The Press Box - The "Wrongthink" Episode | Damage Control

Episode Date: April 25, 2019

Following the horrific Easter attacks, Sri Lanka banned social media to prevent the spread of misinformation; was this the right move (1:46)? Also, we discuss the concept of "wrongthink" and how it is affecting our current political discourse (18:13). Hosts: Kate Knibbs and Justin Charity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. Season 8 of Game of Thrones is underway, and you can stay up to date with the ringer staff as we make our way through the final episodes of the series. On the podcast side, listen to Binge Mode Game of Thrones with Mallory Rubin and Jason Concepcion, the Watch with Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald, and a pre-capable series on the recapables feed where we'll make predictions on episodes to come. In addition to our Sunday night Twitter after show called Talk the Thrones, our YouTube channel has tons of other Game of Thrones-related content,

which you can find at YouTube.com slash The Ringer. And for even more Thrones coverage, head over to The Ringer.com. I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibbs. Welcome to Damage Control on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us. So this week, we're going to talk about wrongthink, a.k.a. thought crime, aka political incorrectness.

I wrote a story about wrong think last week. The story provoked some furious discussions. and I wanted to drag my dear colleague Kate into these discussions here. I love being dragged into discussions and dragged in general, so I'm fine with that. Yes. But first we're going to discuss something notable that happened just after the horrible attacks on churches and hotels on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka. In the aftermath of those bombings, the Sri Lankan government banned access to social media,

including Facebook and WhatsApp. And I'm not so sure that was a good idea. So we're going to talk about why they did that and what it means. On Easter Sunday, a coordinated attack on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka killed over 300 people. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attack and the Sri Lankan government has named a local nationalist jihadist group. So there are still many, many questions about how exactly it went down. And in the uncertain immediate aftermath of this attack, the Sri Lankan government made the decision to temporarily block. They blocked citizens access to social media.

So they blocked Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and Viber, among other platforms. And the reason that they gave for doing this was that there's so much misinformation that spreads on these social networks. They were worried about, you know, retaliatory attacks of action with suggest these platforms. And this move comes by a lot of U.S. commentators. There was a lot of focus on how, you know, this is a consequence. of Facebook and other social networks badly fucking up over the years and spreading so much misinformation. And, you know, it was, it was sort of being portrayed as a natural consequence of the destructive nature of social media. You know, it is true that there is a huge

misinformation problem on social media. And it is also true that platforms like Facebook have been used to basically foment genocide and other violent acts. So obviously there's a kernel of truth to that rationale, but the social media ban, in my opinion, is nothing to be celebrated. And I wanted to talk about that with you because I've really been a little unsettled by how much the focus on this decision has been placed on the fact that Facebook sucks, which like Facebook does suck, but it's more complicated than that. And a lot of countries, including Sri Lanka, Facebook, and WhatsApp are really, really critical venues of communication for people. And I'm not sure that blocking access to them in a time of emergency

is the way to go. That said, you know, there was a New York Times column by a friend of me of the podcast, which was about how she, her first reaction was good when she found out that Sri Lanka had banned the social network. And I do understand that reaction, but I think once you go past the headline, you have to come to the conclusion that it's a lot more complicated than that. I'm wondering, did you have an initial reaction to this news, Justin? Well, I was reading a buzz... I was reading a few stories, but I was reading a BuzzFeed story about the complications of social media blackouts in times of crisis. And especially something like this, where you're talking about terrorism

and you're talking about the Sri Lankan government trying to basically prevent further attacks and having evidence that there are other attacks planned related to the initial attacks. And in a BuzzFeed story, there's this line where one tech writer says the extremist groups are IT savvy. Many of them have turned on VPNs.

