The Chris Cuomo Project - Fringe Thinking and Politics: Lessons from the “Hawk Tuah” Meme

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

Chris Cuomo explores how the viral “hawk tuah” meme epitomizes the provocative, extreme content that thrives on social media. He uses this example to show how fringe thinking, amplified online, drives division and distorts reality, affecting both political dialogue and societal perceptions. Chris explains why it’s crucial to push back against divisive influences and encourages level-headed thinking to help create a better political climate. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday: https://linktr.ee/cuomoproject Join Chris Ad-Free On Substack: http://thechriscuomoproject.substack.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. The debate has shown us who and what the enemy is in our politics. And I can tell you what we need to do about it. This piece should also be titled,uck-Tuh-Wise. The Crossover Ah, Cozy Earth. Support from the Chris Cuomo Project comes from Cozy Earth.

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a deal? You want a deal? You ready to sleep this summer? You want to sleep better? 30% off at CozyEarth.com slash Chris. Just use the code word Chris and forget to tell them that I sent you. And if you do that, you get some free socks. Oh yeah. I'm Chris Cuomo. Welcome to the Chris Cuomo Project. Here's the food for thought. Here's the theory of the case for me.

Huk-puh is a perfect metaphor for what works on social media. All right. Now, what does huk-puh is a perfect metaphor for what works on social media. All right, now what does huk-puh mean? Well, it is the obvious sound or onomatopoeic reaction to spitting on something. Okay? Now, the something winds up becoming part of the magic of this moment. On social media, ridiculous, provocative things dominate. Social media is not reality. It is not used by everybody. It is overused by some of us. And as a result, it over samples fringe, appetites, interests, and attitudes, which we have allowed to filter into our political dialogue.

So why do I keep making this weird sound? I'll tell you why. There is a clip that has absolutely gone more viral than anything I have ever done. Let's be honest, this is not a compliment to myself, but people know who I am and there's plenty of things that I've said and have been said about me that have been all over the place in the major media. Social media is different, okay? It's tickles, titillates, stimulates, provokes, fringe thinking. So a guy is sitting out on the street talking to drunk young women. Always a formula for success on social media, right?

This pretty young woman, I think that's a fair assessment of who she is, and we'll be showing you the clip so you can decide for yourself. He asks her, what's a really weird thing that works during sex that people wouldn't know or some kind of stupid tell me something sex related question. And she says, oh boy, she's drunk or she whatever she seems a little off. Oh boy, you need to puttu on it. Talking about how to better filate her man. Okay? What's one move in bed that makes a man go crazy every time?

Oh you gotta give him that huh-tu and spit on that thing. You get me? Now it explodes. Why? Well it's a combination of things right? She's a young pretty woman. Okay that's a good ingredient's a young pretty woman, okay, that's a good ingredient. She's talking about sex, well, that's a good ingredient. She's being crass about sex, that's even better. Gets us into that kind of pseudo porn appetite mode. She captured the onomatopoeic magic of what it sounds like when a woman describes spitting on a pee-pee that she's about to do something to.

This is a magic moment for most males who are straight, right? Okay, so we get it, but why is Huck-Huuh now a meme? And I'm not saying it right. To me, it sounds like a kind of perverse karate sound, but that's not what it is. Huk-tuh, which I think they spell T-U-O-H or something like that, is now all over the meme landscape. Everything, the solution to everything is to put a little spit on it with that sound, okay? All over the internet. And that, my friends, is the metaphor for two things. One, what resonates on social media and why. And, and it is also a metaphor for what's happened to our politics, which is literally men and women just basically spitting in the wind as opposed to on a pee pee, trying to find a way to capture an ever fickle,

ever fleeting zeitgeist of social media provocation. Now, within that setup, we see the enemy. The fringe is the enemy of the whole. The fringe, and there is one on each side, it is much more active on the right. It is talked about more on the right. It is talked about in terms of the left being the problem of the fringe almost exclusively on the right.

Well, why would the left talk about itself being a problem? No, I'm saying that not only does the right fringe constantly want you to believe that the problem with fringe is the left, but nowhere on the left do they discuss their concern with the fringe or on the mainstream right do they concern themselves with the fringe left as much as the right fringe does. Why? Again, two reasons.

