Tangle - RE-RUN: Clementine Morrigan on cancel culture, social justice, and white guilt.

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

Hi all! We are on vacation this week, but to keep things flowing, we are bringing you some past editions. We will return with new episodes beginning Monday, August 21, 2023. Have a great week!Clementine Morrigan is not someone you'd expect to be an outspoken critic of the left.Warning: this episode contains explicit languageYou can read today's podcast ⁠here⁠.You can⁠ subscribe to Tangle by clicking here⁠ or drop something⁠ in our tip jar by clicking here.⁠This podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.

Hey guys, Isaac here. Just a reminder that we are on vacation this week, but I hope you enjoy this rerun of a past podcast episode. We'll be back with fresh episodes on Monday, August 21st. Enjoy. Hey friends, this is your friendly neighborhood podcast producer Trevor speaking. Just wanted to pop in before this really lovely and engaging conversation that Isaac is about to have and let you know that it does include a bit of colorful language. So if there are any sensitive ears in the vicinity, proceed with the awareness that their vocabulary might expand slightly in the next hour or so. Thanks a lot.

Pardon the interruption. Let's get to the interview. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and I am very excited for today's guest, Clementine Morgan. She is a writer.

Kids, cover your ears here. She is the writer behind the zines like Love Without Emergency, Fuck the Police Means We Don't Act Like Cops to Each Other, Fucking Crazy, and Fucking Girls. They also teach other workshops like Bisexual Girls with Baggage, and they are one half of the podcast fucking canceled. I'm pretty sure Clementine likes the word fuck. In her own words, they are an eco-socialist, an anarchist, an abolitionist, an oppressor of cancel culture, a trauma educator, a sex educator, a person living with complex PTSD, a sober alcoholic, a polyamorous bisexual dyke, and a proud dog mom to Clover the dog Morgan, who you may hear a little bit in the background today. Clementine, that's one of my favorite intros of

all time. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for having me. I'll make one small correction, which is that it's a poser of cancel culture, not oppressor. Well, those are kind of the same things a little bit, but yes, a poser of cancel culture. Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you. No problem. So there are so many different directions I could go here. You are, and I said this in my newsletter today, kind of promoting this conversation. Frankly, one of the more interesting people I have stumbled across in the online internet political space. I'm so curious, maybe just like baseline, we could start with, how did you get into this political activism and writing?

I mean, what's your story? That bio is wild. It's all over the place. I'm yeah. Who are you? Okay. I mean, that's a big question, but I guess I'll try to answer it as quickly as possible. I am, I'm a queer person. That is a big part of this. I grew up in a small town. I had childhood trauma, dropped out of school and moved to Toronto when I was 16. Being a queer person, like the social justice culture and the queer culture are like very, very connected.

So from a young age, I was in a queer alternative high school for kids who had dropped out of school due to homophobia, which was part of the reason I left school because I came out really young. That was like 2002 in like a small town. So it was quite homophobic. In that school, I was sort of brought into this emerging culture, which has now become more and more mainstream, which is often called social justice culture. It is a left-ish, but I wouldn't actually say that it represents the left kind of. I'm sure we'll get into more about all of that later on and unpack it. But basically, I was brought into a sort of way of thinking about politics from a young age inside this alternative queer high school, which is the kind of culture where basically like we all stood in the line and they would be like, if you're white, take a step forward.

If you're if you're queer, take a step back. If you have a disability, take a step back. If you're a man, take a step forward. If you're queer, take a step back. If you have a disability, take a step back. If you're a man, take a step forward, right? It's an identitarian, like I guess you could say identity politics, but it's not exactly the same thing, kind of way of thinking about power and about politics. So I kind of was indoctrinated into that culture. And then I took a 10-year detour getting blackout drunk on the streets of Toronto because I am an alcoholic with complex PTSD. So that was a crazy time. Don't remember a whole lot about that decade. Then when I got sober and I started to get some recovery, get some therapy, get some

stability happening in my life, again, because I'm queer, I landed right back into social justice culture, which I had sort of ignored for 10 years because I was too drunk to pay attention to it. And so when I came back, and that was about 10 years ago now, I just passed 10 years of sobriety. So came back into social justice culture and was immediately terrified because I was like, oh my God, the culture that I remembered from being a teenager had definitely progressed and gotten more intense and also more mainstream. And then, you know, that was 10 years ago. It's gotten even more intense and more mainstream in the following 10 years. And what I noticed about this culture is that it was incredibly morally

judgmental. It was very, very hard on people. It treated people like they were disposable. judgmental. It was very, very hard on people. It treated people like they were disposable. It constantly was scanning for possible evidence of crimes. And, you know, having PTSD already, you know, I was very hypervigilant. I was very stressed out. And I was trying really, really hard to be good and to be, to not get in trouble, you know? And it was also coming from a genuine place because my politics are very strongly about an opposition to dehumanization about compassion about believing that people should be able to have what they need to live and also about believing that people should be allowed to be who they are those are the basics of my politics and so you know it seemed like I

