Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - “The War on Fun” with Noah Rothman

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

Are there comparable periods in our history that can guide us through the current ‘“woke” debates? Is there precedent for this kind of thing burning out? Will it? How did we get to this point? And how long will it take? That’s what we discuss today with Noah Rothman, whose new book, just released this week, is called “The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives War on Fun.” Noah is an incisive writer and analyst. He writes about policy and politics and foreign affairs. He is an associate editor of Commentary Magazine, his previous book was called “Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America.” He’s also an MSNBC/NBC News contributor. You can order Noah's book here: https://tinyurl.com/2p88cc2k

You can't earn an indulgence from this movement. It's a sort of thing that requires ongoing, active, everyday participation in just about every facet of life. Now again, that's a mania. That's a sort of thing that you can't really sustain unless it is being enforced and imposed upon you, and that there are punishments for offending the particular pieties of the tribe. Whatever they may be, they change from moment to moment, which is another reason why this is becoming a source of so much resentment. If you drew a Venn diagram of listeners to this podcast and viewers of The Bachelor, I suspect there'd be very little overlap. So I'm going to take a moment to tell you about a controversy on The

Bachelor that you probably never heard about. Stay with me. Early last year was the 25th season of the hit reality series, The Bachelor. One of the final contestants made it to the last round, only to be greeted by a revved up social media mob that had crowdsourced a photo of her from 2018 when she was like 20 or 21 years old, showing that she had once attended an antebellum themed party. A flurry of outrage lit up on social media and even in the mainstream press. The longtime host of The Bachelor, Chris Harrison, who had 19 seasons under his belt, called for calm. He was quoted saying that everyone should have, and I quote here, a little grace, a little understanding, a little compassion towards this contestant. Then, almost on cue, everyone turned on Harrison. All of the contestants from that season even felt pressure to jointly sign a statement that they released publicly saying, quote, that they denounce any defense of racism and any defense of racist behavior.

Was Harrison defending racism? Well, according to the mob, he was, and after 19 seasons, he was pushed out of his job due to the, quote, racism controversy. That's what Deadline Hollywood called it in its reporting. Sound crazy, or does it actually sound too familiar? Like the kind of canceling you hear of these days all the time on college campuses and newsrooms and even at some companies or at children's schools. It's also ripping through entertainment and professional sports.

But this isn't new. What is new is a real understanding of comparable periods in our history that can guide us. Is there a precedent for this kind of thing burning out? Will it? Can it? How do we get to this point? And how long will it take? That's what a lot of people are asking. That's what we discussed today with Noah Rothman, whose new book just released this week is called The Rise of the New Puritans, Fighting Back Against Progressives' War on Fun. Noah's an incisive writer and analyst. I read just about everything he writes for Commentary Magazine, where he writes about politics and policy and foreign affairs. He's also an associate

editor of Commentary Magazine, and his previous book, just a couple years old, was called Unjust, Social Justice and the Unmaking of America. Noah is also an MSNBC and an NBC News contributor. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome Commentary Magazine's Noah Rothman to the conversation, the author of the just-released book, The Rise of the New Puritans, Fighting Back Against Progressives, War on Fun, a book I have been devouring. Noah, welcome to the conversation. Thank you so much for having me, Dan. It's a pleasure to be here.

Well, I gotta tell you, this book, I've enjoyed reading, but it also has like made my head explode, because it's reminded me about so much of what I've hated about the last couple of years. So what we get to do now is like unpack some of that, which I guess is be therapy. I mean, I guess I like you're sort of, you're a writer and journalist. And I guess for my purposes today, a little bit of a therapist. I mean, this book was therapy for me. The whole genesis of it was that I was absolutely miserable in 2020. And I'm sitting around with my wife and saying, you know, how can I get unmiserable? Politics is just the height of the riots, the pandemic.

So summer 2020. It's actually like a late 2020, late fall, early winter. And I'm like well what she said well what do you want to do oh if i had my druthers i'd talk to people in industries i like i'd talk to chefs i'd talk to playwrights and entertainers and comics and ah but i can't because that's even that's not outside the realm of politics anymore politics is everything and it's everywhere and it's making everything terrible she says that's the book and it was the book so it was therapy for me too.

