The Press Box - Die a Hero or Live Long Enough to See Yourself Get Cancelled | Damage Control (Ep. 579)

Episode Date: February 28, 2019

The social platform Pinterest is going after anti-vaxxing memes in a big way, but what does this mean for free speech online (1:39)? CNN published an investigation of the famous soul singer James Brown this month with grisly allegations about his past. What happens to someone's legacy when new information about them comes out after they've died (22:56)? Hosts: Kate Knibbs and Justin Charity Read the CNN investigation into James Brown here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Liz Kelly and welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. This week on the site, Danny Kelly, Robert Mays, and Kevin Clark will be offering their takeaways after each day at the NFL Combine. Miles Surrey brings you his Ringer guide to streaming in March, and Andrew Grida Dara tells you how to survive The Bachelor. You can check those out and more on the ringer.com. I'm Justin Charity. And I'm Kate Nibs.

Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us. So we're going to talk about James Brown. domestic abuse, R. Kelly, sex abuse, and musical legacies. Just light stuff. But first, we got to talk about how something has made us happy about the internet for a change. A social network has taken a bold step in what appears to be a genuine attempt to make the world a better place. And to make things even stranger, it is Pinterest.

But what if people think you shouldn't be the one to make that decision for them? As adults who are on the internet, doing really? research on their own. Why should you get to make that call? Well, we aren't making the call because vaccines are settled science. And we also are very clear because we know that there may be questions about the decisions that we've made. We're really clear and transparent in our community guidelines and use simple language so that everyone can understand why we're considering certain content harmful. Justin, as you know, people put all sorts of insane information on internet. You do. You do this all the time. I'm not even on Twitter anymore and I go to your Twitter

feed and you're just spreading misinformation. All my tweets are true. But conspiracy theories are like a genre of fake things that people love to share online. There are conspiracy theories all over the place. They're on Facebook. They're on Twitter. They're really on YouTube. YouTube loves a good conspiracy theory. Right. Which sounds like innocuous until you realize that you that their conspiracy theories about like school shootings. Yeah. There is like there are tons of like bigfoot's I guess could be considered a conspiracy theory. Like whatever.

But some of the more popular ones, yeah, are really messed up. There's a theory that, you know, Sandy Hook school shooting was fake. That's horrible. Like the parents of kids who have been killed are being harassed. There's like the flat earth movement has gained like a strange amount of traction. You got Kyrie Irving talking about how the earth is flat. One type of really pervasive conspiracy theory is the anti-vax, which basically states that vaccinations are dangerous for children. So I don't know a single social network that these conspiracies don't exist on.

Right. Pinterest, I guess, is really turned into a place where people were sharing anti-vaccine. information. Which is weird because Pinterest is not Twitter, right? Where like Twitter, whatever your weird ideas are, you go on Twitter and like Twitter is this message based text based medium. So like if you told me that people were going on Twitter to spread anti-vax misinformation, I'd be like, sure, that's almost the point of Twitter is to spread misinformation.

Pinterest though? Pinterest is like, it's like a website of. of people making collages. Yeah. I always think of it. I know a lot of people who have used it to like plan their weddings. Yeah.

I mean, I guess it makes sense because it is, Pinterest is really popular with women. I think it's really popular with moms. So I think moms who have sort of gone down that alternative health rabbit hole into some wrong pockets. The underbelly of mommy blocking.

Yeah, it's like, basically. Yeah, yeah. So that's, that's been going on for a while. And Pinterest has been, to their credit, they've been sort of looking for ways to stop the spread of anti-vaccing content for a few years. But recently, they really cracked down on it and they banned search results for it. So, so like if someone would type anti-vax into the Pinterest search bar, because you can search for images on Pinterest, like nothing will come up anymore. And they're using a pretty sophisticated technology that is used mostly for

to get child pornography off of social networks called hashing. It sort of gives an image a digital watermark and makes it easier for platforms to remove it. Pinterest is really putting a lot of effort, a lot of sort of focused effort into getting rid of anti-vax content. And they've come out, Like their community standards specifically say no, like none of this. Whereas, you know, mostly community standards tend to be pretty vague. Like with Facebook and Twitter, they're like, they won't go into specifics of what's banned to this degree. So they're definitely doing something different. Like YouTube did announce recently that it was changing its algorithm to stop conspiracy videos from like popping up so frequently.

but what Pinterest is doing is more intense and focused. And I think it's a pretty remarkable step. I think it's a step in the right direction, but I also worry that what does it mean that, you know, social networks are deciding what health information is valid, if that makes sense? Like, do you think it's a step in the right direction? I do.