should be into this social justice culture stuff because that's what they said that they were about what they said they were fighting for. But in how they were doing it, it was all very terrifying and actually quite dehumanizing and was not compassionate. But this was all very confusing for me. And I did not know how to sort of sort that out. So I just, I was very woke in this time in my life. I went from being a crazy alcoholic who was definitely

extremely problematic to being a very, very devout, vigilant, woke person who was saying all the right things, who was always on top of the correct terminology and the changing terminology. And yes, who was taking part, fortunately not in a very extreme way, but who was definitely taking part in cancel culture while also being terrified. So basically like the fast forward, the next 10 years, I grappled with this. And more and more, I saw that like, there was this huge contradiction in my life between I, as I said, I'm an alcoholic and recovery. I got sober in 12 step programs. So I had this framework and this way of looking at the world from 12 step programs. That was very much about people are not defined by the worst things they've ever done. People are capable of change. All people deserve grace,

empathy, and compassion. Um, you know, and this idea of tolerance and acceptance of others, meeting people where they're at. These were the things that had gotten me sober and that had, you know, you know, saved my life and were my deeply held principles. And also the stuff that I was learning in trauma therapy, which was like, you know, not don't be codependent. Don't be a people pleaser. Stop trying to manage other people by, by doing what they want. Be authentic, live in your integrity, these types of things. they want. Be authentic, live in your integrity, these types of things. So the divide just started to grow between the healthy, you know, integrity based principles that I was developing in my recovery and the ways that I was acting and the things that I felt I had to believe inside my social justice culture. And so that divide started to grow, but I was trying to sort of like walk the

line for a while. And I started to like a little bit talk about cancel culture, but I was terrified also being a writer, being an independent writer. I was, you know, I have a public persona as part of my job. I was, I didn't want to get canceled. I didn't want to destroy any opportunity of me being able to write or being able to do the things that I want to do. So I didn't want to get canceled. But I also started to be like, I can't keep being dishonest about my feelings about these things. So I started to be a bit more honest, just a little bit. And then unfortunately, I was canceled in 2020, along with so many other people, not really for anything that substantial. It was just like, I was accused of not sharing enough. Actually, I was accused of not sharing

about Black Lives Matter. And I had like a relatively large Instagram. So I was supposed to be doing that, I guess. And even though I had been doing it, I was accused of not doing it. And then when I pointed that out, it was like, how dare I disagree with what had been said about me? And then it turned into a giant, huge campaign that was, I needed to give up my Instagram. I was being deplatformed. And so that was very drama. But what is really significant is that I lost almost all my friends in my real life. I lost almost all my real life community. And I had to move because I was like living in a queer collective house that wanted me to do an accountability process because of it. Just extreme, extreme. It was traumatic. It was actually traumatic. I had an international campaign

of harassment against me and I was called horrible things and totally dehumanized and misrepresented on a massive scale. So that was the turning point where I was like, well, there is actually no way. There was no way to prevent this, you know, and there was no way for me to do what they were telling me to do because it was out of alignment with my values and my integrity and I couldn't do it. So I was willing to face the consequences of what was going to happen to me for staying in my integrity. And so I started a podcast called Fucking Cancelled with my partner, Jay, who is my collaborator on that project. And then since then, it's just been a whirlwind, you know, because I am a very outspoken critic,

opposer of cancel culture, and many of the things that we call social justice culture, although not, as I said, the values that you would think underlie that, but the actual behaviors that are coming out of that culture. And I do this very firmly on the left as a socialist, as a queer person, et cetera. Yeah. I mean, there are so many interesting threads of that story. I want to pull that, that I'm not even entirely sure where to start. I think just in the interest of transparency for listeners and readers of my newsletter, I think I'm very aligned and sort of sympathetic to your worldview, both about cancel culture and the culture of the quote unquote social justice left.

cancel culture and the culture of the quote unquote social justice left. So I'm going to do my best to sort of flesh things out and press you on things, despite the fact I think this might be a little bit of like a home court advantage for you, because I think we see things similarly. I guess one place I'm interested in starting is kind of this question of accountability versus cancellation. I mean, I think this is like a really difficult line to walk because I imagine most of the people who, as you put it, are kind of devout subscribers of this worldview on the social justice left would say, your cancellation, regardless of the details, I think there's always a presumption that somebody who has been canceled deserved it. There's generally the initial kind of knee-jerk

reaction is, okay, well, what did you do? And why is it a problem that you were being held accountable for your actions? And I'd be interested to hear your perspective on that. I mean, what kinds of accountability do we have out there that aren't canceling someone? And why do you think that canceling somebody or this sort of mob coercion into doing something is not really an effective form of accountability? Let me answer that on a couple levels. The first is that when I was, so much of this comes back to the things that I learned in 12 Steps. When I was in 12 Steps, we do this thing called a fourth step and a fifth step. And in that, you write down basically all of the times that you've ever done something wrong in your life. And then you go through that with your sponsor and you talk about each one of those things. And this is, you do this before you get

