The Daily Signal - A Gen X Liberal's Take on the New Woke Left

Episode Date: November 14, 2019

“I consider myself a liberal. I still consider myself a feminist,” says writer Meghan Daum. But the past few years have left her shaken. “I did not feel that the new left was necessarily representing my values all the time. There was a sort of purity-policing that interestingly we used to associate with the right," she says. Between #MeToo, smugness on social media, the Covington high schooler incident, and an interest in the so-called "intellectual dark web", Daum is carving out her own political path. We also cover the following stories: What happened during the first public impeachment hearing. Hillary Clinton says Margaret Thatcher wasn't worthy of being in her new book about gutsy women. Disney is warning viewers of its older films that they may contain outdated cultural depictions. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet,iTunes, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Thursday, November 14th. I'm Kate Trinco. And I'm Daniel Davis. In recent years, the political left has been swept by woke liberalism, leaving a handful of old-fashioned liberals in a lonely place. Nowadays, principled liberals who believe in facts over narrative and who can tolerate some disagreement just aren't woke enough for the movement. Megan Dom is one of those people. She's still on the left, but she's also intrigued by the intellectual dark web, a group of thinkers who, reject identity politics and political correctness. She'll join Kate for a conversation. And if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on iTunes,

and please encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. The House officially kicked off the impeachment process on Wednesday, and leaders from both parties couldn't have framed it more differently. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, began with his opening statement. Here's part of what he said. The issue that we confront is the one posed by the President's acting chief of staff when he challenged Americans to get over it. If we find that the President of the United States abused his power and invited foreign interference in our elections, or if he sought to condition, coerce, extort, or bribe an ally into conducting investigations to aid his reelection campaign and did so by withholding official acts, a White House meeting or hundreds of millions of dollars of needed military aid,

must we simply get over it? Is this what Americans should now expect from their president? If this is not impeachable conduct, what is? Schiff's Republican counterpart, Devin Nunes, slammed the Democrats in his opening statement. Here's part of what he said. We're supposed to take these people at face value when they trot out a new batch of allegations. But anyone familiar with the Democrats scorched earth war against President Trump

would not be surprised to see all the typical signs that this is a carefully orchestrated media smear campaign. Nunes cast doubt on the entire process saying it was a sham and that the witnesses were carefully selected by Democrats. The Democrats rejected most of the Republicans' witness requests resulting in a horrifically one-sided process where the crucial witnesses are denied a platform if their testimony does not support the Democrats' absurd accusations. Notably, they are trying to impeach the president for inquiring about Hunter Biden's activities,

yet they refuse our request to hear from Biden himself. The whistleblower was acknowledged to have a bias against President Trump and his attorney touted a coup against the president and called for his impeachment just weeks after the election. At a prior hearing, Democrats on this committee read out a purely fictitious rendition of the president's phone call with President Zelensky. They clearly found the real conversation to be insufficient for their impeachment narrative. So they just made up a new one. Nunez finished his remarks with this. This spectacle is doing great damage to our country.

It's nothing more than an impeachment process in search of a crime. Here's what Bill Taylor, currently acting as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a key witness, said in the hearing. By mid-July, it was becoming clear to me that the meeting President Zelensky wanted was conditioned on the investigations of Burisma and alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. It was also clear that this. condition was driven by the irregular policy channel I had come to understand was guided by Mr. Giuliani. In a regular NSC secure video conference call on July 18th, I heard a staff person from the Office of Management and Budget say that there was a hold on security assistance to Ukraine, but could

not say why. Toward the end of an otherwise normal meeting, a voice on the call, the person was off-screen, said that she was from OMB, and her boss had instructed her not to approve any additional spending on security systems for Ukraine until further notice. I and others sat in astonishment. The Ukrainians were fighting Russians and counted on not only the training and weapons, but also the assurance of U.S. support. All that the OMB staff person said was that the directive had come from the president

to the chief of staff to OMB. In an instant, I realized that one of the key pillars of our strong support for you was threatened. The irregular policy channel was running contrary to the goals of longstanding U.S. policy. Here's what George Kent, Deputy Assistant Secretary in the European and Eurasian Bureau at the State Department, had to say about Hunter Biden also during the hearing. Later, I became aware that Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma. Soon after that, in a briefing call with the national security staff of the office of the vice president in February of 2015, I raised my concern that Hunter Biden's status as a board member who,

create the perception of a conflict of interests. Let me be clear, however, I did not witness any effort by any U.S. official to shield Burisma from scrutiny. In fact, I and other U.S. officials consistently advocated reinstituting a scuttled investigation of Zlicevsky, Burisma's founder, as well as holding the corrupt prosecutors who closed the case to account. Over the course of 2018 and 2019, I became increasingly aware of an effort by Rudy Giuliani and others, including his associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, to run a campaign to smear Ambassador Yovanovitch and other officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev. The hearing itself featured plenty of spirited exchanges.

