Balaji Srinivasan

This is the first really important graph.

Do you see this graph?

You see it says newspaper advertising revenue adjusted for inflation?

Yep.

So let's call the newspapers a proxy for Democrats.

because they're 90% Democrats or what have you in terms of journalists.

Their peak was 2000.

People, I think, in retrospect will say peak America was 2000, 2001, right before 9-11.

So their peak was here, and then they kind of flattened and then crashed after the financial crisis.

And look at how Google's revenue and Facebook's revenue, the green chart, just go whoosh like this.

Yes, that's right.

So Google and Facebook start going vertical in the late 2000s, early 2010s.

And that's because the financial crisis in 2008 caused a shock, which forced people to do more with less.

And they forced them to look at what could do that and say the one big part was looking at digital deflation, which was the internet.

And ads are one piece, classifieds are another.

There's many other pieces of this.

This is just one very quantitative chart that shows the scale of the disruption to a very important Democrat stronghold.

Okay.

Then in 2010, the same thing was happening to the Republicans because the same financial stress after the financial crisis pushed people to do more with less, and they looked overseas to China, and that was the moment at which Chinese manufacturing flipped Republican manufacturing.

Mm-hmm.