Offline with Jon Favreau - TikTok Ban Returns, AOC Hounded by Protesters, and Jon Ronson on the End of Public Shaming

Episode Date: March 10, 2024

Jon Ronson, author of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and host of the BBC podcast “Things Fell Apart,” joins Offline to discuss culture wars—why do they originate in America? Are they going too far? Are we all becoming immune to the public-shaming superbug? But first! Max and Jon break down the latest bombardment of everyone’s favorite algorithm (TikTok ban) and everyone’s favorite politician (AOC being screamed at). 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.

You know, there's psychopaths out there. There's monsters out there. But most people aren't. Most people are just a mess. Good people do stupid things. Stupid people do good things. And that's just a healthier way to perceive our fellow humans than, you know, creating, as we did on Twitter,

a stage for constant artificial high drama where everybody's either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It's not true. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Max Fisher. And you just heard from today's guest, journalist, author, and filmmaker, Jon Ronson. Jon's the host of the BBC Radio's podcast, Things Fell Apart, a series that explores the host of the BBC Radio's podcast, Things Fell Apart, a series that explores

the origins of different culture wars. The newest season is specifically about the culture wars that started during the pandemic, when being stuck at home, glued to our screens, made us all a little crazy. I heard about that. Yeah, yeah. But John's been covering topics like these culture wars, public shaming, conspiracy theories, long before we all had to pay attention to them. In 2001, he followed a small-time radio host by the name of Alex Jones for a film and book about extremists. In 2015, he published So You've Been Publicly Shamed, which was a first-of-its-kind book exploring cancel culture before it was called cancel culture. John has a real sixth sense for these types of stories and really an incredible ability to get all kinds of people to open up to him. He's amazing.

I love his work so much. He's so great on Mike. I have been following him since I was in college. I'm a huge fan. Just a lovely, thoughtful man. We had a fantastic conversation. We talked about why culture wars are such an American phenomenon. The lingering effects of the pandemic on our national psyche,

whether public shaming still works, and what the hell happened to Alex Jones. So much. So much. So much. And so little. But first, Max, it looks like Congress is making another run at banning TikTok. A really sincere run.

They're really going for it. Yeah, they want to ban it unless ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the platform, divests from the company within six months so that it's then American owned. On Thursday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced this legislation unanimously in a 50 to nothing vote, bipartisan.

I didn't even know there were 50 votes on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. I was surprised by that too. I know that's a small point, but I'm like 50 votes. What is this committee? Are they letting everyone on this committee? You've been in a meeting with 50 people.

You can't get anything done. Yeah, well, apparently they did. That's true. All 50 of them voted to ban TikTok or to ban TikTok if it doesn't divest. So TikTok users not happy about this. Congressional offices were bombarded with calls after TikTok sent out a push notification encouraging users to call their congressperson to, quote, stop a TikTok shutdown. One house staffer estimated that their office received over a thousand calls, mostly from teenagers. One caller reportedly said, quote, if you ban TikTok, I will kill myself.

Don't do that another threatened uh another january 6th riot uh there were multiple posts about how joe biden will lose the election if he signs the law uh which the white house has said it's in favor of and and one post just said let's eat them who are they gonna eat who it's a modest proposal um max what do you make of the ever so slightly dramatic reaction so okay let me give you a like patented wishy-washy on the one hand on the other that's why you're here that's why that's why i'm to give you non-take takes look we're from the obama so on the one hand like yes it sounds like many of these calls were like pretty silly like there was a political story writing those it was very funny where they're clutching their pearls over

the fact that one of the callers identified themselves as mr bend over i'm so glad you brought that up because i had made a note to myself completely forgot um and there was like what there was a quote from one house staffer that said it's so so bad our phones are not stop ringing they're teenagers and old people saying they spend their whole day in the app. We can't take it away. On one of them, as the girl spoke, a very clear school bell rang in the background. So it's like, yes, it's easy to roll your eyes at this. On the other hand, it's young people getting involved in politics.

Seriously, over an issue that affects them, that they care about, like calling their member of Congress. Like, would I have placed a different call over a different issue? Yeah, probably. But I don't know. Although apparently it backfired because a lot of the members of Congress said all of these calls that TikTok has successfully organized and urged people to make sort of proves our point about the platform and how much influence it can have when it wants to. And I don't look, I think there's a difference between

like a Chinese owned platform sort of influencing American politics and kids just calling their representatives because they're upset about something, which is we absolutely want to happen. We have talked a lot here about the addictive nature of social media, TikTok, Twitter, whatever it may be. And I was trying to substitute in my mind,

instead of TikTok, imagine this was all like cigarettes and people calling in to be like, I can't live without my cigarettes. And you're like, okay. That's exactly, it's so funny. You mentioned exactly what I was thinking. I was like, okay, it's a little dystopian that the addiction product company is using its addictive product to get its addicted users to tell Congress don't take our addiction away. And it would be like Philip Morris putting little cards in all the Marvel packets saying, call your congressman and tell them not to regulate cigarettes. cigarettes but like on the other hand i do think that this is different than what congress and

other critics are alleging tiktok is doing or could do like this is not algorithmic right like manipulation yes they're not like radicalizing people who would otherwise be in favor of banning tiktok to suddenly oppose it they're not like tricking people or manipulating them it's just like it's just a push alert saying Congress is trying to ban TikTok, which I think is mostly true. Like I understand it divest or ban, but like who's going to buy it? It's a trillion dollars.

Yeah. And mobilizing people around. Elon Musk. Please, no. Please, please, no. We don't deserve this. I know. We deserve a lot.

Give us a win. Let's be clear. Yeah, right. But not this. So I think that it just like, like meta has done so much worse. I know. And it just like the fact that we are singling out TikTok. Mark Zuckerberg, not a member of the CCP though.