One, they are all about provoking you to be outraged about an enemy. And the enemy is obviously going to be their opposite. The second reason is that in discussing a left fringe, they validate the reason for their existence as a right fringe, that they are not a wild exaggeration of things. They are a necessary counter. They are an equal opposite. They are balance. They are your defense. Now, none of that is true, but all of it is an effective piece of the equation of what works on social media. Now,

let's take a next step. Why would social media cater to fringe? Here's why. There is no such thing as sentiment driving things. When you're measuring people in politics, you're doing focus groups, and you're doing dial tests. Do you know what a dial test is? dial tests. Do you know what a dial test is? Dial test is where a bunch of people sit in front of a panel, okay, and it has a knob. And when they like something, they turn the knob in one way, and when they don't like something, they turn it in the other way. Called dial tests. Still done. What do they do? They help us approximate strength of sentiment of like and dislike about whatever they're being presented with. Campaign messaging, news, personalities, people, ideas, commercials, anything, anything you want. Anything you want to get a taste structure on, a preference structure on, sentiment. How do

they feel about it? That sentimentality. So that doesn't exist online. It's much better measured. It's all data driven of what is clicked on for how long, how much similar content will people look at, right? When people say the algorithm, the algorithm, what is an algorithm? An algorithm is an equation. It's a multifactorial equation. So what they've learned how to do on digital media is a better version of what we've always tried to do in linear and cable and traditional media, which is to figure out what people like and give them more of it. That's why I always tell you that the media is a mirror. Stop blaming the media for making the meal. They're only cooking what you say you want to eat.

You see what I'm saying? The media has responsibility, but you have them pulling the wagon. And I'm saying they're not, they're just a horse, but you're telling it where to go and you're sitting in the wagon. So the next step, we know that what works in social media is that which gets clicked on,

listened to, watched longer, and sought out as a basis for more. Okay? So what does that wind up doing? It winds up turbocharging all of the most ephemeral, extreme, exaggerated appetites and interests. So not only does your phone tell you a little something about you, but it tells you about how you are interpreted by the universe of what is available. And what we see is that politics in general on social media gets reduced to the most extreme points of provocation. The loudest, angriest, most divisive things. That caters to what? Fringe thinking. Okay? Like you're not gonna get me with hysterical culture war, exaggerated viewpoints and twisted stats and versions of reality.

You're not gonna get me. But you will get a fringe thinker and someone who's part of a political fringe. So that is what we see on social media. So it caters to them, it gets more of them. So it has become a home for them, for the political fringe. They don't have a home in mainstream media. Now that's changing. I'll get to that.

But traditionally, mainstream media has talked about that which affects the most people, that is not necessarily concordant, that is not necessarily coordinated with what the fringe wants. So, social media is set up to cater to a fringe. And now, fringe participants, fringe players there on both sides of the equation, the user and the creator side, has increased this. You have more people there catering to this small audience. Now, how small?

Too small to swing a general election. Too small to decide network television or really even cable. Cable kind of, network not really. Digital media, absolutely. So, let's take the biggest fish in the pond, and it is a pond. That's what you have to remember. We see social media as the ocean.

It is not. It is not. Social media is a pond, okay? And most people dip in and dip out. And those who stay there often and live there are the extreme. And they're also the exception. Joe Rogan, okay?

He's the biggest fish. I believe that a study of Joe Rogan is a great, great analog for what works on social media, right? Kind of a one-off quirky character who is really motivated by the voices he has around him. I don't think many of you could really tell me what Joe Rogan is. He's really just kind of a vessel, right?

He's a little bit of things for different people, but he's not like some thought leader himself, right? He's not a Ben Shapiro type or a Jordan Peterson type, right? Or a Huberman, a Dr. Huberman, right? He's not like a specific thing. He's just kind of who he's talking to, kind of like you, except he's worth a gazillion dollars. Why?

Well, how many people does he get a month? How many views does he get a month? 20, 30, 40 million, depending on who you're gonna look to. Okay, so that's humongous, right? Well, I don't know, it's relative. Nightly News puts on a show every night, gets about eight million people. So they get 40 million people a week.

He gets 40 million a month. Now they'll say uniques. What's the difference? That means 40 million individual viewers have downloaded that thing. You don't know that the same way about television. You don't know how many of them watch three nights a week. So you don't know.