Okay, so I want to start about the idea that the book, or what you identify in the book, is making everything fun political. So I'm a massive sports fan. One of my favorite quotes is by this manager from Real Madrid who actually comes originally from Italian football or Italian soccer named Carlo Ancelotti. And he famously said,

football, referring to soccer, football is the most important of the least important things. And to me, it's very important because the emphasis is on the least important. In other words, we get wound up as sports fans about something incredibly unimportant because it's a form of escapism and what you zero in on this book is how all these banal forms of escapism in our daily life are suddenly not allowed to be untouched by politics. Sometimes explicitly.

Explain. Well, just to take one example in sports, if you're a sports fan and enthusiast watching live broadcast games or network coverage or ESPN, for example, you're often treated to prolonged digressions about the lamentable state of race relations in America. And fans routinely object to the imposition of political themes, not politics, but political themes on their happy pastime, their diversion, and when they object, they're often explicitly admonished for privileging and preserving their desire for escapism and putting that above their duty to dwell on the world's miseries and resolve to act to try to alleviate them. That is your

mission in life because sports ultimately aren't that important. Okay, so let's, I want to give our listeners a few examples. So what you are talking about right now was like ongoing commentary on ESPN. So can you describe to us what was happening on ESPN, how ESPN got sucked into this, what it actually looked and felt like? I mean I know what it looked and felt like because I was living it and I was like throwing things at my television when I would watch ESPN. But for those listeners of ours that aren't sports freaks, what was happening? I mean, it certainly predates 2020, but not by a whole lot. We were overtaken with this sentiment in which ESPN contributors, guests, hosts, and sports figures, athletes, had to contextualize the game within the context of American social politics.

And American social politics sort of overtook the mission of entertaining audiences. The most famous example of this is Jemele Hill, who's a member of ESPN2's His and Hers, and she became very political, explicitly political, and ended up losing her gig over at ESPN for it. Now, she was very well compensated for it, and ended up moving country, we need to use these athletes as a meat shield, right? I mean, if you're a sports broadcaster, your mission is to broadcast about sports. Now, you might find that unimportant,

but your fans probably don't. And if you do feel like you're underserved by this, by your calling in life, then find another calling. ESPN's leadership was shaken up as a result of this because one of the new president came in, I think 18, 19, something along those lines, explicitly said, look, we're a sports broadcasting network. We're going to talk about sports. Your pangs of conscience notwithstanding. And that might

sound a little cruel, especially if you perceive yourself to have an absolute moral imperative to address the circumstances that are in your environment that you find so utterly intolerable. That does make sense. But when the fans object to it, when they want what they came here to get, your core primary mission statement, and you have a problem with that, it's not the fans that are the problem. It's you. You have abandoned your mission statement. You are outside your lane. You are trying to do everything and be everything for everyone and therefore not doing anything well. And there is also, to bring it back to the latent Puritanism of all this, there is an element of Puritanical thought in the late 16th century, 16th century, 17th century, and up to 19th century early nascent progressivism that had

very much disdained anything that was athletic, that didn't have a martial dimension to it. Blood sports, sports involving animals were statutorily banned, and they generally frowned upon anything that could produce injury that led to excess consumerism, jingoism, wearing costumes, which was odiously similar to performance art, which is utterly banned in the Puritan world. And we kind of go into that strains of thought about how in the modern world, sports distract from your studies, which is a much more important pursuit. Sports distract from, sports encourage toxic masculinity and the abuse of women, which is also something

that the puritans were very much attuned to and punished accordingly and ultimately it distracts from the great mission of our time which is organizing for progressive change that should be what your what your focus is on the great mission of our lives today so another example from sports and then we're going to provide some examples from other walks of life to show that no sphere of life today is left untouched. The Colin Kaepernick saga over the last few years. Now, just to refresh, Colin Kaepernick was a superb quarterback, played for the San Francisco 49ers. But with many, like many athletic careers, it, you know, his, his performance, uh, started to wane and it, it, the, the, the, the, it ended if you will, in 20, in this 2016 season, when the

49ers had two wins, 14 losses, Kaepernick started, I think most of the, something like 11 games that season. And, um, and then he, during the, his contract was up and he wanted to explore options and he didn't get picked up anywhere, which is common for athletes in any sport who are coming, trying to go out into the, uh, free agency market and have a, um, lackluster record, or at least recent lackluster record. What happened from there? Well, I mean, what is in common is that the guy trying to fish for a new contract gets this tryout, gets this, you know, tryout for all the teams that were, they were attempting to bring him back to the game and internal negotiations broke down.