I mean, it's weird, right? like parents refusing to vaccinate their kids and forming communities around these beliefs about vaccines. I know that that predates the internet and yet I think modern anti-vax culture feels like this distinctly, extremely online thing. You know what I mean? It's like the internet is the worst thing to have happened to that

in terms of like the spread of that kind of. belief in information. And so obviously, like, the health consequences are for families in, like, real life. But it just seems like the Internet has become just the crucial hub of anti-vax culture. But, like, despite how serious that is, right, as an issue, it just feels, like, so self-evidently stupid. What? Not. Like, like, like, the anti-vax movement.

Yeah. Right? It's like in so much as the anti-vax movement produces like media figureheads. Like Donnie McCarthy? Right. It all just seems like so obviously farcical that I guess I'd never really thought about. Like looking back, right, I've always been really flip about it and thought, oh, that's just part of kooky, like extreme online culture. Yeah.

But it does produce real life. Right. Really bad stuff. Totally, totally. I also feel more sympathy for the people who are convinced that vaccinations are dangerous, I think, than I do for like the flat earthers, which is like really just like read a book. Wait, why more sympathy, though? Because I feel like what has driven them to that conclusion is like a desperate longing for their child to be healthy, which, you know what I mean? And in a lot of cases, like there's this whole segment of the anti-vax movement that thinks that vaccines cause autism.

And a lot of those people, like, have children with autism and are seeking answers for why they got sick. So that's why I feel a sympathy for them because I know that it's horrible, really just so horrible when you're struggling for an answer of what's wrong with your family member when they're sick. And, like, doctors don't have all the answers and doctors are wrong a lot. they just are. And so I just have a lot of sympathy for them. Like, I definitely think they're wrong and, like, they need to vaccinate their children. Well, I was just my instinctive... Can't stress that enough.

Yeah, but my instinctive response when you were comparing it to, like, the flat earthers is that, like, what is the... Again, flat authors are in that bucket of... That's some silly shit. Yeah. But otherwise, like, somebody who's a flat arthur, like, nothing about, like, their logical or political conclusions of being a flat-earther mean very much to me. Like, how does that affect me the fact that somebody is a flat-earther in 2019 as opposed to somebody's an anti-vaxxer where it's like,

well, you're endangering a kid's life as opposed to being like B-O-B and just being an idiot. Oh, yeah. I mean, flat-earthers are like a particularly goofy conspiracy movement, but it is like upsetting when you think about, oh, these people really don't accept, like, settled science, settled. It's disturbing when you realize just how frail our social understanding of, like, reality and truth is.

But yeah, I mean, anti-vaccing has a much more direct real world consequence. Like, I think that it's smart of Pinterest to prioritize removing this content versus, like, the flatties. The flatties. The flatties. I think this is a step in the right direction. I think it's easier for me to say that with confidence because it's Pinterest and not Facebook or Google. Right. Because Pinterest is, it's like super popular.

Like millions of people use it, but it isn't one of the main two social platforms where people get most of their information. So it doesn't have this like monopoly over how people find out about things. It really does feel like a publisher. It's very clear that it's a publisher and a way. way that like Google and Facebook are so large that it's hard to just classify them as that. So I do think it's good and admirable. And I do wrestle with a question of like what would it mean if Google pulled all anti-vax content?