Here's Republican Representative Jim Jordan talking to Taylor. Let me read it one more time. Ambassador Taylor recalls that Mr. Morrison told Ambassador Taylor that I told Mr. Morrison that I conveyed this message to Mr. Yarmac on September 1st, 2019, and connects with Vice President Pence's visit to Warsaw and a meeting with President Zelensky. We got six people having four conversations in one sentence, and you just told me this is where you got your clear understanding. Which, I mean, even though you had three opportunities with President Zelensky for him to tell you, you know what, we're going to do these investigations to get the aid. Didn't tell you three different times. He never makes an announcement, never tweets about it, never does a see an interview.

Ambassador, you weren't on the call, were you? You didn't listen to President Trump's call and President Linsky's call? I did not. You've never talked with Chief of Staff Mulvaney? I never did. You never met the president. That's correct. He had three meetings again with Zelensky and it didn't come up.

And two of those, they had never heard about as far as I know. There was no reason for it. In President, Zelensky never made an announcement. This is what I can't believe. And you're their star witness. You're their first witness. You're the guy. You're the guy based on this.

I mean, I've seen church prayer change that are easier to understand than this. Representative Elise Stefaniac, Republican of New York, made this point. For the millions of Americans, viewing today, the two most important facts are the following. Number one, Ukraine received the aid. Number two, there was in fact no investigation into Biden. Well, prior to Wednesday's hearing, Adam Schiff rejected Republican calls for the whistleblower and Hunter Biden to testify. Hunter Biden received a hefty sum from a Ukrainian gas company after his father, then Vice President Joe Biden, was put in charge of Ukraine policy. President Trump has accused the Bidens of corrupt. President

of corruption, hence his request for the Ukrainian government to investigate wrongdoing. President Trump was asked Wednesday if he was watching the impeachment hearing. Here's what he had to say via ABC News. No, I did. I did not watch it. I'm too busy to watch it. It's a witch hunt. It's a hoax.

I'm too busy to watch it. So I'm sure I'll get a report. There's nothing. I have not been briefed. No. There's nothing there. I see they're using lawyers that are television lawyers. They took some guys off television.

I'm not surprised to see it because Schiff can't do his own questions. Margaret Thatcher was undoubtedly a strong and influential woman, but for Hillary Clinton, that's not good enough. Clinton recently appeared on BBC Radio to talk about her new book, Gutsy Women, and was asked why she didn't include Margaret Thatcher, the first woman British Prime Minister in her book. Here's the interaction. I think it's quite striking from a British perspective going through this book,

that, as I understand, in case I've made a terrible error here, you haven't included Margaret Thatcher. Was there a row about that? Did you think to include her? Because surely she comes to mind with gutsy woman, even if you didn't like her. Well, she does, but she doesn't fit the other part of the definition, in our opinion, which really is knocking down barriers for others and trying to make a positive difference. I think the record is mixed with her.

I thought she was incredibly strong. I remember taking Chelsea to see her in the parliament when she was. was prime minister and we were visiting. So I had, you know, a lot of understanding of what it took. And I thought it was clever of her to, you know, really try to mold herself to be more acceptable in terms of everything from hairstyle and speaking style to clothing style. But I think on the criterion that we were really looking at, okay, what were the positive differences, the changes that this person made that really opened doors to Moore. That wasn't that apparent.

Disney's new streaming service is bringing back plenty of older films. But it's also a warning user so they may not love everything about those older movies. Several Disney movies, including Dumbo and the Jungle Book, reportedly have a warning placed on them that states. This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural dependence. What depictions are potentially problematic? Admittedly, I don't personally recall much about these movies. It's been a few years. However, Mike.com asserts that Dumbo features faceless black circus workers working while singing. We slave until we're almost dead. We're happy-hearted roused

about. And keep on working. Stop that shirking. Pull that rope, you hairy ape. Another film that reportedly has a warning. Lady and the Tramp has a song, the Siamese cat song, deemed offensive to Asians. Up next, Cade's conversation with Megan Dom. Do conversations about the Supreme Court leave you scratching your head? If you want to understand what's happening at the court, subscribe to SCOTUS 101, a Heritage Foundation podcast, breaking down the cases, personalities, and gossip at the Supreme Court. Joining me today is Megan Dom, the author of The Problem with Everything, my journey through the New Culture Wars. Megan, thanks for joining me.