We can only imagine why. But as you said, you know, Kaepernick overshadowed the 2016 season with his kneeling protests and his various grievance, which were omnidirectional. He had a problem with just about oppression broadly, his own, and that of Black Americans in the United States. And ultimately he won. The NFL sort of objected to kneeling protests and did their best to discourage them and even punish those who engaged in it. But by 2020, the league had utterly capitulated to the point where you had two national anthems being played at the NFL, the American national anthem and the so-called black national anthem, which is the civil rights hymn, Lift Every Voice and Sing. And fans objected to

this. Fans frequently booed. They booed displays of racial separatism. They booed kneeling during the national anthem. They didn't like it. And they're routinely admonished by the people who know better, who think that you need to be properly educated and steep yourself in the inequities of this country, even enduring your pastimes and diversions, which renders them not diversions anymore. But that is the point, because you shouldn't be allowed that kind of uh that kind of excess that uh abdication of your responsibility to make for a better world

and kaepernick appears in the chapter in my book on austerity which is on sports and fashion which you wouldn't think would go together but they absolutely do in colin kaepernick's case because he transitions right over to fashion where he proceeds to make his cause into um a form of uh what what has become what has become to be called moral merch which is in which um you know fashion presenter i didn't even that's a real term moral merch it's a real term um it's in it's in there and it was uh it was in a mckinsey memo okay uh and uh it describes exactly what it sounds like. It is literally wearing your politics on your sleeve. Now that used to be an epithet, a euphemism for trite and shallow political values. Not anymore. It is how you're expected to navigate your environment and Puritans had this as well.

They had sumptuary laws mostly to delineate class, to demonstrate outwardly who you were, what your birth was, and to whom you were subordinate. We have that today too. It's not class so much that this signifies. It is your ethnic background, your ethnic heritage. So you're expected to wear a uniform that comports with your ethnicity. If you're anything other than in the new Puritan fashion, if you're anything other than a Latina, you should not be wearing hoop earrings. Otherwise, you're appropriating something. If you're appropriating African-American hairstyles as something other than an African-American without having properly been permitted to do so, you are appropriating a culture that is not your own and not paying homage to it, which is a distinction they refuse to draw.

There is a difference then. One that I draw sort of subtly with nuance is that like pornography, you know it when you see it. I'm not saying that there isn't a way to be flippant and careless with cultural heritages that are not your own. It's possible. But this has been broadened to a scope and degree that doesn't observe any distinctions whatsoever. The most illustrative of this, I think, is in that fashion section where there's this something erupts over an offense caused by an online realtor that was marketing a T-shirt with Japanese characters on it.

The only problem was those characters were Chinese. And the people who are of this culture took that as a great offense, as a great attack on their cultural heritage, when it could only have ever been an accident that was the result of ignorance. And if you cling to that idea that you've been deliberately offended when the simpler explanation, Occam's razor, is that these people just had no idea what they were doing, that's not a mark of maturity or sophistication. It's utterly childish. But we have elevated that kind of immaturity into a value proposition. On the issue of, so when Kaepernick left the NFL, or I think when he started the kneeling protest, he made some comment that he was willing to do this even if it meant him not you know not availing himself of opportunities in the nfl going forward and he was willing to do

this if it meant giving up his sponsorship deals and and all his sources of income uh going forward he was willing to take that risk which you know if it's it's something he believed in obviously it's it in a in one sense it's admirable but but the reality has been i'm not saying this was his calculation but it is it is worth noting the reality is as far as sponsorships are concerned um the track the path that colin kaepernick has taken has been pretty good business for him and nike right so why don't you explain what what has happened since i mean yeah his um his slogan. So he joined Nike as like the premier spokesperson. Yeah, an ambassador.