Like if you could type into your search bar anti-vax and nothing would come up what that would mean. Or you would only get news articles about anti-vaxers and maybe like critical takes. but you would not get, like, anti-vax literature. Yeah, because that, I'm like, what would that do to the research of the movement? I just don't, it's a little more complicated there. Right. But what I, what I'm struggling to engage with why it's more complicated, right? Because it's sort of, again, this feels so related to previous conversations we've had on damage control.

You say anti-vaxxer, like I think of Alex Jones, right? Like I don't think we have that ambivalence or had that ambivalence about the run-up to all of the major social media platforms banning Alex Jones, right? Like I don't think that the world is worse off in really any way for Google and Twitter and Facebook having said, yo, whatever you're doing, you're not going to do it on our platform. And our platforms are prohibitively large, but like you're not going to do this on our platforms. So I don't know. It's like on the one hand, as like a liberal and a journalist, like, yeah, I sort of reflexively think what does it mean to censor anything? But I'm also trying to game out like why would I not be comfortable with Google aggressively moderating anti-vax content in the same way that, you know, they just booted Alex Jones from YouTube.

What is the difference? I don't really know. I think the difference is if Google was to completely wipe this entire, like all the content about vaccination that says it's dangerous from its search engine, I think it's just a lot more comprehensive. And Google is how it's more than a platform at this point because it's basically, I don't know. I guess it's just a matter of scale for me. Yeah. I kind of think that like slippery slope arguments are frequently ridiculous, so I don't want to say that. But I just think that we need to be very, very cautious and we should be monitoring how these social networks decide what's true and what's not true and what should be discovered and what should be not discovered.

Yeah, I guess the reason I keep harking back to previous conversations. we've had about political content, like right-wing extremism in the internet, which are separate questions from the anti-vax movement, is just because it's almost like the original sin that all of these social media companies have danced around for a long time is a question of, do we want to moderate content at all? Or do we want to be laissez-faire? Like, listen, we're just platforms. Don't, like, publish what you're going to publish on us. But, like, the moment that we start taking down this page for that, we also got to take down that page for this. And then our entire business model has to accommodate for the fact that like certain kinds of speech are allowed on our platforms and other kinds aren't.

So now we got to hire a shit ton of people to read everything published on these platforms. And it's like I understand on an accountability level why like Facebook and Twitter like avoided that for so long. Oh, for sure. But. I would have. I mean, a lot of things in my life would have had to drastically change for me to be in a position. But like content moderation for the platforms, I'm obsessed with it because I think it says it opens up so many questions about speech and truth and who gets to control the flow of information. And I don't think that there's one, it's just hard to parse sometimes, like what is right and

what is wrong. I think this Pinterest step for me is righteous and they've done it in a way that's transparent. And I feel very comfortable with it in general. But it does once again, like open up questions of how did we even get in this situation where like these tech platforms are deciding or controlling the flow of information in this way. Right. Here's one way I think about it. is like, what is, what's the line? Like, just for you personally. I'm trying to think of, like, the absolutely most stupid, dangerous lineage of idea on the internet that is, like, truly stupid and truly dangerous. But I don't really think should be banned.

Like, what exists at that line? Or, you know, I mean, should be moderated in the way they're talking about. This isn't quite, I think what you're asking, but I think it was. explain like some of my concerns. So I've been following the moderation of sexually explicit advertisements for a few years. And most of the social networks have had like sex workers using them. A back page was like Craigslist style classified platform that was like really popular. So last year, I think it was last year, there was there is. this sesta-fosta legislation, it was anti-human trafficking, seemed like something that no one would,

like no one wants human trafficking to exist, right? So it was signed, it's a law now. And it made websites like Facebook and Twitter and backpage liable when human trafficking content was posted. So that sounds like, okay, fair enough. Like if there's a bunch of child sex slaves being advertised on Facebook, sure, like maybe Facebook should do something about that. That's awful. So on the surface, it seems pretty reasonable, right? But it has had a lot of negative consequences. Sex workers who were consensually like adults advertising had no place to go.

