The Press Box - 'Damage Control': Two Black Thinkers, Two White Agitators (Ep. 402)

Episode Date: December 20, 2017

The Ringer’s Justin Charity and K. Austin Collins unpack the tension between prominent black intellectuals Ta-Nehisi Coates and Cornel West (1:00) and then critique Eminem’s lackluster new album ���Revival’ and one-sided feud with President Trump (15:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just go to the ringer.com slash video. Or even better, please subscribe to our channel at YouTube.com slash the ringer. All right, now on to damage control. I'm Justin Charity. And I'm Cameron Collins. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets,

excites, and divides us in popular culture. This week, we're going to talk about Eminem, who's released a new album, a frankly rather frustrating album as he tries to launch a public feud with Donald Trump. But first, we're going to talk about a different feud between two prominent black thinkers, the journalist Tanazi Coates, and the leftist, Tunisian, Cornell West. All right. First, Camp, do you want to explain briefly who is Tanasi Coates and who is Cornell West? And why are these two black men fighting? Ooh, that's a lot. Well, I mean, first of all, Tanahisi Coates is the long time Atlantic Monthly columnist.

author of books like Between the World and Me, more recently, we were eight years in power, MacArthur Genius, et cetera, et cetera. Cornell West is the esteemed philosopher, public intellectual, best known probably for the book Race Matters, getting arrested at Occupy and, of course, fighting Tanahasi Coates on the internet since I was in college. Why are they fighting? This is a big question. Well, you say Cordell West best known for Race Matters. This week he's best known for having written, or this week,

really. He's best known for having written an op-ed in The Guardian that has a pretty punchy headline where he accuses Tanaasi Coates of being, basically of being like a neoliberal shell, which is a popular epithet. In fact, word for word, the headline, quite a headline. The headline is, Tanahasi Coates is the neoliberal face of a black freedom struggle, which is a lot. This is a really sort of punchy, combative, arguably mean-spirited op-ed about a popular Black writer. Written by Cornell West. I'm going to read a brief bit of it.

Sure. In short, Tanasi Coates fetishizes white supremacy. He makes it almighty, magical, and unremovable. What concerns me is his narrative of defiance. For Coates, defiance is narrowly aesthetic, a personal commitment to writing with no connection to collective action. It generates crocodile tears of neoliberals who have no intention of sharing power or giving

up privilege. That's a lot. I mean, I should say, you know, Charity, we've reflected on this just to make sure we both weren't going crazy that this is a fight that's been going on for a while. According to my Twitter feed, this is newly exciting for many of us. But this is a fight that, I mean, I feel like I remember when Cornel West first wrote a Facebook post was basically like his version of Live journal where it was just complicating some of the political positions of Taunahasi Coates. I feel like I've been seeing this rehashed many, many, many, many times. And nothing in this editorial really changes that. But there's something about this particular editorial right now, 25th anniversary of race matters, Donald Trump presidency, etc, etc, that feels particularly, wouldn't you say, pungent, pointed?

Let's give Tanahasi some reading room here. So, Tanahasi, in responding to this sort of viral guardian op-ed by Cornwall West, sort of takes to Twitter. initially. And he goes on a, he basically tries to engage Cornell West somewhat sort of mute, not mutedly, but he doesn't get nearly as vitriolic as Quino-West doesn't. He doesn't.

He doesn't. He doesn't. Um, what's your sense of Tanaasi Coates' response to this op-ed on Twitter? Well, what I mostly remember, because Tana Hosea since left Twitter, since deleted his Twitter, for, for various reasons, not limited to this editorial. But part of Cornel West's

argument, these are things that he said before, is that Tomahasi Coates is committed to kind of a myth of President Obama's political legacy that just does not quite hold up under the scrutiny when you think of things like drone strikes, American imperialism broadly. Cornel West's basic position is that this was not a liberatory president, that if you're thinking in those terms, you're mostly thinking in terms of symbolism. You're not thinking about the everyday fabric of, in particular, black people's lives, poor people's lives. that this was not a good president for black people or poor people or people abroad. The thing is, when Coroner West tweeted this out, people like Richard Spencer kind of agreed with it and kind of piled on online. And of course, there are the many, many people that are fond of Tonohasi Coates who also kind of pile on. Basically, what I'm getting at is I saw a lot of Twitter threads.