Right. As far as we know. Right, exactly. There's like the real issue here is that it's Chinese. The real issue is not that it's addictive because if that were true, then we'd be going after all the social media companies. The real issue is not that it's addictive, because if that were true, then we'd be going after all the social media companies. The real issue is not that it's manipulating people over its politics. I don't think that's really what it's doing here. But very famously, Meta deliberately manipulated people's politics to achieve political ends

during the Trump administration. We know from fucking leaked meeting notes. We know from internal memos that Meta said, we are going to put our finger on the algorithm and platform moderation to please Republicans and please Trump so that we will get political outcomes we like. They actually did that. And even though this, I agree, is not manipulating people, I do think it lends credence to the idea that if they wanted to, the Chinese government through TikTok could manipulate American voters. So that's true. That's true of all the platforms. I totally agree. At the same time, to me, isn't this kind of evidence that TikTok is not putting its thumb on the scale because TikTok, the content on it is very famously or infamously, depending on who you talk to, anti-Biden? No, I think the Chinese government would love Trump.

Really? Yeah. No, Trump has passed these huge tariffs on China. He's a disaster for the US-China relationship. I really disagree. I think that anything that causes chaos within the United States is a win for foreign adversaries. And I think Trump is a chaos agent.

I think that's very true for Russia and for Putin. But I really think like when I would talk to people who were like, you know, in policy circles in Beijing or like you can't call up Xi Jinping, obviously, or I can't. But when you would talk to people like, if I were a better reporter, talk to people who like are in these worlds, they are like really terrified of Trump. And they specifically think that Trump brought things to this breaking point. The Chinese economy is incredibly reliant on the United States and is only growing more so because they're moving back to exports. It's this whole thing we don't have to get into. No, I think they're probably weighing Trump's policies, which they don't like with just

general destabilization of the political system in the United States, which they do like. Look, I don't know. Again, it doesn't have to be this much of like a concerted campaign. The dangers are out there. But to sympathize with all the kids who are calling, I was also thinking about when I was a kid and I was like glued to the television every day and glued to my Nintendo every day, if the next day someone would be like, oh, yeah, that's shutting it off for good. I would have been mad.

Yeah. I would have thought that that was like a huge part of my life that was going away. Right. So I get it. Yeah, I get it for sure. It does feel like, speaking of Biden, a bit of a lose-lose for Biden here. So the White House has been working with Democrats and Republicans in Congress on the language of this legislation and improving it or whatever or to their liking. So the White House is backing it. We don't know if it's going to get to Biden's desk, this bill, because it's, you know, with a 50 to nothing vote in a House committee does, I think, bode well for it

passing the House, but then the Senate could be another story. You know, I think like the Chuck Schumers of the world, those people, I don't know if they're into the ban, but if it does get to Biden's desk, he could sign the TikTok ban and get a lot of young people very angry who are already pretty angry at him. Yeah, right. Or he could let it continue and have all these young people continue to consume a ton of anti-Biden content. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, who threatened to ban TikTok when he was president, that was the first threat from Donald Trump. Last night, he said he supports TikTok because he hates Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, who are the true enemy of the people.

Well. Exactly. Exactly. Raptors testing the fences. I think it's a very shrewd play from Trump. Even though it's a complete flip-flop from where he was, he knows Biden has problems with young people. He knows that this potential, the chaos on TikTok,

to the extent that there's chaos in the political realm, helps him. I could see him. I mean, look, on the merits of the ban, much less political merits, and I agree with your read of the politics of it. Like, I just don't think that this is a good idea. I think that if they were saying we're banning infinite scroll across social media, we're banning promotional algorithms, I would be

standing up in my chair, like with tears in my eyes clapping. That's a promise. Mr. Trump, Mr. Trump. Look, whoever it is, they're going to get a big thank you on this pod from me. Yeah, no, I agree. But the fact that they are, the effect of just banning one platform and continuing to fail to regulate the other platforms just means that those other platforms like Instagram, like Snapchat are going to absorb TikTok users and continue to do to those users all of the things that people are accusing TikTok of potentially doing. Yeah. And I do think that this is not because it's Chinese-owned, this is because of the nature of the platform itself. I think TikTok has

some drawbacks that are even worse than the other platforms, in that you're not choosing anything, it's just the algorithm spitting videos at you that seem true, that are often not true, especially in the political realm. So there's that challenge.

But I do, look, I would be most comfortable with a solution where the United States government felt confident that the Chinese government didn't really have control over the algorithm or didn't have influence over the algorithm. And so that would, if there was some kind of, and we've talked about this in a previous episode, but if there was some solution that could get us there, I'd feel good. The outright ban

is tough. Yeah, and I would actually urge people to go back and listen to our episode where we really dove into like, here is ByteDance's plan for how to like, how is TikTok in the United States? How's oversight of it in the United States? That I don't think that I am quite, to be

candid, like technically savvy enough to fully say like this is a good or bad plan. But I will say that the people I talked to convinced me that it would do a lot to sever the company from meddling by the Chinese government. Yeah, that's right. All right. Speaking of youth activism, this week while leaving a show of, apparently it was dune 2 was it really yeah good i looked it up it's dune 2 that's my freaking girl so uh alex aoc yeah uh she was at uh she was at dune 2 she's walking out of dune 2 five stars uh with her partner and was confronted by protesters demanding that she call israel's war in g Gaza a genocide. In a viral video of the exchange, the congresswoman slams the protesters. Let's play a clip.

Cut it and you're going to cut this and you're going to clip this so that it's completely out of context. I already said that it was and y'all are just going to pretend that it wasn't over and over again. It's fucked up, man. If you're not helping these people and you're not helping them. You're not helping them. Oh, man. Oh, boy.