now they're like back on the street like they've lost a lot of agency it sort of has made the internet more dangerous for sex workers basically that's like an example because when you first hear about it you're like obviously I don't want humans to be trafficked on these platforms

like let's get them off let's sign this bill into law let's let's do this but the purge had like a ton of unintended consequences or not unintended but like it had a ripple effect that has now made the world less safe for sex workers, that sucks. And it's something, it's, it's just one of those things that is a good example of the fact that like moderation is really complicated and messy. Right. It feels like so many different hypotheticals and so many different

real life situations, whether it's about anti-vaxxers or Alex Jones or Backpage. It's like, it feels so hit or miss. Like you could either end up with an Alex Jones, right, where this guy is literally leading a movement of online dipshits who are harassing school shooting victims. Yeah. And like you ban Alex Jones from Facebook and Twitter. And that does pretty simply and effectively decimate his audience and make him much less of a problem. Yeah.

I think it's good that they did that. I also did write a piece about how I thought Donald Trump should be banned from Twitter. for violating their terms of service and people freaked out and called me like the biggest censor and I still stand by it. What was the general argument? The back, okay, so people who didn't like your argument in that piece, what was their counter argument? There were many.

Some were coherent than others. A lot of people thought that he like hadn't violated the terms. People thought that it would just, a lot of people were like, no, he can say whatever he wants. Like, it's free speech. which I was like, no, it's not because, like, first, or they were talking about the First Amendment, which just doesn't really have much to do with, uh, with, like, private companies. Yeah. Terms and conditions of a social media platform.

Like, what, the thing is that he was using Twitter. He still uses Twitter as his way to communicate with people. Like, those are, his tweets are considered, like, official statements from the president. So he's using it as, as a way to speak to people. it has sort of emerged into like a public discourse space. It still is a private company, but taking someone off of deplatforming them or whatever does obviously, as with the case of like Alex Jones or like that Milo fool,

removing them from Twitter does like make their voices less loud. Right. They sort of retconned their decision by saying that. his tweets are too newsworthy. Yeah, he's too important to ban, which to me just underscored that as much as a lot of these conversations we have are about like what are the terms of service? Yeah. For these platforms.

I'm like trying to find a way of, like that was so much of the Alex Jones discourse, right? It wasn't just, you know, it wasn't just Alex Jones is a nut job and he's harassing kids and he's, He's a toxic figure who leads toxic people to do crazy shit using the internet. It was, okay, but we can specify that Alex Jones is breaking this particular clause in the terms of service for Twitter. It became that. It was like people were so frustrated with Twitter and Google and Facebook that they were like, well, maybe if we just become really pedantic about the terms of service, we can force Twitter to ban Alex Jones on a technicality. But I think Trump himself, right, is the evidence that the terms of service aren't really important. Twitter is basically said that, like, the terms of service don't apply equally.

Like, they don't apply to Trump the same way they apply to me, which means that they don't really matter. That, if anything, makes it scarier to, like, that's, I think, the thing that makes it scary to think about, what if you took the Pinterest policy against anti-vaxxers and, like, let Twitter execute it? Because Twitter already is so arbitrary. This is what I'm saying. This is like the heart of my concern. It's like these companies are not trustworthy. Arbiters of the truth or what is what should be allowed on the internet.

Like they suck at it. Right. And even if we agree with them about like anti-vaxxers are wrong. Next time they could be banning like political speech that we agree with. I don't know. It's just I don't think we're. ever going to, I don't think we'll be able to iron out exactly how the internet should be moderated in this, in this episode. I will say the Trump combo and the anti-vax conco

kind of dovetails because Trump has tweeted about vaccines being questionable. But just in conclusion, vaccinate your children, use Pinterest to plan your wedding. And I, I, I, I, I, I also highly recommend blocking Donald Trump on Twitter. It's very pleasant. Don't have to see his tweets. I mean, I see them like when they're on CNN, but... Right. I don't see them in my feed.

Well, my recommendation is that you block CNN. My recommendation is that you also block CNN. James Brown died about 12 years ago. And James Brown is among the most widely admired and influential pop musicians who has ever lived. He also has a troubled, violent personal legacy that involved a lot of alcohol and drugs. James Brown beat his second wife, D.D., he beat his third wife, Adrian.

