, repeated so often that it became a mantra for its viewers. This psychological conditioning relied heavily on cognitive biases like confirmation bias and the illusory truth effect, where repeated exposure to the same false information eventually made it feel true, regardless of the evidence.

Fox News knew its audience well—older Americans, many living in rural or suburban areas, already skeptical of mainstream media and deeply invested in a particular version of American identity. For these viewers, the pandemic wasn’t just a health crisis; it was an existential threat to their way of life. Fox’s hosts capitalized on this fear, offering their audience a sense of familiarity through narratives that downplayed the severity of the situation.

Night after night, viewers were told that masks didn’t work, that vaccines were dangerous, and that the government was overreaching.

As the death toll climbed, so too did the network’s ratings. Hannity’s dismissal of the pandemic as “hysteria,” Ingraham’s promotion of unproven treatments like hydroxychloroquine, and Carlson’s skepticism toward vaccines became nightly staples, reinforcing the narrative that the pandemic wasn’t to be taken seriously.

The consequences were concerning.

Research has indicated a correlation between higher viewership of Fox News and lower vaccination rates, as well as higher COVID-19 mortality rates in certain regions, suggesting that media consumption may have influenced public health behaviors.

Counties with higher rates of Fox News viewership reported lower vaccination rates and increased COVID-19 death tolls. A study published in the American Journal of Political Science found that exposure to Fox News was associated with a significant drop in adherence to public health guidelines.

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The Intellectualist

@highbrow_nobrow

Oct 30

The Intellectualist Forecasts Kamala Harris to Win the 2024 Presidential Election

🧵1: The Intellectualist, after reviewing data from trusted sources like Marist, YouGov, Monmouth, and Emerson, believes Kamala Harris is positioned to become the next President of the United States.

This forecast comes from a model that carefully weighs what voters care about most: candidate approval ratings, top issues (especially the economy), demographic support, expected turnout, and the overall national mood.

To check the model’s reliability, The Intellectualist backtested it on past elections (2018, 2020, and 2022) and found that its predictions closely matched actual results. This strong alignment gives additional confidence in Harris’s projected edge.

theintellectualist.com/kamala-harris-…

The Intellectualist Model: Voter Sentiment Analysis

2. The Intellectualist's voter sentiment approach to election forecasting is designed to capture a well-rounded view of how voters feel about each candidate and the issues that matter most to them.

Rather than focusing on polling numbers alone, this model creates a Composite Score that combines five key factors: candidate approval ratings, issue importance, demographic alignment, expected voter turnout, and overall national sentiment.

Each factor is weighted based on its significance in the current election cycle. For example, economic issues might hold more weight during times of financial strain, while approval ratings might play a larger role when evaluating incumbents.

This Composite Score offers a single, comprehensive measure of how well a candidate aligns with the priorities and concerns of the electorate. A score over 50 signals that the candidate is resonating positively with voters, suggesting an advantage in the race. For 2024, Kamala Harris’s higher Composite Score over Trump’s reflects stronger alignment with these critical voter priorities, especially on issues like the economy and overall favorability.

To ensure accuracy, this model has been rigorously backtested against previous elections (2018, 2020, and 2022) and refined based on those results. Further, it uses Monte Carlo simulations, eigenvalue analysis, and chi-square tests to validate the model’s reliability, accounting for variations in polling and turnout patterns.

The approach offers a snapshot of current voter sentiment but remains adaptable, ready to capture the influence of shifting public priorities on election outcomes.

theintellectualist.com/kamala-harris-…

Explanation: 2024 Forecast, Composite Score, and the Intellectualist Approach

3. For 2024, the Intellectualist Model forecasts a close race with a slight advantage for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump:

Popular Vote: Harris ~52%, Trump ~47%

Electoral College: Harris 289 EV, Trump 249 EV

Why the Composite Score?

The Intellectualist Model uses a composite scoring approach to interpret voter sentiment, combining five critical factors: approval ratings, issue importance, demographics, turnout, and national sentiment. Each factor’s weight is dynamically adjusted based on the election cycle. A Composite Score over 50 generally signals an advantage for the leading candidate, meaning Harris’s score of 56.75 suggests a moderate edge over Trump’s 51.15.

