Weekly Grounding #72

News, links, writing

Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.

After Part 1 and Part 2 of the Special Edition Weekly Grounding on the United States election, this week is back to a Grounding with a mix of topics.

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“Liberals Speak a Different Language”

Janan Ganesh argues that “Style and substance are linked” in his column for The Financial Times: “Liberals have evolved a language of their own. Or at least a dialect. Those who speak it tend to have no earthly idea how odd it sounds to others, and therefore what a competitive disadvantage it is versus the plain-speaking right. While conservatives have their own argot — ‘red pill,’ ‘blue pill’ — you have to delve quite far into the weirdo fringe to encounter it. Among the megastars such as Joe Rogan, not to mention Donald Trump, what stands out is an Orwellian directness. ‘Bros’ or not, their speech is far closer to the American or Anglosphere median.”

Ganesh goes on to addresses “the matter of cadence,” in American “Liberalese”: “I have given up my brave war against Upspeak, which is the habit of lifting one’s vocal pitch towards the end of non-interrogative sentences. The world has won. Except it is not the world, is it? It is progressives and centrists. You hear far fewer conservatives talk like this. Theories vary as to why they so dominate the podcast charts in a 50-50-ish nation. Here’s mine: they are easier on the ear. People who think him a dangerous fool on vaccines will nevertheless take three hours of Rogan over 30 minutes of someone? Who speaks? Like this?”

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“Covid Masked Liberal Weakness”

At Unherd, Michael Lind suggests that covid concealed Trump’s continued popularity in 2020: “the pandemic allowed the Democrats to benefit from various mail-in voting systems, adopted in response to Covid lockdowns. To be clear, there is no evidence of systematic cheating here. But the combination of mail-in voting with lockdowns favoured university-educated and politically engaged Democrats at the expense of Trump’s core constituencies. Even with these advantages, at any rate, Biden still only managed to defeat Trump by a few tens of thousands of votes in swing states.”

Lind concludes that “the Democrats didn’t lose last week merely because of Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris, or Tim Walz. Rather, they lost because they underestimated the degree to which the pandemic temporarily eclipsed the underlying popularity of Trump in particular and the Republicans in general.”

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“The MAHA Wing of MAGA”

Sean Butler

discusses the rise of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) wing of MAGA at the

Farmer's Table

. Butler reports that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for Health and Humans Services secretary and the face of the MAHA movement, has “an impressive resume”: “From suing Monsanto over exposure to the herbicide glyphosate, winning $11 billion in damages for farmers and farm workers; to getting arrested protesting the Keystone pipeline; to authoring a dozen books; to winning Time Magazine’s ‘Hero of the Planet’; to helping indigenous nations fight logging in Clayoquot Sound; to being declared a persona non grata by then Alberta premier Ralph Klein due to his activism against the province’s large scale hog production facilities; to going on a hunger strike with the United Farm Workers and being a pall bearer at Caesar Chavez’s funeral; he has consistently fought powerful interests in common cause with the disadvantaged.”

Butler notes that “RFK Jr. offered an alliance with the Harris campaign, but they declined to even meet with him. Trump, on the other hand, accepted the MAHA’s into his coalition, thus displaying once again how the left’s ideological purity around certain sacred cows results in a continual chipping away of their coalition, while the right is only to happy to hoover up the disaffected into their cauldron of discontent towards the status quo.”

I discuss the MAHA constituency in my reflections on the election and look forward to covering the development of this movement at Handful of Earth.

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“Jared Polis Wants to Win Back the Hippies”

The MAHA movement provides a unique opportunity for depolarization, since its core focus resonates deeply with many historically left-wing causes. While the vast majority of Democrats—still attached to their pro-lockdown and pro-mandate positions from the pandemic—have been content to cancel covid dissidents like RFK Jr., Democratic Colorado governor Jared Polis is an important exception.