Thanks for having me. Okay, so I actually started reading your columns when you were at the L.A. Times. I was in college at the time, and I know you always had an interesting perspective. You seem to not be quite right, not quite left. But I recently rediscovered you when you were writing about the intellectual dark web and your flirtation with it. So that really interested me because, of course, you're on the liberal side. I was surprised to see some of the ideas and people you were listening to.

And you also chronicled this in your book. So what, this is such a weird way of putting it. What attracted you, I guess, to the intellectual dark web? How did this all come to be? Yeah. I can best answer that with a personal story. So I got divorced about four years ago. And my husband, for all of our problems, had really been my intellectual ally.

We talked about things all the time. We just always were on the same page. We saw the same world. Even if our friends seemed to be having a different set of ideas, we always felt sort of aligned. And, you know, we both considered ourselves liberals, but we were very skeptical. We were both journalists. So we took, you know, took the issues on a case-by-case basis and we're able to just constantly be talking about stuff.

And the book is called The Problem with Everything, because like I say, you know, we were always sort of talking about the problem with everything. Like, you know, when you have a great, you know, sort of. intimate conversational rapport with somebody, you're always sort of chewing on this. Like, what is the problem with the world? What's the problem with everything? So when we split up and I lost that, it happened to coincide with the time around 2015 when a lot of people on the left started to just engage in a rhetoric that was really

extreme and very outrage-based. And people who had once seemed very reasonable and questioning and like critical thinkers didn't seem to be thinking as critically anymore. They were being enabled by social media. And this was well before Trump, mind you. This was not a Trump effect yet. So I had lost my intellectual ally and my husband. And a lot of my friends seemed to be not occupying the same universe anymore.

And I found myself watching people on YouTube talking to each other, scholars and scientists and academics and politicians and all this sort of thing. So that's I sort of drifted. into this world that would later become known as the intellectual dark web. So among those figures and some of the ones associated with the movement are Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, you mentioned, Christina Hoffs, Summers, Ben Shapiro to a certain extent. Are there particular voices you listen to especially? And why do you think you were open to that? Well, what got me started?

It was Glenn Lowry and John McWhorter on bloggingheads.tv. Oh, wow. I forgot about that. Oh, they are, this is the best show in town, I'm telling you. So Glenn Lowry is an economist at Brown University. John McWhorter is a linguist and a cultural critic. They're both African American. Their show is called The Black Guys on bloggingheads.tv.

And they would talk about all kinds of things, but especially issues of race in this incredibly nuanced, just really intellectually honest, thorough, thoughtful way that I had never. I never heard anybody talk about race like that before. And I was totally mesmerized. And I think Glenn is a little bit on the right, at least very centrist. John is a liberal, although I think he was affiliated with the Manhattan Institute at one point. Anyway, they're not like hardcore left or right. I would say they're certainly not Trump supporters. I doubt they vote Republican.

I know. I'm sure Glenn did at one point. Anyway, all this is to say it was not a partisan show that was not the tenor of the conversation. So I started watching them, and they would have these about hour-long conversations every couple weeks, maybe every month. So I started watching them on YouTube. And then the YouTube algorithms started taking me down the rabbit hole of all sorts of other people. And I would watch like Camille Pahlia talking to Christina Hoff Summers. I guess I saw a little bit of Joe Rogan at that time.

And, you know, some of these figures I liked more than others. But this world of people talking to each other for long periods of time, became a sort of sustenance for me. And it just became a huge part of my life in my, in my sort of brain life. So I think he used to phrase echo chamber and how this moved away from it. And why do you think that liberalism is moving in this direction where there isn't as much room for disagreement right now? What's going on there? Well, I would say it started, I think it started on the right. I mean, Rush Limbaugh was the original outrage machine. And now the left is just sort of co-opted I mean, the left has become in some corners, not all, but in many, like a bunch of little teeny tiny rush limbaas, right?

So that's what we see on Twitter. I think that social media has just flattened discourse in such a way that it's much, much easier to just say something very simple, very reductive, something that you know the people who follow you are going to approve of and therefore give you likes. And it's like a dopamine hit. We're not really participating in conversation as much as saying things in order to have other things echoed back to us so it all feels good. To me, it really comes from a place of loneliness. And I think that's true for everybody. This is like a universal human problem right now is we're all so much on our screens and so much of our social interactions are happening in this mediated way that we're sort of desperate for any kind of connection. and connection online can only be found if you say something immediately translatable

and very easily hashtagable or memeable or whatever it is. Yeah, and I would agree that that's a problem on the right too. Like I've noticed, and it didn't seem to me, I've been on Twitter since 2009, and it seemed to me in the early years it wasn't as much like this. Yeah, that's about when I joined too, I think, oh, wait, yeah. Did it seem to you that around, maybe around 13 or 14, I felt like there began to be a shift, and it was like, unless, yeah, you would have to say, like, what is the most, partisan thing you can throw out there and then that would get all the retreats.