And in fact, three weeks ago, CNN reported a three-part story about James Brown, whose family members and acquaintances say that he murdered his third wife. wife, Adrian, who was previously believed to have died from an accidental drug overdose in 1996. So I should say that Brown's family and friends have discussed Brown's abusive marriages and interviews for years. They've talked about this. You know, I write a lot about politics for the ring around out, but I also write about

music. I enter journalism as a music critic. And, you know, I mostly write about hip-hop when I read about music. and James Brown's influence in hip-hop is massive. And, you know, occasionally I've written things reckoning or at least acknowledging these things about James Brown's legacy. I'll say the CNN report is an eye-opener, the allegation that he murdered his wife.

There's also a rape allegation in the CNN story. So Jackie Hollander, a circus performer who worked with Brown, says that James Brown raped her in 1988. and then threatened to kill her family if she reported him to the police. This is, I mean, this is like really grisly stuff from credible people, including family members, who knew James Brown better than anyone else, right?

These stories are super shocking, but they don't really seem to have sparked any broad reckoning with the legacy of James Brown, or any sort of, I don't know. There's no real sort of sustained discourse about any of this. I think if anything, like, I didn't even know about this story until a couple days ago. So crazy. And I'll give you some background.

So I like to shout out Sam Donsky and Cam Collins to former employees of the ringer, including the former co-host, the founding co-host of damage control. And I was talking to Donsky and Cam. And they were, like, Donsky specifically was the one who brought this up. And I went back and I read the CNN story and I was reading a CNN report about the CNN story. And Donsky was just saying, oh, this is surprising. Like, there's not that much discourse about this. And the lack of discourse about James Brown is running parallel to the abundance of present discourse about R. Kelly and Ryan Adams, right?

Now, obviously a key difference between James. Brown on the one hand and Arkellie and Ryan Adams on the other hand is that James Brown is dead and Arkellie is very much alive and Arkellie has like for the past two decades basically just shrugged off like just shrugged off stories about him being a pedophile and has has it There's a tape. There's a tape. There's literally a tape. Right. There's literally a tape. Arkelley was recently arrested in Chicago and is apparently going to face 10 counts of sexual misconduct with the minor. Michael Alvinotti is involved. That is going to be a huge case. 26 in California is going to be, it's like so busy. That's also where Jesse Smollett was.

Oh my God. I think they're like in the same. They're in the same jail. Anyway, side note. Yeah. The new developments in the R. Kelly case come after, you know, the lifetime documentary surviving R. Kelly that's largely about R. Kelly's victims throughout the years and the attempt to sort of make R. Kelly face some sort of justice for having allegedly abused a lot of women and girls over a long period of time. Yeah. And it feels like regardless of whether R. Kelly is, like, I don't know, the language surrounding someone like R. Kelly is fraught because it's, on the one hand, this super grotesque story about R. Kelly. But we use this term canceled, which seems so like e-news. You know what I mean? It's like, I get it.

I get it. But it's like you're talking like, really, you're not talking about canceling R. Kelly at this point. We're talking about sending him to prisoning him. Yeah, and it's not just about like stop streaming him on Spotify. Like, it's, R. Kelly should go to jail now. That's what should happen to Rkelly. Yes. But one thing I was talking to Kam and Donski about was, you know, that disparity of like, why does it seem like there is a real abundance of energy for people to talk about and mobilize around the idea that like, listen, no matter how much you like R. Kelly's me.

And this is specifically it. On the consumer level, it's people saying, it doesn't matter how much you like R. Kelly's music. This is the facts about this guy. He's a patophile. He's abused women. He's brainwashed people. He's ruined. He's like broken up families. Yeah. Like he's ruined the lives of women and girls and their families and pit these people against their families. He's had this effect on real-life people versus something like the James Brown story, which seems also grotesque on its face,

but doesn't really seem to have inspired any sort of like attempt to reckon with the legacy of James Brown. And I struggle to explain why that is and why those sorts of disparities exist. I think there's a big answer. I think there are a few big answers. Yeah. But what's your big answer? Well, James Brown is there's no justice to be served. in the James Brown situation.