to the famous ninth step where you make direct amends to the people that you've hurt, right? First, you got to get clear on what you actually did wrong and why you did it. And you have to talk to someone about it. When I first did this, I wrote down every example of someone being upset with me because I had a codependent understanding that somebody being upset with me meant that I had done something wrong. And this is a fundamental misunderstanding that is highly, highly upheld within social justice culture. Just because somebody says that you've done something wrong actually doesn't necessarily mean that you have. And I think that what is complicated and that people don't want to actually look at and get into is that on many questions, there is disagreement about the

correct way to behave ethically. We don't actually have a simple, clear answer to that in all cases, right? So for example, especially on political issues, right? If we're going to take this idea about calling people out because they have not been, you know, and even on the left, right? Because I am firmly on the left. So I'm not even talking about on the other side of the aisle here. I'm only talking about on the left, but you can definitely have this conversation on the other side of the aisle too. But if we're even just talking about within the left itself, leftists don't agree. We don't agree on the best way to get to where we want to go. We never have, right? And so the idea that social justice culture can now come in and say, no, no, no,

these questions are settled and you have to do this. Otherwise that means you're that that's just not true. And so like in the case of my cancellation, right. I was accused of not sharing Black Lives Matter. Technically I had shared about Black Lives Matter, but like, if we're going to be honest, what I really think I was being canceled for is that I was not doing performative white guilt on the internet. And what was expected of me as a good white ally was to do performative white guilt on the internet at that time, right? I don't do performative white guilt because I find it to be racist and reprehensible to my values of solidarity and opposition to dehumanization. And so my opposition to racism comes out of a different lineage,

which is a socialist lineage of which there are many thinkers, and they don't want white people doing performative white guilt because it's actually not the way to build cross-racial solidarity, which is good for everybody in our struggle against capitalism and all forms of dehumanization. Yeah. So that's sort of one piece of it. But to get to your question about accountability, right? So there's basically two pieces to this. One is that not all the times that people are saying you need to be accountable, you do need to be accountable because sometimes you haven't done anything wrong. And you actually shouldn't be accountable when you haven't done anything wrong.

You should know what you think is right and what is wrong. You should know why you think it. It doesn't mean that you should never take feedback. If somebody is giving you feedback, you should definitely think about it deeply. You should consider why they're saying that. If they're giving you resources to look at, sure, look at those things. Talk to people that you trust. Think it through.

But if you do all of that and you look at your principles and your values and your sense of ethics, and you're like, actually, I have not in any way acted out of alignment with those things. And yes, this person is upset with me, but I actually have not acted out of alignment with my integrity and my values and my principles, then you absolutely should not take accountability because that is a codependent behavior of taking responsibility for somebody else's emotions and acting as if you've done something wrong when you haven't. Now, in cases where somebody has done something wrong, because like there are clear cases where I think perhaps even universally, we could agree that this is a wrong thing to do, such as for example, punching someone in the face. You know,

I can't be like, well, based on my ethics, I think it's fine that I punched you in the face. Like, no, it's pretty clear that it's not fine. I mean, maybe some people could argue that, but that's an obvious violation of somebody's bodily autonomy. So not great, you know, but even in cases like that, and again, this comes back to the things that I have learned in 12 steps. And I use the language of responsibility rather than accountability, because I actually don't believe that even in cases where somebody has done something wrong, that they can be held accountable. Because responsibility, true responsibility means changing your behavior in an ongoing way, which means doing a lot of internal work to understand why it is that you behaved in

the way that you did and making actions of repair. Doing that work can really only happen from an authentic place of willingness. If you're doing it to get people off your back, if you're doing it because you're frightened, if you're doing it because, you know, your life is being destroyed, it's actually like you might get some success from that, but it's not the conditions under which people are going to do their best work towards repair and towards responsibility. And so in a 12-step culture, you know, you have people who have done some actually fucked up shit in their lives. You know, I'm not talking about writing something not very nice on Twitter. I'm talking about people who have assaulted people,

people who have, you know, actually been violent and fucked up to the people in their lives. who have, you know, actually been violent and fucked up to the people in their lives. So those people, you know, in a context where they are actually welcomed and treated with unconditional compassion, but also with honesty that their behavior is not acceptable and that they are better than that and that they have the capacity to change their behavior, but that they're going to be given a community and tools and time to actually do the work that is necessary, that's where you see these things change. And I know that it's totally possible because it's happened in my own life. And I know so many people who are alcoholics who have gone through this process and have gone from being like a total train wreck running through people's lives to being like

responsible members of their communities who are like actually who have changed, who have transformed, you know? And so the question is, you know, what do we want? Do we want transformation? Do we want people to genuinely change their behavior in a consistent and ongoing way? And do we want them to make repair to the best of their ability to the best of what's possible? Or do we want to punish them because we're upset that they did something fucked up? And I understand the impulse towards punishment and towards wanting to even

