Cringestack in Review, Part I

A Based Guidebook

[Editor’s Note: I realized- when I was 90% through with this- that

Yuri Bezmenov

had come up with a similar project some time ago. I encourage all of you to read his work first, and to consider my own essay an expansion and elaboration of his original offering, which I hope proves a useful entry in the nascent field of Cringe Studies.]

There are a lot of names for a certain phenomenon here on Substack. You know it when you see it. In the past, I’ve labeled it Sludgestack, which I think has a certain diagnostic facility, while others have floated variations of TDStack and Hackstack. In general, all these terms and more describe writers and publications that fit the following criteria:

• They generally feature creators who developed a following somewhere else before migrating to Substack, and not always for their writing. Their presence here is often due to their having been driven from some other platform after becoming tiresome to general audiences. However, they will retain a core of supporters who have migrated with them (at least their email addresses have), and their audience heavily overlaps with other Cringestack authors.

• They write almost exclusively about Donald Trump and his political movement; upwards of 90% of their content will reference him specifically. They seldom attempt to write anything else and if they do it falls quite flat.

• Their takes on him are highly derivative and tendentious. When they attempt humor, it is leaden and- as their moniker indicates- cringe. Every post is entirely predictable from start to finish and largely indistinguishable from what might be generated by an LLM.

• They are incapable of depth, nuance, or subtlety. They are poorly read- even the academics evince little awareness of anything outside their specialties- and attempts at historical analogies will reference about 70% Nazi Germany and 20% the Confederacy, the remaining 10% divided between citing the Founding Fathers (they alternate between dismissing them as racists and enlisting them as rhetorical allies against Trump) and allusions to the Civil Rights Movement. Nothing else important has ever happened as far as they know and every current event will be interpretively shoehorned as analogous to those particular periods.

• They typically only allow paid commenters (though not exclusively) but even with that caveat the responses to their articles will almost entirely be of one of two types- sycophantic or emotionally incontinent. The first may be bots and the latter perhaps more representative of the sort of actual human who enjoys this sort of content. It is very rare for the Cringestack writer actually to engage with his commenters in any case.

• Along those lines, their engagement is far, far below what one might expect from the number of subscribers they purportedly have. Many Cringestack authors- with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and thousands or even tens of thousands of paid contributors- get likes, comments, and restacks within the range of anons who built audiences from scratch on this platform with exponentially fewer followers. And despite having enormous overlap with other Cringestack writers in terms of content and style they seldom mention one another or collaborate. There is no Cringestack community or communities; each one is a subscription funnel lacking any real organic presence within Substack.

As Substack has grown in popularity, the Cringestack phenomenon has proliferated within it, to the point that a kind of dichotomy has emerged between creators organic to Substack and ‘celebrities’ parachuting in to grift. Substack management loves those latter types for the same reason university presidents love D1 sports; they welcome the attention it brings their enterprise and don’t particularly care if their special admits are cheating or worse. For regular Substack users, the main point where the two ecosystems overlap is where the former begin to tire of their feeds being choked with TDS sludge and flip the script, using the latter as fuel for content. It helps that Cringestack authors are so out of touch with their paypigs that they generally don’t even know about, much less bother blocking trolls. Thus, if you can stand prose that is at once shrill and dull, overwrought and empty, and ponderous yet thin, there’s often some comedy gold to be had.

Clay Travis brings up a good point. Why isn’t Don Lemon on Substack yet?

But even without the laugh value, Cringestack is still an important window into how our elites think; after all, these people were generally promoted by dynastic media establishments to serve as instruments of managerial control. There’s something significant in that the mainstream media refugees washing up on Substack beach are the best the regime could do. It shows that there’s no clever wizard behind a curtain secretly manipulating things. The controllers and paymasters-the actual politicians and bureaucrats- are simply less glib and telegenic versions of what you (increasingly used to) see on CNN and MSNBC. The writers of Cringestack are what our elites think thoughtful and engaged public intellectuals should sound like. Knowing that fact makes a lot of their response to the current assault on their power base in the federal bureaucracy make sense. For decades, they’ve been told by people hired for the purpose that they are smart and capable meritocrats. The reality is a bit more sordid and pangendery. Behold the inner workings of elite human capital:

Imagine the ending of The Bourne Ultimatum, where the big reveal in the mind-control lab is that he was always meant to battle “anti-queer” forces on behalf of the they/thems of the Deep State. Also, the head scientist would look like the guy from Rocky Horror Picture Show.

