Tangle - PREVIEW - The Friday Edition: My actual views on class and class politics in America.

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

In the last couple weeks, I've been accused of being "out of touch" more times than I ever have in my entire life. The criticisms have mostly been for "my take" on the murder of Brian Thompson and then my response to reader feedback on that take. As frustrating as the criticisms have been, I also realized the problem was partially my fault. While I've touched on the topic a lot, I've never written explicitly about class and class politics — or my upbringing — here in Tangle. So on today's episode, I'm going to do just that. This is a preview of today's Friday edition that is available in full and ad-free for our premium podcast subscribers. If you'd like to complete this episode and receive Sunday editions, exclusive interviews, bonus content, and more, head over to tanglemedia.supercast.com and sign up for a membership. If you are currently a newsletter subscriber, inquiry with us about how to receive a 33% discount on a podcast subscription! You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Today's podcast was written by Ari Weitzman and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Come on Mufasa, let's get in some trouble. This holiday season, Destiny awaits you. You can grab your friends and experience Mufasa the Lion King in 3D. Everything the light touches belongs to me. You'll have to take it. Don't miss the perfect family Christmas movie.

Now I'm swimmingly if I say so myself. Disney's Mufasa the Lion King. Oh yeah, that looks good. Now playing Olympiators. Tickets on sale now. This is an ad by BetterHelp. What's your perfect night? Is it curling up on the couch for a cozy, peaceful night in?

Therapy can feel a bit like that, your comfort place where you replenish your energy. With BetterHelp, get matched with a therapist based on your needs entirely online. It's convenient and suited to your schedule. Find comfort this season with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp.com.

Every listener feels like their favorite podcast is speaking just to them. If you're a marketer, your brand's message can do the same. With podcasts ranking number one against all other media for good use of time, good for learning, and mentally engaging, podcast ads are proven to be one of the most effective marketing channels. Have your brand heard everywhere with Acast. Our podcasts are available on all apps and the only way to reach their listeners is through Acast. Visit go.acast.com slash ads to get started today.

Over the last few weeks, I've been told you're out of touch more than I have in any period in my life. It's always hard for me to know how to weigh critiques like this, especially when I'm being criticized for rejecting vigilante justice. Most of these criticisms accuse me of not understanding the struggle normal Americans are experiencing, what it's like to live with tenuous finances or insufficient health care and why so many people are angry enough not to care about the cold-blooded murder of a major health insurance CEO. And to be honest, they've been eating at me. Our brains are hardwired to focus on negative criticisms more than positive feedback.

I could read a thousand emails praising a piece I wrote as profound or steadying or engaging or meaningful, but I'll spend all night thinking about two emails telling me I was out of touch. For a few days, these criticisms were infuriating. I'm not out of touch, my inner monologue kept chanting. As the emails and comments kept coming in, I felt more misunderstood than I have in a long time. I sensed the despondency and impatience of so many Americans relative to the current state of healthcare in our country, but I also felt like they didn't really know how I

viewed the issues I was writing about. At times, I even found I agreed with my critic's central points and felt perplexed that we seemed so far apart and adversarial. And then something occurred to me. I've never actually written explicitly about class or class politics or even my upbringing entangle. Sure, I've analyzed class politics a lot and I've included a few lines about household economics, poverty, and the working class's role in the electorate. Similarly, I've made some mention of my upbringing

or my experiences going from struggling journalist to entrepreneur. But I've never once written a piece explicitly about how I view my own class or how I view class in America or what I think productive class politics actually looks like. The realization froze me. I was standing in my kitchen

and basically came to a complete halt, then ran downstairs to my computer and started outlining this piece. My hope going forward is that I can point back to this piece as I might refer back to my solutions to the immigration crisis or my views on gun control and use it as a jumping-off point for future writing that touches on this subject. on this subject. So first, I think it's important to start with how I grew up. Class is something you can understand and empathize with

regardless of your background, but it's also clear to me that personal experience intimately informs this understanding. I've experienced some class-related struggles and not experienced a host of others. And as the lead editorial voice in this podcast, I want to be as transparent about those experiences as possible. I don't want to pretend to be something I'm not. So, here's a little bit about me.