Some Twitter threads that were like, what is neoliberalism? Let me take a moment to point that out. Which I just, man. I should clarify that Richard Spencer is like the alt-light. He's like a popular alt-light white nationalist. I mean, a lot of people who sort of online are defending and extolling Ta-Nehisi Coates are parroting this line, right? I just think it's funny how Cornell West and neo-Nazis both happen to not like Tanahasi Coates. And I'm interested in getting, I'm interested in drilling down on the variety of people who I would say,

over the years have sort of taken their stabs at Tanahasi Coates' political perspective on Obama. Sure. And Tanaasi Coates' political perspective on white supremacy. There seems to be this sense that of an impressively diverse coalition of political interests object to Tanahasi Coates' political project. And I'm trying to figure out what it is about Tanahasi Coates' project or his journalistic project, however you want to understand him.

Right. As a historian, as a journalist, as a public intellectual, whatever you want to call him. What is it about him that attracts this multi-varied opposition online? There's certainly a part of that coalition of dissenters who are interested in the fact that Tanahasi Coates does seem to have a lot of appeal for specifically a white liberal audience. There's a sense with which white liberal Democrats with college educations love to be put in their place by Tonahasi Coates in like 50,000 words, just a 50,000 word spanking. Yeah, it's a weird kink. It's a weird intellectual king. It's a kink, right? It's absolutely a

kink. And there's a lot of suspicion of that. There's a lot of suspicion, I think. I mean, there's a lot of questions being raised also just about the role of black public intellectualism here. I think that's a fundamental thing that's going on between Kornow West and Tana Hasi. Cornwallis is leftist. He's someone who's kind of anti-impeer. imperialist, anti-capitalist, et cetera, et cetera. So for him, if you have anything positive to say about Obama, who he just thinks is not up to par in those conversations, you're fucked.

He's just not interested. Tanaasi Coates, I think it's not overgenerous to say has a more complicated relationship to the president. But it's hard to disentangle Cornel West's opinions about Tanahasi from Cornel West's opinions about Obama, right? These things are deeply tangled. I'd say maybe setting aside the right wing and like right wing opposition to Coates. I think a lot of liberal left skepticism about Coates is basically using Coates as a stand-in for Barack Obama.

And it's sort of in this sense that everyone I think senses at this point the things that are complicated about Barack Obama's appeal. Right. His narrative. His status is the first black president and the fact that America is founded as this racial nightmare state. And there's something you don't want to discount about the fact that regardless of the policy contours of his presidency, he's the first black president that's meaningful to a lot of people. We get it. And so because people, I think, even after a year after Obama's been out of office, right, people still don't know how to engage with Obama in a nuanced way. It's almost like they've transformed Tanahasi Coates into Barack Obama's proxy. Right. And so the whole time I'm reading this Cornell, and this is why we're talking about,

I think, this feud on damage control because otherwise it's these two random black guys who have never liked each other arguing with each other. Who always fight. Right, who always fight. This is like not new. Right, but the thing that I think... This is a rap view that I've just...

God, Jesus. It is. It is. But I think the thing that's emerging now that I just hadn't thought about until I read the Cornel West op-ed is that Cornella West is a huge... huge Obama critic, but over the years, you have to sense that Cornell West has become demoralized

at the lack of traction that his Obama critiques have gotten, I think, in the mainstream, whereas going at Coates seems like a very effective shortcut. Okay, absolutely. To a lot of critiques of Obama. Absolutely. And, and again, I mean, you said, right, that Ta-Nazi Coates has a complicated view of Obama, but he's still, he's this figure who, because I think his rise, his rise as a journalist, is entangled in Obama's rise to the presidency and his two terms in office.

Absolutely. Which is something that Cornel West is written about. Right. About black public intellectuals kind of coupling themselves with the rise of Obama as a way of he would call it sort of professional climbing, right? Right. Right. Just seems like there's a conflation going on here. I basically think that a lot of things that are written about,

Nahi Hosey Coates should be repitched and rewritten as just things that are about Obama, because it seems like they're conflated targets. I would say, though, that if there's anyone in public intellectual circles who's done the most for Obama's mythology, it would be Tanahasi Coates for me, I think. Who would you read a 60,000 word piece about Obama by? Right. It's going to be him. I don't think anyone else would get me to... That's a lot of words, man. That's a novella. It's a lot of words.