But it is safe to say that Joe Rogan has the most reach in digital media, but he has almost no impact on our politics, if you think about it. He's only come up a couple of times as a sacrificial lamb, once about vaccine opposition, right? Once about using ivermectin as kind of like, you know, the, he was like the Trojan horse for ivermectin, right? Which kind of like launched this attack on the vaccine and everything else, hence Trojan horse. But if you think about it, like if he says

I'm voting for Trump, Trump doesn't win. If he says I'm voting for this guy or I'm for this, I'm for that, he doesn't drive big things. Why? Because even though it's a lot of people, it's still a fringe. You got 200 million people you're basically working with when you're going to get to an election here, right? You're going to have about 150 to 200 million people voting. 40 million just isn't enough. 100 million really isn't enough, right? You're gonna have to get a little bit above that. So social media on its own is not enough. That's why Trump can't win even with a locked-in base. He needs more. Because

even with all of his diehard voters, the likes of which I've never seen, puts him over 30%. Usually it's about a third, a third, a third. A third is with you no matter what. Third is against you no matter what. And it's up for grabs with a third. Now, I think that that up for grabs is a much smaller number.

But still, even with the base being bigger, it's not enough. So the fringe is not enough. Social media is not reality and it is not sufficient to carry the day. Well then why the hell is it so powerful? Now we get to the next step. The difference between relevance and resonance. What's the difference? Resonance is significance within a context. Now, the enemy is social media and fringe thinking. Now social media on its own isn't the evil.

It's how it's used and by whom, okay? It itself is just a vessel. We have allowed the fringe to dominate our politics, not our outcomes, not our outcomes. Those people don't have enough votes to dominate the outcome, but they do dominate the dialogue. Why, why, why?

Two reasons. One, there are enough of them to exploit the poison party system of the primary structure. Primaries carry to low turnout, high zeal voters. That's got fringe written all over. So they can beat you in a primary. This has been the focus of Trump's power. Trump's power does not come from the many,

it comes from the few. Again, Trump's power does not come from the many, it comes from the few. A very strong, zealous few. His base is stronger than Biden's base. His base is stronger than the Democratic base. The squad and Biden does not have enough juice to beat Trump's base, I believe that.

Well, then why do they keep losing in these congressional cycles in the overall? Because it's not enough, it's enough for him. It's enough for him to blow away the rest of the field and not even have to participate in a primary. It's enough for him to say, if you're my guy, I'll whoop your ass in a primary if you say you're not, because the fringe is enough.

You only have somewhere between 15 and 25 or maybe 35% of the registered vote within that party participating. So that caters to what? The most enthusiastic voter. Who is what? The most zealous voter, which is what? The most extreme.

So they can control a primary process and certainly have on the right, not so much on the left, they're not as organized, it's not as much of a sell as the fringe is on the right. The GOP has completely capitulated, given its head over to its fringe. Now we say Trump, but it's really the fringe. Now, so okay, so they can control the primary process.

All right, so they're gonna have an over-sampled significance there. And you gotta be careful during primary season, and primary season is important. What's the second reason? Just as important, even more powerful maybe. The media. The media has made a choice, okay?

Part because of the jealousy of this growing part of the media when because of stratification, because of diversity of media, now you have digital, you have more outlets, you have independent, you have corporate, you have this, you have that, and you have everybody putting out podcasts, everybody putting out content, more and more content, more and more pie, more pie, smaller slices.

So there's a jealousy, there's a desire to add reach, there's a newness, and what works best in getting clicks and views, which are ratings for the regular media also, and now you have the regular media now, they're all in the brand game also. They call themselves brands. News Nation is a brand. Leland Vittert is a brand. He has his own following. He wants to put up his numbers,

helps him get paid. What gets you clicks and views? That takes us back to what stimulates the fringe on social media? Provocativeness. Enragement. Anger works better than love. Only light can drive out the dark. Yeah, but it's hard as shit. Dr. King left that part out. Only light can drive out darkness. Only love can eclipse hate.

Yeah, but it's hard as shit. That part matters too. So what's easy is anger. That's why you know the word demagogue, right? Someone who plays on prejudice and outrage and anger. What's the positive opposite of demagogue? What do you call somebody who caters to love and unity and peace?

Oh fuck, if I know. Why? Because the other one's much more common because it works better. Always has. You want to motivate somebody, get them angry. Why is a general instructor telling you you're a piece of shit instead of telling you you're great? Because the negative can often be a great motivator. So the media has made a choice So, the media has made a choice to oversample what is on social media as Vox Populi, voice of the people. It's easier, it's in their face, it plays to provocativeness, plays to enragement, which plays to engagement, which gets them clicks and views.

