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      ‘I’m rocking with Kamala’: Black men defy faulty polling by showing up for Harris campaign

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      On Monday night, more than 53,000 Black men joined a virtual conference, Win With Black Men, to rally behind the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris. During the four-hour call, organizers said the group raised more than $1.3m for the Harris campaign and grassroots voter organizations focused on Black men.The success of the call, which was inspired by the Win With Black Women call the night before, runs counter to the narrative shaped by recent election polling indicating that 30% of Black men are planning on voting for Donald Trump. “Don’t let anybody slow us down asking the question: ‘Can a Black woman be elected president of the United States?’” Raphael Warnock, who represents Georgia in the US Senate, said on the call. “Kamala Harris can win. We just have to show up. History is watching us, and the future is waiting on us.”Black voters have consistently been a key voting bloc for Democrats, but experts say inaccurate polling about Black men in particular could be creating false narratives about their leanings this election cycle, mainly the idea that there is a mass shift of Black voters to the Republican party. Win With Black Men, which was hosted by the journalist Roland Martin, said it’s working to dispel stereotypical notions about changes in Black male voting habits, their refusal to support a woman candidate and their unwillingness to mobilize politically.“People are making a lot of conjectures without actually talking to a large enough sample of Black people to be able to say things with the precision that they’re making it,” Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University, said. “You’re not going to be able to detect what is likely to be no more [than] a one- to three-point swing in favor of Donald Trump based on changes in surveys where you’re talking to 200 Black people at a time. I can’t say with any statistical certainty that that three-point shift is real or not.”Unrepresentative polls can also have an adverse effect on voter habits. People tend to vote if they perceive that an election is close, Gillespie said. So polls that suggest that Trump is going to win easily and that even Black people will vote in droves for him may distort people’s understanding of reality. Ensuring that the public is aware of potential polling inaccuracies is key.“These narratives are also used to kind of confuse Black voters themselves, which can in turn depress Black vote and drive down turnout,” said Christopher Towler, founder of the Black Voter Project (BVP), a national polling initiative. “It can be used as a mechanism of voter deterrence, knowing that Black voters will play a key role in this election.”View image in fullscreenThough Gillespie said it will take a few days for new polling that specifically examines how Harris is performing with Black voters, recent mobilization around Harris suggests that narratives about a would-be exodus of this bloc from the Democratic party might have been premature.The problem comes down to sample size. In surveys of 1,000 to 1,500 voters, sub-sample sizes of Black voters may be anywhere from 150 to 300. In some cases, all people of color are amalgamated into one demographic group. Surveys with such a small sample size create large margins of error.“The issue is the level of precision with which we can make certain types of pronouncements when you’re talking to that few people,” Gillespie said. “The number that comes out in the survey is the midpoint of a range of possible numbers that we think is in the real population because of statistical analysis.”If the sub-sample size is less than 100, she said, the margin of error is plus or minus 10. So if a survey says that 20% of Black voters are going for Trump, the real number based on the sub-sample is between 10% and 30%.Towler, of the Black Voter Project, said that he began noticing the issue of unrepresentative polling years ago. He started BVP to “counteract the industry standard of taping on a couple hundred Black responses to a general survey” and using that small sample size as a full picture.“It’s really unscientific,” Towler said. “So I’ve worked for years now to try and create data that is reliable, accurate and actually representative of the Black community.”This year, BVP released a large, multiwave, national public opinion survey focused on collecting representative data of Black Americans. Fielded from 29 March to 18 April, with 2,004 Black Americans interviewed, the survey collected a nationally representative sample of respondents from all 50 states. The BVP study found that 15% of respondents would vote for Trump if the election had been held at the time of the survey, a figure much lower than reported by other polls with smaller sample sizes. A survey on the BVP scale is important to garner an idea of what the Black population and Black voting population of the US actually looks like, Gillespie said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut mainstream beltway polling companies typically lack Black leadership, so accurate polling of Black communities is not a priority, said Towler. What’s more, some pollsters do not see the value in spending more money to survey a population that they estimate will already vote staunchly Democratic.Black and brown communities exist on the margins in American politics, said Emmitt Riley, president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. Mainstream political scientists’ biases result in pollsters who are not adequately capturing the political behaviors and views of excluded groups.