Fun to be in Congress. This video came the same week as another in which climate action protesters confronted Senator Joe Manchin during a talk at the Harvard Kennedy School. You've sold our futures and you've gotten rich doing it. You sick fuck. futures and you've gotten rich doing it. You sick fuck. How dare you? They posted that clip. This was

Climate Defiance, this group. They posted that clip and the tweet was, We called Joe Manchin a sick fuck. Great. Congratulations. Congratulations on joining. I called him a brutal murderer too. I was like, what? I wanted to talk about these because it does feel They called him like a brutal murderer too. And I was like, what? Yeah. It's just.

So I wanted to talk about these because it does feel like a very online phenomena that what protest has become. Yeah. Or like one aspect of protest now that we are in this intensely online age of social media. Right. It has sort of, I think, warped the incentives around protesting and sort of the strategy and effectiveness of protesting. But what do you think? Yeah, no, I was like, boy, there are a few things going on here. One is that just like confrontationalism, ideological maximalism, and in some cases,

misrepresentation or lying lying as in the EC video, like for clout. Like we have convinced ourselves that if you go viral or if you are the loudest voice online, then that means that you're doing activism and changing the world because you're getting all these likes and shares. You're getting all this attention. And isn't attention the only thing that matters? Isn't that the only currency that means anything? And there's also this thing of like this outrage and identity incentive that I think we've all internalized from spending so much time online to make politics about who is the most, who is just the most, who is the, who's the truest progressive, the purest progressive, or if you're

on the right, who's the truest MAGA, the most MAGA. And that makes you the like vanguard. And if you are someone like, God forbid, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who like is trying to work within the system, then you are a betrayal of everything that we stand for and you're the enemy and we have to tear you down. Yes. And most sympathetic view, right? You are a young person who is outraged and upset about the war in Gaza and about the continued threat of climate change. Yeah, me too. Right? Me too. And you're like, all right, I'm not seeing anything done.

The political system isn't working here. Yeah. The war has continued. I have written letters. I've called my member of Congress. I've shown up at protests and nothing is getting done. And so I'm going to go be more confrontational, right? Yeah. I think the challenge is confusing what you just said, attention for persuasion.

Because what you want, your goal is to end the conflict. And to end the conflict, you have to, by necessity, change people's minds from where they are right now. And so then you have to ask yourself, if I want to change minds, is making people somewhat uncomfortable and really confronting them changing their minds? Sometimes, yeah, that's a completely legitimate form of protest. And that does sometimes change people's minds. It can shame them, whatever else. Does screaming at someone who agrees with you, maybe more than 98% of all US politicians,

is that the most effective way to change something? It is not. So I think there's, I think there's like a charitable thing you can say about this kind of approach generally to politics. And then maybe a like, I don't want to say uncharitable, a like more critical thing you can say. I think the charitable thing you say is that there is a, there's a kind of, I think, legit tactical, at least debate here, which is how much support should be withheld from Biden in order to pressure him to change positions in Gaza.

And this is part of the campaign on AOC specifically is that she has been campaigning for Biden specifically. And it's like, a la the uncommitted votes in state primaries, should she be refusing to do that to kind of like hold his feet to the fire and force him to be like, look, if you want to get reelected, you have to go with me on this. And like, I could see both sides of that argument. It's a valid debate. It's worth having out. It does, I should say also this like pressure on AOC. It's like, oh, you're just a boring Democrat. You're not a real progressive. Does precede the Gaza thing. Yes. So there's also just a like online holier than thou, purer than thou thing.

Right. Right. From people who have never stepped foot in the political arena in any kind of way. Yeah. And then the people who do step foot in the political arena, which by necessity means that you are going to compromise in order to get some stuff done, even if you maintain your progressive values and you vote as progressive as possible. That's just the nature of stepping into the political arena.

And, you know, there is a satisfaction in just being pure. I think that there's, yes, I think that's right. And I think there's kind of a like online slacktivism to that. Like, I don't think the point that you make is a good one. There's like, why are you going after OC? She agrees with you 98%. I think that is actually why people like that are often the target of these campaigns

because they're just the easiest to reach and they're easiest to shout at. And I think that that kind of speaks to the like Kony 2012 of all this. And it just like, we're going to yell at the people who are easiest to yell at. Tell the Kony 2012 for all the. And it just like, we're going to yell at the people who are easiest to yell. Tell the Kony 2012 for all the folks who missed out. We're not elder millennials. I'm sorry. I forget sometimes. So, okay. Joseph Kony was this horrible

warlord operating in Uganda for many years. And this NGO released this video called Kony 2012. There was this very slick 30 minute, like Vimeo YouTube video that was just about how Joseph Kony was very bad. And the stated purpose of the video was participate in our like online campaign by clicking like, share, subscribe, and then go to our rallies. And that means that you personally

will be stopping the warlord Joseph Kony by raising awareness. And it was kind of the peak of like making change. Performative, yeah. Performative, just forward a viral post to people who already agree with you. And it's like, now it's kind of the byword for when it's like, not just unfunctional,

but is actually, I think, arguably harmful because it's diverting the energy that people have and the people want to spend on this issue, like Joseph Kony or like climate change or like Gaza, away from more useful ends and towards the kind of like, we'll yell at AOC on Twitter because that'll be the thing. It's also just, there's a, and I think that, again, sort of the social media gives you the illusion of political organizing.

You're organizing online, you're doing all this. But there's not a lot of strategy of political organizing. You're organizing online. You're doing all this. But there's not a lot of strategy anymore to organizing because go yell at Joe Manchin if you want. Fine. I've yelled at Joe Manchin from this studio many times. But Joe Manchin is on his way out. He is retiring.