And it just, it changed it completely. I honestly, I stopped tweeting a lot. It was, because it felt like, you know, what's the point of preaching to the choir? Well, exactly. To me, especially if you're a journalist, if you're a writer or somebody whose job it is to think in the world, preaching to the choir is a dereliction of duty, in my opinion. I mean, it is our job to look at the world and see where the hypocrisies are and see where the cognitive dissonance is and think about like, okay, well, this is what's going on in the world.

And these are the assumptions and the approved messages. And do I think those are true? What do I think people are getting wrong about that? And it's our job to take all of that and metabolize it into something that's interesting and provocative. And it's going to make people think. And that very process is disincentivized now because of the value system of social media discourse. Yeah. And I think I was thinking about your Rush Limbaugh example.

And I was like, I don't think that's true. And the reason I would push back a little on that one, and this might be my own bias showing through, is I think that, you know, conservatives. And I was homeschooled. Like, I know the conservative bubble. But you can't open, like, there's no media that reflect. Like, you get the opposing view in your face all the time. Oh, the mainstream media is left. Yeah.

Yeah. I think, again, just in terms of story selection. And, I mean, Daily Signals a conservative outlet. that affects what we choose to cover. So I don't know. I guess in some ways I would say that Rush was kind of like an alternative, but it was never really, the ability to stay in that bubble was pretty hard. Well, I think in terms of tone, that was, you know what actually really interests me

about conservative talk radio is that it coincided with people moving to the excerpts. And so the longer people had commutes in their cars, the longer distances they were driving, the more they were listening to Rush Limbaugh and like the AM radio guys. I find this fascinating because I'm a huge radio fan. I always have been. And so that kind of dynamic is, I think, compelling and worth thinking about. But now people are listening to podcasts while they're driving. No, and no commercials, which is nice.

No, but I remember growing up, my mom would switch the dial between Rush Limbaugh and then commercials. We would go to the liberal station. And it was great. We would get both perspectives. That's good parenting. So on the social media, you also get into one chapter, the infamous United Air leggings incident.

This is the controversy of our time. Right. For readers who aren't familiar, a girl was told she couldn't go on a United Airlines flight because she was wearing leggings. It turned out she was on a discounted ticket because she was with a United Airlines employee. They all have a dress code. That all got lost and it became a huge thing about why is United policing what girls wear. And you said this particularly rankled you.

Why? Well, it particularly rankled me because I am a fuddy-duddy when it comes to how people should dress on planes. I, you know, I always, I lived in Los Angeles for a long time, and I always said, I think it is actually against the law to fly in or out of LAX without wearing sweatpants with juicy written across the butt. I think that is required. I think it is like an FAA regulation that you cannot land or take off from LAX unless you

are wearing this. You know, it rankled me because it was just such an example of, first of all, somebody budding their nose into a situation that they really did not know what was going on. So specifically, yeah, it was a family traveling on an employee buddy pass, and there were maybe three kids or, you know, there were some girls. And so there were little girls and they were wearing leggings and they were allowed to keep the leggings on. But because there was a girl over 12 or something like that, according to the regulations, she had to just put on like a skirt over the leggings. And the family, by the way, it was completely fine with this. It was not an issue.

They were not politicizing this moment. They were just trying to get on the plane. They were like, okay, okay, you know. And what was happening was there was a woman. in another line, like not even for the same flight. Kind of a few gates away. I don't think I knew this. Oh, yes.

This is perfect. Yes. So there's a deep, deep story. And the woman who was watching, she was observing this from afar and seeing this going on. And she starts tweeting, oh, you know, there's a little girl is being forced to, she's being body shamed and not allowed to get on this flight because of sexist gate agents at United or something like that. This woman happened to have a lot of followers. She was herself a very well-known activist and gun control activist.

So she had a lot of followers. She starts tweeting this. And then a bunch of celebrities picked it up. So, you know, it was, I don't know if the usual suspects, Alyssa Milano. I know William Shatner tweeted photos of – everyone started tweeting photos of themselves in leggings, including William Shatner, who had like a very hilarious shirtless photo of himself in leggings. And, you know, everyone was jumping in on this. and male celebrities, female celebrities, trying to show solidarity with this girl

that she was being body shamed. And the whole thing was absurd and nobody connected that this was just a normal dress code because they were traveling on an employee buddy pass, which is actually a pretty serious perk. And until recently, men flying on this pass had to wear suits, coats and ties. This is a serious thing, yes.

That's insane in my view. It's not insane. I think everybody should wear coats and ties to fly personally. I hope you never run an airline. I would nod. Really? I think many people would fly my airline. It's called Fudddy-Ddy Air.