“Many people who study race aren’t considered to be mainstream political scholars,” he said. “This has profound consequences for the kind of reporting that’s happening, the kind of news stories that are coming out, how you describe what’s happening in these communities.”Towler said that pollsters should create surveys that are culturally competent and that ask questions in ways that don’t manufacture misleading opinions. “It’s important when looking at polling of Black people to, one, not only make sure you have polls designed to accurately measure Black opinion, but to also have pollsters who study and understand the Black community,” he said.While polls continue to try to parse out where Black men will place their political support, groups like Win With Black Men and Black Men for Harris are making their loyalties clear.“Let’s protect Kamala. Let’s be with her like she was there for us,” Bakari Sellers, the former South Carolina representative, said on the call. “We are going to disagree a lot. But let’s put the petty bickering aside. Let’s stand up and be the Black men who change this country. We built this country. I’m rocking with Kamala.” More

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      Brawny billionaires, pumped-up politicians: why powerful men are challenging each other to fights

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      The first rule of insecure masculinity fight club? Tell everyone about it. And I mean everyone. Tweet about it, talk to reporters, shout about it from the rooftops. Make sure the entire world knows that you are a big boy who could beat just about anyone in a fistfight.Twenty twenty-three, as I’m sure you will have observed, was the year that tech CEOs stepped away from their screens and decided to get physical. Elon Musk, perennially thirsty for attention, was at the center of this embarrassing development. The 52-year-old – who challenged Vladimir Putin to single combat in 2022 – spent much of the year teasing the idea that he was going head-to-head with Mark Zuckerberg in a cage fight. At one point he suggested the fight would be held at the Colosseum in Rome.Don’t worry, you didn’t miss it. The fight never happened and will never ever happen for the simple reason that Musk would get destroyed by Zuckerberg, who has been obsessively training in mixed martial arts (MMA) and won a bunch of medals in a Brazilian jiujitsu tournament. The only way Musk will actually follow through with the cage match is if he manages to get his hands on some kind of brain-implant technology that magically transforms him into a lean, mean, fighting machine. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if Neuralink, Musk’s brain-chip startup, was working on that brief right now. Although seeing as the company is under federal investigation after killing 1,500 animals in testing– many of which died extremely grisly deaths – it may be a while before any such technology comes to fruition.Musk and Zuck aren’t the only tech execs looking to get physical. Vin Diesel-level biceps have become the latest billionaire status symbol. Just look at Jeff Bezos: his muscles have increased at about the same rate as his bank account. The Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky, has also been working on getting swole. Back in June, Chesky told the Bloomberg writer Dave Lee that he’d “challenge any leader in tech to bench press”. He added: “I’ve been waiting for these physical battles in tech. It’s just so funny.”It’s not just tech bros. Politicians are at it too. Over the summer, Robert F Kennedy Jr posted a video of himself doing push-ups while shirtless with the caption “Getting in shape for my debates with President Biden!” Which may or may not have been prompted by Biden once challenging an Iowa voter and Donald Trump to a push-up contest.I don’t know how good Kevin McCarthy is at push-ups, but he’s certainly fond of shoving. In November, the former speaker bumped into the congressman Tim Burchett of Tennessee and reportedly elbowed him in the back. Burchett then chased after him, calling him a “jerk” and a “chicken”. McCarthy, it seems, was angry that Burchett had helped oust him from the speakership in October, making him the first speaker in US history to have been removed by his own side.Just a few hours after that altercation, Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, challenged Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, to a physical confrontation during a Senate committee hearing on labor unions. Mullin, a former businessman who regularly boasts about his prowess as an MMA fighter, was miffed that O’Brien had once called him a “greedy CEO” and a “clown” on Twitter. He decided to settle his private grievance during a public hearing and the two agreed to have a fight right there and then – yelling at each other to “stand your butt up” and get started. Eventually Bernie Sanders got them to calm down.Just pause for a moment and imagine acting like this in your own job. