Offline with Jon Favreau - Kanye West’s Dark, Twisted Internet

Episode Date: October 30, 2022

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

I think once we're getting to a place where we're having this pretty watered down, simplistic debate that you hear people say, well, I think someone like Kanye's account should be deleted. I think it should be frozen, but not deleted. I think he should be able to say whatever he wants. You can defend any of those positions if you want to, but they're all 25 steps down the causal chain too late. What went wrong is so far up the chain of events that it's like, there's no good options left. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey everyone. My guest today is the New Yorker's Andrew Marantz. So unfortunately, we need to talk about Kanye West. Not just because he's gone on an anti-Semitic bender that may end with him buying the alt-right social media app Parler,

but because the story of his radicalization is also a story about the internet, which is why our guest today is an expert in online extremism. A few years ago, Andrew embedded himself with alt-right trolls and interviewed social media founders for his book Anti-Social. Last week, he applied the lessons he learned from that book to Kanye West, writing a piece for The New Yorker titled Kanye West's Parlor Games. In it, he argues that Kanye's path from George Bush doesn't care about black people to white lives matter and antisemitism isn't all that unfamiliar. The only difference is the size of West's platform. He also argues that the free speech discourse peddled by West and his new platform-owning pals, Elon Musk and

Donald Trump, isn't all that deep or well thought out. Quote, being in favor of free speech is the content moderation equivalent of being in favor of peace. It sounds nice, but as a template for making policy, it's worse than meaningless. Andrew and I talked about all of that and more. What successful content moderation would actually look like, what a Kanye West-owned parlor would actually mean, and what the splintering of the right-wing media ecosystem into new echo chambers means for our discourse and our politics. As always, if you have comments, questions, or episode ideas,

please email us at offline at crooked.com, and please rate, review, and share the show. Here's Andrew Morantz. Andrew Morantz, welcome to Offline. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So we were trying to decide between doing an episode on Taylor Swift fandom or one on Kanye West buying Parler. And I saw your New Yorker piece on the ladder and figured it would be great to talk to someone who's been covering online extremism and radicalization for quite a while now. So, I mean, I also I also wrote a profile of Jack Antonoff, so we can cover both. Oh, okay. Well, maybe you come back on next week.

We'll get that one done. So I guess I'd like to start by talking about Kanye's journey. And we should say that he legally goes by Ye now. But let's talk about his journey from being the guy who said George Bush doesn't care about black people during Katrina in 2005 to wearing a White Lives Matter T-shirt and spouting off anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, as he's been doing over the last couple of weeks. Obviously, he's always been a bit of a jackass, to quote my former boss. Obviously, there are mental health issues at play here but how much of this do you think is unique to kanye uh and how much of it feels like

a familiar path it's definitely familiar you know even if it were just kanye it might still be worth writing about because he's such a singular figure but it's obviously not just him and you know in these recent weeks he was really sort of hitting levels of third rail trolly contrarianism that uh he hasn't hit before that i was like i kind of feel like i know exactly what's coming next i've just seen this movie enough times in my reporting that it was like we're about to get to the JQ is what they used to call it in the alt-right, which is the Jewish question. We're like two steps away from it's the Jews fault. And I was like, oh, it's like even more on the nose than I thought it was going to be. Usually it's like globalist, rootless cosmopolitans. This is just like, it's the

Jews. So it got there fast. Why do you think that all these radicalization journeys end up with anti-Semitism as a result, end up with the JQ? Yeah, it's a very good question. It's a, you know, tale as old as time. I mean, we should we should dig in on that. But just just to make sure I answer your first question, like he's obviously singular and he's not every other radicalized, you know, lonely teenager in their bedroom. He's Kanye West. But there were hallmarks of it that were so familiar that and to the to the original part of your question, like the through line from George Bush doesn't care about black people to let's go Defcon 3 on the Jews is a sad one and almost tragic in many ways. But one of the simplest ways to put it is just that if you are so addicted to the video game of button pushing and contrarianism and playing the thrill ride roulette wheel of engagement, then regardless of the substance of what you're saying,

you're gonna just seek out those feelings, those dopamine hits. And it's almost the toddler thing of, any attention is good attention. Because you've covered so many people who've sort of gone down this path, many of whom far less famous than Kanye, can you talk about some of the typical stops along the trail from bored internet surfing to alt-right troll? Yeah. And, you know, I also, before I did a whole sort of deep dive into the ways that the internet was making politics crazy, I did a piece way back when for the New Yorker about this thing called Truman Show Delusion,