It's the average social media user who is unable to connect, right, in the time, like if the policy is we're blacking out social media so that the state can can sort of get a hold on a situation. And it's like you note, right, the initial impulse, if you're a U.S. tech correspondent, the initial impulse to be like, yeah, this sounds like a sensible move, it makes sense at a distance. And it does feel like more broadly, it feels like we've spent the past decade hemming and hawing between the idea that social media. media is a very powerful liberal force that should very much so not be overly regulated by the state because the state, depending on where you're talking about in the world, can be authoritarian and counterproductive versus very much so thinking that social media is a force for chaos

and misinformation and desperately needs to be regulated and policed and restricted by the state. And that's the thing. I guess that early consensus that Sri Lanka shutting down social media in the country was a good idea. It feels like it's born of that very uneasy, very erratic consensus about whether social media is a force for good or a force for dystopian chaos. Yeah, I feel like it's a bit of an over-gratism. or not a bit. I feel like it isn't overcorrection. You know, like the first, I think the first time I can remember a government shutting down social media that made a lot of headlines was in, you know, 2010, Egypt. No one, I mean, no one in the West that was at all liberal or I am like reasonable in my mind thought that that was good. There seemed to be this consensus that social media to be a force for democracy and a force against authoritarianism. But in the decades since, we've discovered all of these really obvious and now the impulses to sort of be in favor of regulation. And I think there has to be something

more measured. And actually, I would say that the first idea, like the idea that the government should not have the power to just completely block a platform, I think that was more correct, to be honest, because it's scarier to me that a government could just completely block venues of communication for people than the idea that misinformation could spread. I guess they're both scary, but I do think that they're

both problems that should be weighed and treated as serious issues. But it's interesting, like, if he draw out that contrast between Egypt and Sri Lanka, right? I mean, it's a very vivid difference in that Arab Spring, social media censorship, Facebook censorship during the Arab Spring, specifically in Egypt, that censorship is overseen at the time by Hosni Mubarak.

And if you're, again, if we're looking at this from our perspective, so from the Western perspective, it's easy for basically anyone, whether you're a U.S. political conservative, a liberal, a classical liberal, I guess. You know what I mean? Like a lot of different political persuasions can look at Egypt during the Arab Spring and look at Hose Newman Brock and say, oh, well, this guy is an authoritarian. Like, obviously he should not be in charge of, he should not be entrusted to, to any degree, severely limit social media discussions in the country, because he looks like an authoritarian, he walks like an authoritarian, he quacks like an authoritarian.

Whereas, like, in contrast, Sri Lanka is a country that, I mean, one, it's just because of the sort of surprising and sudden nature of the, of the. attacks in Sri Lanka and also because Sri Lanka, I think, is less vivid in the American political imagination. It's easy for the Western perspective to look at Sri Lanka and be like, oh, this seems like more vague. The politics of this seem more vague. So, and the leaders of Sri Lanka seem more vague and not really relevant to the Western context. And that's what makes it so easy to look at Sri Lanka and say, sure, they should just ban Facebook for like a week two, why not?

I know. I just feel, I just think it's so irresponsible not to actually delve into the country's context. Right. You know, because with Sri Lanka, a lot of, and yeah, you're right that it isn't, I would wager that a lot of people don't know that in America don't really know that much about Sri Lanka.

And maybe what they do know is about the civil war and like the Tamil tigers, but not much beyond the fact that there was a civil war and there is, you know, There are different, it's like, for me, the reason why once you go one level deeper and think about it for a second, the reason that it's so obvious that, you know, social media ban by the government in Sri Lanka is acceptable, is it a disturbing thing to say, is when you look at the context and think about, you know, this is not a country that is known for having a free press. This is a country where the internet has already been really heavily censored by the government. You know, it's gotten a little bit looser since the current president was elected,

but this is a place where people were using social media to communicate because other venues like the traditional press were not trustworthy and were censored by the government. This book and WhatsApp were extremely valuable ways to use. to get the truth. You know, they weren't perfect. I would never say that there isn't fake and false and misinformation in Sri Lanka. It's just these were necessary tools for a lot of people. And to be okay with them getting, getting like, unilaterally blocked by the government.