the scales or not let people get away with things. But I actually think that those emotional responses should not be standing in for our politics or for our sense of ethics. Because just because I feel really hurt, and this is my abolitionism, you know, like does not, in my opinion and in my political worldview, give me the right to hurt somebody else. And that that very human impulse within me is something that I actively choose to guess, acknowledge, and work with, but also resist so that it's not, I'm not acting out of it. I will also say, you know, and I think this is important, because so often now in these conversations, we're always using the language of abuse, even when we're not talking about abuse, right? The language of like survivor, victim, harm, you know, is constantly being used, even in situations where what we are

talking about are political disagreements, in situations where we're talking about, you know, somebody saying something that's not very sensitive or something, but it's definitely not the same thing as abuse. We're using that language when we're talking about interpersonal conflicts and stuff. But I do want to talk about abuse because that is also a very real thing. And it's where a lot of this discourse is like coming out of, right? And as I alluded to in my mini description of my life, like trauma is the fundamental and underlying, you know, narrative of my life. I am a survivor of child abuse who got complex PTSD and became an alcoholic.

And then you can imagine the things that happened to me being a street involved alcoholic. It was very bad. So what I get annoyed by is that so often this culture, cancel culture, which I see as a culture

that is abusive. It's a culture that actively abuses people and it uses survivors to justify itself. And that really upsets me because it doesn't actually speak for all survivors. There are many of us who don't want that being done in our name. And I'm one of them. I feel like they'll get very mad at me for that. But I don't believe that me traumatizing someone else, this is also why I oppose jails, because I don't believe that me traumatizing someone else, this is also why I oppose jails, because I don't believe that traumatizing someone else is going to untraumatize me.

It's not going to change what happened. And it also has the effect of literally working against the outcome that I want. The outcome that I want is for this person to be able to transform, for this person to be able to heal and change and figure out what is going on in those terms that not just that it's an ineffective way to usher in transformation, but that it's actually counterproductive to the left sort of bringing people into their movement. I mean, one of the examples that I always talk about or that I've referenced before in my writing is my experience as a political reporter and as someone who I think has pretty incongruent political positions that don't really fit neatly into certain spaces. And, you know, I remember being on Twitter in the span of a month and

expressing support for something Donald Trump had done. I think it was some kind of trade policy or something. And just getting love bombed by the right, because from my verified Twitter account, I'd said this thing. People like, yes, you're finally seeing the light. Come join us. I'm getting DMs to get brought into message groups and stuff from one tweet tweet. And then, you know, a few weeks later saying something about Elizabeth Warren's plan for, you know, reducing student loan debt or something and saying, you know, I really love this plan from Elizabeth Warren. And I had tweeted a few minutes earlier about a different Senator who is a man and had referred to him as Senator so-and-so and my mentions were just full

of people on the left being like, it's Senator Elizabeth Warren. Why didn't you refer to her as a senator when you just referred to another male? And it was like, that was the top response. And some people were like, and it was just like, I just said I liked what she's doing. And you're coming at me for not referring to her as a Senator and accusing me basically of being a sexist, you know, and in not so many terms, because I had referred to someone else's Senator. And what I'm thinking in my head is like, holy shit, like, you're just, you're never going to win this way. Like, you're never going to expand the tent this way with these kinds of purity tests. I mean,

I know in some ways I'm preaching to the choir, but I'd be interested to hear from you about, you know, what you think, how you think the left could change in ways to be a more approachable or more expansive kind of demographic kind of, you know, voting block. I mean, it feels like that sort of at the core of what you're doing is there's this frustration that the people who want the same things as you want are going about it in a way that you think is really counterproductive. So one of my favorite socialist thinkers is a guy called Adolph Reed Jr. And he describes social justice culture. I don't know if he uses that word, but the culture that we're talking about, he describes it justice culture. I don't know if he uses that word, but the culture that we're talking about,

he describes it not as the left, but as the left wing of neoliberalism, okay? And I think that what we all have gotten very confused about and that what we think is the left is actually like, if this is the center, it's like here, okay? And I guess this isn't visual, but I put right beside the center, just slightly

to the left of center. Whereas like as a leftist, I'm much, much further over to the left. Okay. But even talking about it these ways, I understand that you have listeners who have different political affiliations. So I'll make it really simple. Okay. Like my politics come down first and foremost to the idea that people should have what they need. It's really that simple. People should have what they need. People should have housing. They should have food to eat. They should have an ecology that is protected and is not going to not be able to sustain human life. And yes, part of that is that they should have the freedom to be who they are, however that might be, and that they should be protected from violence, you know? But in the social justice left,