There is nothing to gain from shaming Joe Manchin anymore. Other than it's emotionally satisfying and you get some shares. That's exactly it. And you don't even have to believe that Joe Manchin allowing the biggest investment in climate in history and voting for it. I know. You can still say it wasn't enough. I don't think it was enough, right? Yeah.

But that aside, the guy is a retiring senator from West Virginia. There is nothing else to gain from Joe Manchin. It's all over, folks. And it's like, how did those people get to the point where someone or they thought it was a good idea or someone told them it was a good idea or it was an effective idea to waste their precious time going to Joe Manchin and screaming at him so they could post it online. And the same thing with AOC. If AOC turned around and said, genocide, genocide, genocide, would that have changed a thing about the war in Gaza? Absolutely not. I know, but it's an easy ideological limit. So all of this speaks to me, for me. I think this really big epochal shift in how political activism works and does not work, and you kind of alluded to this. Can I tell you

about this? There's a study I cite all the time. I think it's so fascinating, completely changed how I think about political activism. Okay, it's by this woman, Erica Chenoweth, who's now at Harvard University. So the way, and you referenced this, the way that political organizing used to work, like think of SNCC, like in the civil rights movement, where you have to go organize people in person, you have to build an organization that has a hierarchy, there are officers, people are training each other, it takes all this time to build this actual grassroots organization. And then, yes, you organize some protests, but you also send the leaders of SNCC to go negotiate with politicians behind closed doors and say, hey, you saw our

protest. We have all this power. Here are the things we want. Here's what we want to achieve. And the way that protest works now is that something will spread on Facebook. Think of the Arab Spring. So I'm not just trying to like poo-poo this. Something will go viral on Facebook. There will be a ton of energy on Facebook or Twitter or whatever. And then there will be a million people on the streets, which is amazing. It's incredible. And we've seen this more and more over the last two years. It's huge mass protests like have never happened before. So like what's happening and why does it seem like activism is not working as much? So, okay. Erica Chenoweth was like, let's look at the data. And she tracked two things over the last hundred years. She tracked the frequency of mass protests year by year, but then she also tracked the success rate

of those protests. And she was looking specifically at how successful mass protests are at like bringing about democracy reforms. So it's a little bit of a specific thing, but just think of it as a kind of like benchmark for how activism works and doesn't work. And what she found was that both the frequency and the success rate of protests were rising consistently throughout the 20th century. More protests, more successful. Think about the wave of democratization around the world, people power movements, and that both of those peaked in the early 2000s with two and three mass protests succeeding, which

is huge. That's a lot, two and three. But then there's this sudden change in the mid 2000s with two and three mass protests succeeding, which is huge. That's a lot, two and three. But then there's this sudden change in the mid-2000s. What happens in the mid-2000s, of course? The internet, social media, the phones. And all of a sudden, the frequency of mass protests actually continues to go way, way up, but their success rate overnight drops in half. And then it drops in half again. And now we are at a point where we've gone from two and three mass protests succeeding to only one in six. And so like what's going on? Well, her thesis and a few other people's thesis, like a few things like authoritarians have got smart, like outmaneuvering protests, but that a big part of it is that now political activism

happens on the internet. Those grassroots organizations just don't get built. Like the SNCCs just don't happen. You don't have people who are leading it. You don't have these kinds of structured hierarchies. So you get a million people in the street, but then there's kind of no way to direct them. There's no way to direct all that energy. The protest dissipates. You don't have people who are leading the movement who can say, I'm going to go behind closed doors and negotiate with, let's say a Joe Biden to say, here's what we want. And we're going to get off the streets if you give us this. And that now it looks like protests are much more successful and you see much more activism. And I think that includes on a smaller scale with like

these crazy protest videos of people screaming at EOC, but they suddenly feel like they are much less successful. And I think that's a big part of why. Yeah. Being loud is not necessarily being effective and attention is a no substitute for persuasion. Right. That's how I see this. All right. Before the break, sometimes it's nice to take a break from troubling news about politics with some troubling news about the hellscape AI is creating. Is it? Wow. Tommy sat down with Crooked producers Elijah Cohn, Ben Heathcote, and Caroline Dunphy to talk about the Timu on acid version of Willy Wonka's factory, alligators at Wendy's, and possibly the worst Bill Ackerman take.

I'm on for that. I was going to say. You got me. That's the bait right there. To hear this exclusive series, subscribe to our Friends of the Pod community only at crooked.com slash friends. Also, go pre-order our book, Democracy or Else, How to Save America in 10 Easy Steps. The perfect guide to get you through the 2024 election cycle. And Crooked's donating the profits to support Vote Save America and groups that are organizing for 2024.

As of today, we are 20% to our pre-order goal and to getting on that New York Times bestseller list, which let's be honest, that's all that really matters. Nothing else matters. So yeah, go to crooked.com slash books and you can pre-order your copy of Democracy or Else Now. It's out in late June. Check out my new series with Aaron Ryan of Hysteria. It's called How We Got Here. Each week, Aaron and I explore a big question behind the week's headlines and tell a story that answers that question. This week is the weird, wild story of how Democrats invented voter primaries and why this uniquely American practice might be quietly driving a lot of the polarization and extremism that define today's politics. Find new episodes, John, every Saturday on the What A Day feed. You're going to love it.

All right. After the break, my conversation with John Ronson about finding empathy beneath the culture wars. John Ronson, welcome to Offline. Hi, John. Hi. Thanks for having me. Thanks for doing it. So you have this fantastic podcast series called Things Fell Apart about the origin of different culture wars. And the newest season, each episode is about culture wars that began during the pandemic, specifically in the spring of 2020.