I was born in Trenton, New Jersey, the third of three boys. My mom wasn't working when I was born, and my dad was a salesman at a burgeoning computer sales company. Our neighborhood was decidedly working class and predominantly black. My parents owned the house we lived in and when I was five years old, they sold that house and moved across the river to Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Yardley, to be specific, one of the more affluent towns in Bucks and a much whiter area than Trenton. Bucks County is at the heart of Tangle.

It has a great deal of class and political diversity which shaped a lot of my worldview. My family lived on the quote-unquote wealthier side of the tracks. We had a great big beautiful house that my parents were proud of and worked very hard for with a driveway, backyard, and a front yard walking distance from my elementary school. It was the suburbs. Our neighborhood was a glorious smorgasbord of free-running kids, roller hockey, mischief, manhunt, and low-level crime. We had a gang of kids who all spent a lot of time getting in trouble together and making memories that childhood should be full of.

We moved into that house across the street from a family of three girls and one boy that effectively merged into our family over time to become one. 30 years later, we still have Thanksgiving together, consider each other's parents as our own, and think of one another as uncles and aunts to our children. Their dad was a former Green Beret, who was a major father figure in my childhood before he died when we were in middle school. Money was always tight. I remember that part. When I became an adult, my mom would describe our family during my childhood as house broke, well off enough to have bought the house, but struggling to afford to keep up with it.

As kids, we did all the stuff a lot of middle-class kids did in the suburbs. We got jobs when we were old enough to work. We got hand-me-downs. We drove crappy old cars that our siblings owned before us. And we did our best to stay out of trouble and get decent grades in school. My dad worked a number of sales-related jobs throughout my childhood, and like a lot of people in sales, he cycled through promotions, layoffs, and change.

I remember him variously selling computers, cars at a local dealership, credit card processing, and a polymer construction material. For a brief period of time, he also managed Catch a Rising Star at Comedy Club in Princeton, New Jersey. When all the kids were old enough to be in school, my mom started working in the Judaic Studies Department at Princeton as an assistant to a professor. Princeton, through a generous and supremely middle-class-friendly employee benefits program, helped pave my way through college when I went to Pitt years later, simply because my

mom had worked there. We'll be right back after this quick break. Timothee Chalamet reinvents himself again as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, a riveting portrayal of the legendary artist's meteoric rise and groundbreaking journey. Witness the untamed spirit of a musical pioneer brought to life. From James Mangold, the visionary director of Walk the Line and Logan, this powerful film celebrates the courage to create and the legacy of an icon who redefined music forever. Watch the trailer now and get your tickets for a story that inspired generations.

A complete unknown, only in theaters December 25th. This is an ad by BetterHelp. What's your perfect night? Is it curling up on the couch for a cozy, peaceful night in? Therapy can feel a bit like that, your comfort place where you replenish your energy. With BetterHelp, get matched with a therapist based on your needs entirely online. It's convenient and suitedish your energy. With BetterHelp, get matched with a therapist based on your needs

entirely online. It's convenient and suited to your schedule. Find comfort this season with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more and save 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelpHELP.com. In middle school and high school, a lot of my close friends' families were in visibly worse shape than my own. Parents living on disability, unstable single parent homes, abuse, addiction, moving constantly, siblings in and out of jail. This was part of the class diversity that I grew up in. And just like many of those families, mine was deeply impacted by the 2008 financial crisis.

My parents were living on the margins of what was doable in the middle class, and the economic downturn was devastating. We had to sell our house in Yardley, and my parents got divorced. Both moved into their own apartments that they rented. My dad started driving limousines and eventually Uber to make ends meet, while my mom continued to work at Princeton until she retired. When I started Tangle, before I had a single employee,

my dad volunteered to help me start editing the newsletter one morning after I called him to run through it because I was running behind, and then he hung around like a well-fed straight cat. He's still one of the now paid part-time editors on our team. My later high school years were a very formative time for me. Two of my older brothers, one who is now a general contractor and the other an operations

and event planner, had gone off to college. The third brother, whom I consider a brother though my parents never formally adopted him, was still in the house with me. He was my oldest brother's best friend and my parents had taken him in when I was in middle school. He now owns his own screen printing business and works as an independent artist in Philadelphia. Two of my parents' friends fell on hard times and also moved into our home, so it was me, my parents,

my adopted brother, and my two family friends we had taken in during my final years of high school, all during a financial crisis and as I was getting ready to leave for college. Throughout my adolescence, I always worked. I was a janitor at a veterinarian's office, a lifeguard, a busboy, and I worked seasonally, shoveling driveways, mowing lawns, or babysitting. In the summers, from the age of 13 on, I would go to live with my cousin in West Texas on the border of Mexico in a