we have become so obsessed with identity and with cultural issues. And it has become this sort of like in-group infighting. And it is like a class thing. Like the people who know how to play this game are university educated people, right? They're university educated people who are trying to climb a class ladder. Right. And it's not just them. It's also all of those who are adjacent to them, who, you know, are on social media, who are learning the rules of this game that to climb the ladder within the existing system of capitalism to make those who have money a bit more diverse, you know, to make sure that, you know, Amazon can put BLM up there, you know, and the Starbucks, you know, workers can't have a union, but they can have their pronouns on their little name tag, you know, like these things, it's a total distraction from what I actually consider to be leftist priorities, which in order to make real change, we need to build mass solidarity. We need to build mass solidarity of people who actually maybe disagree on a lot of things, but who agree on a few basic things like we should have what we need. People should be allowed to be who they are, et cetera. And I am way more willing to work with people, even if we don't a hundred percent agree, like I don't need to a hundred

percent agree. Right. I just need to, I just need to be on the same page that people's basic humanity is important, and then we can work from there. I think I forgot your original question, but... The kind of thing I'm scratching at is how you think the left can be more effective at sort of bringing people into that tent, which you're touching on a little bit. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal

web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and

older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca. So first and foremost, we have to be nice to each other and to other people we have to be kind um we have to i would really like it if we could uh practice some grace some humility um if we could have some generosity if we could not assume the worst in everybody all the time you know if we could look for common ground instead of constantly looking for, you know, where we disagree, people are like unwilling to organize with people who they literally agree with on 99% of things. And yet we actually, if we want to make change, need to be willing to organize with people and work together with people who we don't agree

with on actually like a majority of things, you know? And so I would like to see a lot more tolerance, like really. And I understand, I know the responses that people are going to make to that. They're going to say, well, why should I have to tolerate somebody who is homophobic and doesn't see my basic humanity? And I'm like, okay, sure. But I also think that we have really expanded our definition of the word homophobia. Like does this person hate you and is actively trying to harm you and like destroy your life? Some people are like that for sure. But actually somebody like not understanding queer subculture is not the same as being a homophobe. You know, somebody literally not understanding what we're talking about because we live in an insular subculture that you need like a bachelor's

degree to like understand the nuances of is literally not a homophobe just because they don't understand what the hell is going on, you know? So to me, I'm like, is this person, does this person, is this person treating you with basic human dignity? Then I think we have some common ground to work on. And I don't know, like on fucking cancel podcast, like, you know, Jay and I joke that we literally are the representation of like what people make fun of when they make fun of woke people. We are queers, you know, Jays as they, them pronouns. We're polyamorous, you know, we're all of these things. And it's fine that we're like that. But what we joke is we're like socialism with freaky options, freaky options for some, for those who want it, but not freaky

options for all. It's actually fine. If people literally don't know about any of that, they don't understand queer and trans stuff. Like they're, they're not in that world. Fine. But what matters is, is can they treat the people around them with basic human dignity and be kind and considerate and respectful. And like the same thing goes for us on our side, right? Because I can't claim to know about the cultural world of people whose culture I'm literally not in and have no contact with. So a lot of these people who are like conservative or who are more on the other side of the aisle, I might be being in acting in ways that they're perceiving as rude. You know, I might be acting in ways that they're perceiving as offensive. And I'm not trying to do that, but I might be by accident, right?

Because we actually are not understanding each other. And so for me, I would like to come to a place where we can like boil it down to like a really simple thing of like, can we see each other's basic humanity and can we go from there? One of the things that you harp on a lot is actually something that I've written quite a bit about in my newsletter, which is just this concept of victimization and being a victim. And I think one of the most popular newsletters I ever wrote was titled, You Are Not a Victim. And it was sort of this proverbial you. And it was just born out of this frustration. And this is something actually that is not exclusive to the left.

It happens on both sides of the aisle of everyone just kind of trying to out victim each other. And when I was perusing your Instagram and some of your writing before this interview, I saw that you wrote when you were, quote unquote, deep in the social justice culture, you were encouraged to see the actions of others in the worst possible light and to take things extremely personally, to be offended easily, and to feel victimized in everyday interactions. And honestly, that resonates with me in terms of how I see people operating in the leftist spaces. I live in Brooklyn. A lot of my friends are in very left spaces and I love them and I'm in those spaces often. And that is how I see people acting a lot of the time. And I'm curious if you could tell me

about, you know, what that experience was like for you and then also, you know, what sort of led you out of it. I mean, how you started to see that as a not productive space to be in. Yeah. So, I mean, as I said, I have complex PTSD. Like I have had experiences of very real and true victimization and I have severe trauma because of it. Right. And so being taught that, you know, that like somebody, cause I used to only use they, them

pronouns. Now I use she and they pronouns. But when I was super in the world, the woke I used to only use they, them pronouns. Now I use she and they pronouns. But when I was super in the world, the woke world, I used only they, them pronouns and I felt very strongly about it. So somebody, you know, not using my pronouns, I was encouraged to see that as them literally dehumanizing me, not seeing me as an equal, doing violence to me, you know? And I was And I was encouraged to like equate that with like real experiences of violence that I have had, you know? And so I was having a nervous system response