He's dead. R. Kelly is, well, I guess he's in jail now? Well, he's out on bond. He got bonded up. There's a famous, I don't know. There's an already famous clip of him getting bonded out. It's late at night, and he and his entourage pile into a large SUV, and they roll through a McDonald's in Chicago.

Okay, that's horrible. And there's like a helicopter following them to McDonald's, yeah. But like, R. Kelly can be brought to some sort of just. And if you stream James Brown, that's not helping James Brown. He's still fucking dead. Nothing can help him. He's done. If you're streaming R. Kelly, if you're buying tickets to an R. Kelly concert, you're helping, you're actively giving money to a pedophile. I guess I should say alleged pedophile for legal purposes. I think he did it, though. That's a huge difference to me. Like, I think that when it comes to me, the art of men who have done horrible things, it's not as clear cut as like, oh, I'm never going to listen to this person again. Always, especially if you grew up loving their music. Like, you can still love remix to Ignition.

That doesn't make you a bad person. But I think streaming it is kind of fucked up if you think that he did it because he's actively getting money from that. Pirated if you have to, I guess. Whereas, like, I don't really think there's anything wrong with people who grew up loving. James Brown still enjoying his music, even as they found out that he probably was a horrible murderer. Hmm. The death argument is sort of where Kam and Donsky and I started.

But you already briefly mentioned the Michael Jackson documentary that is coming out. Yeah. About Neverland and about the Child Melistation rumors about Michael Jackson. And I think Michael Jackson is like a good. standing counterargument to what you're saying in the sense that like people because this documentary about Michael Jackson's coming out are going to have a renewed discourse about Michael Jackson but the original like pedophilia child molestation conversation about Michael Jackson formed when he was alive.

Yeah and I think it was fucked up for people to support him when he was alive. But I just think there's a difference between. actively supporting an active musician who you know has done horrible things and enjoying music from the past. I don't think there's a moral issue with listening to the Jackson 5 now, but I do think it was a questionable choice to, like, attend his concerts after credible information about him molesting children came out. Fair. Okay. This is just my stance, too.

It's messy. Yeah. Like I like a lot of art from bad people. Like I do. And I don't really think I... Who's the worst person who's art? Woody Allen? Like I love Annie Hall.

I haven't watched it because I feel gross about watching it. But I don't think that there's a moral... I don't think it's morally wrong for someone who grew up loving that movie to turn it on. That's my stance that other people might have different stances. I think it's messed up, though, when people just like throw on Chris Brown. Okay. I don't think that it's like you're a horrible person if you do that or anything. I just personally would not choose to do that.

I think because of, so you take a term like cancel. You take a term like problematic, right? These are terms. These are language that gets used when we're talking about, you know, the classic good art by bad people debate. Like that term, it's like that phrase itself is part of the language of how we talk about this stuff. And it flattens a lot. Like, I think that there are, there are differences, for instance, between, like, Chris Brown and R. Kelly, for instance. Yeah.

Like, Chris Brown faced, like, the criminal justice system in a way that R. Kelly did not. Right. And I think that, like, if someone... Their crimes are different, too. Their crimes are different. They had totally different interactions with criminal justice up to this point. There have been totally different, like, average. They've proceeded down different avenues of accountability.

Yeah. Now, one can still look at Chris Brown and be like, this guy's a piece of shit, and I still think that, like, he never really fully accounted for, like, beating Rihanna, among other problems with that guy. Yeah, and that's why I don't choose to play his music. Right. But I struggle with this sometimes. I struggle with these arguments about, like, bad people, good art, what is one to do?