So we talk about culture wars all the time on this show, on Pod Save America. And whenever I use the term, I always wonder if it's either ill-defined or too broadly defined as like every argument that isn't about the economy. How do you define a culture war? As every argument that isn't about the economy. But that's not a perfect definition at all, because kind of everything's about the economy in one way or another. Yeah.

But that is kind of the best possible. And I think that's a good definition for another reason, which is that my conspiracy theory is that our overlords in tech and politics enjoy us having culture wars. They enjoy us yelling at each other because then they can just get richer, they can profit off of the outrage. And so the fact that, you know, our culture wars aren't economic based doesn't mean that it doesn't benefit the economies of the billionaires. Yes, this is something I've been trying to figure out, at least politically, for a long time now, which is the last campaign I was on in 2012, I was working for Barack Obama. And the whole campaign against Mitt Romney was about economics and tax cuts and the middle class and economic mobility. And we haven't had campaigns like that here in a long time.

And our politics isn't like that either. And I wonder, since you have been reporting on so many of these cultural wars, what you ascribe sort of the transition away from class-based arguments to identity-based arguments to? The rise of identity politics. In one of the episodes of Things Fell Apart, one of my interviewees says that. He says that America, and I think Britain too, is a class-based society that pretends to itself that it's an identity-based society, which I thought was a very interesting perspective.

And yeah, I think the rise of identity politics came hand in hand with a rise in us defining ourselves as being in opposition to other people. And all of that was obviously stoked by the tech oligarchs who realised that the more outraged we were, the more engaged we would be. Yeah, and we became trapped in it. Not that there hasn't been. I mean, obviously, there's been culture wars since the 1960s. Right. But there was a dramatic escalation six weeks into lockdown, actually.

For six weeks, we were all pretty compliant. And then suddenly, after six weeks, we became like coiled springs, just losing faith in our institutions and in our neighbors. And yeah, extraordinarily, so many of the culture wars that consume us today all emerged within days of each other in mid-May 2020. And why do you, I want to get to that. Before we do, what do you think, I've seen you say that America is the land where culture wars begin,

which feels depressing but accurate. You're originally from the UK, you now live here. What do you think it is about America that makes us fertile breeding ground for so many culture wars, even though, you know, the rest of the world has social media and is connected and everything else? What is it about America? I actually don't think Britain is really any better than America when it comes to succumbing to cultures. And by the way, I think we should say that many culture wars are necessary. Many very positive things have come from culture wars. What I found quite startling was the debilitating nature of the ways the wars were being fought, the disproportionate impact it was having on our mental health. The reason why I wanted to start making this show

was because I'd see friends fall apart. They'd go down rabbit holes and they couldn't get back out again. And it was impacting their mental health in very deleterious ways. And they became like trapped and all they could do was lash out and lash out and lash out. And that happens in Britain just as much in America. Sometimes I think that the reason why most of my culture war stories are American is actually because Americans are just better than Brits at talking about their inner lives and like telling their stories and so on.

That's interesting. Because, yeah, so maybe a lot of them emerged from America, but they've really taken over the world. So, yeah, you mentioned the pandemic. That's the theme of the second season. You know, one theme of this show has been that we all lost our minds a bit during the pandemic because we were stuck home glued to our screens all day. What is your take on the social and political ramifications of that period, which it feels

like we are still grappling with? Right. Well, for a start, I feel quite optimistic, possibly foolishly optimistic. But I think Ron DeSantis' abject failure to make any headway was encouraging, I thought. Now, you can't just put that down to the fact that people saw him as the culture war candidate and there was a move against that. Also, he was a pretty terrible candidate in every way, including charisma and so on. However, the fact that people really didn't buy his Florida is where woke goes to die stuff, I found quite encouraging. I don't know if you feel the same way,

that maybe we started to feel, are we being, you know, are we being manipulated here? Are we, you know, being encouraged to? I do. What do you think? I do find it somewhat hopeful because the reason I do is I think that most people, like when you sit down and ask most American voters what concerns them, they will usually talk about, you know, economic well-being or in this country, since the Dobbs decision, they'll talk about lack of reproductive choice, but things that really affect their lives. And some of these culture wars do seem distant,

I think, from the lives that most people live. And so I don't think that the salience of them, when you get down to actually walking into the voting booth and choosing, is as powerful outside the extremes and especially the right. Yeah. However, one reason why I think they flourish in America is because of the polarization of the media here. One of the episodes of the second season of Things Fill Apart is about this family in Washington state who escaped lockdown when the restrictions were lifted. They were Twilight fans. And so they decided to go on a Twilight-themed camping adventure to Forks, Washington, which is where Twilight was set. So as they pull into Forks, they suddenly notice that they're being followed by heavily armed townspeople.

When they go to the grocery store to buy shrimp, it's like a Western. These townspeople are like surrounding their bus. And then when they go to the campsite, people are driving past shooting guns in the air then then they hear the sound of chainsaws and and now and people are chopping down trees to keep them barricaded into their campground and and when everybody you know they just said we're just we're just twilight fans on a camping trip and it turned out that the reason why all of this happened to the family was because the townspeople had got it into their heads that they were Antifa. And they were out, this family of six people were Antifa out to destroy this tiny forest town. And the reason why the townspeople felt that was because of the extraordinarily polarised media in America. The right-wing media was terrifying people

into saying that Antifa was this clear and present threat. And on the other hand, the left-wing media would kind of go the opposite way, saying that, oh, no, it's all just freedom fighters and looting is just another way of redistributing wealth. And so you had this sort of somewhat dysfunctional polarization and in the midst of it, real world horrors are happening to this family. Yeah. And it's such a great example and it's a fantastic story. And I think it used to be here that it was, you know, you could blame Fox News for that and to an extent you still can, but a lot of this polarization happens online,