of extreme stress, like all the time, because I was walking around in a world in which I perceived that most people really, not that they didn't understand, but that they actively were against me. You know, they actively didn't see my humanity. And that's just a terrible way to move through the world. And it's not actually correct. In reality, I think that most

people generally don't want to hurt other people. They may not understand what's going on with those other people. And they may not know how to act in a way that is going to be the most respectful to those people, but they're not out here actively trying to hurt other people. And of course, sometimes people are, like, I'm not saying that people never are like that. Sometimes people are, but I think the majority of the time people are literally not actively maliciously out here trying to hurt people. Very often it's coming down to different worldviews, different understandings and things not lining up. And so there was just a shift for me where I came to be like, why is it that I am expecting everybody else to cater to me and my

specific subculture and my specific worldview and my specific needs, but I'm not actually extending that grace and compassion the other way to be like, what's going on with them? What do they need? What's up with their world? Are there things that I'm doing that could be not landing with them. So I was burning up so much energy unnecessarily and cutting so many potential connections before I even had the opportunity to find out what these people really thought about anything. So I really do practice tolerance. And there's a new episode of Fucking Cancel that we recorded that's about to come out that's all about the topic of tolerance and how on the left, we got really mad about tolerance and we're like, tolerance isn't good enough. And I'm like, actually tolerance is pretty great.

Actually. Like we don't have to agree. And for as long as I'm like, you know, we can't, we cannot be kind to each other. We cannot work together until we're entirely on the same page. I'm like, then we're not going to ever be kind to each other or work together because we're probably not going to agree. There's billions of people in the world. There's billions of people in the world coming from totally different cultural backgrounds, totally different life experiences. We're coming to totally different conclusions about things. And I would rather approach with kindness and curiosity than condemnation. I'm like, how did I get to that

turning point? Mainly, like I talk about on my Instagram a lot that like, this was an experience of deprogramming. Like I literally feel like I was not exactly in a cult, but in a fundamentalist religion of some kind, you know, where I was taught that I literally couldn't question these things and that it was like a crime to question these things. And that if I'm queer and I'm like, I care about social justice, then I have to believe these things. And I did have questions, but even thinking the questions was terrifying to me because I was afraid that I was doing something horribly wrong or that I would lose everything. And I think that for me, like I said, the process was being like, what actually are my principles and are my behaviors and the way that I'm acting in alignment with them or not?

And I came to see that my deeply held principles of believing that human beings deserve what they need, which is just socialism. That's literally just socialism in a nutshell. And also that people shouldn't be defined by their worst mistakes, which is abolitionism in a nutshell, and also that people shouldn't be defined by their worst mistakes, which is abolitionism in a nutshell, that I was not acting that way. I was actually acting in a way that was very dehumanizing of people, that was stripping them of their complexity and their rich human experience and just turning them into a caricature that happened to be against me and then turning them into the enemy. And importantly for me as a leftist, this was distracting me from my actual enemies who are, you know, the guys at the top, the Bezos of the world, let's call them. And yes, those people are humans too.

And I hope that they get the help that they need. But those people are the ones who are dominating and controlling the rest of us. And those people have power that the person who doesn't understand the they, them pronouns could not even dream of having. Those people are affecting my day-to-day life in a way that these other people who are whatever, not on the same page with me about everything. These people don't have the power to control my life. These people are not the ones responsible for, you know, potentially making it so that human beings can no longer live on the planet.

That, you know, it's like we have more in common than not. I would actually really like to see a return to the language of like the 99%, you know, of understanding that the vast majority of us have our lives controlled in a very real and material way by people who live lives that we could never even imagine. And those people are the ones that we should be making demands of, not, like some random working class or middle class person who can't even ever dream of owning a house or something. Yeah. I think the title of your sub stack post that addressed this was that the enemy is not within or not from within, which I think is an interesting framing of it. glasses, contact lenses, and eye exams, and you can shop with them online or in stores.

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I get lots of compliments on mine. And you can try five pairs of glasses at home for free right now if you go to warbyparker.com slash tangle. That's warbyparker.com slash tangle. You can get some free at-home try-ons right now on us. Go check it out. I'm tempted to engage you on the virtues of capitalism and get into some in the mud on that. But I'm actually, I think something you touched on in that answer is really,

I think very important and sort of at like the center of a lot of this, which is just the concept of guilt and the way that guilt is sort of used, I mean, you're explaining this, you know, I had these questions, but even thinking about it felt wrong. And I hear you use words like devout. And I know a lot of people on the right view the sort of social justice left as being something akin to a religion. And I do think one of the really primary functions of it is guilt, is this idea that you have to feel bad for your transgressions. In some cases, you have to feel bad for your fortune, your good fortune, for the things that you have. And I personally really struggle with that concept, even in moments when I am trying to align myself with the left and trying to understand the position that a lot of people on the social justice left have, I think the guilt thing is a place where I really get tripped up, where I don't see, I'm like, I don't want to feel guilty for this. I don't feel like I should feel guilty for this.