What follows is a expository tour through some of the major Cringestacks. They are not listed in any particular order; rather, I have grouped them by subtype so that they can be analyzed according to their respective niches. My hope is that this work can serve as the basis for a more thorough field guide for the future, so that new writers and other content creators here can properly understand the role played by les auteurs de s’humilier.

Journo-Cringe

Dan Rather

Dan Rather is one of the godfathers of the journalistic cringe-variant; in fact, he may be old enough actually to qualify as a Biblical Patriarch. From his early days covering the Civil War, to the great crisis of his being assaulted by a crazed vagrant which led to a legendary R.E.M song, Rather has seen it all, and from what he’s seen conservative Americans are pretty gross. Thus, when the story of a lifetime fell into his lap in 2004, forever proving correct the controversial CCR thesis that rich kids got preferential treatment during Vietnam, he jumped at it. He was all set to bag his very own Nixon in the person of George W. Bush, who apparently wasn’t that great of a fighter pilot and should have therefore been sent to the war instead of guarding Texas from the Viet Cong. Granted, the guy shopping the documents demonstrating all of this was a bit dodgy and only had photocopies of the originals, which was a shame, since the typeface was Windows Times New Roman, which meant that Bill Gates had plagiarized that too, since even the PC wasn’t a thing for a decade hence.

Rather can be forgiven for not really understanding all the technical details; after all, most of his early stories were filed by palace scribes using cuneiform. And the media of the day very much backed him up, with the New York Times refusing to call the documents definitively fake, presumably on the off chance that some sort of quantum gateway had torn the boundaries of space and time, through which passed the sort of Republican-slaying magic scrolls they hoped would similarly come their way. The internet, however, is a savage place, and insisted that the media consensus of “fake but accurate” was a bit dumb even for journalists. Rather was driven from his prime-time career, and forced to reinvent himself, much as dinosaurs had to turn into birds.

Today he posts regularly on Substack. He might be considered a pioneer of a sort, one of the first to realize that there would always be a crowd of aging boomers who would pay to hear him say things authoritatively regardless of how true any of it was. He had been on TV news once, and to a boomer that’s like being a priest, an indelible mark of sanctity. This remains the core Cringestack audience, and in many ways he set the tone for the phenomenon long before he came here. Others have learned the lessons well, such as the “team” that probably does the heavy lifting publication-wise. It’s all classic Cringestack. From “Trump’s Most Dangerous Move- Yet:”

David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, raised the alarm on Bluesky. “Trump tried a seizure of power in 2021. It didn’t work, because he relied only on a violent mob. The military and FBI stayed loyal to the Constitution. This time, with approval of the Republican Senate, Trump has installed anti-constitutional putschists at FBI, DoD, and Pentagon.”

Don’t worry if you don’t know what a putschist is — I had to look it up. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a putschist is a person who believes that a government should be removed by force.

Yes, you heard it from David Frum on Bluesky, Trump is attempting to overthrow the government by winning a democratic election and installing personnel who will implement the agenda on which he campaigned. You know who else did putsches? The comments know . . .

tRump & muskrat's actions are replicating Hitler's insanity for power. I can't watch or listen to the news, mainstream or otherwise.

It's beyond frightening & I don't trust anyone but Mr. Dan Rather.

Why has muskrat & his juveniles not been arrested for entering a government office to remove and/or fire the staff. They are private citizens for crying-out-loud!!!

God help us all.

This guy has a proposal:

So we know the problem well. Very well. What is the solution? Maybe a counter coup is in the works. Or an assassination or two. What is certain, is America has passed the "vote the guy out" solution because time is fasting running out for America. Think I exaggerate?

Perhaps delegate one of the interns to content moderation there, Dan.