Because it's sort of as much as I – you and I can talk about this. And I think that there are definitely examples where, I think R. Kelly is a good example where it's like, to me, I could give you the most intellectualized reason for why I don't listen to R. Kelly as somebody, again, who writes about hip hop and R&B, and who has known for most of my life the basic outline of the pedophilia narrative about R. Kelly. But, I mean, in 2019, I also don't listen to R. Kelly really because, like, when the fuck was the last time R. Kelly made a relevant song to anything. You know what I mean? It's easy. Like, if anything, I don't want to oversell the morality of these choices as a consumer sometimes. Like, it's the same thing with Chris Brown.

It's pretty easy for me to not listen to Chris Brown because Chris Brown is certainly more musically active and relevant than R. Kelly is. But I don't know. Chris Brown's known Michael Jackson. Right? It's not really the same thing. Like, I didn't, like, Chris Brown literally became a star when I was. in my teens,

whereas I grew up on Michael Jackson, so it feels like a fundamentally different question. But I say all that to say that as much as you and I can go on a podcast or as much as Sean, my editor can assign me a piece about this stuff, I will say that when I sit down at Spotify, I can't really tell you how, where I am

in any given moment of like, oh yeah, the person who made this song, what are the things I know about them? and their, like, personal behavior. You're not applying a moral purity test when you're choosing what to, yeah. And I'm not saying that in a, like, I feel like there's a patronizing way someone can say that of, like, I'm not sitting here and applying moral purity. It's not that. It sounds exhausting.

Yeah, it's just like that's not even where my brain goes. Yeah. Like, I'll say this. I will say that, like, again, knowing as much as I've known about R. Kelly, like, I would say as recently as, like, I would say like four years ago. I was really into, like, revisiting trapped in the closet. Okay, yeah. So I, like, I have a lot of guilt about this because so I grew up in Chicago. I always read Jim D.

Dorothe's reporting. I was an intern at 26 in California in 2007. The case was postponed because the judge fell off a ladder. I don't know if you remember that. But anyways, I talked to, like, the people, the prosecutors. I saw, like, it was very clear to me that he was guilty. I saw the tape. I still, like, they're all throughout college.

It was like laughing to trapped in the closet, like, oh, this is great. Like, I didn't really care that. I was able to push it to the side and not really reckon with the fact that I was, like, actively supporting someone who I knew was a monster. Right. And that's why I feel guilty about that, but I'm, I'm. I'm also very understanding of people who, like, don't sit down and, like, think about this all the time. It's not fun to think about. It seems there's a sense that it's, like, kind of fucked up that people who are just trying to enjoy art are having to, like, reckon with this.

I don't know. It's, I feel guilty about that, and I'm glad I'm thinking more seriously about it now. But, like, I understand that it's hard to figure out what to do. Yeah. And if anything, I look at the fact that, like, yeah, like in recent years, what I would go back and, like, revisit the trapped in the closet videos and those songs. Part of me wonders whether the reason we read these stories and the reason we, like, write essays about R. Kelly or whatnot. It's not just because we're trying to talk people out of listening to R. Kelly or listening to James Brown or something. I mean, sometimes I feel like it's just as much about, like,

you're really trying to retroactively work through your own ambivalence about what you're confronting when you confront Art Kelly. Because when you confront Art Kelly, you're confronting both the alleged serial pedophile, and you're confronting the guy who made trapped in the closet. And you're always engaging with that person simultaneously. And the only way I've ever been able to synthesize it is not through going into Apple Music or SoundCloud and being like, I'm going to unfave all these songs. If I ever fave them. And it's more like, I don't know, the only way I can ever think to do it is like sit down and like write about it or have a conversation with you or Cam or Donsky about it. But if I think about James Brown, like realistically, I can't tell you what is going to change about my ability.

to engage or like my not even ability like the basic experience of opening apple music and happening to come across the big payback like i don't i can't tell you that the emotional and intellectual process of doing that is going to be fundamentally changed like now that i've read the cnn in report about James Brown killing his wife versus before I knew that. I don't know that. I have to tell you, like, I don't think I would

really think twice about listening to James Brown still. I don't know if that makes me a bad person or not, because I think I've sort of come to the conclusion that I don't want to support any people actively making art that I think are monsters. Yeah. But I'm not going to stop listening and watching and reading stuff made by bad people who are dead.