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure that if I challenged a colleague to a fight and started yelling at them to “sit their butt down” in the middle of a public meeting, I would face some sort of consequences. In the Mullins case, the meltdown doesn’t seem to have had any impact on his career. It may have even increased his popularity among his base. Politicians routinely seem to be held to a lower standard than the rest of us.If you ignore the fact that we’re being ruled by people with enormous egos and no self-restraint, then there is an amusing element to all this. But more than anything, it’s just pathetic, isn’t it? All these grown men so clearly worried about their masculinity that they feel the need to puff out their chests and show everyone just how strong they are.The one per cent’s desperate shows of bravado are part of a broader insecurity about masculinity in the west that plenty of snake-oil salesmen and opportunists are exploiting for all it’s worth. In 2022, for example, the rightwing commentator Tucker Carlson came out with a documentary called The End of Men that argues testosterone counts are plummeting and “real men” are an endangered species. The documentary was full of bizarre ways to counteract this, including testicle tanning. I’m not sure how many tech bros and politicians are regularly exposing their balls to red-light therapy, but there does seem to be a widespread preoccupation with “bromeopathic” ways to increase testosterone. Testosterone blood-test “T parties” are apparently a growing trend among tech types: a bunch of founders get together and find ways to raise their T.Do whatever you like in private, I say. Tan your testicles, go to T parties, organize push-up competitions. Just don’t foist your masculine insecurities on the rest of us. Stop challenging each other to public fights and getting into brawls in government. It seems to be easy enough for women to follow this advice, doesn’t it? I mean … has a female CEO or politician ever tried to organize a public fistfight with a female counterpart? I’ve got a weird feeling the answer is “no, they would be a complete laughingstock if they did”, but if anyone can find me a recent example then I’ll eat my hat. Or – on second thoughts – I’ll throw my hat in the ring and fight Elon Musk myself in the Roman Colosseum. Consider that a challenge. More

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      Springsteen and Obama on friendship and fathers: ‘You have to turn your ghosts into ancestors’

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      Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen discuss their dads, their unlikely friendship, and second careers – as podcast hosts Sat 23 Oct 2021 04.00 EDTPresident Barack ObamaGood conversations don’t follow a script. Like a good song, they’re full of surprises, improvisations, detours. They may be grounded in a specific time and place, reflecting your state of mind and the current state of the world. But the best conversations also have a timeless quality, taking you back into the realm of memory, propelling you forward toward your hopes and dreams. Sharing stories reminds you that you’re not alone – and maybe helps you understand yourself a little bit better.When Bruce and I first sat down in the summer of 2020 to record Renegades: Born in the USA, we didn’t know how our conversations would turn out. What I did know was that Bruce was a great storyteller, a bard of the American experience – and that we both had a lot on our minds, including some fundamental questions about the troubling turn our country had taken. A historic pandemic showed no signs of abating. Americans everywhere were out of work. Millions had just taken to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd, and the then occupant of the White House seemed intent not on bringing people together but on tearing down some of the basic values and institutional foundations of our democracy.Almost a year later, the world looks a shade brighter. But for all the change we’ve experienced as a nation and in our own lives since Bruce and I first sat down together, the underlying conditions that animated our conversation haven’t gone away. And in fact, since the podcast was released, both of us have heard from folks from every state and every walk of life who’ve reached out to say that something in what they heard resonated with them, whether it was the imprint our fathers left on us; the awkwardness, sadness, anger and occasional moments of grace that have arisen as we navigate America’s racial divide; or the joy and redemption that our respective families have given us. People told us that listening to us talk made them think about their own childhoods. Their own dads. Their own home towns.Bruce SpringsteenWhen President Obama suggested we do a podcast together, my first thought was: “OK, I’m a high school graduate from Freehold, New Jersey, who plays the guitar … What’s wrong with this picture?” My wife Patti said: “Are you insane?! Do it! People would love to hear your conversations!”The president and I had spent some time together since we met on the campaign trail in 08. That time included some long, telling conversations. These were the kind of talks where you speak from the heart and walk away with a real understanding of the way your friend thinks and feels. You have a picture of the way he sees himself and his world.So I took Patti’s advice and followed the president’s generous lead, and before we knew it we were sitting in my New Jersey studio, riffing off each other like good musicians.There were serious conversations about the fate of the country, the fortunes of its citizens, and the destructive, ugly, corrupt forces at play that would like to take it all down. This is a time of vigilance when who we are is being seriously tested. We found a lot in common. The president is funny and an easy guy to be around. He’ll go out of his way to make you feel comfortable, as he did for me so that I might have the confidence to sit across the table from him. At the end of the day we recognised our similarities in the moral shape of our lives. It was the presence of a promise, a code we strive to live