But, no, so that was an example. And it just exploded. And every celebrity was using it as, you know, a vehicle for their own self-promotion and to virtue signal and to really gain social capital off of this situation that was effectively a fictional one. Because this is not what had happened. So I use that as an example of something

that can just catch fire and has no meaning. whatsoever. And in fact, what happened with the Covington High School kids a year or so later is exactly the same dynamic. And it caught fire in a much bigger way and with much greater repercussions for people. And in a really appalling, just the absolute lack of will to understand that situation. I don't know if we need to remind our listeners what that was. I think they're familiar with the boy who was at the March for Life and smirked in front of a Native American activist. And when in fact, what he was doing was holding his ground because the, what was the group?

There was another group, the black Israelites or the whatever. Yeah, the ones, they shot really crazy things. I can't remember. So this kid was shamed for supposedly smirking at a Native American activist when in fact he was trying to keep calm because there was another group yelling absolutely appalling and I'm sure to a high school kid from Kentucky totally baffling and shocking things. And so actually the kid should have been commended for his composure. And it totally went the other way.

And it's just and it became a calling card for a lot of people on the left just once again, reaffirm where they stand and signal to their tribe that they're on the right side. And that to me is just the height is the height of not only dishonesty, but laziness. And I see that more and more with the way the media handles any number of stories. There's no will to actually scratch beneath the surface and see what's going on because complexity is it's not only not rewarded, it's penalized in the current landscape. Well, it's also interesting because sometimes you wonder, and this is going to sound very old-fashioned of me, but like we seem to ignore that there are vices of, I think you use word shoddenfrud in your book. Shodden Friday, yes, yes. Okay, that's how you say it. Sometimes it just seems that so much on the Internet is making fun of other people.

And sometimes it's people who deserve to me made fun of. But I sometimes wonder when I catch myself spending time doing this, I'm like, is this really the best use of my life? And is this really make, like, it's a little uncomfortable. And it strikes me as interesting that there's not more tension in our culture where we wonder, ought we to do this? But anyway. Yeah, I was thinking, you know, people, we should ask ourselves, if we're about to tweet something or, you know, put something up, you know, say, am I doing this? Do I feel a moral obligation to say this? Or am I actually just self-soothing?

Because I think that's a lot of what's going on. You say it because you have a moment of insecurity or, you know, loneliness or anxiety or whatever, and I'm going to say this thing and I know it's going to get a response and it's going to give me a little jolt and make me feel better. Yeah. One second. And then you'll have to do it again, 10 seconds later. Yeah, those jolts are real. I realized how bad my own addiction was when a few months ago my sister was like, okay, I'm not going to check my Instagram likes after I post this picture for three hours.

And I was like, whoa, what's self-control? And then I was like, what is wrong with me? I got to go to a meeting. I'm going to go to a meeting during these three hours to my 12 step so I can not look at Instagram. That I should probably get at that meeting. Instagram anonymous. Do you think there's any hope for social media? Is there anything that could make it better?

I think we're already starting to see the tipping point. People are really, really sick of this. I can tell you a few things about this book. A lot of people told me not to write it. So I consider myself a liberal. I still consider myself a feminist. I always have. but it really came out of a certain increasing disconnect with the modern, the contemporary iteration of both of those things.

I did not feel that the new left was necessarily representing my values all the time. There was a sort of purity policing that, interestingly, we used to associate with the right, right? We would associate it with Jesse Helms and Tipper Gore, even though she was a Democrat. out, but, you know, remember when she was putting labels on records. And so there was this sort of moral authoritarianism that the left really never had anything to do with. And suddenly it was coming from there. And I thought, my gosh, everything that I stood for just sort of, you know, the rights of the individual and just letting people do what they want and not being so such a prude, other than in flying, of course, I remained my prudish self. suddenly the left is espousing all of these things.

So I felt very alienated from it. And I wanted to write a book that really captured that very confusion. And it wasn't just that I wanted to hammer away at things like trigger warnings and, you know, radical campus activists. Because a lot of people have done that. And, you know, I think there are very obvious things to say about that. I wanted to really examine my own confusion. And I wanted to do a self-interrogation. Like, what is it about growing up when I did in the 70s and the 80s that made me.

identify as a feminist in certain ways and why is the contemporary version of feminism so alienating to me. And so I wanted to do that kind of book. And this is to your question. People were saying, don't do it. Don't do it. You know, we can't. There's, you know, for so many reasons.

First of all, everyone will annihilate you on Twitter and your career will be ruined. You're a person in the media. You need the, you know, you need your tribe. And another thing that the left continues to say, and I hear this, it's like, it's like, like the Trump emergency is so dire that we need all hands on deck and we need to be totally on message and anything that might be the slightest bit complicated or any issue to tease out any issue in a way that requires talking about it for more than 30 seconds or thinking about it deeply and considering other points of view might give leverage to the other side.