which is all these people who had seen the Truman Show and they said, oh, that's me. And actually, I mean, incidentally, Kanye has said similar things to this in the past. And what the sort of basis of the piece was, was schizophrenia and bipolar and all these various illnesses obviously were not invented in the 20th century, but they take different forms depending on the era they're in. If you had delusions during the Cold War, they might sort of flow into the shape of the Soviets are spying on me. If it was during the Napoleonic Wars, it would be, you know,ets are spying on me if it was during the napoleonic wars it would

be you know napoleon is spying on me whatever it might be i'm a prophet you know sent to jerusalem so and now it's i'm in the truman show and i think there's a similar thing here where there's a form and content thing um there's the the form of it which has hallmarks that are sort of older than prehistory. And then there's content that gets poured into it, and that content just these days comes from the internet. And I think the part of it that is different, there are several parts that are different, but the most obvious one that's relevant here is that it's so engagement-based. I mean, it's not just that information flows more quickly and at a broader scale, it's that it's incentivized differently. And so the third rail stuff is not just you're not only judging that based on

the reaction of Mike Myers standing next to you in a television studio. When you say something, you're judging it based on literal numbers in a video game on your screen, based on, you know, when you tweet something, how many numbers can you rack up? And so it obviously doesn't always go down a dark path. And there's some dispute about how often it does sort of quantifiably empirically go down that path. But what I saw again and again in the reporting was, okay, you might start out with um a kind of uh just asking questions kind of how far can we push let's say libertarianism like often it would be someone like you know the reporting you see about blake masters or someone being on a college uh libertarian message board and then

going well if we push libertarianism to its really logical conclusion, then maybe we don't need a state at all. All we need is freedom of association and freedom of contract. And if we have true freedom of association, then maybe we don't need things like the Civil Rights Act. And maybe, you know, we can just have housing compacts where it's only white people, and then you're sort of off to the races. As to the JQ specifically, this is a whole thing we could get into and the kind of internal logic of, I mean, to be honest, I was not expecting, I'm Jewish. I sort of grew up where the debate in my family, like a lot of families was, why doesn't Ann Esther just chill out about antisemitism? Like it's not as big a deal as

it used to be. And that was kind of the generational divide where i would be arguing with my elders like yes anti-semitism is a real thing but the jews have become white in america and this is kind of the familiar contours of the debate so i was i was very surprised when i started going down i expected it to be conspiracy theories about syrian immigrants i expected it to be transphobia. I didn't expect like you guys have not updated since the protocols of the elders of Zion. Really? We're doing this still. It was but it but it came up again and again, especially in the last several years.

Right. Like in the in the Trump era, in this like era of radicalization. You're right. There's like there are new others for the right to attack. But yet they've also gone back to and especially some of these online trolls. They've gone back to anti-Semitism again and again, which is very frightening. Yeah. And it doesn't mean that people of color or trans people or misogyny, it all kind of gets woven into one fabric, you know, so it's not that there's a hierarchy where one is replacing the other. It's actually kind of a conspiracy theory of its own, which is, because the Jews control everything, what they're doing, and this

gets to all this sort of Soros and the border stuff, is that they are trying to bring in these menacing black and brown hordes because they want to break the white majority. And the only way they can do that is by importing these hordes. And that was when I started to go, okay, I kind of get all the Jews will not replace us stuff that you heard in Charlottesville. Like it sort of made it make sense a little bit. You've written that a lot of these alt-right characters aren't fundamentally political figures. They're metamedia insurgents. What do you mean by that?

I think when I was spending a lot of time with them, because the origin of the project was not writing like a polemic about whether these people were good or bad. I think I just sort of took it for granted that what they were doing was bad. The question was, how were they doing it and what were they good at? And the reason I was interested in them was not because I wanted to explore whether I liked their political ideas. It was because I wanted to see them

do the thing they were good at. And the thing they were good at was media. So they weren't particularly deep readers of Strauss or Nietzsche or something like that. What they were good at was being ahead of the curve in terms of figuring out how social media was built to work and exploiting it to its fullest extent. And there was a lot of, you know, at the time, this, you know, internet cycles move fast. So it feels like a long time ago. But around, you know, the 2016, and even up to the 2020 election, there was a lot of talk about hacking and Russian hackers and Russian trolls and how social media was being