by. Honesty, fidelity, a forthrightness about who we are and what our goals and ideas are, a dedication to the American idea and an abiding love for the country that made us.We are both creatures stamped Born in the USA. Guided by our families, our deep friendships and the moral compass inherent in our nation’s history, we press forward, guarding the best of us while retaining a compassionate eye for the struggles of our still young nation.My father’s houseBruce Springsteen and Barack Obama talk about the impression their fathers made on their lives and their concept of manhoodSpringsteen From when I was a young man, I lived with a man who suffered a loss of status and I saw it every single day. It was all tied to lack of work, and I just watched the low self-esteem. That was a part of my daily life living with my father. It taught me one thing: work is essential. That’s why if we can’t get people working in this country, we’re going to have an awful hard time.Obama It is. It is central to how people define themselves in the sense of self-worth. For all the changes that have happened in America, when it comes to “What does it mean to be a man?”, I still see that same confusion, and the same limited measures of manliness today, as I had back then. And that’s true, whether you’re talking about African American boys or white boys. They don’t have rituals, road maps and initiation rites into a clear sense of a male strength and energy that is positive as opposed to just dominating.I talk to my daughters’ friends about boys growing up, and so much of popular culture tells them that the only clear, defining thing about being a man, about being masculine, is excelling in sports and sexual conquest …Springsteen And violence.Obama And violence. Those are the three things. Violence, if it’s healthy at least, is subsumed into sports. Later, you add to that definition: making money. How much money can you make? And there are some qualities of the traditional American male that are absolutely worthy of praise and worthy of emulating. That sense of responsibility, meaning you’re willing to do hard things and make some sacrifices for your family or for future generations. But there is a bunch of stuff in there that we did not reckon with, which now you’re seeing with #MeToo, with women still seeking equal pay, with what we’re still dealing with in terms of domestic abuse and violence. There was never a full reckoning of who our dads were, what they had in them, how we have to understand that and talk about that. What lessons we should learn from it. All that kind of got buried.Springsteen Yeah, but we sort of ended up being just 60s versions of our dads, carrying all the same sexism.Obama You don’t show emotion, you don’t talk too much about how you’re feeling: your fears, your doubts, your disappointments. You project a general “I’ve got this”.Springsteen Now, I had that tempered by having a father who was pretty seriously mentally ill, and so in high school I began to become very aware of his weaknesses even though, outwardly, he presented as kind of a bullish guy who totally conformed to that standard archetype. Things went pretty wrong in the last years of high school and in the last years that I lived with him at our house. There was something in his illness or in who he was that involved a tremendous denying of his family ties. I always remember him complaining that if he hadn’t had a family he would’ve been able to take a certain job and go on the road. It was a missed opportunity. And he sat there over that six-pack of beers night after night after night after night and that was his answer to it all, you know? So we felt guilt. And that was my entire picture of masculinity until I was way into my 30s, when I began to sort it out myself because I couldn’t establish and hold a relationship; I was embarrassed simply having a woman at my side. I just couldn’t find a life with the information that he’d left me, and I was trying to over and over again.All the early years I was with Patti, if we were in public I was very, very anxious. I could never sort that through, and I realised: “Well, yeah, these are the signals I got when I was very young: that a family doesn’t strengthen you, it weakens you. It takes away your opportunity. It takes away your manhood.” And this is what I carried with me for a long, long time. I lived in fear of that neutering, and so that meant I lived without the love, without the companionship, without a home. And you have your little bag of clothes and you get on that road and you just go from one place to the next.And you don’t notice it when you’re in your 20s. But, right around 30, something didn’t feel quite right. Did you have to deal with that at all?Obama So there’s some stuff that’s in common and then there’s stuff that tracks a little differently. So my father leaves when I’m two. And I don’t see him until I’m 10, when he comes to visit for a month in Hawaii.Springsteen What brought him to visit you eight years after he left?Obama So the story is that my father grows up in a small village in the north-western corner of Kenya. And he goes from herding goats to getting on a jet plane and flying to Hawaii and travelling to Harvard, and suddenly he’s an economist. And in that leap from living in a really rural, agricultural society to suddenly trying to pretend he’s this sophisticated man about town, something was lost. Something slipped. Although he was extraordinarily confident and charismatic and, by all accounts, could sort of run circles around people intellectually, emotionally, he was scarred and damaged in all kinds of ways that I can only retrace from the stories