How the Composite Score Works

For 2024, the formula places extra emphasis on economic issues and candidate approval:

Composite Score=(0.3×Approval)+(0.4×Issue Importance)+(0.15×Demographics)+(0.1×Turnout)+(0.05×National Sentiment)\text{Composite Score} = (0.3 \times \text{Approval}) + (0.4 \times \text{Issue Importance}) + (0.15 \times \text{Demographics}) + (0.1 \times \text{Turnout}) + (0.05 \times \text{National Sentiment})Composite Score=(0.3×Approval)+(0.4×Issue Importance)+(0.15×Demographics)+(0.1×Turnout)+(0.05×National Sentiment)

Using sample data for 2024:

Harris’s Score:

Approval Rating: 55% (0.3 × 55 = 16.5)

Issue Importance (Economy): 60% (0.4 × 60 = 24)

Demographic Influence: 50% (0.15 × 50 = 7.5)

Turnout: 65% (0.1 × 65 = 6.5)

National Sentiment: 45% (0.05 × 45 = 2.25)

Total Harris Composite Score = 56.75

Trump’s Score:

Approval Rating: 48% (0.3 × 48 = 14.4)

Issue Importance (Economy): 55% (0.4 × 55 = 22)

Demographic Influence: 45% (0.15 × 45 = 6.75)

Turnout: 60% (0.1 × 60 = 6)

National Sentiment: 40% (0.05 × 40 = 2)

Total Trump Composite Score = 51.15

Why Each Metric Matters

Approval Ratings: Reflects candidate favorability; Harris’s 55% approval leads Trump’s 48%.

Issue Importance: Economic issues dominate this cycle, with voters slightly favoring Democratic economic policy.

Demographic Influence: Harris’s strong support among younger and urban voters adds to her advantage.

Turnout: Higher expected turnout among Harris’s base groups gives her an edge in mobilization.

National Sentiment: The “right track” vs. “wrong track” metric slightly favors Harris.

This scoring approach has shown reliable accuracy across elections, as seen in its backtesting, which produced low Mean Absolute Error (MAE) values in past cycles (2018, 2020, 2022). 📊
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The Intellectualist

@highbrow_nobrow

Oct 20

🧵1/12: In the Bible, it is mentioned that in the desert, Jesus faced a temptation from Satan for dominion over the world—a bargain He famously refused. But in 2016, as Trump began his presidential run, evangelical leaders chose a different path.
theintellectualist.com/evangelicals-t…

2/12: Jerry Falwell Jr., a man driven by a love of the worldly—particularly luxury—revealed his hypocrisy when he endorsed Trump. Falwell, who used Christianity as a cudgel against marginalized groups, found his own secrets exposed.
theintellectualist.com/evangelicals-t…

3/12: The increased scrutiny from his alliance with Trump exposed Falwell’s hidden life: he and his wife secretly maintained a relationship with a male lover. This was the man who preached Christian values while indulging in excesses he publicly condemned.
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The Intellectualist

@highbrow_nobrow

Oct 19

🧵1/12: Imagine a man whose admiration for his daughter crosses a line so blurred, it shocks even his closest allies. That man is Donald Trump, who once mused about dating Ivanka, offering a window into a mind steeped in disturbing desires.
theintellectualist.com/access-hollywo…

2/12: “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her,” Trump said in 2006. But this wasn’t just an offhand remark—it was a revelation of a man who views even his daughter through a lens of sexual objectification.
theintellectualist.com/access-hollywo…

3/12: The disturbing reality is that Trump’s inappropriate comments extend far beyond Ivanka. Over 26 women have accused him of sexual misconduct, with stories ranging from groping to outright assault, painting a damning portrait of predatory behavior.
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The Intellectualist

@highbrow_nobrow

Oct 16

The Ghosts of American Racism: How Trump’s Presidency Rekindled Division and Authoritarianism

🧵1/5: Charlottesville wasn’t just a violent outburst—it was a harbinger.

The flames of 2017 lit up more than just torches; they illuminated a chilling resurgence of white supremacy, casting long shadows over the very foundation of American democracy.

The embers of America’s racist past never died.

They smoldered beneath the surface for generations, unseen but always present, waiting for a gust of wind or a deliberate hand to fan them into flame. Charlottesville marked one such moment.

As white nationalists marched with torches held high, chanting “blood and soil,” the ghosts of America’s racist past rose again, drawn to the silence of the nation’s highest office. From that silence, the old fire reignited, and the embers that had long smoldered beneath the surface burst into open flames.

Trump’s refusal to condemn these marchers was not an isolated moral failure—it was a strategic decision, the latest in a long line of political calculations designed to tap into America’s buried racial grievances. In an era where America prided itself on the progress of civil rights, Trump represented a shocking regression.

He didn’t merely allow the fire to spread—he stoked it, feeding off the flames of division and resentment that had been smoldering since the nation’s founding.

Trump became not just a racist president but the most racially divisive leader relative to his time in American history, actively working to raise the dead of America’s darkest chapters.

theintellectualist.com/trump-presiden…

Raising Ghosts: Nixon’s Strategy and Trump’s Resurrection of Racial Division

2/5: The fire Trump reignited wasn’t new—it was the same fire that Nixon had tended with his Southern Strategy. In the aftermath of the civil rights movement, Nixon saw an opportunity to capitalize on the fears and frustrations of white Southern voters who felt alienated by the Democratic Party’s embrace of racial equality.

But Nixon’s strategy, guided by advisers like Lee Atwater, relied on coded language—what Atwater himself described as “abstract” racism in a 1981 interview with Harper’s Magazine.