I just think you're like inviting authoritarianism. I'm not accusing the current government of being authoritarian. I'm just saying, like, they could be. We shouldn't be cavalier. about that just because Mark Zuckerberg is a dickhead. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to contrast broad-based social media bands with the also flawed American approach, right? Where the American approach, the congressional approach to the misinformation perils of

social media, and we've criticized this approach on our very own podcast, but the American approach is to basically pressure the... actual tech CEOs and the companies themselves to figure out what to do about misinformation rather than asking, you know, Donald Trump to just decide when Facebook is on and when Facebook is off. Because that approach feels... Yeah, that would be a freaking nightmare. Right, right.

It's obviously the U.S. congressional approach kind of sucks, and there are weird incentives for conservatives and liberals to... exert as much pressure as they do or don't on Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey at any given time. But yeah, it's hard not to draw the American approach still in favorable contrast with becoming China, right? Which China doesn't even go through the pretext that Sri Lanka is with, well, it's an emergency. We're doing this because it's a national emergency. It's like, well, the Chinese approach is the extreme, right? Which is just that the default is at all times the Chinese government has the authority to say,

we're turning off certain keywords or we're turning off the internet or we're turning off social media in general because we don't like the conversations that are happening and you know what it's not about misinformation it's just about controlling information and I think that yeah social media fucking sucks but uh as much as we talk shit about extremist rhetoric on the internet I do think you and I, you know, I think you and I definitely would rather err on the side of misinformation flourishing potentially, I think, either in a time of crisis or just in general, versus trusting the state to, yeah, trusting the state to be the sort of ultimate authority in terms of whether I in a time of emergency

am able to figure out whether my sister is okay. You know, and it's like there's a curfew too. And in fact, it's just there are all these logistical challenges anyway inherent in like terrorism response and disaster response. And it almost feels like we're talking about 2007 Facebook, right? Which is just we're not. It's like 2019 and people really do, I think,

the way that people use social media to communicate and coordinate is real and it's deep. And it is really disruptive to be in the middle of an emergency and realize that one of your main channels of communication is just not available to you. That's not something that makes you feel safer necessarily. It's something that makes you feel less safe and more scared. Yeah. Like, can you imagine being in an – I just was thinking as a human thinking what I would do and how I would feel in this circumstance. I would be more traumatized by all of a sudden not being able to communicate with people the normal way that I communicate. Like that seems very damaging to people who have already been through something horrible.

And it seems like it's going to sew more panic. It's just strange. I feel like one of the other things that gets lost in these discussions, when something happens in a different country that people might not know about, like there are a lot of countries in the world. like the Philippines and India and Sri Lanka to some degree too. And where Facebook is the infrastructure of the Internet in a way that it isn't in like the U.S. and Canada and a lot of Western Europe. Like in countries where Facebook took a really active role in developing the infrastructure with Internet. Oregon stuff, like that is when people say they're going online, like it means they're going on Facebook, It is essentially a utility.

Whether that's a good thing or not is like a totally different topic, but it means that like blocking it is tantamount to like cutting people off from communicating in a lot of circumstances. And that's, it's really, I just haven't been like really taken aback by how with the Sri Lankan government doing this. So I'm like, this is, I don't know, this is not going to lead to anything good. I mean, in fairness, when is social media? and agonizing about social media led to anything good, you know? It's almost like the standing question of this podcast.

I know. Well, it's one of those things where it's like it's, you want to tear it down because it's so dysfunctional, but then you need something to replace it with. And I don't know what that is or what that even looks like. And, yeah, I don't know. I definitely feel like over the past few years, my reforms and their role in society, they keep evolving a little bit and going back and forth. I feel like maybe a year ago I would okay with this than I am now. Like it just, it's been interesting to really be constantly evaluating what function these communication tools have in society and stuff.

And yeah, this is another opportunity to agonize over it, as you said. Kate, last week I wrote, last week I wrote an essay about wrong think. And wrong think is just a sort of more pretentious way that a current generation of centrist and conservatives have come up to talk about political correctness, right? And in my essay... So they sort of take pride in the label? Right. And that's the thing about wrong think. It is like political correctness in that way that when you talk about wrong think, right?