that I heard later, because I didn’t really know him. Anyway, when he’s a student in Hawaii, he meets my mother. I am conceived. I think the marriage comes after the conception.But then he gets a scholarship to go to Harvard and he decides: “Well, that’s where I need to go.” He’s willing to have my mother and me go with him, but I think there are cost issues involved and they separate. But they stay in touch. He goes back to Kenya, gets a government job, and he has another marriage and another set of kids.Springsteen When he comes back to visit you, he has another family …Obama He’s got another family, and I think he and his wife are in a bad spot. And I think he was probably trying to court my mother and to convince her to grab me and move all of us to Kenya, and my mother, who still loved him, was wise enough to realise that was probably a bad idea. But I do see him for a month. And … I don’t know what to make of him. Because he’s very foreign, right? He’s got a British accent and he’s got this booming voice and he takes up a lot of space. And everybody kind of defers to him because he’s just a big personality. And he’s trying to sort of tell me what to do.He’s like, “Anna” – that’s what he’d call my mother; her name was Ann – “Anna, I think that boy … he’s watching too much television. He should be doing his studies.” So I wasn’t that happy that he had showed up. And I was kind of eager for him to go. Because I had no way to connect to the guy. He’s a stranger who’s suddenly in our house.So he leaves. I never see him again. But we write. When I’m in college I decide: “If I’m going to understand myself better, I need to know him better.” So I write to him and I say: “Listen, I’m going to come to Kenya. I’d like to spend some time with you.” He says: “Ah, yes. I think that’s a very wise decision, you come here.” And then I get a phone call, probably about six months before I was planning to go, and he’s been killed in a car accident.But two things that I discovered, or understood, later. The first was just how much influence that one month that he was there had on me, in ways that I didn’t realise.He actually gave me my first basketball. So I’m suddenly obsessed with basketball. How’d that happen, right? But I remember that the other thing we did together was, he decided to take me to a Dave Brubeck concert. Now, this is an example of why I didn’t have much use for the guy, because, you know, you’re a 10-year-old American kid and some guy wants to take you to a jazz concert.Springsteen Take Five, you’re not going to love …Obama Take Five! So I’m sitting there and … I kind of don’t know what I’m doing there. It’s not until later that I look back and say: “Huh.” I become one of the few kids in my school who’s interested in jazz. And when I got older my mother would look at how I crossed my legs or gestures and she’d say: “It’s kind of spooky.”The second thing that I learned was, in watching his other male children – who I met and got to know later when I travelled to Kenya – I realised that, in some ways, it was probably good that I had not lived in his home. Because, much in the same way that your dad was struggling with a bunch of stuff, my dad was struggling, too. It created chaos and destruction and anger and hurt and long-standing wounds that I just did not have to deal with.Springsteen The thing that happens is: when we can’t get the love we want from the parent we want it from, how do you create the intimacy you need? I can’t get to him and I can’t have him. I’ll be him. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll be him … I’m way into my 30s before I even have any idea that that’s my method of operation. I’m on stage. I’m in workmen’s clothes. I’ve never worked a job in my life.My dad was a beefy, bulky guy. I’ve played freaking guitar my whole life, but I’ve got 20 or 30 extra pounds on me from hitting the gym. Where’d that come from? Why do I spend hours lifting up and putting down heavy things for no particular reason? My entire body of work, everything that I’ve cared about, everything that I’ve written about, draws from his life story.Here is where I was lucky. At 32, I go into hardcore analysis. I don’t have my children until I’m 40, so I’m eight years into looking into a lot of these things, because what I found out about that archetype was it was fucking destructive in my life. It drove away people I cared about. It kept me from knowing my true self. And I realised: “Well, if you wanna follow this road, go ahead. But you’re going to end up on your own, my friend. And if you want to invite some people into your life, you better learn how to do that.”And there’s only one way you do that: you’ve got to open the doors. And that archetype doesn’t leave a lot of room for those doors to be open because that archetype is a closed man. Your inner self is forever secretive and unknown: stoic, silent, not revealing of your feelings.Well, you’ve got to get rid of all of that stuff if you want a partnership. If you want a full family, and to be able to give them the kind of sustenance and nurture and room to grow they need in order to be themselves and find their own full lives, you better be ready to let a lot of that go, my friend.My dad never really spoke to me through [to] the day he died. He didn’t know how. He truly did not. He just didn’t have the skills at all. And once I understood how ill he was, it makes up for a lot of it. But when you’re a six-year-old or an eight-year-old or a nine-year-old boy, you’re not going to have an understanding of what your father is suffering with, and …Obama You end up wrestling with ghosts.Springsteen I guess that’s what we