Terms like “states’ rights” and “limited government” replaced the explicit racial slurs of earlier decades, giving white resentment a veneer of respectability.

As Atwater famously explained in that Harper’s article, the key was to be subtle:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘n*****, n*****, n*****.’ By 1968, you can’t say ‘n*****’—that hurts you. So you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ and all that stuff.

You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

Nixon’s War on Drugs, ostensibly framed as a crackdown on crime, was, in reality, a calculated political effort to target and destabilize Black communities and anti-war activists.

This strategy was candidly revealed by Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, in an interview from the early 1990s.

Ehrlichman admitted that by associating drugs with these groups, the administration could vilify them publicly and justify their mass arrests, effectively disrupting their political power. This admission was later published in Harper’s Magazine in 2016, shedding light on the ulterior motives behind the War on Drugs.

Reagan picked up where Nixon left off, feeding the same embers of racial division under the guise of law and order. Each administration added fuel to the flames, carefully maintaining a fire that never truly died, though hidden beneath coded language and political abstraction.

Then came Trump, who discarded the subtlety of his predecessors and openly fanned the flames that they had kept smoldering.

Trump’s approach, however, was different. He didn’t bother with Atwater’s abstractions. Where past Republican leaders had used dog whistles, Trump grabbed a megaphone.

His birther conspiracy—the baseless, racist claim that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States—was one of the most blatant attempts to stoke the embers of racial animus in modern political history. And it worked.

The birther movement morphed into the Tea Party, which cloaked its racial anxieties in the language of “limited government” and “personal liberty,” but these terms, as Atwater admitted, were thinly veiled code for the same fears that Nixon and Reagan had exploited.

The Tea Party pretended to be about limited government, but its true fuel was racial resentment. Ironically, many of its members would later depend on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for healthcare—a system they had once fiercely opposed.

The ACA provided significant benefits to many lower-income and middle-class Americans, overlapping with the demographic that had supported the Tea Party, as discussed in Politico in 2017. Even as they protested against “government takeover,” many would come to rely on Medicaid expansion or marketplace subsidies to access affordable healthcare.

The flames grew higher as the Tea Party railed against the ACA, branding it as a government takeover that would lead to “death panels.” These claims had nothing to do with small government—they were demagoguery, designed to stoke the embers of fear and mistrust. Many of the very people protesting the ACA would later rely on it for health care, but that didn’t matter.

What mattered was keeping the fire alive, maintaining the resentment that had been smoldering for decades.
theintellectualist.com/trump-presiden…

Charlottesville: The Flames Burst into Open Fire

3/5: Charlottesville wasn’t merely a flare-up of racial animus—it was the moment when America saw the fire for what it was.

The torches held aloft by white nationalists weren’t just symbols of hate; they were emblems of a larger political strategy, one that had been carefully cultivated over decades.

Trump’s infamous remark that there were “very fine people on both sides” wasn’t just an act of equivocation—it was a signal to his supporters that the ghosts of America’s racist past were welcome in his America.

Trump’s presidency fanned those flames at a time when they should have been dying out. His decision to breathe new life into racial animus sets him apart from figures like Andrew Jackson, whose racism, however reprehensible, reflected the brutal norms of his time.

Trump’s presidency, however, comes at a moment when American institutions—media, education, and even the judiciary—have been complicit in creating the illusion of post-racial progress.

Yet, the very structure of these institutions, with deep roots in white supremacy, allowed Trump’s brand of racial division to flourish under the guise of free speech and political correctness gone too far. The fire, it seems, had never truly been extinguished—only hidden beneath layers of cultural myth-making.

The Authoritarian Flame

Authoritarianism, like racism, has always burned beneath the surface of American history, its flames fed by the lives of the vulnerable and the marginalized.

From the forced labor of enslaved people to the mass incarceration of Black men in the 21st century, this fire has consumed lives while enriching those in power.

Under Trump, this authoritarian flame has found new fuel—fueled by xenophobia, fear of immigrants, and a growing disdain for dissent. And it is the same communities, already scarred by history, who now find themselves in the line of fire once again.

His administration’s aggressive immigration policies, which included family separations and mass deportations, were designed not only to punish but to divide. Trump, in his admiration for authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, made no secret of his desire for similar power—the power to silence dissent, to crush opposition, to fan the flames of fear.

Trump expressed envy for these leaders’ ability to keep their nations under control, and in his own presidency, he sought to bring that authoritarian fire to American soil.

When Trump’s lawyers were questioned in court about whether he had considered using SEAL Team 6 to eliminate political opponents, the hypothetical, though unproven, aligned with Trump’s clear admiration for violent repression.

His willingness to see violence as a solution became unmistakable during the 2020 protests, when he reportedly asked if the military could shoot protesters. In these moments, the authoritarian flame blazed bright, revealing the extent of Trump’s willingness to burn down democratic norms to maintain control.
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