Honorable Mentions

Both Jim Acosta, formerly of CNN, and Joy Reid, formerly of MSNPC, have recently migrated to Substack, couch surfing here presumably until the USAID money starts flowing again. In the meantime, they’ve both been busy producing groundbreaking content informing the American people that Trump is in fact . . . evil. Jim Acosta is already making friends here; check out a rare example of a Cringelaboration, this panel discussion with Steve Schmidt (more on him later). It’s fairly vanilla TDS of a sort that used to pay well when the Deep State would cough up enough money for a decent propaganda outlet, but now that Elon Musk and his Techno-Jugend are checking receipts, it’s a harder sell to a more disinterested general audience. Joy Reid is an angry black woman, like cold fries at McDonalds-World Star-rampage angry, even more so now that cuts in the DEI budget have forced her here. If you want to know why the aforementioned Musk is so deeply evil, check out this piece where she proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is both white and from South Africa. That in itself should be a crime.

The cognitive dissonance of TDS while Trump hairmaxxing.

Vintage Cuckservatives

I know, I called out Dan Rather for being the coelacanth of journalism, and here I am being nostalgic. If you’re my age, you remember the glory days of the likes of National Review and the Weekly Standard boldly debating whether Republicans should focus on more wars or more immigration. Mitt Romney was the future- or maybe ¡Jeb!- and America was an idea, one that primitive foreigners should be forced to believe at gunpoint, at home and abroad. But then a great orange meteor hit this placid ecosystem, and the men and women of Conservative Inc. were forced into a Mad Max post-apocalyptic hellscape, wandering through cable newsrooms desperately seeking attention. Now they’re here on Substack.

Bill Kristol is perhaps the wrongest man to have ever gotten everything wrong in his very wrong life. He’s the sort of person who never really strays from a few neighborhoods in Washington and New York but fancies himself an expert geo-strategist with his finger on the pulse of Middle America. There’s an entire genre of media dedicated to head-scratching examinations of why he’s still treated as an expert on anything other than failing, and I admit I’m baffled as well.

This is just the first page of search results.

This is the man who thought David French would make a great president and decided he should run, apparently without consulting French. If Kristol were capable of humor or irony he would have made a good troll; also French seems to have tried and failed on Substack, his last post here was about why the internet needed better censorship. Truly a man-out-of-time, Kristol missed his calling as an advisor to George McClellan (“slow down, George- you’ve got Lee right where you want him”), but he did have a streak for a while as the anti-Cassandra of the Republican Party, always exactly incorrect in his predictions but invariably heeded nonetheless. This came to a final end with Trump, whose instincts, while not always good, tend away from Kristol’s universal prescription of bomb everyone- something something- liberal democracy and gay pride! So now he’s here on Substack with The Bulwark, being wrong:

The good news is that the Harris campaign seems to be closing with the right message. That message, not to put too fine a point on it, is: Never Trump.

It made sense for the Harris campaign to stress first its positive message about Kamala Harris, to spend time introducing her to the American public and making her case. They did this well, and it took them from the deficit they inherited from Joe Biden to an even race. But now they need to close by reminding the public just how dangerous and disastrous a Trump second term would be.

And one way to do that is by highlighting the Republicans supporting Harris. Harris did that at Washington Crossing on Thursday. Today, the vice president is appearing with Liz Cheney in three swing states. And not only with Liz Cheney—but also with Sarah Longwell in Pennsylvania and Charlie Sykes in Wisconsin.

Wow, first Beyoncé and now LIZ CHENEY! Plus two Bulwark editors! How could Kamala lose!?

Kristol is hopeful that Trump will crash and burn any day now. Given his track record, this probably means that Trump will discover some method of becoming a human-sandworm hybrid and rule the universe for thousands of years as an immortal God-Emperor. In the meantime, he’s discovered a lucrative niche as a Cringestack author explaining to credulous boomers how Putin is thiiiiiis close to losing in Ukraine, assuming that the French/Cheney ticket of 2028 is sufficiently committed to all-out nuclear war.