right? And on the right and to a lesser extent on the left. What I really enjoyed about Things Fall Apart is that you tell stories about cultural wars that either start on the left or don't fit neatly into any ideological box. And I'm thinking about the episodes on the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer and the hierarchy of trauma. What drew you to those stories? You know, I hate the phrase, the great awokening. It's a right-wing phrase that's,

you know, annoying. However, I have been really interested in trying to figure out how come these conflicts that have been on campuses for as long as we can remember. I mean, when I was at college in the mid-2010s, which was that these debates suddenly left colleges and entered the workforce, entered newsrooms and so on. And I noticed just in my own life, a big rise of activist journalism. And activist journalism is very positive in lots of ways, but I think it becomes too much the default journalism than it comes with a cost. So I was really interested in, well, how did it happen?

These arguments that stayed within campuses suddenly burst out into the world. And one of the reasons why I think that happened was the concept creep of the word trauma. And the episode traces that, how PTSD very appropriately grew. At first, PTSD was very much about people who'd been caught up in wars and sexual assault. And then it grew to include emergency workers, firefighters and police and so on. But then the word trauma, that book, the Bessel van der Kolk... Body Keeps the Score. The Body Keeps the Score became lockdown's biggest bestseller, huge bestseller. So everybody started thinking about trauma during lockdown.

And as a result, I think it entered the workforce in a way that was troublesome, that you had younger journalists emerging from colleges and saying you can't print that because it would be traumatizing to people. Trauma became a kind of weapon in the culture war as opposed to a diagnosis. Yeah. That was my take on it too, because I read that book. And I mean, what the book lays out is that trauma is, you know, PTSD is not just, like you said, having been in a war or being sexually assaulted, is that you can have trauma based on something that happened to you as a child, whether it was family trauma, whatever else.

And there's different gradations of trauma, right? And so you might have a little PTSD. And so that's fine to have this huge range of what counts as trauma. But when you use it, but what happens now is it's used as a weapon or to kind of wall yourself off from anything that makes you feel uncomfortable or bad? Which is how the story that you tell was how it manifested there. Well, there's one extraordinary story that took place at a college where the students thought that being forced to read Plato was traumatizing. And so they started protesting the lecturer. And the lecturer really did have PTSD. And she said, look, this creating a hierarchy of trauma where her trauma mattered

more than their much more theoretical trauma of being forced to read Plato. Yeah. And the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping story I found fascinating because here you have this sort of like right-wing paramilitia group up to no good, armed to the teeth, definitely like hates the government, is like plotting something bad. But then there is this need to label them also as like a white supremacist group, even though that wasn't part of it. And it's like, why do you need the white supremacist label when they're bad enough? Well, I mean, I found this fascinating that, yeah, you had these young disenfranchised guys radicalized not by racism, but by Jordan Peterson. That was like their entry point. I mean,

the guy who I was focusing on, Brandon Caserta, his entry point into being radicalized was reading Jordan Peterson. He was a schlubby guy who felt like he was failing in life and his room was untidy. He read 12 Rules for Life, straightened himself out, started dressing better, started dating. But then Jordan Peterson led him to reading, you know, anarchist philosophy books and so on, and it became more and more radicalised, and then lockdown happened. And in Michigan, I think the lockdown was especially draconian and weird. Like, you could go to a supermarket, but you couldn't buy seeds. So you couldn't, like, plant in your own garden. So that's going to make people paranoid about authority.

So he joins a group of like-minded young men, some of whom, by the way, may well have been racist. I mean, there was a lot of people involved in this plot. Yeah, but certainly the guy I was focusing on, there was no evidence of racism. In fact, you know, quite the opposite. Some of the plotters would attend Black Lives Matter meetings on the side of Black Lives Matter. So this was a complicated, you know, thing that was difficult to put in any particular box. However,

when they were arrested, immediately the narrative formed that they were white supremacists. So this was a white supremacist plot. And people were very casually, including Gretchen Whitmer and people like that, and journalists were very casually using the phrase white supremacy to describe them. And I was fascinated, like, you know, why is this? You know, there's many reasons to not like these people. So why add this much shakier reason? It didn't seem to hold up to reality. And I think one reason why it happened was, fascinatingly, because of the work of an academic, Barbara F. Walter, who wrote a very good book called How Civil Wars Start. Now, she was working for a CIA-funded group that was looking at how civil wars started in other countries, in Bosnia or Rwanda or wherever. But because

she worked for the CIA, she was forbidden from studying polarization in America. And so she published her book, How Civil Wars Start, saying that what they had discovered in their CIA-funded task force was that civil wars always started on ethnic grounds. A group that was once dominant, but now no longer felt dominant, felt threatened. And so they would start a civil war based on these ethnic grounds. Ergo, in America, if civil war is imminent, it must mean that the people who were starting the civil war are doing it on ethnic grounds, they're white supremacists. So it felt like she was, or this argument was coming about because of a model as opposed to actual research. Well, I thought it was fascinating because at the end of the episode,

you make the point that the reason it matters is because it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Where it's like, if you mistake or mislabel a bunch of right-wingers who are armed, who are protesting against COVID restrictions and planning kidnappings and all that kind of stuff, and you mislabel them as also a white supremacist group that is in league with others trying to start a civil war.