But I know that I need to read his piece because that's the one that everyone's going to be talking about. To your point earlier about, Cornwall West, being frustrated by the lack of traction of his ideas, that is only more true in the Trump era when it seems even harder to levy a nuanced critique of Obama. because look who we have now, right? It's sort of like in so many ways we all are saying that Obama is just, you know, I mean, however bad or good you think he is, clearly Trump is worse. I think a lot of people are insta knee-jerk defending Tana Hase because there's a sense of what is so wrong about having a complicated but overall positive view of President Obama in the midst of political apocalypse.

I mean, we're sitting here right now and like today I've gotten multiple push alerts about this tax stuff, right? It's like, I think there's an extent to which the grass is always greener. I would be more sympathetic to that complicated but overall positive sort of outlook that you're describing if it seemed like an outlook that was about politics. But I think a lot of the time that complicated but positive outlook on Obama seems really like a triumph of aesthetics and contrast. Absolutely.

Again, this is a dance we've all done before. We've heard this song before, but something that actually felt a little bit new to me was toward the end of his piece. Cornell kind of saying outright, like, I wish I would stop saying this is just about me being petty. Because, and I'm with him there. There's this sense with which, like, in the way that for many people, you can't say anything about Obama, you cannot say anything about Tomahasi. There's this pedestal that he's put on that's complicated for me because I feel like part of the reason so many people are interested in this debate right now today or since Sunday. Are people just not used to two highly political black thinkers being so different? And disagreeable.

And disagreeing? Like, is this all just come down to the same argument I see on Twitter every day, even today, like the Hillary v. Bernie relitigation over and over again? Except this time it's like within the black community. So it's newly interesting because, oh, my God, do you mean to say that there is a variety of political opinion? Is that what's interesting to people? the fact that we have a black radical thinker being pitted against a black liberal thinker, and holy shit, we just thought blacks were Democrats. Is that what this is? Like, please help me. Well, I think, I think that's true in terms of how other people perceive this feud. I do think

that sometimes Tanasi Coats carries himself, he carries himself in ways that aid that perception. If you remember a few years ago, Tanaasi Coates got into a protracted exchange. It wouldn't even call it a feud. It was just a protracted exchange about his sort of signature pessimism about the future of race relations with Jonathan Chate, a longtime columnist and writer at New York Magazine. Right. Right. And Jonathan Chate is white. And the contrast between Tana Hassee Coates' worldview and Jonathan Chate's worldview is much, I would say it's wider than the contrast between Cornell West and Tanahasi.

it's world view. I would agree. But the way that that exchange of ideas played out, it was very, it was almost like this weird 18th century exchange of letters. Like, I received your previous correspondence. It was very wild. It was, it was exceedingly polite for the fact. Intellectual debate. Right. And it's salon. It's a salon. Right. It had that tone. It had that tone of a very old school. Two gentlemen exchanging letters. Absolutely. Whereas when it becomes a debate between Cornell West and Taunahisi Coates who are both black, it just seems like it devolves very quickly. And sort of it's not, neither party affords the exchange that level of care and self-awareness about the high-profile nature of their disagreement.

Sure. And so it begins as a really snippy column from Cornell West. And it ends with Tanasi Coates doing the ultimate taking my ball and going home move. which is deleting his Twitter. Absolutely. Speaking of messy political rivalries in the Trump era, Eminem. Has a new album out. Who knew, first of all?

It's called Revival. Someone get this area in a sheet. Time to parry him, so tell him to prepare to get impeached everybody on your feet. This is where terrorism and hair was a meet square off in the street. This chunk barely even sleeps. All he does is watch Fox News like a paired and repeats. Looks like a canary with a beak. Why you think he banned transgenderists from the military with a tweet?

He's trying to divide us. This shit's like a cult. Like Johnny Hill only unite us because nothing inside us drives us like this fight. Charity, you review the album for the ringer.com. I am with you 100% in saying that the album sucks. Musically, the album can fuck right off. But I am eager to talk to you about Eminem and the Trump era. I have thoughts, but you are the music critic.

So let's start with, tell me about this. album that I listened to two times out of due diligence, could not tell you a single thing about it except that Beyonce was on there and she need not have been. And that's the first track. We're going to end up talking about the politics of this album and a lot of the anti-Trump posturing that Eminem does in this album. Keyword posturing. And because I know we're going to get into that, I just, I will say that musically, let me be a music critic for like five seconds on this podcast. That's all it deserves. Musically, the album is excruciate.