Ambassador for Nike. Yeah. And his slogan was on his advertising was believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. Nike didn't sacrifice anything. Kaepernick branded products provided Nike with roughly $163 million in free advertising. The stock went through the roof. People really respond to this sort of thing, which is why moral merch is everywhere, because it is good for your bottom line to market yourself as, for example, Levi's, is the official pants of the gun control movement. Did you know gun control had an official pants? They do. Levi's jeans. You can go down the line,

but this is the sort of trite political conduct that passes for sophistication today, and it is purely a uniform to show outwardly your piety, your level of commitment to the cause. Okay, I want to rattle off a couple more stories that I think are very illustrative of what we're dealing with, and then I have a few other topics I want to get into. in Minneapolis. It's called the Holy Land Grocer, which is a Middle East food grocery store owned by a gentleman by the name of Majdi Wadi. Can you tell the story of what happened to him? Yeah, he was pretty well known in his community, and he was even featured on the floor of the house by Congressman Keith Ellison. Guy Fieri went there and featured his place on Diners, Driveins and dives and keith ellison just for our listeners former democratic congressman from from minnesota the stores in minneapolis he's now the attorney general

he's very much a progressive yeah icon uh early supporter of bernie sanders it's kind of one of the big voices at the left in Minnesota and nationally. So he was a fan of the store. The store had other, as you're saying, a lot of very liberal activist types who frequented. So it's not like this was Chick-fil-A. No, but I mean, not to digress, but it is often that the targets of this movement are those who are most deferential to it. Okay, so I do want to get to that point. So first tell the story, and then that's a very important point. Yeah, so he was very popular and very successful, which also attracted a lot of negative attention from people who resent success or want a piece of the pie for themselves. So at one point, this gentleman's daughter, who was an employee, a low-level employee at Holyland,

had been discovered that she had made racially insensitive remarks on social media twice when she was respectively 14 and 18 years old. She was subsequently several years older. But young in discretions. And there was a pile on the internet, and they attempted to ruin the place's reviews and had this... They were going, like, on Yelp, right? Yelp and ruining the reviews on Yelp and piling on and making a case out of it.

And one that Waddy responded to. And just to include, was this around the 2020 George Floyd? When did all this heat get kicked out? I have to go into my notes. It was early 2020. Early 2020. So it was maybe even before the riots.

But still, a lot of this predates the riots. I mean, that was just a catalyst for this sort of thing. But anyway, so he did his best to appease them, saying that they would engage and they would, they would engage and they would donate and they would engage in listening to her, what have you. It wasn't good enough. So he eventually had to take the step of firing his own child. He promised that he would hire diversity consultants and she would devote herself to doing good works and engaging in anti-bias training. And it was none of it was good enough. No apology was good enough.

Eventually, the landlord terminated Holy Land's lease, and this was a punishment that I write was befitting the sin of careless parentage of a willful daughter, which is quite clearly something that you wouldn't think of would be something that the permissive left would be so finely attuned to. But the permissive left is no more. There's a moral framework informing a lot of this. This is one example of it.

Another subsequently comes to us from the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer team, where midfielder Alexander Katai woke up one morning to find that his family was enduring a lot of scrutiny over his wife's conduct online. She had posted some, Teja, his wife, who speaks Serbian, I believe, had posted some very actually provocative and arguably racist. I would be convinced by that argument. Racist posts during the riots where she was writing things in Serbian, like Black Nikes Matter, like picturing individuals who are looting and saying, you know, really kind of offensive slogans.

And she was called out for it and she apologized for it. But it ended up costing Katai his career. He was fired. kind of offensive slogans um and she was called out for it and she apologized for it uh but it ended up costing katai his career he was so just to be clear no one was suggesting that katai this midfielder for the la galaxy did anything wrong no one said he said anything offensive he publicly denounced his own spouse he publicly denounced his own spouse who said some very provocative and offensive things on social media, but she's her own person with her own identity. He publicly condemned it, and he lost his job. Yeah, his association with a woman of low repute had tainted him too. Okay, so we can go on and on and on with

these stories. I highly, you chronicle a lot of them in the book, which is, and they're important to read, and they're important to actually really think through, so that's why I encourage listeners to read this book. But I want to get now to how this happened. So you, in the book, explain that this approach to, I don't know, public, you know, kind of public square censorship, if you will, was something that historically had been the province of the right, the American political right, and then it somehow migrated to the left. So first, can you describe what it was when it was the right doing this? What it looked like? I mean, it, we we all i mean all of us who grew up excuse me um who basically were alive for the last 40 years know full well that um traditionally

the you could count on the right to be priggish to be prudish to be sanctimonious to see with their keen discerning eye and seemingly innocent and harmless cultural products, the influence of corruption that not only would taint you, but degrade society as a whole. This was something that an excess of the moral majoritarian sort of approach to political dialogue that was borderline paranoid, but nevertheless had a moralistic philosophy that informed its political activism. By contrast, the liberal left emphasized self-fulfillment, self-actualization, and self-gratification, even at the risk of being self-destructive. It was a permissive philosophy that had its roots in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, which subsequently took over the culture in the