misused. And my sort of contention that I that I kept coming up against was, they're not misusing it. They're using it the way it was designed to be used. A lot of these people, they weren't breaking any rules of social media. They weren't breaking any laws, certainly. They were just doing the thing that the algorithms incentivized you to do. And they were just using it for things that I, in my humble opinion as a citizen, considered to be anti-democratic and dangerous but there's nothing in the rule book of facebook or twitter that says your content has to be true or good for

the world or make it so that you know miami won't be underwater in 50 years because of global warming like it's content neutral they're just good at uh pushing the buttons way better than um anyone else was really at the time i think it's so interesting because it's you're right like these these people don't necessarily have a very uh well-formed political philosophy but it does seem like they all share a certain attitude which is like very anti-institutionalist to the point of let's just break everything let's fuck things up let's get attention for ourselves right i mean this is a trump thing too right like everyone tries to is this is this a new kind of fascism does trump have this ideology and it's like well he doesn't

necessarily need to have a cohesive ideology to be incredibly dangerous to democracy and i do think that what unites a lot of these alt-right figures who are very sort of you know they have different views come from different places different class status right is that they all have this sort of attitude and personality trait of like i just want to tear shit down i mean two things on that one is agree with you. And I don't think that should be taken as a reason to discount the seriousness of it. Because, you know, I mean, the actual fascists didn't have much of a cohere. I mean, Mussolini contradicted himself about his ideology pretty frequently. It didn't make it any less menacing. So, you know, you have this often with things that are like fascism or different kinds of authoritarianism. There's a sense in which they're kind of obviously comical or kitschy or campy or hypocritical. And yet none of that dilutes the actual power that they can hold in people's imagination or in their politics. In fact, it sometimes makes it more powerful and influential. Totally. Right. Like if it's not this sort of scary philosophy and seems like it's Hitler-esque,

if it just feels like it's funny or hypocritical or it's ironic, it's detached, right? Like it can make it seem, I think, more appealing to some people. Definitely. And I mean, one, you know, I don't have to tell you this one big thing in politics is just where the energy is, where the momentum is, where the wind is blowing. And it's very hard to beat that kind of, you know, punk rocky energy. I mean, just totally being agnostic about the content, again, just talking about what it feels like, the momentum, the excitement, there is something really exciting about let's just burn all this shit to the ground. And, you know, it doesn't even really have an intrinsically left or right valence. If every

election is in some degree a change election, what's more changey than let's burn it all to the ground? I mean, it's not productive by definition, but it's hard to out cool that message. And then it always put me in the position of feeling like, well, I'm just necessarily going to have to sit here and be the pearl clutching square, right? Because I'm like, could we just think about why we're burning it down for just a set or just like make sure there's a fire extinguisher after we burn it down or some, does anyone have a plan? And that's just never the cool position to take ever. Obviously, the thing that makes Kanye quite different

than your typical alt-right troll is that he's incredibly famous and wealthy. How do you think that affects both how he got here and what kind of impact his transformation will have or is already having? It does make it more dangerous in the sense that same with Donald Trump. If you start off from a position of high name recognition and high access to the levers of attention, and if we sort of accept as i think your listeners basically would that attention is everything or close to everything in this particular moment of political economy then um then yeah the the more you start out with

the more you have a first mover advantage like i i will i will say just my experience you know as just a jewish person listening to kanye's rants is not everyone's but my basic feeling on it from from that angle is i don't feel that he is issuing specific actionable threats i don't feel like he is you know threatening physical violence but i just think it's generally a pretty bad signal in a canary in the coal mine kind of way when people start talking about the Jews and we've sort of seen where that leads. And it increases the difficulty on both sides, right? The difficulty of how to deal with it when an influential person is leading people down a really dangerous path. And also the difficulty from the side of the gatekeeper content moderator side, if you're a social media company of knowing what to do for the same reason

that it was apparently really hard for platforms to kick Trump off when he was president. There's a similar, you know, obviously not as well defined thing, but there's a similar thing with the celebrity economy where it's just harder for platforms to kick off huge celebrities. And there's also a kind of related third thing, which is Kanye either is or was a great artist. I mean, the reason this is so sad for me and everyone I know is that he's like an incredibly important artist. And so it sort of gets into a little bit of an existential question of what is the point of social media or what what are they doing in terms of content moderation. But one would think intuitively that if there's a great artist who has gone off the rails in some way,

it makes it harder to shut them down than if it's just some random person who has no other contribution to society. I totally agree. And I think the reason it's harder to shut them down is the same reason that, you know, Donald Trump's magic, whatever you want to call it, I don't think is easily transferable to a Ron DeSantis. Like Donald Trump was famous to most of the country because of the Celebrity Apprentice before he was president.