It's trash. It's excruciating. It's so bad. Eminem is writing the line between two different types of Eminem records that I think people will know Eminem for since the Eminem show. And then since songs like Love the Way You Lie, which is like, on the one hand, you have the Eminem records that are these big top 40 pop rock rap ballads. Ba with the bar era. Right. To be honest.

And then on the other hand, you have Eminem album cuts, which are. these songs that most times don't have hooks and that totally feel like gym class. They feel like a rapper rapping just to show you the metaphysical possibilities of rapping and how much they've trained and gotten their breath control down pat and how they can bend words to their will. And he's writing the line between those two types of records. And he has a lot of those records on his last four or five albums. But this album just feels so long in the mistake.

stakes and the missteps feel so pronounced. And Eminem's style of rapping, for one, his very wordy, lyrically dense style of rapping, very aggressive style of rapping, and then his musical sensibilities, which have never been great. But his very arena, rock, rap, musical production sensibilities

have not sounded more dated and more out of step with what contemporary hip-hop sounds like. He could not sound. any more incompatible with the sort of trap, trippy sound cloud mainstream. So here's the thing. M&M is a white rapper, and it's uncomfortable to talk about sometimes, but white rappers have a different career tract.

They have weird, nuanced differences in who their fan bases are over time, whether you're talking about M&M, whether you're talking about McLemore, whether you're talking about Mac Miller, whether you're talking about Post Malone, whether you're talking about G-Easy, Machine Gun Kelly. The way that white rappers, who aren't always novelty white rappers, the way they cultivate fan bases, they can afford to stand out a bit more from the hip hop mainstream and still sell albums and still make money and still do well on tour beyond just having whatever their breakout or viral single is. And so Eminem is the he is the godfather of that. He is the godfather of sounding more and more adrift from the hip hop mainstream every year and year. yet selling a boatload of albums first week. But how is it an album like this, which, as you point out in your piece, and again,

how is it that he is posturing sort of this anti-Trump thing? Is that alienating his audience? Well, that's a good question. You take him and M out his word. White America is about you. Right. The album, again, it's called Revival. And the album rollout began a couple months ago.

And it didn't begin with a single. It began with the freestyle. You begin with this B-E-T freestyle that's sort of informally called The Storm, but it's several minutes, and it's M&M on video. And again, it's Eminem on video after a while of people not really seeing Eminem on video. So it really seemed like, oh, Eminem just came out of nowhere. Okay, he's clearly dropping it off. So he does this freestyle. And the thesis, the gist of the freestyle, is this anti-Trump brand.

And in the midst of that freestyle, he has a couple of lines where he's saying, hey, any of my fans who are with Trump, fuck you. That's not, I don't stand for that. I'm doing this freestyle to let you know that I don't stand for this. Right.

The racism's the only thing he's fantastic for because that's how he gets his rocks off and he's orange. Yeah, sick tan. That's why he wants us to disband because he cannot withstand the fact we're not afraid of Trump. That's why he keeps screaming, drain the swamp

because he's in quicksand. You know, Eminem seems self-conscious about the idea that, sure, he has a lot of white fans who maybe think of him differently than they think of black rappers. Even if on more subconscious levels, they're just being like, I only fuck with white rappers. Right. Yeah. M&M is self-conscious about it, but I don't think he knows what to do about it. He doesn't really have a sense of, you know, he doesn't have a sense of accountability ultimately about his fan base is.

politics, I don't think. Yeah, I mean, you're really making me think because when that freestyle dropped. That freestyle was viral and lots of people talked about it, I should say. Yeah, it was big. It was a big deal. Right. And it's sort of as much as I think the last few Eminem albums from the past five or six years have left a lot of people cold, have left a lot of critics cold. I think people seeing Eminem come back with a very, again, a very passionate and very vulgar freestyle against Trump.

was basically the most goodwill Eminem was going to earn from people in terms of rolling out a new Eminem album on. Particularly in the moment of why won't Taylor Swift tell us who she voted for. Right. This need, this real need that people have. It's not a need, it's a thirst. It is a thirst. People are thirsty. I stand corrected. But this, this urge that people have that just you need, I mean, you need someone like Taylor Swift.