80s and the politics in the 90s, and became an unquestioned ethos of the left until the last decade, at which point we've seen a profound reversal. A much more austere progeny is coming up that emphasizes torment, that emphasizes gratuitous displays of public labor and public penance, of self-deprivation. It elevates self-deprivation to a virtue, because there are certain temptations that you should not allow yourself. In fact, if you do allow yourself, there's something of a zero-sum game here. You're taking it away from somebody else. And this book endeavors to draw out the threads between that outlook, that philosophy, and how it connects to mid-19th century progressivism, which was very native to geographic areas dominated by mainline Protestantism. It was a moral crusade as much as a political movement.

And you'd follow that thread a little bit longer, and you end up in the late 1600s, early 1700s, where that mainline Protestantism really honed itself. I mean, it was a transatlantic philosophy, but it was the most excessive, the most zealous in the colonies uh and while the puritan experiment was very short-lived in historical terms we they've left with they've bequeathed us with a really uh enduring legacy for a lot of good reasons this book is not an attack on puritanism per se they left us with a lot of things that we should be thankful for proto-democratic institutions that eventually became the American experiment as we understand it. They were the most committed abolitionists. They left us with

a social contract that ensures that you don't have to be dependent on charity alone in your darkest hours. These are valuable, but there's an excess to it. And the excesses are that you aren't utterly exhausting. You in mixed company are difficult to deal with because you are so consumed with this moral crusade that you know to be righteous and that you must observe at all times and in all places. And that does not allow for diversions. One of the greatest sins in the Puritan book of sins is idleness. That which is not contributing actively and without any nuance to it, you can't be trusted to enjoy nuance, was deemed to be the vessel of sin. If it wasn't productive, it would inevitably be co-opted by evil.

And we see that today in how everything must have a very plotting, didactic narrative associated with it, because you cannot be trusted with subtlety um why is disney decided that every movie has to have regardless of the plot line has to have this uh lgbt yeah narrative to it or or or are they playing or when they're playing classics like aladdin and others they have to put out the disclaimer before right because it can't be something as trite as entertainment right it has to have a higher social value right so how did the pivot of what you're describing from liberalism to progressivism like when i think of liberalism i think of the liberal

movement of the last liberal politics philosophy political philosophy in the last you know 10 20 years it just seems like this very accelerated flip to what you're describing. This would have been unrecognizable to liberals 10, 20, 15 years ago. It feels like this acceleration, it just went into turbo speed. So what happened? Yeah. So, well, the sexual revolution won, and a sort of permissive licentious philosophy became the relatively unquestioned dominant theory within the liberal coalition of how they should organize themselves and what they should support and endorse. But there were dissenters within the ranks even during the new left. You had your Marcuse types who advocated for intolerance towards particular views that could lead to authoritarianism, an anti-liberal view. heterosexual courtship rituals and interpreted assault and harassment and rape broadly and to a degree that was perhaps a little mad, but nevertheless, it had its audience, but it wasn't a large audience. These were on the sidelines. This was the intellectual movement on the sidelines

of the new left, and they didn't have many adherents they do now um there were this dissension from uh the hedonistic permissive uh new left of the 1960s that eventually became and reached its apotheosis with the clinton presidency um was ultimate there were a lot of dissensions within the ranks but they didn't have their audience a new younger generation has since discovered uh the virtues and some of them are virtues. The book is organized by unimpeachable values to which any responsible, well-socialized adult would likely adhere. It is their excess in practice that is the problem. But when you see young adults who are now turning away from sex, who are scared of alcohol, these adult markers, they're informed by a philosophy that came back into vogue in the last decade, which understands that when you have social situations that are bathed in alcohol and men and women are on top of each other, things happen that are disruptive of the social fabric. This is something conservatives understand rather intuitively, but to see the left rediscover it as though it's a new philosophy is fascinating.