And I think same thing with Kanye West. You have someone that famous who that many people love his music and not everyone is paying as close attention to the latest controversy as you and I probably are and a lot of people listening. And so it becomes trickier and more dangerous, I think, to have someone like that spouting off anti-Semitic theories, even if, like you said, he's not calling for actionable violence or anything like that yet. Although I noticed, you know, already there was a headline like the Holocaust Museum of LA has been flooded with anti-Semitic messages after they offered Kanye West a private tour and he turned them down

and now they're just like flooded with anti-Semitism. So it's clearly like the trolls out there and the anti-Semites out there are like taking cues from here. And then, you know, we saw there was the Nazis like unfurled a banner saying Kanye was right over the 405 here in L.A. last weekend. So it's definitely like people do take their cues from this shit, I guess. also a semi-related thing which is i sort of eventually reached the conclusion the longer i hung around these people that there is no easy sort of skeleton key to get you out of the trap that a professional troll can set for you there's just no good way out because a good troll and i mean it's almost like diminishing to call this a troll but it has the same mechanic which is like either you ignore it in which case you try to starve it of oxygen and we went through this a million times with trump right you you either starve it of oxygen in which case you seem like you have no rebuke no recourse you're just sort of silent on it and thereby implicitly i guess taking the high road but it makes it seem like you have no good answer to it

or you're somehow condoning it or complicit in it or you respond to it in any way and there's no good way to respond to it. And so in this case, there's a kind of content moderation version of that, which is either you keep letting someone say, let's DEF CON the Jews, which doesn't seem like a great option,

or you don't let him say that. And then immediately the predictable response, which I did, in fact, then immediately see is, oh, see, that proves him right. You see who really has power in this society, you know, which plays right into the conspiracy theory. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. Like, how do you get out of that? Because I thought it was a very important point that by shutting him down or by taking down the post or by kicking someone off a platform that just feeds the conspiracy theories and say, oh, we were right. This is this is exactly what we're saying. We must have something important to say. And that's why they want to shut us up. Yeah. You always hear that. If you're getting flack, you must be over the target. was kind of the counter response. And I think, look, I didn't set out

to make a set of policy recommendations to Twitter's content moderators or something. I really, I'm a narrative journalist, and I just sort of watch as things unfold and try to put the patterns together. And so my main interest was just, can I watch you guys set the match and watch how you light the kindling?

And I really got way more access to that than I thought I would. And so that was, but from seeing that, I did sort of start to think through, okay, what would I do if I were on the other side of this? And I think that one of the low hanging fruit conclusions is there's no such thing as absolutist content moderation of any kind right we're now in a position where you have elon musk saying i'm going to come in and buy twitter and i'm just going to be a free speech absolutist i think he even used that phrase to describe himself which like bro you're not i mean there's no such thing as a free speech absolutist

there just isn't you yeah i mean first of all he definitely isn't because he's like trying to bribe people to not write about where his private plane goes and all kinds of stuff so but also on a larger level there's no such thing as free speech absolutism because you you always have to pick a thing that you're going to allow or not allow when when elon musk takes over twitter he either will or won't allow doxing or he either will or won't allow you know the, or he either will or won't allow, you know, the easy out that people often try to say is we'll allow anything that is legal under US law. No, you won't. Lots and lots of the stuff is legal that is not and should not be allowed on Twitter. And so there just is no easy out from this. And I think once we're getting to a place where we're having this pretty watered

down simplistic debate that you hear people say, well, I think someone like Kanye's account should be deleted. I think it should be frozen, but not deleted. I think he should be able to say whatever he wants. You can defend any of those positions if you want to, but they're all 25 steps down the causal chain too late. What went wrong is so far up the chain of events that it's like, there's no good options left. Yeah, I totally agree with your point that by the time you start debating content moderation, you're already too far down the path. But then where does the conversation start? Is it that we're just not meant to be connected at this scale? Is there a version of these platforms where, as opposed to, you know,

having an army of people who are content moderating all day long and imposing their own value judgments on this, like, is there an earlier version of these platforms that actually could work? Or is it just like, once you start connecting everyone in the world with this technology, we're fucked