So we cover what happens on social media. Now interestingly, we cover the sentimentality and the culture wars and the extreme opinions, and we ask legitimate leaders to answer for those opinions and suggestions, which have put pressure on them to cater to the fringe because of both the primary structure and their concerns about that in their own election year,

and in dealing with what the media narratives are, which they must, that's the state of play most often, all of this winds up catering to a minority, a magnified minority, the fringe mostly on social media. Lazy media, a choice by lazy media to play to what's easy and obvious and moves the needle. But we have seen the enemy. And it is those of us that cling to social media as an outlet for fringe thinking and feeling.

That is the enemy. That is the engine of the division. And look, it's getting help. It's getting help from the media. It's getting help from the parties. It's getting help from the players. Everything contributes. Everything contributes. But that is the nucleus. That is the nexus. That is the center. That is the hub. It is that application of the internet. Fringe thinking. It's overtaken our dialogue. It has overtaken our politics as a result. And the only time we see its true reach, its true inability to control all of us, is in general elections. That's why polls are only good snapshots of a moment in time at best.

And are very often not suggestive of what happens ultimately. are only good snapshots of a moment in time at best. And are very often not suggestive of what happens ultimately. Why? Because they don't say, well, you know, because you don't have fucking time for a poll. Because you don't give a shit about micromanaging it and moving the needle for some group. You worry about you and your family and your community.

And that's enough. And that's enough. And that's fine. You should be selfish in your politics. You should be selfish in love. What? Yeah. Why? Because if you're not getting what you need for yourself, you're no good to anybody else

and you'll never be what they need you to be for them. And if you are, you'll resent it more and more and find them less and less appreciative and until kaboom, And we both know it. So be selfish in love, be selfish in your politics. What are you gonna do for me? I'm tired of hearing about you and I don't wanna hear about the other person. I don't wanna hear about why they suck less. I'm gonna treat you like everybody else in my life.

What do you do for me? If you're a vendor, if you're someone providing a service, what do you do for me? If you're massaging me and I'm like, this massage kinda sucks. Well, yeah, but the other lady's even worse. What? That doesn't work. His paint job sucks. yeah, but the other lady's even worse. What? That doesn't work.

His paint job sucks. Yeah, but the other guy's even worse. Never, not satisfying. Doesn't work for you at work. Sorry, boss. This wasn't great, but other people do worse. Only allowed in our politics. Settling for less.

Stop, be selfish. And see the enemy. The enemy is fringe thinking that does not represent. Here's the good news. The good news is thinking that does not represent. Here's the good news. The good news is it's not you. You're right. You don't relate to this. It doesn't make sense to you. You don't know who these people are. You don't see them in your life. You're right. Because there are not that many of them. And those who you do know that are there are hiding it because they're being f** fucking whack jobs online and

they don't want you to know. That's why they have the weird names and that's why they have the anonymity. Now the good news is the plurality no longer wants to be part of that game. You see the game. Not a majority, but a plurality, 40 something percent. I'm an independent. I'm not a Democrat. I'm not a Republican. Free agent, free agent. I don't want to be part of that game. I see it, I smell it. Now reject it. Now to the extent that you are on social media, say, that's not me.

Don't join the crowd. Don't reduce yourself. I'm not sure about whether or not the mandates were all good. Okay, so I guess I'll side with the anti-vaxxers. No, don't do that. Don't do that. Stay reasonable, stay rational, stay pragmatic. You don't have to go all in.

You don't have to be with them because they're not really with you. They're gonna blow up. They're not gonna be there for the long haul. They're not gonna be determining the outcome of the election or policy. It's not going to happen. They will be the engine of what motivates opposition to policy. They will cause the constipation that we see in our government because the fringe is enough. It only takes a

few when the numbers are so tight because we're so divided. The division is the enemy and the numbers are so tight because we're so divided, the division is the enemy and the division is fomented and turbocharged by fringe thinking that is magnified in its importance by lazy media that is more concerned with its own clicks and reach than with what matters to you. That is why I'm doing it differently. That's why I'm doing the Chris Cuomo project. That's why I'm at News Nation. That is the enemy.

And you and I are the solution. And the good news is we are the many and they are the few. Do you get it? If so, if not, let me know and let's get after it. I'm Chris Cuomo. Thank you for subscribing and following. Be a free agent. Wear your independence.

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I'll see you every weekday night for now, 8 and 11 P on News Nation. We know the enemy. The enemy is the division. The division is driven by fringe thinking, which exists largely on social media, which is magnified as a minority, by lazy media and opportunists in politics. The division must stop, and the answer is in the majority. We're so close.

Let's get after it.