And it is an explicit rejection of their far more permissive, far more chill grandparents and parents. This is something that I, that this book argues these, these individuals need to be confronted with because they will adamantly reject it. But it is nevertheless the truth. But, okay, so, but I just, was there a trigger? Like, was it a gradual process or was there, am I missing something that, that where liberal politics turned into this? Because I didn't see it coming. Yeah, I don't, I don't identify a a starting point but for example john height and

greg luganov have uh in their book uh the coddling of american mind they identify the turning point as sometime around 2013 at which point the student body on campuses became um began to conflate safety with intellectual cosseting, that they began to change the terms of the debate so that speech and violence were sort of indistinguishable and that speech could be violence and that violence could ultimately then be a response to speech, and that frankly, anything that challenged them intellectually or otherwise was seen as a very literal form of trauma. This has subsequently migrated off campus and into institutions. Why? Because these individuals were handed the levers of power. They festoon their arguments with polysyllabic jargon that is superficially authoritative, difficult to argue with. And it has the capacity to capture institutions because these institutions are helmed by people who are teaching these children how to capture these institutions. It's a very kind of clever act of piracy on their part. And it's been wildly successful because they've been lent this success back to

this point that I was making before about how the targets of this movement usually agree with it. It does you no good as a movement to attack a hard target, have no success, and then just kind of have to slink away after three days and go after another one. To have efficacy, you have to be effective. So going after the food truck with a bunch of liberals who believe in white privilege and saying that you've appropriated and stolen from the indigenous folk of Southern Mexico,

it's a very effective tactic because they will self-defenestrate and hand you the reins. And we see this in quite a lot of institutions. Those institutions that are resistant to this sort of thing can and do resist it but there aren't that many of them that are they're probably growing now but over the last decade we've seen quite a lot of institutions fold in the face of this agitation because they fundamentally agree with the philosophy at root even if they resent the tactics being employed against them.

So I want to quote here from your book. You say, I'm quoting, the fatal flaw in the practice of new Puritanism is that it immiserates its adherence, and misery is unsustainable in the absence of a coercive mechanism. For now, that mechanism is, as it was centuries ago, the guilt and shame imposed upon transgressors by the public square. With the advent of social media, the public square now resides in your pocket, meaning an iPhone. You go on to write it is in your bed when you wake up in the morning. It's right there on your commute to and from work and on your couch as you wind down for the night. It is with you, judging you always. Explain. Well, yeah, I think social media is probably one of the most effective ways in which this is enforced and imposed on you because you have the sensation,

an artificial sensation, frankly, that there is a overwhelming body of opinion that's arrayed against you. And this is not new. This is not well, you know, untrodden ground here that social media creates an illusory perception of general consensus. But social media is also an instrument by which these maxims are enforced deliberately. So, for example, Facebook has been flagged and targeted appropriately because it is actually true for very often limiting access to conservative books, for example. Amazon, too. Anything that sort of becomes really controversial,

Abby Schreier's book. There's another novel. There's a novel about Abraham Lincoln that was blurbed by Mike Pence. And because it was blurbed by Mike Pence, it was too provocative for social media. Now, all of these books did wildly well, far better than they should have

by virtue of their PR campaigns around them and their investments by their publishers. It was the censorship that created these conditions for a backlash. And we saw that in the 19th century as well. The story I tell at the end of this book, which I think is illustrative of how the seeds of this movement's destruction have already been sown is captured in the phrase banned in Boston. So in the 19th century, Comstock, Anthony Comstock's moral policing efforts and Comstock society's Comstockery, as it was called by H.L. Mencken, became vogue. It was in fashion and it was designed to combat lewd and lascivious literature. Among them, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman,

that subversive tome. And they have very successful. Boston, where mainline Protestantism was most effective, managed to ban a lot of books, bottlerize plays, ban songs from the radio, make sure that you never had the dime store novel that was very popular elsewhere in the country. And this was seen as sort of an esoteric feature of Boston. And it was definitely for the moral

majoritarian movement, which also festooned its arguments with semi-authoritative jargon, the moral science in Gail Porter's book, talking about morality as a science. But it eventually became not a warning against titillating literary experiences, but a powerful advertisement for it. Authors and publishers around the country actively sought to have their books banned in Boston so they could get more money from everywhere else where everybody would buy this very titillating experience. You simply had to have the experience for yourself.