You're basically broadcasting the idea that you're expounding on political views that are not or supposedly aren't mainstream, that are unorthodox, that are unwelcome in the liberal media. And wrong thing can cover a lot of things. Wrong thing can cover like skepticism about trans issues or it can cover like Holocaust denialism. You know what I mean? It's like a really broad range. of regressive or reactionary or even just mildly right-wing thought that falls under this term wrongthink

in that, again, like you said, conservatives and other, let's say, anti-liberal people embrace. They wear their wrong think like a badge of honor. And so in this essay I wrote for the ringer, I was talking about various examples of wrong things, and various examples of wrong thinkers. So I was talking about Andrew Sullivan.

I was talking about Jesse Single. I was talking about Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro. And I was talking about two publications near and dear to my heart, the National Review, and Quillet. And in my piece, I'm arguing that, you know, it's interesting because if you look at something like Quillette and you look at something like the intellectual dark web, right?

the intellectual dark web being this very strange rogues gallery of anti-left thinkers who have grown in popularity, specifically via the internet and podcasting in the past couple years, you know, if you read anything about the intellectual dark web, or if you engage with any of the personalities associated with that at all, they'll mostly tell you they're not even conservative. they get lumped in with the alt-right, but they're really classical liberals, sort of all of them but Ben Shapiro, they don't really identify as conservatives, and they don't necessarily overlap with one another

in terms of what their politics and what their interests, with their academic interests, with their intellectual interests even are. But the thing that unites them as an intellectual project, right? The intellectual dark web, the thing that unites them

is their belief that they are that they have basically been kicked out of the left or been alienated from the left by their reveling and wrong thing. So they have a common, and it sort of? Right, right, that's it. That's totally it.

It's basically suicide squad. It really is like a bunch of misfits who, like they basically, they are organized around the fact that they have common enemies, even if otherwise there are ways to distinguish among them, but they are the suicide squad of discourse.

I guess is how I would describe them. But, okay, so wrong think is not just the label. It's not just a term that these people sort of rally around to describe their antagonistic relationship to the left. I also think of wrong think as one word in a sort of broader language of the right in like the current moment. Because I actually got the idea to write about wrong think.

For the website, I want to say back when the Christchurch massacre happened. And the reason why is because you and I did a piece about that where we talked about A. Chan, we did a piece on the ringer.com. And I had spent a few days

after the Christchurch shooting just lurking 8chan and remembering that like Right I was worried about you I was very odd week for me But I I'd spend time lurking 8chan politics

And other channels in 8chan And I just could not get over The language of 8chan And the fact that 8chan Threads are just An uncountable mass of people All sort of droning on

About wrong things and about how their ideas about the Holocaust are wrong think and about how like the Christchurch shooter, like thinking the Christchurch shooter was good actually is wrong think. And to me, the fact that I can go from that environment, 8chan, and then go to Quillette or the National Review or Ben Shapiro's Twitter feed and see that same, like, weird,

self-pitying, self-martying, droning about wrong think in this weird quasi-persecution language that conservatives have developed. I look at something like Quillette or I look at something like Ben Shapiro and because the way they talk to me basically sounds like how 8chan sounds

after a white guy shoots up a mosque, like because they have that common language, I can't help but hear words like wrongthink or people complaining about social justice warriors or hearing people complain about outrage culture or people being like unreasonably furious about wokeness. Like all of that language is to me a storm. It's just a storm.

It's a shit show. It's a storm of anxiety that I find really, hard to engage with in measured productive ways? I mean, I don't know as well as you because I don't often engage with these places. I don't regularly read any of them. I shouldn't say that, like, I am familiar with them and that I will, I like to just see what's going on at different publications. You know, like back in 2016, I read a lot of bright bark because I wanted to see what

was going on there. I do check out Quillette from time to time in the National Review, and I don't go on A. Chan really. So specifically, like, what they're saying on A.C.N., I'm not as familiar with. What I've seen with, like, you know, the quote, unquote, intellectual dark web figures like Shapiro and Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan and Candice Owens and stuff like that. Like, when you're saying wrong, think, I think it's so interesting that that's the term that they've latched onto, and they're probably declaring themselves to be, you know, wrong. And it just reminds me of, like, someone smoking weed in a dorm room and insisting that, like, they see the world in this unique and daring way. And there's two things that are interesting to me about it. One is that it's so obvious, at least to me, it's very much so like grievance-based identity politics in a way that's very ironic because one of their favorite things to complain about is that the left is all about identity politics and like only and doesn't like engage with policy or issues and it's all about identity.