And it might be an opportunity for the other side to take your point and twist it up and use it for nefarious purposes. and you see it happen all the time. You try to have an intelligent conversation about something like the gender wage gap, for instance. And the other side will go and just say, oh, yes, you're right. See, you know, it's totally – it is women's fault that there's a gender wage gap. And I'm actually saying, well, it's the result of a lot of things, including choices women make and on down the line. But the other side will take it and run with it.

And then the left will say, see, you shouldn't have brought it up. You should not have brought it up because this is what happens. And that makes me so crazy. And really the crux of the book is a call for nuance and a call for people to just calm down and have conversations and entertain complexity. And I think that social media makes that difficult. But I also am seeing more and more people listening to podcasts. They're listening to three hour long podcasts. They're listening to people talk to each other for hours and hours.

And I can tell you going around and talking about this book, doing events, there is such hunger to have more. nuanced conversations. People come up to me and say, oh my God, just thank you for saying all this. And so that really makes it worthwhile, even though a lot of my colleagues in the media still think I'm crazy. Yeah, I mean, it's awful. You get really scared to think out loud at all because it's like, oh, well, what if I misphrase something? Or, I mean. But that's our job, you know, I always say, like, if the smart, thoughtful people don't step up and speak the truth and and try to make complicated, honest points, the stupid thoughtless people are happy to do the job for us. So you mentioned feminism.

You talked about Me Too in the book and that you felt you were an older feminist in that movement. What did you think of Me Too? And what did you think of the feminist response to Me Too? It's such a hard question because it depends. Me Too is so big and it's so evolving all the time. And it's a spectrum. Obviously, cases like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, that's not negotiable. I don't think any sentient person would argue that that was handled improperly.

But then you have cases like Aziz Ansari where something that, you know, to somebody my age, I'm 49, that's going to, I'm going to interpret that as like a bad date, a yucky experience. And women 20 years younger will say, uh, no, like we, you know, we need to put this in the category of harm. of real harm done and some kind of violation that requires adjudication or some sort of corrective. And that was the moment where I think the generational divide became totally pronounced. Like we were sort of on board for a while and then that happened and then there was a real split. And so what I wanted to do to answer your question is to, you know, again, not just say, well, you guys are wrong and the older ones are right and you guys should just toughen up and all that. but I wanted to go back and think about what it is that made me that way. And I don't know how old you are.

I think you're a lot younger than I am. 32. Okay. But I can tell you that growing up in the 70s as a kid, as a girl, it was a great gift because that was a time, and I don't know if you, you probably, this may be the first you're hearing about this. It was a time when, like, there weren't like super girly girls or, you know, super macho boys.

Everyone was just sort of a kid. There was a sort of weirdly. That actually sounds great. And it was. It was. And there was this sort of androgynous aesthetic. Like everybody watched the bad news bears. You know, there was this, there were not, you know, pink toy aisles and blue toy aisles. There were not Disney princesses. It was cool for girls to be tomboy. And the girls were doing better than the boys. I never had any sense of myself as anything but equal to, if not better than boys. And that continued as I grew up into the 80s when I went by the time I got to college and the late 80s early 80s, early 90s, there were more women than men going to college. I got into my 20s and 30s and women who were like buying their own real estate and having babies and adopting babies on their own. And the guys were just kind of like twiddling their thumbs, waiting for their lives to

start. You know, I'm talking in huge generalizations, but that was observable. So it was quite striking to me, fast forward a couple decades when maybe starting about five years ago, the default premise of the conversation around women was that we were this monolithic oppressed class under the thumb of the patriarchy. And it didn't resonate with me, but frankly, it resonated with enough of my friends, even my same age friends, that I wanted to really investigate what, if anything, I was missing. Yeah, and I think me too, it was complicated for us, too, a daily signal because, as you said,

there were the very clear-cut cases, and then there were the ones that were just so much more complex and it was like where does due process fit in but at the same time you know women obviously shouldn't be pressured and i think one thing in the aziz and sorry case was uh really drove this home for me as it was like i thought the way he behaved was you know if accounted accurately we've never really heard his side of the story but it was reprehensible and it was the sort of thing that struck me is he ought not to have done it i don't think like publishing it and there's certainly no criminal effect i guess what it sort of struck me was there is something deeply wrong in our culture that he thinks this is okay and that this resonates with so many women,

which suggests a lot of men think this is okay. But I don't think Me Too is the way to fix it. Well, and it depends what we mean by Me Too fixing something. But this is really interesting, actually, because you're on the right and I still claim that I'm on the left. But I actually would push back at that a little bit because it's not clear to me, I wouldn't call what he was doing reprehensible. I would call it like pushy. And from what I remember of the case, weren't they both sort of like

been sitting on the couch naked together and watching TV? Yeah, to be fair, it's been like a year since I read the article. Let's not, I don't want to, you know, don't, you know, fact check me on this. I'm just like flashes of memory. But, you know, I as a 49 year old,

I'm going to look at that and say like, well, she wasn't being kept there against her will. She could have walked out at any time. She wasn't sure what she wanted. It seemed like she was sort of disappointed. and his level of commitment potentially. I don't know, all of these things.