I should feel grateful for it. I'd be interested to just hear you talk about that. And again, I understand you're on, you're, you're getting some home court love here because you're speaking my language, but yeah, I, I'm curious, like how you reflect on that or what you think about that. Yeah. So even, even more than guilt, I think that what is the operating emotion is shame. Because guilt is almost like, you know, it's, it's like, it's supposed to be information that you've acted out of alignment with your integrity, or I prefer the word remorse, you know, because it has less baggage attached to it. Just the idea that, okay, I've acted in a way that hurts someone else, or I've acted in a way that is not in alignment with my values. And so I feel remorse and I would like to do repair. That's great. That's healthy. That's

fine. But like shame is, is that there's something deeply bad and wrong inside of me that I will never be able to truly overcome. And all I can do is just sort of repent and try to atone for it indefinitely. And you actually see that there's, at least I see when I look at this, I see a lot of comparisons between fundamentalist Christian ideas and what goes on in social justice culture. This idea of like original sin and that I can never really get past it, but all I can do is just constantly try to make up for it and repent. it, but all I can do is just constantly try to make up for it and repent. It's a very strong operating system within social justice culture. And I think it's totally dysfunctional.

Even the discourse of privilege, I don't think is useful because what we are talking about when we use the language of privilege is, in my opinion, as a socialist, just basic human rights. You know, if what we're talking about when we talk about privilege is things like having enough, having even having enough to have like a good, you know, enjoyable middle class kind of life, you know, I'm not talking about hoarding yachts, but like, you know, that you can go on vacation and like, you know, you can like afford, I don't know, a computer when you need one or something like that. Like these things, having a house that you own, you know, I'm like the fact that we see that as like extreme privilege, our bar is so low, you know? And like, these are basic things that people should have.

We should have material security. We should have nice lives. We should have protection from violence. And those are just rights. They should not be seen as privileges. And the idea that, you know, somebody who has a few of these things should feel shame about it and also should give it away to somebody who has less is absolutely bonkers because it's not appealing to the vast majority of people who work very hard and who are trying to just, you know, get by in a terrifying timeline that we're in. You know, if you're going to tell someone who's still paying off a mortgage that

they're so profoundly privileged and they, you know, are working 40 hours a week and trying to raise kids and do whatever. And now you're saying you have the Venmo, some random stranger on the internet because they're a member of an identity group that you're not. That doesn't make any sense. You know, we all deserve better. We all deserve better, including the people at the very bottom, including people who are homeless, you know, and who are living in abject poverty and who are suffering. Of course, those people, you know, are suffering worse than

the person who's like middle class for sure. But it's not the middle class guy that needs to be then mowing, you know, the little bit of money that's left over after paying off the mortgage or whatever. It's the guy with the lots of yachts. I'm going to have to say it. It's the guy who has so many yachts. That's the one that, that is the problem. And so we should not be, you know, fighting over scraps and feeling shame and guilt over having a little bit more than somebody else, because what we are literally doing is fighting each other at the very bottom of a hierarchy. And that's why I'm so interested in trying to, you know,, if your time belongs to your employer, you know, and especially like with the way that housing is like so many people who are like middle-class who in past generations would have been like way more comfortable than they are. And they can't

even afford a house, you know, you know, professors are like contract faculty. They can't even get like a tenure position. They have no job security. And so like, these are the people that we're supposed to be seeing at the top, but I'm like, they're not actually doing very good. And so I would rather get those people on the same team with the ones who are at the way. And I think maybe a debate that immediately comes to mind for me and a practical policy solution is something like reparations. And I'm curious, how do you apply your worldview to something like that, where we talk about a government policy to literally transfer wealth or money to people who have historically been oppressed or deprived of that? I mean, do you view that as being a productive way to address it? It's a complicated question. But my general, I will start by saying I'm

a Canadian, right? So I'm a little bit outside of this discussion, but I should have said that at the top in your bio that also a Canuck. Yeah. But here's, here's my, my basic, my basic feeling about that. One, I think that it's trying to do two separate things at the same time. One, I think that it's trying to do two separate things at the same time. One is address the like extremely intense collective trauma of a country that was founded to like, you know, the situation in Germany with the Holocaust, right? Like there is like a collective wound that needs to be addressed in like a very serious way. That's one piece of what I think reparations is trying to do. The other is to try to address the impact of these historical discrepancies, starting from slavery and then going down through all of the racist laws that have prevented racialized people from gaining the same access to wealth as white people, right?