Ezra Klein reports for The New York Times that “Polis’s embrace of Kennedy may be no less significant to his success than his attention to affordability.” Polis stated: “I was sad to see R.F.K. leaving our coalition because his voters in Colorado are a big part of my coalition. I mean, I had to threaten to veto vaccine mandates and we were able to avoid them. We have been trying to legalize raw milk in our state for several years and we’re continuing to try because it leans into empowering people to make their own choices.”

Democrat Jared Polis promotes bipartisan food freedom legislation by sharing a meal with Republican Thomas Massie that includes hemp scones, raw milk, kombucha, and beef raised by Massie. Image.

Klein writes that “Democrats are ready to face the support they lost to inflation, but they’ve never fully reckoned with the anger and mistrust that still pulses from the pandemic…Politics is about what you prioritize, and liberals, today, prioritize respect for institutions and expertise. ‘In this house, we believe in science,’ and so on. It’s telling that the announcement that Kennedy might lead H.H.S. has generated far more liberal fury than Trump’s decision to name Mike Huckabee the U.S. ambassador to Israel or charge Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy with cutting trillions from the federal budget. There is more overlap between Kennedy and most liberals — who’d have thought Trump would name a pro-choice candidate to lead H.H.S.? — than between liberals and any of Trump’s other nominees. But the relationship to institutions and expertise is very different. And institutions and expertise are what American politics has really polarized over.”

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“Is the Femininomenon Still Happening?”

Cat Zhang discusses hints of a male turn in pop music for The Cut: “The narrative that came out of the 2024 Grammys, back in February, is that women now rule pop music. They still dominate the 2025 nominations, with 11 nods going to Beyoncé and seven to both Billie Eilish and Charli XCX. Mainstream-music discourse has centered on female performers like Charli, Sabrina Carpenter, and Chappell Roan, who make cheeky songs about the joys of being sexually liberated women. But the charts have told a different story. While critics proclaimed this year the ‘summer of girly pop,’ men commanded Billboard ‘Top 100’ — in June, only Sabrina Carpenter and Billie Eilish made it into the ‘Top 10,’ while Post Malone and Morgan Wallen’s ‘I Had Some Help’ occupied the top spot.”

Zhang continues: “This year has been massive for rural, working-class men, or at the very least artists claiming that aesthetic, pretending to be lonely drunkards whose only friend is their pickup truck…Country is everywhere, and everyone is trying to seem blue collar. Consider the camo hats that were first Chappell Roan merch, then support symbols for the Harris/Walz political campaign, or Lana Del Rey and Quavo’s country-trap collaboration, ‘Tough,’ in which Lana — now married to a Louisiana alligator-tour guide — croons about guns, leather boots, and ‘red-dirt attitude.’ We’ll check back in next year, but for now, it looks like culture is going South.”

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“Out of the Landscape, into the Portrait”

Nicholas Carr calls for a “phenomenology of the phone” at

New Cartographies

: “Thanks to the lateral placement of our two eyes in our head, we see the world in something like Cinemascope. Our horizontal field of vision spans about 180 degrees, while our vertical field is limited to about 130 degrees. The horizontal bias makes sense in evolutionary terms. The land presents a lot more opportunities and threats than the sky does, so a species like ours benefits from a broad ‘landscape’ view. When we see a horizontally composed image, like a Constable landscape, it feels comfortable and calming to us because we recognize in it our own point of view. We know that this is how the world looks. Now imagine being forced to wear blinders and suddenly seeing the world in a narrow ‘portrait’ view. Not only would your new perspective be dangerous, limiting your ability to see your immediate surroundings. It would feel cramped, even claustrophobic.”

Carr continues: “The aspect ratio of our lives has changed. By narrowing our field of view, cutting off our peripheral vision, the phone doesn’t just remove us from space and provoke a sense of claustrophobia. It isolates us. A horizontal frame places a person in a landscape. It emphasizes the ground in which the figure stands. It provides context. It tempers vanity and hubris. Verticality erases the landscape, the ground, the context. The figure stands alone, monumental in its solitary confinement.”

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What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.