It does start, it starts polarizing you even more. And then the civil war becomes potentially inevitable. Yeah, it certainly could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And also it's just, it's inaccurate. You know, one of the things that I look at, you know, throughout the season of Things Fell Apart is the different way that untruths spread. And on the right, lies are often these big, balls-out kind of mythological lies like Pizzagate or QAnon or whatever, these huge,

garish lies. But on the left, sometimes our ventures are kind of slightly more subtle than that. And I think that's an example of that. Just because when civil wars start in Bosnia, they start on ethnic grounds, doesn't mean that everybody who's disenfranchised with COVID restrictions and join a militia group, there's hundreds of militia groups in Michigan. It's a white supremacist. It's a strange, almost like mathematical equation that's gone wrong in this country.

I know you've talked a lot about the importance of telling stories with nuance and curiosity and empathy for other people's perspectives, even if you disagree. Why do you think that's so important? Because if you fill your brain with instant judgment, then there's just no room for curiosity or empathy. You know, I wrote So You've Been Publicly Shamed around 2013, 2014. And I've noticed a, you know, a change in social media. In the earliest days of social media, it was a place of curiosity. We had a window into other people's worlds. And we use that window to be curious, like, oh my God, you know, this is so interesting. But suddenly, that turned into something else. It curdled into instead of being curious about other people's lives, we became judgmental about other people's lives. And then these miscarriages of justice happened, like the ones I wrote about

in So You've Been Publicly Shamed. It's just, again, it's just, you know, most people aren't, you know, there's psychopaths out there, there's monsters out there, but most people aren't. Most people are just a mess. Good people do stupid things, stupid people do good things, and that's just a healthier way to perceive our fellow humans than, you know, creating, as we did on Twitter, a stage for constant artificial high drama where everybody's either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain. It's not true. Yeah, it does tend to turn everything into black or white, good or evil. And I do think that social media has played a huge part in that. And it seeps out.

It seeps out into the world of politics. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, we live it. I do feel like, speaking of public shaming, over the last year or so, there have been fewer big public cancellations. I'm wondering if that's because social media has started to fall apart or if it's because people are becoming more impervious to shame or maybe people think it went too far. What do you think? What's your take on the state of public shaming? Well, the first thing that happened was people did become impervious to shame.

We overused our shaming weapons. And, you know, I equate it to like hospital superbugs that become impervious to treatment. Transgressors became impervious to shame in part because we overused shaming as a weapon. So, yeah, we created this world. for taking part in a quote-unquote sick Nazi orgy, which was on the front of all the tabloids. And he said, like, you know, no, my orgy was German-themed, but there was no Nazism. And so he sued the newspaper and won. And he said to me that when a shamey steps out of the pact by refusing to feel ashamed, then the whole thing crumbles.

A shaming is a pact between the shamers and the shamed. And so I think that happened. We, in part, created a world where people became impervious to shame. But then something else happened after that. Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, I think, has been terrible in almost every way. But one arguably positive thing that came from it was those days of, you know, we're going to choose somebody and tear them to shreds are kind of over. You know, the left left Twitter moved to places like blue sky, which don't have the power to influence society the way that Twitter did.

So, yes. So that kind of punitive left wing bullying, I know, almost caricature bullies of themselves, attacking, quote-unquote, woke culture as, quote-unquote, woke culture is beginning to lose its power. So they're defining themselves as being like, you know, fighting this dragon of woke culture just as woke culture isn't the thing it once was. Yeah. And I've always thought that one of Donald Trump's, speaking of super bugs, Donald Trump's biggest political advantages, which most of the right has now learned from him,

is being impervious to shame. And I always think that that's interesting is that not only that pact that you said that breaks down between the shamey and person being shamed, the people who can get shamed or who should be shamed, they use that to their advantage, especially in the world of politics. with Ralph Northam. Do you remember the Ralph Northam scandal when, you know, photographs emerged of him wearing blackface and everyone was calling for him to quit? And he just said, no, I'm not going to quit. And what the world realized was, whoa, if you refuse to feel ashamed for something, then there's nothing anyone can do. The shamers just have to.

And even a step beyond that, when you like fast forward a couple of years later and Northam wins and he's got this high approval rating. And I think the Washington Post did a story where they sat down with a lot of black voters who said, you know, we're still pretty upset that that happened, but he's human and he really tried hard to make amends

and he's passed really good policies that we believe in. And look, we've been discriminated against before in life. And so that's not a surprise to us. And so it's like people outside the world of the intent online shaming or political shaming, you know, they're normal people who are willing to forgive, show grace, and all that kind of stuff. It's interesting what happens there. Yes, and I think people didn't like the overly draconian, punitive nature of left-wing shaming. And I think also people felt that, you know, a generation was coming along and had created a set of rules that were impossible to live by. You know, these retrospective shamings where you could be, you know, your life could be

upended for something that you did 25 years ago when you were 17, when you were a child. And, you know, it was too much. It was untenable. It was cruel. It was untenable. And yeah, all of the stuff that's happened as a consequence, Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and people being more forgiving of Ralph Northam, and Donald Trump emerging as this super bug, it kind of all came from our overuse of shaming as a punitive weapon. Have you ever been scared to cover a topic for fear of being cancelled? Yeah, I definitely started to feel, not so much now, but around 2015. Well, when my book, So Even Publicly Shamed, came out,

and there was a little bit of a sort of wave of attacking me in the book, mainly because I was attacking public shaming. And there was a view that public shaming is one of the few weapons of the dispossessed. So if I'm attacking public shaming, then I'm attacking the dispossessed, which was kind of a ridiculous ideological argument that really wasn't true to the book. But yeah, I became a little bit more like sort of Eve in the Garden of Eden, you know, hiding behind a tree, like cover me, ye boughs. I don't know if that's like an overzealous metaphor. But yeah, I felt a little bit like that. But funnily enough, you know, season two of Things Fell Apart does go into areas that I probably would have been a bit scared to have gone into in previous years, like trauma being used as a weapon to silence free speech and so on. Yeah.