So I get it. But at the same time, when we're looking at it from an economic angle, I just feel like this is trying to give a leg up within the existing system that is still capitalism and is still going to have a class system where some people have nothing and some people have everything. And maybe the people on the upper rungs now maybe will have more opportunity for racialized people to climb up that ladder and get closer to the top. But to me, that is not justice because as long as there is people living in abject poverty or even just poverty, this is not justice, right? And I also think that using like racialized language, when we talk about these things, of course, like there is disparity and there is discrepancies

based on currently existing and historical racism. And there's also tons and tons of white people living in abject poverty. The white people living in abject poverty and the racialized people living in abject poverty should be in solidarity with each other to middle class, this whole giant chunk of people should be working together to make demands on behalf of all of them. And I think that this needs to coincide with, you know, the other piece that I was talking about, which is like a more of a spiritual, emotional, like social reckoning with the historical trauma of slavery, right? Like those two things have to happen side by side. But I don't think like any economic policy that is about identity groups being like, we're going to get this identity group a leg up within existing capitalism. It's not going to address the poverty across the board. And it also has the side effect of contributing to basically anti-solidarity and resentment because somebody who is white, who doesn't have that trauma and that history in their family, but who has also been at the bottom of the barrel, you know,

is also just like, okay, well, it sucks for me too. What about me? You know? And we all should have what we need. Everybody should have what they need. So it's not like there's, I've heard people say, and it's literally offensive. People will be like, you know, about poor people who are white. They're like, well, I guess like you had white privilege and you fucked it up or something like that, you know? And I'm like, that's fucking insulting, man. Like it's fucking insulting. And it's not true. Like look at how many people are in poverty across racial lines. It is absolutely not true that just simply being white is going to be your ticket out of poverty. And we know this. So we need to stop pretending that that's true.

And instead we need to turn towards cross-racial solidarity of the working people of the world. cross-racial solidarity of the working people of the world. Yeah. No, I mean, I think it's an interesting reframing of where this current political moment is on the left. We're coming up on time here. So I have one last question for you. I mean, I guess when I scroll through your Instagram and I look at your sub stack and stuff, I think as the intro made clear, you are many things. But in my eyes, I think a dominant feature of your online presence is sort of this criticism of this sector of the left, however you want to define it, the social justice left, the identitarianism. I'm curious, fundamentally, do you think you're getting through? Is this working? How do you feel about how your message is landing and what kind of feedback you're getting? I mean, you have 100,000 followers on Instagram or something. Clearly, people are interested in what you're saying.

I'm wondering just if you think the tide is shifting a little bit, maybe. Yes, I absolutely think that it is. You know, when I made the decision to go mask off about this stuff and to make the podcast and to be like, all right, I was like, well, I might be committing career suicide here. Like, I don't know what's going to happen, you know? And for sure, I received tons of harassment. There has been a huge amount of pushback and my audience has continued to grow. And I receive endless, endless, endless messages from people. And I'm watching people have these awakenings and gain the courage to begin to start saying these things. There are so many people who

agree with me, who have just been afraid because the social consequences, especially, you know, if you are like a quote, multiply marginalized person, if you are inside these cultures and you rely on these cultures because they are your home. So it used to be that the social consequences of saying these things was so fucking high that nobody wanted to say them. Now, you know, because a few people have come out and started to say it, then more and more people start to say it. And then more and more people start to get brave and so on and so forth. So I really do see it changing. I am not naive about it. I know that it is going to be absolutely, there's going to be lots of backlashes.

There's going to be lots of strugglesashes. There's going to be lots of struggles. People are going to be mad. But I think that the way through is to model integrity, you know, to practice what we preach, to never dehumanize the counselors, you know, to treat people with respect and kindness and have good boundaries and just continue on living in integrity. And I think that that is very attractive to people. And I think that if you, you know, like, like it used to be, for example, that I, because the way that cancel culture works is that it's contagious, right? So if you associate in any way with someone who has been canceled, then you are going to get in trouble too. So part of my hypervigilance before was that like, I had to like hyper research anyone that I was

going to try to associate with. Cause I didn't want to get in trouble for something they might have said or done. And now I literally do not give a fuck and I will just go on any podcast that I'm asked to go on. Right. And I think that people can see that like, when you are open to them and you're not condemning and you are, you are willing to treat them with respect and kindness, even though you guys don't agree on everything, it creates a way more open space and people are attracted to that. They're attracted to the freedom to not be stressed out and to be able to say what they think and to be able to be honest, to be able to like think critically and ask questions instead of just like reciting dogma. So yeah, I think it's changing.

I love it. Clementine Morgan, thank you so much for the time. If people want to follow your work and keep up with your stuff, where's the best place to do that? So yeah, I'm on Instagram, Clementine Morgan on Instagram. My website is clementinemorgan.com.

And my podcast is fucking canceled, which you can find basically anywhere you listen to podcasts. Just look it up. Thanks so much. And yeah, I hope to have you back again soon. I think this is interesting. I'll be curious to check in with you in a year or so, see where things are, how this whole thing's going. Absolutely.

Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, We'll be right back. begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine

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