all do.Obama And ghosts are tricky because you are measuring yourself against someone who is not there. And, in some cases, I think people whose fathers aren’t there – and whose mothers are feeling really bitter about their fathers’ not being there – what they absorb is how terrible that guy was and you don’t want to be like that guy.In my mother’s case, she took a different tack, which was that she only presented his best qualities and not his worst. And in some ways that was beneficial, because I never felt as if I had some flawed inheritance; something in me that would lead me to become an alcoholic or an abusive husband or any of that. Instead, what happened was I kept on thinking: “Man, I got to live up to this.” Every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or live up to his mistakes.You know, Michelle wonders sometimes: “Why is it that you just feel so compelled to just do all this hard stuff ? I mean, what’s this hole in you that just makes you feel so driven?” And I think part of it was kind of early on feeling as if: “Man, I got to live up to this. I got to prove this. Maybe the reason he left is because he didn’t think it was worth staying for me, and no, I will show him that he made a mistake not hanging around, because I was worth investing in.”Springsteen You’re always trying to prove your worth. You’re on a lifetime journey of trying to prove your worth to …Obama Somebody that’s not there.Springsteen The trick is you have to turn your ghosts into ancestors. Ghosts haunt you. Ancestors walk alongside you and provide you with comfort and a vision of life that’s going to be your own. My father walks alongside me as my ancestor now. It took a long time for that to happen.This is a condensed and edited extract from Renegades: Born in the USA by Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen. It is published on Tuesday (Viking, £35).TopicsPodcastsBarack ObamaBruce SpringsteenFamilyMenUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      A leaked S&M video won’t keep Zack Weiner out of politics – and nor should it | Arwa Mahdawi

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      You have to be something of a masochist to want to get into politics – and Zack Weiner is an unapologetic masochist. Last week, the 26-year-old, who is running for a place on the city council in New York, was something of a nonentity: he had zero name recognition and his campaign had raised just over $10,000 (£7,200), most of which he had donated himself.Perhaps the most notable thing about Weiner was the fact his dad is the co-creator of the kids’ TV show Dora the Explorer. But that changed when a video of a man engaged in consensual sadomasochism was posted on Twitter by an anonymous account that claimed the man was Weiner. On Saturday, the New York Post ran a story about the video, complete with salacious screengrab. Pretty soon it made international headlines.Why would anyone care about the sex life of an unknown twentysomething running for local office? Well, because a lot of people are pervs, for one thing. But the main reason the story has become so popular is because of how Weiner responded. Instead of going on the defensive, he owned it. His own campaign manager was the one who tipped off the New York Post about the video and Weiner told the paper that he is a “proud BDSMer”, who has nothing to be ashamed of.“Whoops. I didn’t want anyone to see that, but here we are,” Weiner later wrote on Twitter. “Like many young people, I have grown into a world where some of our most private moments have been documented online. While a few loud voices on Twitter might chastise me for the video, most people see the video for what it is: a distraction.”Weiner’s response to the video is almost identical to a plotline from the TV show BillionsThe frank and dignified way in which Weiner handled this episode has, quite rightly, earned him a lot of praise. It is, in many ways, a masterclass in how to respond to revenge porn.There was some speculation that the video was a publicity stunt. Releasing a sex tape of yourself in order to kickstart a political career might once have been unthinkable, but in today’s attention economy it is all too plausible. Donald Trump taught the world that any idiot can get into politics as long as you find a way to keep your name in the headlines.Then there’s the fact that Weiner’s response to the video is almost identical to a plotline from the TV show Billions. “I’m a masochist,” the character Chuck Rhoades announces in a press conference after a political rival threatens to leak pictures of him enjoying sadomasochistic sex in an attempt to derail his campaign for state attorney general for New York. Rhoades’s speech is a huge success: he goes on to win the election.So is it possible that Weiner’s campaign, inspired by Billions, might have leaked the video itself? Absolutely not, Joseph Gallagher, Weiner’s campaign manager, told me. He added, for good measure, that neither he nor Weiner, who is also an actor and screenwriter, had ever watched the TV show. The reason he flagged the video to the Post, he clarified, was in order to control the narrative and get ahead of the story. Which makes sense.Ultimately, what’s important is the fact that, as Weiner pointed out, a generation of young people who have documented every part of their lives are starting to enter politics. Revenge porn, which has already helped derail the political career of the former congresswoman Katie Hill, is going to become a common political weapon. And I suspect female politicians will have a far harder time surviving the weaponisation of their personal lives than men. More