tiny little town at Outfitters where most people are self-sufficient and skilled in some trade, living off the bare minimum and getting by happily. I loved it there, and still do. Now as an adult, it is my happy place I escape to once or twice a year for weeks or months at a time. It's where I learn to shoot guns, drive motorcycles, and ride horses. It's where I fell in love with the country and the desert and Texas and open air, and where I learned the value of a full day or week or month or season of manual labor. My cousin ran a cactus nursery and his wife ran horse stables and I spent a lot of full days digging holes or driving

forklifts or slopping through horse pens or moving bales of hay. I tried and failed to learn how to fix cars and I picked up some broken but effective Spanish. After high school, I went to college at the University of Pittsburgh in the heart of one of America's quintessential working class cities. I worked at the student newspaper and held down a landscaping job to pay my way through school with my parents' help. I also picked up some internships at local newspapers like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and, like an idiot, I sold drugs to make extra cash, which I've written and spoken about and tangled before. When I graduated from college with my childhood home gone,

I moved into my mom's condo and lived with her as I entered the workforce. For about a year, I commuted to New York City every day from Bucks County, two hours and change door to door while being paid $38,000 a year at my first reporting gig. That job was with the very liberal Huffington Post. It was a rather obscene setup, getting paid $38,000, an impossible wage to live on in most cities, let alone New York City, to churn out three or four articles a day. But I loved the work.

I learned a lot from smart, aggressive reporters there. I also learned a lot about how news organizations with an overt political slant were run. And then I caught a break. A few articles I wrote about politics went viral and I ended up going on CNN as a 23-year-old pundit to defend my positions. So as far as those things go, I got noticed. I left the Huffington Post when Ashton Kutcher, the actor and angel investor, quite randomly came across my work and offered me $60,000 to help him start a news organization focused on quote unquote solutions journalism. I took the position of running the politics vertical and I moved into a five bedroom, one bathroom apartment in Harlem with six roommates for $600 a month.

It was the only way I could afford the city while also paying off my student loans, which I would do over time. I lived there for the next five years. When I started Tangle in 2019, I was making $72,000 a year. I was still at Ashen's Media Company and I was living with my girlfriend, now wife, in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She was working as a server while pursuing a career in theater. We both had artistic pursuits. I wanted to be a writer, she wanted to be a director, and we pledged to love each other through our forthcoming decades of being happily broke together. And then the pandemic and Tangle and life and luck and hard work collided.

Phoebe decided to try law school. Tangle got traction and it went from a side gig to a real business and now I'm here. Back in Pennsylvania, running my own news organization as my wife nears graduation and readies herself for a second career. On all counts, I consider my upbringing incredibly, unbelievably, unfathomably fortunate as anyone who has had a similar upbringing should consider theirs. I'm not exaggerating when I say I thank God for it every day. A lot of people in this country had it better than I did,

but plenty more here and across the globe have it much, much worse. I had a roof over my head my whole life, loving parents, a big family, tough loving brothers who looked out for me, a good community, good schools, and lots of opportunity. I say all of this to share what I have and have not experienced personally.

I've been broke and live paycheck to paycheck, but I've never gone hungry. I've lived with my mom as an adult in the workforce like many millions of young American adults, but I've never been homeless. I've worked backbreaking manual labor jobs for days on end, but I've never pursued a true blue collar career and I've never been part of a trade union. I've had crappy landlords with too much power, but I've never been evicted. I've never pursued a true blue collar career and I've never been part of a trade union. I've had crappy landlords with too much power, but I've never been evicted. I've had surprise medical bills that were financially debilitating, but I've never had a disability. I've also always felt a deep and abiding affection for the so-called working class or non-college

educated or whatever insufficient language we have for people who aren't wealthy, ultra educated, out of touch snobs. I love a posh event or a fancy dinner as much as anyone, but I feel much more comfortable drinking shitty beer in a grungy bar, talking politics with some Philly locals than I ever have navigating an event like the Democratic National Convention. I recognize that might sound like I'm trying to virtue signal myself as down to earth here, but I'm just trying to paint an honest picture of who I am and where I came from. We'll be right back after this quick break. This is an ad by BetterHelp.