and this is what's going to happen? Yeah, I mean, I'll probably, I imagine, give the answer that a lot of people would give. I mean, this is why I am a narrative person and not a policy person, because I often arrive to the same conclusions that, not always, but that, you know, I think that what accelerates this is the building the entire incentive structure around emotional engagement. So it's not necessarily intrinsic to scale, although scale makes everything hard. It's that when you make it so that there are literal numbers that show you get a high score is by increasing the level of divisiveness, outrage, fear, all the things that we know. It's just really hard for most of us to avoid that

incentive structure because it's designed to suck us in. So you will often hear from the tech people that it's just sort of a neutral emergent property of scale. But, you know, they built it to incentivize this and it worked because they're good at what they do. One potential impact of Kanye's alt-right awakening could be his acquisition of the social media platform Parler, if the sale actually goes through. For listeners who don't spend their days scrolling through Parler, could you talk about what that platform is and what it's like on there these days? What's going on with Parler these days? I would say it's not the most fun place to hang out. You know, a lot of these places, basically, they look like Twitter. You know, Gab is like this. Truth Social, to the extent that it even is functional

these days is like this if you've used something like twitter before you wouldn't go there and be like what is this how does this work you know it would just be like a tweet is called a parlay or something it's called something different you don't retweet it you reach truth It or whatever, but it's basically a clone. And it's hard to see how that is a long-term business model. Like, we're just going to do this thing, but for our tribe, it has never been a transformative business model. It might be enough to sustain itself because these are very low overhead businesses, but it's not going to be the you know, the next world eating, you know, innovation. This is part of the intrinsic business argument for why someone like Elon Musk cannot be

in practice a free speech absolutist. Because when you try that, it turns into 4chan or 8chan or Gap, it turns into a place where the people who felt stifled by not being allowed to say i hate the jews on the last platform are going to come and congregate at your platform and you know again none of this it's like you can't have very clean sort of rawlsian political philosophy rules for any of this stuff because it doesn't it's it's just not that kind of thing it's not a delineated you know formalist thing it's an emergent social thing and so i sort of think of it in my mind as being like hosting a party and there's no rule that says that you can't just host a bunch of people at your party that were kicked out of the last party for saying a bunch of really gross

disgusting but like chances are just think through your mind about like how that party's gonna party that were kicked out of the last party for saying a bunch of really gross, disgusting shit. But like, chances are, just think through your mind about like how that party is going to go, you know, and that's basically what you have. Yeah, I don't think people understand or enough people understand that the only difference between Twitter and 8chan is a whole bunch of content moderation policies that were put in place that Elon Musk now says he probably wants to get rid of. Yeah, yeah. And I don't think it will immediately become that because you do have this kind of first mover. You know, you're starting from a place and that's going to take a long time in relative terms for it to evolve. But you can just imagine anyone who's been into a large gathering of people, you can imagine, OK, let's say you start out the party and you set a vibe

that's like we're going to have a lot of 15 year old boys and we're going to let's say you start out the party and you set a vibe that's like, we're going to have a lot of 15 year old boys and we're going to let them say and do whatever they want. And it's going to be kind of like musty and like dingy and everyone's allowed, everyone's invited to the party, but a lot of people are going to walk in and take one look at it and go like, not for me and then back out. And if you don't have a party where everyone feels welcome, you don't have a functional social network. It's a great point because forget about like the morality of it, right? It's just like, that's not a good business model. On that note, can you figure out like why Kanye would want to buy Parler? Like his pal Trump has Truth Social. Elon now has

Twitter. Like, aren't there enough rich assholes out there who will like let him on their platform yeah i i think part of it is that he wants to be a mogul or perceived as a mogul like those people and he i think thinks especially elon i think he has a little bit of a you know sort of sibling rivalry slash adoration thing but also you know i think a lot of these things are are even in the business world, they're social, like he's friends with Candace Owens, her husband runs parlor, I'm sure they had a meeting and they said, this would be so cool. And you'll advance the flourishing of human civilization. And he said, Okay, let's do it. You know, he makes pretty impulsive decisions, you know. Elon tweeted a meme of like him and Trump and Kanye and owning all their social networks together.