And so for someone like me, my reaction is that kind of case diminishes the important parts of Me Too. When we have that sort of thing, it makes us less able to fight the more clear-cut cases. And I think if you care about Me Too, you care about due process and taking a testimony like that and publishing it, publishing it without getting doing your due diligence and, getting a comment from the person who's accused, that's just like a blatant violation of due process. So this is, see, this is exactly what's so interesting because we're like ostensibly on opposite sides ideologically, but you're much more forgiving. Well, but I think it's harsher on Azizant. I guess I think my impression was he behaved very selfishly.

And I think that, you know, ideally when dating and relationships, you should be thinking about the other person's good. And if you're just out to, you know, get some. should be, but this is not reality. But right. And to be fair, I do agree. Like, I do think one of the things about Me Too that was frustrating was the number of cases where it wasn't, and obviously, you know, there can be an act of rape without any violence or whatever. But at the same time, like, women do have an amount of agency. And that sort of got lost.

Yeah. And, you know, one of the interesting things about agency, if you notice, like, around the conversations around race and gender, we're in this moment where when we're talking about racism or misogyny, for instance, those concepts are being applied onto systems and groups of people and not individuals. You don't think like this person is racist. You think white people are white supremacist or we live in a white supremacy. And so we're taking these ideas and putting them on gigantic entities and it really robs individuals of their agency. It's quite an interesting thing that's happened that way. So speaking of that, you have a subway incident you recount in the book that I think touches on some of these themes.

Can you share that with our listeners? Yes, and I'll try not to take forever to describe it. So I was on the New York City subway maybe about a year or so ago, and I was, it was probably 1130 at night or so. I live way uptown past Harlem. And the subway was pretty full, which is always remarkable to me because I lived in New York City 20 years ago and the city was very different. It was a lot of crime.

If you were on the subway that late at night, you were probably like by yourself or with one other person, so you would just be dying for a lot of people. to be on the subway. So the car was like fairly full. I was sitting there reading my phone. There were two guys across from me, probably in their early 20s, white guys, kind of hipster guys. And there were these group, there was this group of giggling girls a little bit further down in the car. And they were like looked like they were from the suburbs. They were, they were white. They were, you know, kind of had a lot of makeup on. They seemed a little tipsy. Like maybe they had come into the city for a bridal shower, a birthday party or something. And so everyone's going along their way.

And a guy gets into the car at one point, and he's pretty clearly homeless. He's panhandling. He's asking for money. He is black. And he comes up to me and he starts kind of trying to talk to me. And he says, oh, you have blonde hair. You're so pretty. Can you give me some money or something?

And I did the thing I usually do, which was like, no, no thanks. You know, just kind of friendly, wave him off. And then these girls across from me, he goes over to them and they find him this novelty. They think he's just like so exotic and exciting. And so they're flirting with him and, oh, what are you doing? And he sits down with them and they're laughing and they're joking. And you've just got the feeling that they were exoticizing him somehow or like so pleased with themselves that they were out on the town. And now they were having this experience with this guy who was clearly mentally ill or homeless or probably both.

He was very wiry and sort of unsteady on his feet. He didn't pose a threat to anybody. And the other people on the subway car were kind of rolling their eyes or looking around. So finally, after this visit with them, he was. He decides to get off of the subway. And I'm sitting there. And, you know, he's saying goodnight to them. They're saying goodbye.

Good night. Have a great night. And he passes me and he gets right down in my face. And he says, you. He says, you have a f*** up night. And I just kind of laughed. I was like, okay. Like I kind of put my hands up.