And I see that as perhaps a way out of this, just commercial culture, because taboos are meant to be broken. And that is the cost of living in a free society. You will always have rule breakers who test the parameters of their environment and certainly are attracted to overturning taboos. That's not something we can do away with. It's not something we should want to do away with. It is a virtue of a liberal society. But a liberal society is increasingly the problem, as seen by the people who we used to call liberals. So you said before that, or you identified one of the problems before, one of the features of this movement,

of this phenomenon, is the intense, very aggressive policing of its own, you know, within the movement rather than people outside the movement. I'm reminded of a friend of mine who's a very partisan Democrat, center-left Democrat, who said to me recently that he is more under siege from this movement than i am meaning that he's saying you dan because you're more associated with the right you're less of a target you're like less of a problem for them they like they don't like you but they have to they kind of figure they gotta like deal with you or live with you. I'm sorry? Later.

Later, right. For now, you're just like a foil that's like a necessary foil. But he said, but me, meaning this friend of mine, this Democrat, he's like, they're out to get me. He says, you know, I'm white, middle-aged, Jewish, moderate, liberal, and I am like, they've got a target on my back. So I think that's what you were alluding to before. So why is he more under siege than I am? Well, and this is something I wrote about in my first book on social justice, and it's a right-left phenomenon too. I mean, this is just really just a basic, effective organizing tactic, is that you go

after the targets that are most likely to lend you authority. And those are the people who are going to agree with you. And they happen to be, when it comes to the left, it's there, it's artists, it's, um,

it's chefs, it's fashion creators. Uh, it's certainly, uh, entertainers and performers and have a dozen other subjects in this, in this book. And if I'm wrong,

that the, that there is no backlash fomenting, then there is. Everybody I spoke to for this book, nine out of 10 people I spoke to for this book, are liberal, are Democrat, wouldn't vote for a Republican with a gun to their heads, but resent the conditions that are sapping them of the joy that they had in their life's work, because their life's work is no longer about the work. It's about the work. It's about the politics that they have to adhere to and the moral theory, moral sentiment that they have to project outwardly and not the art. And they do resent it. And I think there's a backlash forming. If not, then what your friend describes will be the ultimate course of events, that the Borg will succeed, they will assimilate their own, and they will train their fire on harder targets.

So you and I are next. Okay. But before we get, I mean, this particular individual is a, you know, is a very public, I don't want to out him, but he's a very public by name, but he's a very public critic of what he describes as mass incarceration and the unfairness of our criminal justice system. And he gives to a lot of very left-wing causes. He's very active funding criminal justice reform causes.

So what, I still don't, I mean, he seems to be going along with the party line, so to speak. And I genuinely, by the way, I think he believed, I mean, he seems to be going along with the party line, so to speak. And genuinely, by the way, I think he believes, I know he believes in these issues. It's not like he's doing it to just to get a membership card. So it seems, but yet it's not enough. You know, they almost view him as like more of a problem that he is doing those things. Yeah, in part because he's showing his soft underbelly.

I mean, one of the things that this movement rejects is the popular front mentality, whereas there's nobody to my left that is too far to my left. The biggest coalition is the most powerful coalition. This is a very small group of people. I mean, it's hard to sort of quantify exactly what this is. I've seen one survey that suggests the truly woke progressive represents roughly 6% of the population.

But this population punches way above its weight. own ideological firmament to a degree that does not comport with the scale and scope of this movement, which lends it outsized gravity and authority. And so, yeah, I mean, just by virtue of failing to toe a particular line, and it is a moral philosophy, it's not a political philosophy, it is in behavior and affect, not just necessarily, you know, you can't earn an indulgence from this movement. It's the sort of thing that requires ongoing, active, everyday participation in just about every facet of life. Now, again, that's a mania. That's the sort of thing that you can't really sustain unless it is being enforced and imposed upon you, and that there are punishments for offending the particular pieties of the tribe. Whatever they may be, they change from

moment to moment, which is another reason why this is becoming a source of so much resentment. But it is just the functional disruption of what they get up every day to do, these professionals who create cultural products, That's not really the focus of their jobs anymore, and they are very frustrated by it. My hope is to catalyze, insofar as I can, that rejection of this austere philosophy, and to confront these very young people who think themselves to be the most open-minded with the fact that they're not, most certainly not. You also talk about what's going on in literature. I, I, I know I can keep going with these examples, but I just, I don't, I don't want to forget.

I won't go through all of them, but I don't want to forget this one. So you talk about like, it's not books being banned, but, um, but the way their books that are sort of being given black marks by libraries and school districts, books like Harper Lee's The Kill of Mockingbird, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. I mean, you go on and on with a few of these examples. So why are these books problematic, and how are educational institutions and libraries responding to the pressure being hurled at them for these books being problematic?