You know, I'm left wing, but that's a kind of right wing argument. And I did it without feeling scared and nothing bad came as a consequence. And, you know, so maybe that's further proof that, you know, that really burning flame that began around 2012 has kind of started to die down. Speaking of misunderstood culture warriors, Alex Jones. Many years ago, pre-9-11, you hung out with him for, I believe it was a film and a book that you were working on. What's it been like watching him go from kind of crazy to monstrously crazy? I mean, I was sort of joking, but do you think he's misunderstood in any way or do you think everyone's got the right view? No, no. No, yeah, everyone's got the right view.

He just lies all the time. Like, in fact, just yesterday, so me and Alex Jones snuck into Bohemian Grove, the secret club in the forests of Northern California where, you know, elitists, mainly on the right, maybe Republican elitists, have a ritual that culminates in a papier-mâché effigy being thrown into a bonfire in front of a giant stone owl. So I thought, well, that can't be true.

So I decided to sneak in. This is back in the 90s, and it's all in my book then. And I didn't want to sneak in alone, so I snuck in with Alex Jones. And so, weirdly, we were sort of intertwined in each other's lives for many years, because that became quite a big story for the both of us. But no, I watch him now, incredibly frustrated. Just yesterday, he gave an interview where he said, yeah, when I was at Bohemian Grove, I saw Clint Eastwood and Danny Glover.

Now, that's just a lie. The reason why he said Clint Eastwood and Danny Glover was because they had both been to Bohemian Grove in the past, and I said so in my book. So he must have just remembered that fact from my book and just said that he saw Clint Eastwood and Danny Glover. He said that I had paid him to go into Bohemian Grove. That's just not true. And there's something very, you know, corrupting and corrosive and dangerous about just, you know, lying so easily. The problem is, you know, we, you know, narcissists, you know, Alex has a narcissistic personality disorder, you know, it came out in his custody hearing. And unfortunately, you know, narcissists have a different relationship with the truth than

non-narcissists do. They want to be the smartest person in the room. And sometimes to do that, you have to come up with counterintuitive information that nobody else has, which quite often is a lie. So, and also, you know, you just don't care whether what you're saying is true or not. So no, I think this kind of easy use of lying that Alex does all the time is, you know, I find it worrying and dangerous, frankly. It could lead to bad places. Yeah, especially since it's consumed a good chunk

of the Republican Party these days, at least in the official politicians, you know. Absolutely. And nobody wants to hear, like, you know, people tend not to want to hear from me fact-checking alex's bogus claims like alex's bogus claims i tend to flourish a lot more than my fact-checking of them which people just aren't that interested in right so um last question many years ago uh you wrote in your book uh The Psychopath Test, quote, if you want to get away with wielding true malevolent power, be boring. And the reason you said that is because journalists don't really like reporting on boring things. Seems like today, those of us in media and politics are having trouble getting people to pay attention to a lot of seemingly boring things that are actually quite important. Any advice on how to do that?

Well, I mean, I agree. I did an event the other couple of weeks ago with Chris Anderson from TED in London, and he said something similar. He said that, you know, the great challenge of our times, he didn't say is to make people get interested in boring things, but to make people get interested in positive things and good news stories and stories that will bring people together. And I think that is the great challenge of our time, to tell stories that don't tear the world apart. It's a huge challenge. I was talking to a YouTuber, kind of fledgling Joe Rogan the other day. And he said, look, you know, he said, look, this is Market Forces. When I put out a kind of nuanced interview, I get 12,000 views. When I put out an interview where

the headline is, woke people are a death cult, I get half a million views. So, you know, but it is the great and important challenge of our time. In season one of Things Fell Apart, I tell a story about a coming together. Like all the episodes are about things falling apart, but one of the episodes was about things coming together. And it was when Steve Peters, who was a gay pastor with full-blown AIDS, went on Tammy Faye Baker's chat show.

And the most beautiful, moving conversation happened between the two of them, where Steve was brilliant, you know, talking about what it's like to live with AIDS. And Tammy was crying. And she was saying how much she would love to just, you know, give him a hug. And after the interview aired, somebody phoned Tammy's studio, a woman phoned Tammy's studio and said that her son had AIDS and she was convinced that when he died, he was going to go to hell. But now she knew that he was going to go to heaven when he died. Anyway, I put out this episode and the number of emails I got from people saying that they were, they had to pull over the car because they were crying so hard when they listened to this episode of Things Fell Apart. And that was partly to do with Steve being brilliant.

And amazingly, he lived, like he lived until last June, the longest living survivor of full-blown AIDS in history. I mean, it really was a miraculous story. But I think the reason why people are pulling over their cars because they were crying so hard is because we're sick of the opposition. And what people desperately need is a coming together, is a connection. We forget that when we're on social media, we're more stoked up, but deep down, that is what we all want. Yeah, and a real genuine connection

and not sort of the illusion of connection that you get on social media when you're in all of these fights. Exactly, because the problem there is that, you know, people believe they're being empathetic on social media, but what they're really doing is practicing a kind of, you know, selective empathy. They're being empathetic on social media but what they're really doing is practicing a kind of you know selective empathy they're being empathetic

to their own group but have zero empathy for people who have a different belief system to them and yeah you're right that's not real connection you know that's that's performative uh john ronson thank you so much fantastic talking to you uh the series is things fell apart everyone go check out both seasons uh they're fantastic. And thanks again for chatting with me. I appreciate it. John, I appreciate it too. Thank you so much. Offline is a Crooked Media production.

It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vasilis Fotopoulos provide audio support to the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer, Reid Cherlin, and Andy Taft for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Dilan Villanueva, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.