What's your perfect night? Is it curling up on the couch for a cozy, peaceful night in? Therapy can feel a bit like that. Your comfort place where you replenish your energy. With BetterHelp, get matched with a therapist based on your needs, entirely online. It's convenient and suited to your schedule. Find comfort this season with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more and Find comfort this season with BetterHelp.

Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more and save 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelpHELP.com. Timothy Chalamet reinvents himself again as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, a riveting portrayal of the legendary artist's meteoric rise and groundbreaking journey. Witness the untamed spirit of a musical pioneer brought to life. From James Mangold, the visionary director of Walk the Line and Logan, this powerful film celebrates the courage to create

and the legacy of an icon who redefined music forever. Watch the trailer now and get your tickets for a story that inspired generations. A Complete Unknown, only in theaters December 25th. Elite Unknown, only in theaters December 25th. So, since I've never really written about class or politics explicitly, I figured the easiest thing to do here, after talking about my background, would be to list a few of my beliefs about class and class politics. I want to be clear, these are my personal beliefs, not those of

Tangle or my staff or the many writers whose work we share every day who disagree with me. So, here are some of those views. Number one, I don't think we have a great working definition in the media for working class. I see working class used interchangeably with non-college educated all the time. I understand that polls often list respondents' education education which is a useful proxy for working class, but the two things are not the same. Many of my friends who are cops, firefighters, construction workers, plumbers, and electricians have college

degrees. Simple economic definitions of working class are probably better. Working a job that is low pay, often defined as $15 an hour or less, requires limited training and or also requires physical labor. It also includes people who have held those jobs or are looking for work, which means a lot of people who are unemployed or temporarily supported by a social welfare program. Number two, it may sound crude, but I don't have a hard time getting on board with the eat the rich attitude. My early political outlook was formed by watching the 2008 financial crisis take my childhood home, watching the opioid epidemic devastate, destroy and kill my friends. My high school was one of

the worst hit in the entire United States. Watching Barack Obama send the presidency with a coalition that includes many future Trump voters. and then watching his administration let the people responsible for the banking crisis walk free, while largely abandoning many of the populist promises, like ending wars abroad, that got him elected. There is a very reasonable feeling among voters of all political stripes that it doesn't matter whether it's Obama, Trump, Biden, or Bush, you're going to get sold out by politicians preaching populist thought. Number three, I believe both political parties express an interest in aiding the working class when it's election season, and while Democrats have traditionally been the party of working class, they seem out to sea with what they stand for now.

Republicans, long supportive of deregulatory agendas and business interests, have historically spurned workers' rights and issues, but in the Trump era, the party seems to be taking tangible steps toward working-class voters and their interests, though the jury is still out on what the next four years will bring. Both parties are still defined by their legacies, for better or for worse, but the ground is genuinely shifting under our feet, at least as I see it. Number four, on a global scale, the vast majority of Americans are either upper middle income or high income and even those defined by our government as poor would be middle income globally.

Put simply, we are all very lucky to live here, which should be obvious when you consider how many people from around the world are willing to crawl through the mud for a shot at a new life in the United States at the same time, we're just... Hey everybody, this is John, executive producer for Tangle. We hope you enjoyed this preview of our latest Friday edition. If you are not currently a newsletter subscriber or a premium podcast subscriber and you are enjoying this content and would like to finish it, you can go to readtangle.com to sign up for a newsletter subscription or you can go to tanglemedia.supercast.com and sign up for our premium podcast membership which will unlock this complete episode, as well as ad free daily podcasts, more Friday additions, Sunday additions, bonus content, interviews, and so much more. We are working on trying to get together a bundled

membership package where you're able to sign up for both the newsletter and the podcast. In the meantime, if you sign up for a newsletter subscription and you'd like to receive the podcast subscription as well or vice versa, we will offer you a 33% discount to sign up for the other. This is the best we can do in the short term while we work on a long-term bundling solution. Most importantly, we just want to say thank you so much for your support. We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offerings, so stay tuned. Isaac and Ari will be here for the Sunday podcast and

I will join you for the daily podcast on Monday. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a fantastic weekend, y'all. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by John Law. The script is edited by our managing editor, Ari Weitzman, Will K. Back, Bailey Saul, and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bacova, who is also our social media manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. And if you're looking for more from Tangle,

please go to reettangle.com and check out our website.