Like, I'm not going to not read, like, books from men who would be canceled today. Right. Because, like, I'd not be able to read a lot of old books. Right. And I just don't, I just don't think it's, I don't know. Maybe I'm being callous. Maybe this is, I don't know. Calus, but like the way you just formulated it, it reminds, I feel like recently, I read a national review story that you used that language about something else.

It's like this, this. Yeah, have I red-pilled myself here? No, but it is in more petulant form. Yeah. I feel like the conservative articulation is like, God, if liberals apply their standards for this one thing to everything, like we wouldn't have movies to watch. And it's like, part of me thinks, God, people are trying to reckon with pedophilia and your counterpoint is that like, God forbid we don't have more movies to watch. You know what I mean?

Like when a dumb person makes some version of that argument, it snaps to my mind that like, wait, the objection you're raising to people trying to, and again, maybe they're trying in ways that aren't sustainable or sort of like not perfectly constructed, but they're at least trying to reckon with bad behavior. And they're trying to create new incentives. they're trying to create new norms to make it so that cultures don't valorize pedophiles.

And I do get frustrated when a certain kind of person makes the argument that, like, well, it would be inconvenient to do that because we don't get to watch Annie Hall. Because then my response is like, fuck Annie Hall. Like, fuck. Like, I don't know. If the tradeoff is, on the one hand, fewer famous high-powered pedophiles, but on the other hand, no Annie Hall. Fuck Annie Hall. Like, I don't care. I know, but what are you going to do?

Go back, like, what art was made by morally pure people? No, totally, totally. That's the thing. And that's why I talk to you. And then you come with a sort of more reasonable version of that argument. But I do feel like there's a more, like, kid in a candy store version of that argument that I encounter in the wild that is just purely like self-interested and like materialistic almost about the idea that like if you're, too rigorous in how you think about artists and their behavior, it means you don't get to consume as much. And that's just like, that's such a self-evidently hyper-consumerist

argument. And my skin crawls when people make it without irony or without sort of like the follow-up that you're offering. But don't you think that there is a distinction based on when the art was made, when the person lived? Like, do you think we- Practically there is. Yeah. But I think, I think practically, sure, there is. Right. I think just by dent of time, like, yes, we are going to hold Chris Brown to a different standard.

Then we're going to hold the dead James Brown. Like, right? I don't want to go. I have no intention of ever going, like, I'm trying really hard not to support people creating art now, who I think should not be valorized, should not be given money, should not be given infinite chances to produce art based on their past behavior. But at the same time, I don't see anything wrong with me watching like a Muppet Christmas Carol because Charles Dickens tried to put his fucking wife in an insane asylum so we could go have sex with a young girl,

which is what happened. You know, it's like there there is there's got to be a consideration there I think. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. Part of me, I do feel bad

because it's like the reasonable half of me I feel like Two-Face and Batman or something. It's like the reasonable half of me is like Kate Nibs is absolutely right. Thank you for keeping my head on my shoulders. Kate, you're totally right. But the other half of me is some like cosmic brain revolutionary who's like, no, the only way you can make humanity a better replace is if you just totally revise the standards of conduct and just accept that like,

you know what? Yeah, you're going to have a few generations where things are going to be fucked up because you've, you've totally shredded the canon. Yeah. And you've like really made it hard to account for how we got from Shakespeare to Aaron Sorkin. But then after a few generations. Aaron Sorkin makes it through. Yeah, that's it.

You're right. But like, but like after a few generations, we'll have smooth. moved out the kinks and we'll be back on good footing and we won't have an art and pop culture that revolve around like valorizing monsters. But that's also like a childish and stupid and reductive way for me to think of art. But there are some days where I just, I think that I would sacrifice a lot of art to improve the overall lot of humanity. And I get that.

That's my extremist position now outlined for the record on damage control. All right, I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nebs. Thanks for listening. We'll be back in two weeks. Vaccinate your kids.