Like, what do you make of this alliance between the three of them who could own these three very Twitter like platforms? Look, it's always, I think, good business messaging to say I'm on a principled mission. And I think probably if you buy Parler, you do think you're on a principled mission because it's not like a blue chip investment. But free speech is very good branding. And I think it's a problem for the left and center left broadly conceived that the perception is that the free speech side of the culture war is the right of center side. I think that's not good for anyone, left or right. And I think it's not necessarily true when you dig into it and look at people's actual

nuanced beliefs, but that clearly has become the messaging deficit. And I can kind of see where the wrong turn sort of happened because, you know, saying provocative, edgy things like, you know, I don't think trans people should have rights and I want to go DEFCON three on the Jews when that gets framed as a free speech debate, which I think is totally disingenuous and misleading. And then the reactionary forces in America are the ones saying, yeah, we love free speech as a kind of fig leaf to say the reactionary shit they want to say. That's bad in many ways. But one of the ways in which it's bad is that then by the nature of negative partisanship and polarization and stuff, then it's like you have Democrats being like, we don't love

free speech. Like that's just never a good look for anyone. And I feel even in my own writing, I feel that tension where it should go without saying, and yet I still say it again and again. I love free speech. I think it's super important. I never want the government coming in and imposing any restrictions on any speech. And yet I then try to go on to make more nuanced arguments about how what this or that racist is doing is not actually a bedrock free speech principle. And actually the first amendment doesn't come into play here because these are private companies. And actually this isn't even about speech because this is about, you know, so I try

to nuance it. And I try to say the tech platforms are just using free speech as a fig leaf to juice their stock prices, which is just obvious when you look at Mark Zuckerberg giving some big keynote address about free speech at Georgetown University. He hasn't even done the reading. He doesn't even know what he's talking about. But no matter how many caveats you give or no matter how much you try to sort of nuance it, to some people, you come out looking like you're saying

the people who love free speech are over here and i'm over here and that's just not a good look yeah i think the the real challenge is you don't want to be in a position where you say like our ears should not hear these dangerous ideas or these awful statements because this is a country where everyone gets to spout off their really horrible ideas in and their hateful rhetoric even if they want to right now just because you have a right to say hateful horrible shit doesn't mean you have a right to then like reach millions of people with that speech it doesn't mean that we won't try to ostracize you that we won't try to marginalize you that we won't try to ostracize you that we won't try to marginalize you that we won't try to like boycott your you know uh if you're if you're a business

or like you know adidas if they want they can drop kanye as they did because like that you know there's no there's no right to be on twitter yeah freedom of speech is not freedom of reach and so you you you do see this i i i hope that people are at least conversant with that at this point i feel like we spent sort of the first i do think yeah three or four years of trump kind of making that distinction and i think now people get okay if kanye west wants to go stand on a soapbox in you know central park and talk about the jews like great i don't want the fbi to come and take him away nor do i want you know tv cameras to come and amplify him saying that like i i think he should just stay on his soapbox and be marginalized

now i don't know entirely where that marginalization should stop i'm a little conflicted about should an odious person not be allowed to have a bank account should they not be allowed to stay in a hotel like that that gets gets much dicier. But in terms of amplification of the speech itself, it's very tricky, but it's not a First Amendment issue. No. I mean, speaking of the marginalization, like the right wing media ecosystem does seem to be splintering into smaller echo chambers like Parler and Truth Social, both because people like Kanye and Trump and various alt-right figures are getting kicked off platforms like Twitter and Instagram, and also because they're choosing to self-segregate. Do you have thoughts on the

political repercussions of this trend? Like, are there any unintended consequences you think we should be aware of now that all of these alt-right figures are sort of going into these spaces where they're not seen as much by the rest of us? Yeah. Well, again, there is kind of a no good scenarios thing here. That's just a lesser of two evils. Most of the research I've seen does suggest that when you fragment and quarantine and make people go away, it was actually the word quarantine was used in terms of Reddit content moderation in my life way before it was used in terms of COVID.