But in reality, I've found that this, this like, breed of commentator trafficked in the exact thing that they complain about all the time by declaring themselves these, like, these vilified victims of woke culture. You know what I mean? Right. And even apart from identity politics, another term is, like, tribalism, right? Like, the intellectual dark web is definitely, it is the paradox of a movement that, resents so-called left-wing tribalism, but the intellectual dark web is itself a tribe of grievance. It's a tribe of alienation. And there is something paradoxical about trying to engage with this loose movement of ideas. Because something like the intellectual dark web, unless you are fawning over them, anybody who writes anything critical about them,

inevitably hears back from them from various thinkers in the intellectual dark web, accusing people of mischaracterizing the specific political belief systems of individual members and of not really engaging with what the intellectual dark web is about. But the more time you do spend engaging and consuming content from various corners of the intellectual dark web, I do think it becomes impossible to overlook the fact that, no, this actually is really, you might not want to identify as conservative, but you use the language of right-wing web conservatism. That is your language. I think there's something to be said for trying to understand the politics of different groups

by way of their language, especially because I think a lot of right-wing people and even a lot of centrist, you know, I would say in the age of identity politics, A lot of what alienates them from the left is, I think, certain language conventions around, let's say, privilege and around things being problematic and around whokeness. I guess I think the difference between the left and the right is that I think that on the left, there are plenty of people on the left who I think would challenge or who just don't like wokeness, right? Or who don't really like identity politics. I mean, you can even look at like presidential primaries that are beginning right now.

And you can look at the fact that for all of the right-wing characterizations of the Democratic Party being totally taken over by identity politics and privileged discourse, you know, Joe Biden is still the guy to beat for president. Joe Biden is still the classic old white guy that most Democrats at this stage at least plan to vote for to be the Democratic Party. presidential nominee. And I kind of, I don't know. I do think that the right has this way of characterizing the left as monotonous and as in lockstep about identity politics being the be all end all. But I don't think the left actually agrees about identity politics and privilege and wokeness nearly as much and nearly as monotonously as the right clearly agrees about terms like

wrong think and social justice warriors and outrage culture. I think that the right-wing consensus about those things is way more monotonous and way more uninteresting, frankly, than the state of liberal politics is. I just didn't, like, quite realize that wrong think was a term that was used so commonly. I know that it is used a lot in like the specific publications that you were pointing out in your piece. Because when I, after I read your piece, I was so interested. I was just looking up things they had written and stuff like that. But when you're talking about like the broader right wing movement, like is that something,

is that Tucker Carlson use that expression? Is it like coming into like the Fox News sort of realm yet or is it so more of a fringe thing? I mean, it's weird because Tucker attitudeally is definitely a wrong thing kind of. of guy, but I don't know if he is somebody who has latched on to that term explicitly. Because for the sake of the piece that I wrote, I was sort of foking, I was focusing very specifically on different corners of web discourse. And yeah, it's just interesting to consider all of these anti-left factions begging for, I mean, if you just think of the state of intellectual conservatism right now, right?

it's like you have the crazy game show host president. Like a lot of people who, they may be conservatives who don't like Trump. They may be conservatives who sort of pretend they don't like Trump. They may be conservatives who love Trump. But I think that if you engage with these conservative thinkers or these anti-left thinkers, they don't necessarily want to explicitly associate themselves with conservatism, at least in that term, right?