“It’s one of many possible futures, people. A Golden Path, the most golden path you’ve ever seen. People are saying I should walk it, lead humanity there. I just might, folks, I just might…”

Honorable Mentions

Chickenhawk is a versatile word. It can mean someone who endlessly agitates for wars he or she has no intention of joining, but also refers to the Harvey Milk tendency among certain segments of the male population. Cuckservatives embrace the full spectrum. So if you prefer your Cringestacks to have more of a lingering predatory homosexual vibe, check out the latest evolution of the Lincoln Project, Steve Schmidt’s The Warning. Schmidt was a longtime collaborator of creepy weirdo John Weaver, who mentored young conservative men the hard way until the LP became too disgusting even for Rick Wilson (another Cringestack regular) and fell apart. Now Schmidt is here, having denounced his foul friend while retaining his foul ideas, and he’s in good company. There’s also former Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who despite desperately wanting to crush the evil Slavic hordes of Vladimir Putin, apparently has yet to click on the link I keep sending him. He actually wrote an article called “Trump Wants to Be Napoleon,” which gets points for not making a Hitler comparison, but definitely loses some for Trump- unlike Kinzinger- not wanting to invade Russia in an inevitable bloody debacle. But perhaps I’m being unfair; Kinzinger wouldn’t be wrong in assuming that Sam Hyde will take care of that problem personally. I wouldn’t want to be Putin or Hasan Piker right now.

This never stops being funny.

Hackademia

The OG of Academic Cringestack is of course Heather Cox Richardson. Dr. Richardson is a professor of American History at Boston College. She’s very much the PMC’s ideal of what a public intellectual should be, and to get an idea of what that is, imagine the Disney movie Fantasia, but with the role of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice played by a coven of faceless NGO apparatchiks and the broom being an animated NPR tote bag dumping plastic swag onto the internet. She’s the tote bag.

Every single opinion expressed in Letters from An American is certified seal-of-approval regime-aligned sludge. It’s a party-line publication worthy of comparison to the Daily Worker, save that that fine periodical slipped up occasionally and accidently crossed Stalin for a moment. Not Richardson. In keeping with the common academic practice of citing friends and benefactors, the pedantic Works Cited list at the end of her articles is never anything but a collection of the publications and people she wants to interview her, which they do. There’s never a single line that doesn’t reflect what even other academics call “MSNBC talking points,” and of course, it’s pretty much all Trump, all the time.

Yuri Bezmenov

has a fine exposition of the work of Dr. Richardson, which you should check out.

Honorable Mentions

The most obvious beta hackademic is Steven Beschloss, you can find him here, crying about how evil Nazis are while in the process of defending Ukrainian nationalism, which is a bit odd considering . . . But history isn’t really his strong suit- his professorship is in journalism- but what he lacks in book smarts he makes up for in fawning regime servitude. There is nothing he won’t say, following the party line to the point of absurdity, such as his conclusion last June that Biden’s dementia-fueled debate performance should have resulted in Trump dropping out of the race, on the theory that being senile is better than being mendacious, ignoring that Biden is a liar as well as a dotard. He proclaimed every Democrat move afterwards to be either a noble sacrifice to principles or a strategic masterstroke, leading up to election night, the results of which prompted him to write advice to his followers on how to stay sane, which, judging by some of the comments, was not heeded:

Joy Reid alt?

Many might expect me to add Robert Reich to the list, but I disagree, on the grounds that he does not quite measure up (pun intended) to my criteria. While horribly wrong about politics and as fully insane on Trump as anyone else I’ve noted, Reich will actually take issue with the party line on occasion (such as leaving the Clinton White House over philosophical differences), and has at times offered meaningful critiques of neoliberalism. I give my economics students his article on wealth hoarding being a more significant problem than inflation. He’s a net negative in terms of his politics, but I can respect that he’s put thought into his positions and isn’t afraid to put them out there, even if it makes people on his own side think he’s too extreme.

SEE, how hard is that, people? You can hate someone’s politics or worldview, even hate him or her as a person, and still, if you’re an honest writer, tease out something good about them or at least apply nuance to understanding them. The difference between lazy, cash grab TDS sludge and proper invective lies in that subtle attunement to the actual character of the object. For Part II, I’ll be annotating the rest of my Cringestack list, so be ready. And word of warning, looking them up will really screw up your algorithm.