To be honest, it is important to me that Eminem does have this stance, but it's important to me because it's incongruous. And this is sort of what I wanted to talk to you about because, you know, good for Eminem that he's distancing himself from what would seem to be the culture that his music helped to facilitate in some ways. This album for me does not quite do responsibly or interestingly what he, I think, is trying to. to do what he seems to feel that he needs to do. I have to say, if this album are not pegged to the Trump era, I don't think I would have anything to say about it, except for that it's bad.

Go home, try again next time. You know, I don't, but because it's pegged to the Trump era, and because it's in this gloss of a confrontation with, frankly, Eminem's own legacy. Right. That's all this is to me. I have to be honest. This is not much more than that.

Let's start from here. Can you describe for me, when you say the culture that Eminem's music. And I assume you mean music from when he blew up, right? So, 1999 through the odds. And you say the culture that Eminem's music help facilitate. What do you think of when you say that? I'm talking about all the angry white boys I went to middle school and high school with

who saw the image of a VMA performance of the millions of blonde Eminems, right? Who, like, who defended the killing my wife or girlfriend and putting her in my trunk bullshit. And Stan, right. And Stan, but also beyond Stan, just like the image of the the image of Eminem, the legacy of Eminem to me. The irreverent wife beater. The irreverent wife beater, the homophobic sort of provocateur. The tiki torch before the teaky torches is what I'm getting at. The guy who would not be out of place at all to Charlottesville riot, right? Like, well, that's what his music has meant to me, even as I have consumed it and in the past liked it. Like, I'm not going to act like, I'm not going to act like Eminem has not had bops.

And I'm not going to act like. Eminem has bops. That's the best thing you've sent to this admittedly young podcast. He does. But there was always this discomfort for me. And now I feel like he is reckoning with precisely the feeling that he instilled in me when he first came out, which is just like, I don't want to auto-reject Eminem. I'm very with the project of a white dude. reckoning with this kind of legacy.

But I listen to this album and I just, in addition to being like a no-dose, it's also just not smart in the way that I think he needs it to be to properly reconcile. Well, let me say, so your line specifically about Eminem is the Tiki Torch before the Tiki Torches in Charlottesville, right?

It's interesting because Eminem is uncanny in a way in that aesthetically, and I wrote a piece about this for ringer.com. The idea that aesthetically, attitudeally, yes, that is true. He has this sort of

irreverent, reckless, white boy, blonde, dickhead mission. This dickhead anti-PC post South Park musical mission

that doesn't really have anything to do with his avowal partisan politics, which is ostensibly liberal, right? Like when it's sort of like the first wave of Eminem music uh, so

Slim Shady LP, right? 1999. Eminem's first blowing up. All of the statements about politics are, are sort of immature posturing. They're like, I'll slap, you know, Hillary Clinton. She called me a pervert. Right. It's lines about you know, Bill Clinton and

Monica Lewinsky and Bob Dole. Right. It's this stuff that sort of, you can't really read a lot into that as much as you can read into his misogyny or his homophobia on records. But when Eminem on the Eminem show, you know, he starts basically he makes White America, which is a instant classic. Instant classic. White America is when he first is engaging, I don't want to say in a serious way, so much as I want to say in a self-conscious way with the idea of I'm making a protest record.

Yes. I'm making a protest record about how staggy white conservatives will inevitably give, you know, birth to white kids who humiliate their politics, right? And how I'm all about that. And he makes this song Mosh, I think, a couple years later, which is about George Bush. It's a protest record against George Bush, largely in response to the war in Iraq. Carry on. Give me hope. Give me straight.

Come with me. And I won. Still you roll. A lot of Eminem's Bush protest stuff is concerned with like American foreign policy. It's all it's concerned with all the stuff that Cornell West is worried that Ta-Nazi Coates is not sufficiently concerned with. Wow. But it's sort of, so it's weird. So on a formal level, Eminem's politics are liberal.

Yes. Aesthetically. Not the takeaway, though, right? In the way that he suffused the culture, at least in my suburban town. Wait, no one's like, oh man, Mosh is a revolutionary political. protest record. The thing that's radical and revolutionary about Eminem to a lot of people is his

hyper white, hyper masculine, hyper angry. Hyper angry and irreverent anti-PC defiance. Yeah. And so, when he forges that in the odds and then comes back in 2017 to basically

you basically have the BET freestyle. You have another record on revival that's called Like Home, which is another, it's featuring Alicia Chiquis, but it's this anti-Trump protest record. The common theme across all of the songs that Eminem is putting

out about Trump is basically Eminem calling Trump a bully, which is the most incoherent thing. Can we, yes. It's the incongruous thing. Eminem is the definitive he is a bully. That was the thing he was famous for being.