So they were talking about the metaphorical quarantining of different groups that had violated their rules. And it does seem to work. It doesn't go to zero, but it seems like the threats and the hate speech and the violent rhetoric does go down because there's just less of a safety in numbers thing. But it doesn't make it go away. It happens in numbers thing. But it doesn't make it go away. It happens in the shadows. I've never really been sold on the idea that sunlight is the best disinfectant in all cases because it just doesn't seem to be, you know, look, we shot we are shining a big spotlight and how much Kanye hates the Jews and it doesn't really seem to be helping, you know, so it's

like not helping. Yeah, it's a trade off. But I think all things being equal you gotta have rules when people violate the rules you have to do something about it again and you can see how this is not the punk rock position this is like the school marm position but i mean it just is what it is like i remember going to um the info wars website and reading their terms of service and they had dozens of rules no one on this site shall use hateful language no one shall make threats there's rules everywhere you know that's that's what living in a society is we live in a society yeah you know that's what you you live

with other people you make rules that govern yourself self-governing is that right um so last week i talked to um anand girdadas about his new book, The Persuaders, and we touched on Hillary Clinton's deplorable comment, which you write a lot about in your book as well. You come to what I think is a pretty fair conclusion that a lot of these alt-right figures just aren't looking to have any kind of reasonable debate about politics. You know, they're just looking to burn it all down. If they can't be won over, do you think they can be marginalized again, since they were marginalized at one point? I mean, like, how do we have a functioning democracy that's filled with a bunch of people who, to quote the title of your book, were able

to hijack the national conversation? Yeah. I mean, I'm intrigued by the thing that, you know, Anand is getting at in the persuaders that no one should be written off as permanently irredeemable. And I'm drawn to that just as a person. I mean, you know, my wife is a public defender. The motto in that world is you're not the worst mistake you've ever made and we don't write you off permanently. And now it's hard to be, you know, perfectly equanimous and Christlike, you know, in the face of people who, you know, are not only doing shitty things, but show no sign of wanting to stop doing shitty things. Like that's, that's not an easy position to be in. And it's, you don't want to just naively to stay with the metaphor. You don't

want to just always turn the other cheek. If people are being very clear that like, I have no intention of changing or trying to redeem myself, but nor do you want to write out that possibility. So I like the notion of, you know, deep canvassing and trying to meet people where they are. I think all that stuff shows promise. It might not be the most immediately scalable thing, but I think it. But I think you got to start somewhere. It's not my nature to want to punish our way out of a problem. I'm just temperamentally more interested in carrots than sticks. But it's really hard. Like you say, the people that I spent time with, they're not looking for a path out and

they'll tell you that. So it's not like I wanna do some kind of like asymmetrical hands tied behind the back. Like you gotta listen to where people are at and part of meeting people where they are is to say, okay, this person's not trying to have a good faith dialogue with me. And I do think the media can get really hoodwinked into making the blanket assumption

that everybody is meeting them in good faith when you get all these kind of manipulation campaigns and you see this when there's a flood of tweets about something and and the the media is very easily convinced that like oh people are really mad about this thing or people are really worked up about this thing when it could be 200 people just deciding to drive that into the media's consciousness. I mean, this is another sense in which I guess what people would say is Twitter is not real life, but what it really is, is a kind of algorithmic manipulation where you don't have to break any rules. You don't have to be at some anonymous, you know, foreign agent. You just have to coordinate with a few of

your buddies and learn the rhythms of how to tweet in such a way that you can get something trending and then once something is trending every journalist sees it because twitter is you know half journalists and then you're off to the races i mean i saw them do this again and again and again so when a system is that easily hijackable, and it's also the lifeblood of our contemporary information economy, it's just not a recipe for good outcomes. No. And I think in terms of persuasion, it's like those alt-right figures that you covered, like maybe you don't want to spend too much of your time trying to persuade them, but I think we should realize that they are spending their time trying to persuade other people.

And they're trying to bring people into the fold. And those people that they're trying to persuade should be up for grabs for the rest of us. And also you can think about the root causes of why parts of the message are resonating. So there are moments in history, this being one of them, where let's burn it all to the ground is particularly appealing. And some of that is just because it feels energetic and cool. But there's also very substantive reasons why people feel all kinds of misery in terms of their not only economic lives, but also their sort of lingering bigotry, or but also because of their malaise and lack of being able to make meaning of their lives

i mean there's all kinds of stews of reasons that vary individually and so you can write off the content of the message like you don't have to sit there being like the jews like pro or con you can bracket that but you can say like what part of this is resonating that isn't just people suck and they're irredeemable right what part of this is hitting a chord and is there any way to hit that chord that is actually productive and can can you hit that chord by saying we're going to give you a good union job uh you know yeah building a light rail or something yeah it's yeah and it's it's probably you probably don't hit that with just a list of policy proposals, nor just a bunch of content moderation. There's got to be something deeper there that can actually pull people out of this, I think.

Yeah. Andrew Morantz, thank you so much for joining Offline. This was fantastic. Appreciate it. Thank you. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music.

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