And it's like, okay, okay. And then he goes, and he gets off. And I was kind of, you know, chuckling a little. And the two guys across from me, the white. hipster guys said, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry that happened to you. I'm so sorry. I'm just so sorry you had to go through that. And I was like, oh, you know, whatever. And they go, no, no, no, really. That's just really wrong. It's really wrong that you had to go through that. And I realized at that moment that they weren't really concerned about me. They were apologizing on behalf of the patriarchy. They felt that what this guy with absolutely no agency, no power, nothing whatsoever that he represented some patriarchal force that was threatening me and that they had to answer for it. And, you know, I don't know anything about them. They could have been

anybody, but like I just imagined them as being, you know, recent liberal arts graduates and they received the full complement of intersectional doctrine. And they had assumed that this was the power hierarchy. And here's the irony about this. They were actually, in trying to protect me or apologize on behalf of the patriarchy, they were actually patronizing me. They were not seeing the big picture at all. This had nothing to do with the patriarchy. It had to do with the mental health system. It had to do with drugs. It had to do with homelessness. The whole wounded city and wounded world, you know, but they had reduced it to misogyny. And it just seemed to me the ultimate irony. Like, how far are we getting in this conversation about sexism if we're going to reduce

situations to the lowest common denominator that is actually incorrect. And that's also interesting because it harkens back to what you were saying earlier about the fake stories we tell on social media, where in some cases the facts are correct, but the context is so removed that the essence of what happened really does make it fake news in a weird way. Yeah. And there's also just this currency in being harmed. I don't want to throw around words like victim.

You know, that's become ridiculous at this point. But it's, you know, being traumatized. There's like social capital in that, I've noticed, and sharing a story about how you were microagressed or somebody did something to you. And, you know, you'll notice that this is coming from the most privileged people in the world. And because they're privileged and really not that much has happened to them, they have to seize onto the microaggression idea because otherwise they don't have anything. That's the only hand they can play. That's something. So last question.

I'm very impressed by your open-mindedness. Do you think there's any areas that, you know, where liberal and conservative women can work together right now? Is there ways that we can communicate better? I mean, obviously there's some areas that we're just not going to agree on. But is there some hope? Well, the irony of all this polarization to me is that I think it's fair to say that the majority of people do not like our president. I think that's fair to say. know, I'm not going to speak for you. We're definitely going to get some reiterating. Okay. But like, yes, he does have some supporters. But, you know, for the most part, we have a common enemy. We can come together no matter what our small differences are to fight this thing that I think at least, you know, certainly more than 50% of the population would rather not the situation in the White House be what it is. You know, there's this concept that came from Sigmund Freud, the

narcissism of small differences. And what that refers to is the way that, you know, the more and more people have in common and the more that the society is actually glued together, the more people start fighting over the little things. And so it's kind of a paradox, right? Like, we think we've never been more polarized. But in fact, we're all sort of enjoying the benefits of prosperity and relative safety. And in a lot of ways, the country's never been better.

I mean, we've never been freer. We've never been safer. We're not living. I know that a lot of, like, you know, third and fourth way feminists like to talk as if we're living in a third world country when it comes to women's issues. We're not. And so it's much easier to argue over these little differences. But, you know, it's interesting you hit on that because I think one of my most vivid 2016 memories is a friend of mine saying to me, if you voted for Trump, I don't want to ever know it. And I'm not actually going to say what I did.

That's how we got it. We didn't know anything. That's how he got voted in. But I remember thinking. And I, you know, the president has said many things I don't agree with in which she had phrased differently. You know, I appreciate his work on judges and the pro-life issue. But I remember just that sort of stayed with me. And especially in a town like D.C.

I don't know. It's just interesting. I do get like afraid. You feel like if you say. I'm sure. But not like, I mean, not, no, no, I don't want to over exaggerate it. It's just like in a social capital way. You're like how, I don't know.

Anyway. I would say, yes. I have to say I am encouraged. People are getting tired of the blunted discourse. And I really think are hungry for real conversation. And, you know, the fact is people are probably friends with all sorts of people who have views that they don't even know they have those views. And lo and behold, they're still friends. They're still like playing golf together.

and hanging out together. I wonder we should all have like political outing day where everyone tells their friends and colleagues because I do think there's so much self-censoring. And I actually remember I grew up near San Francisco and I used to work at Borders Books, may it rest in peace.

Wow. And I, this was back in the 2000s and I had a colleague and I mentioned that I liked George W. Bush. And she like just stared at me. And she said, I thought you were a nice person. Wow.

And I was like, well, you should call her up now and ask how she feels about that now. She would probably walk across glass for a mile to get George Del B. Bush back in office. No, but now I'm going to try to make political outing day a thing. All right. Hashtag. Hashtag. Political outing day. I don't know.

I got to come up with a better term. But everyone in business who's afraid to say their truth. Megan Don, the author of The Problem with Everything, my journey through the new culture wars. Thanks so much for coming on. Thank you. It was really fun. That'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce radio studio at the Heritage Foundation.

Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or Spotify, and please leave us a review or rating on iTunes to give us feedback. We'll see you again tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is executive produced by Rob Blewey and Virginia Allen. Sound design by Lauren Evans and Thalia Rambersad. For more information, visit DailySignal.com.