He would bully random celebrities. He would bully people on records. He would mock kill people. He, you know, he has whole songs oriented around. around being death threats to people. And so for him to reemerge against Donald Trump and say, hey, you're being a bully.

It's just the, it's the most bizarre instinct. It's weird, right? It's weird. And it doesn't follow. It doesn't follow from who you know Eminem to be. Right. So what is going on? This is the thing that I've been trying to figure out.

No, genuinely, like, what is the, I'm just having a hard time with reconciling any of this with who I understand Eminem to be. what his meaning is to the culture. I think that seems to be, for me, the thing that he doesn't quite understand. He doesn't seem to under, he wants to reckon with his meaning to the culture, but he doesn't seem to understand, A, what his meaning is,

B, how to properly, as an artist, do something about it. Because I didn't hate that freestyle, but mostly I appreciated it as sort of like a, well, good for you. At least you've drawn a line in the sand and you don't want racist pieces of shit to be the defining kind of audience for you.

But I don't know what to do with this album. I think you do. know what to do. I think you're hitting the nail on the head. It's just not that much more complicated than it. The through line to me on the album is Eminem sort of scratching his head and grasping, I mean, even on that song, Walk on Water, which is the first single. It's a song featuring Beyonce. It's a ballad. And the whole concept of Eminem's verses is him trying to write through frustration of not knowing how he's supposed to sound now and not knowing whether hip hop appreciates him the way it appreciated him maybe a decade ago. Absolutely. And so on the music,

musical end that translates as Eminem writing these lines about not knowing where he fits in the hip-hop zeitgeist. But politically, I think a lot of the anti-Trump posturing is there because, and I don't doubt the sincerity of Eminem's opposition to Trump. From everything I understand about Eminem's politics, it totally makes sense that he would not like Donald Trump on a certain level. But I think Eminem just sort of senses that, oh yeah, this is what I'm supposed to do, right? Like he's beefed with so many celebrities over the years and he's made fun of so many politicians and he knows that he is a recluse who between album cycles just basically avoids the press. We don't ever see him. And I think if anything, he just has this press

instinct of, yeah, I guess I'm supposed to be for Donald Trump now, right? Like he's the he's the guy that no one likes. It's a compelling matchup. I'm this white guy who, no one likes. The dynamic is complicated. It's just good TV, right? I feel like that's Eminem's logic. Okay, well. And it's, well, it's kind of impeccable.

It's kind of impeccable as a reason for marketing. But it's just once you see Eminem start to advance that feud with Trump, and you see Trump not respond to him and not acknowledge him at all. Well, I mean, but Trump's the guy who's regularly beefs with Rosie O'Donnell. And he's ignoring Eminem. Rosio Donald makes a lot more sense. to me than Eminem. Rosa Donald, TV personality. That makes sense.

But yeah, him acknowledging Eminem, I don't think he has a bandwidth to listen to Eminem. Yeah, well, yeah, because if he made a... Because as you pointed out, Eminem is exhausting as a performer, as a rapper, I don't think... I mean, Trump isn't even to hip-hop, period.

I just... Yeah, for sure. He would need it to be translated. He hasn't responded to YG either. He made a song literally called Fuck Donald Trump. So I think there's something to be said for that. But it's sort of... From a marketing perspective, I think Eminem recognizes that it's a decent feud for him to sell an album on the backup.

But it's like once you watch Eminem start to wade into the dynamic at play, when you pit problematic rapper, white rapper Eminem against problematic white president Donald Trump, that's where I look at Eminem and I think, oh, you're a little over your head. You don't seem to quite understand why people who don't like Donald Trump are also distrustful of you. and you're not really circumventing my skepticism in the way that a smarter version of you or just a different messenger might. So ultimately what this all means is that we need better protest music, better protest rap, better white rappers, better black intellectuals, fewer petty Twitter fights, fewer feuds about neoliberalism, fewer Twitter threads, and better podcasts like ours. All right, well, we'll be back next year.

Until then, guys, chill out. Everybody relax. Happy holidays.