Yeah, everybody talks about books being banned on both sides of the aisle because there are conservative predilections. And frankly, all these literary organizations take very keen note and observance of any time a conservative has a problem with a work of literature, but somehow overlook it when their own side is going after classics, particularly American classics. But yeah, there's a very familiar, it's not new, it's a very familiar rejection of the themes, the thematic elements in these classic works of literature that contain very dated anachronistic stereotypes or even very offensive language that we don't really think anybody should be even exposed to now, much less entertain and internalize and therefore possibly end up espousing later on in life. It's an element of condescension here that taints everything. But we do see bottlerization happening. we do see a revision of some of these classics. There was a very interesting profile in the New York Times about two years ago of a classics professor in Princeton University who had convinced himself that his entire life was a lie. That the entirety of the classical canon was a Trojan horse for white supremacy. And that it was his responsibility as a professor of

classics to destroy his institution. That was the only responsible way to go. And we're up to and including, and we talk about some of this in these people, library, you know, library blogs for professional literature professors and teachers at the elementary level, that certain things should be de-emphasized which is you know euphemism for banning but nevertheless not necessarily banning but de-emphasized removed from the curriculum which is exactly what the right does and they don't make that distinction for the right either um but they you know it involves the classics it even involves shakespeare and that is literally what they did in in times. The word Baudelarization is derived from the work of Dr. Baudeler,

who sanitized, for lack of a better word, the Bard's works, removing Catholic references, removing anything impious, anything sexual, and this was thought of as a great work of his time. He was thought of very well great work of his time he was he was you know thought of very well and thanked for his work he turned his he turned ultimately to the old testament and did that to the bible and people loved him for it he was praised effusively for making um these works accessible to the god-fearing modern reader um we now use the word bottlerization as an epithet it's an insult it took quite a while

to get there uh and hopefully it won't take two centuries for us to figure out that the very same project is just as contemptible as it was then do you envision i mean there's there's when i when i talk to for instance friends of mine who who teach on college campuses, I often ask, because they're on the front lines of this, and I ask, do you think this burns out quickly? Or is this going to take a long time? And unfortunately, most of those I ask who are students of history, they say it's going to take a long time. This stuff does not burn out as quickly. We tend to think it's so crazy that it's just going to like self-combust on its own. But, but, you know, these professors will say to me that I'm, you know, that that's, that's, historically, when you, when you look at these manias, they take a,

they don't burn out. They take a long, they actually just get really, they burrow in, they get settled in, and they take a long time. And if you think they're don't burn out. They actually just get really, they burrow in, they get settled in, and they take a long time. And if you think they're going to burn out on their own quickly, you're crazy. And worse before it gets better. Yeah, so I don't know. But I would venture slowly at first, then all at once. And that was the story of Puritanism, capital P. Well, if you're right that it happens slowly and then it happens all at once, I'm just hoping the all at once part happens soon. Because it's making it very, very difficult to enjoy the least important things.

These banal activities that typically populated our lives. It's been pretty demoralizing. But anyways, the book, like I said— Well, I hope this is a happy book, though. I mean, this is supposed to be a hopeful book, an irreverent book, something that is not— It's definitely irreverent. It's definitely irreverent.

And I guess it's hopeful in that you don't— I think sometimes when we're all encountering this craziness we think we're the ones that are crazy like are we losing our minds right so in a sense you're creating community because you're like oh no i'm not the only crazy person i'm not the only one i'm not the only person that's thinking that i'm losing my mind i've actually like and then and then when you give it a historical context, it's actually, like I said, it's a form of therapy.

So in that sense, it's a positive contribution. I hope so. The rise of the new Puritans fighting back against progressives. War on fun. Noah Rothman, thanks again for doing the podcast, and I hope to have you on again with a more cheery topic.

Thank you so much, Dan. I really appreciate it. That's our show for today. To keep up with Noah Rothman, you can follow him on Twitter, at Noah C. Rothman. C is his middle initial. N-O-A-H-C-R-O-T-H-M-A-N. And of course, you can follow his published work at commentary.org and also at the MSNBC

website. You should also listen to the Commentary Magazine podcast. It's a daily podcast. I highly recommend you becoming a subscriber. Call Me Back is produced by Alain Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor. Highly recommend you becoming a subscriber. Call Me Back is produced by Alain Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.