Conservatism. Again, the intellectual dark web identifies, I think, more comprehensively as anti-left than they do as conservative. But that also just strikes me as self-serving. Like those distinctions, I get it, but it just seems like,

well, of course you don't want to identify as a conservative because conservatism looks fucking ridiculous at the moment. And like, we all understand the benefits of rebranding. It's interesting. Because in a way, I actually think that they are, it is more accurate to categorize them as like the anti-left

if they're going to all be grouped together at all then like part of some sort of coherent conservative movement because I'm just not necessarily can they actually have an ideology behind other than the grievance you know what I mean like I don't know how many like especially with some of the podcasters Like, I've talked to you a lot about how I'm obsessed with Joe Rogan as like a cultural figure. And I would, I think that he deserves to be discussed among this, you know, group of people. But I also don't think he's a conservative.

I don't think he really has an ideology. But I do think that he often has guests on who like launder a very old reactionary thinking through this like alt-right web discourse that you're talking about. And that sort of links him with everyone else. I specifically say that in my piece on the site too, that Joe Rogan, it feels like a lot of the time liberals who want to ridicule the intellectual dark web, they sort of just buy into the perception that Rogan is a weird conservative celeb. And in the piece, I am trying to nail down that idea.

that like if you listen to him talk, you're not listening to a conservative talk. What you're really listening to is a guy, you're not listening to a conservative, you're listening to a guy who likes counterculture and who has identified this quasi-conservatism as the emergent counterculture of the post-Trump moment. And so his association with conservatives and reactionaries,

you know, he's laundering it. through counterculture is what I think is happening. Yeah. Yes. Yes. And it totally comes back to this whole wrong sync thing where the positioning is this sort of like naughty rebel, like this fun, like, you know, edgy. It actually reminds me of like Gavin McGinnis-era advice with like it's quote unquote

ironic racism, which was really just racism, where like there's this movement to sort of repackage reactionary, racist, like right-wing bullshit as some sort of like free-thinking, new things to like the stodgy old social justice warriors. Like it's, that's why I thought your piece is so great. It's just a really neat distillation of that sort of wave. This is the problem, right? You and I host this podcast, and I would say we're both pretty liberal. And yet I would say that I am not woke.

Like there's a lot of stuff that I, a liberal, a person who is apparently an antagonist of the intellectual dark web and all of these other right wing or quasi right wing factions, right? I am not woke. There is a lot of, especially if I'm going to, if I'm going to use this movement's terms just for the sake of this conversation. Like there is a lot of outrage culture, for instance, that I don't like. There are a lot of times that you can ask Ringer, editor-in-chief Sean Fennessee. There are a lot of times when I think both on the left and the right, when some news cycle is happening that the genesis and the basic, in the gist of what's happening is people taking offense at X or Y,

you know, my instinctive response to that most of the time is, I don't care about this. you don't really care about this. And even like the people who are driving this conversation, I don't really believe actually care about this. And that's my response to a lot of outrage culture. And I think a lot of what we call left-wing identity politics is ridiculous. I make fun of both in my personal life and occasionally as a writer.

Like I'm happy to make fun of identity politics, at least like campus style identity politics. And so as somebody who has that broad perspective on modern leftist discourse, I don't like a lot of identity politics and I definitely don't like a lot of outrage culture. I'm just sort of bewildered by this movement of people who are like, yeah, I was driven away from the left because everyone on the left is obsessed with identity politics. Dude, there are lots of factions on the left who do not, like the entire phenomenon of Bernie Bros. versus Clinton supporters in 2016 was specifically a left-wing argument over like the more ridiculous extremes and more ridiculous conclusions that identity politics might render in left-wing politics. There are plenty of people on the left who do not like the things that the intellectual dark web doesn't like. But I'm not on the intellectual dark web because I don't look at the state of identity politics or outrage culture or any of that shit and think I'm going to go get in bed with Milo Yanopoulos.

That's the only, that feels like the only actual difference. I'm not going to go hang out with Nazis. One thing that I've noticed when I read Quillet is that it is really obsessed with different campus controversies related to like outrage culture in a way that, feels like really disproportionate to me. And it's funny because I agree with you. I don't even really understand what wokeness means in 2019. Like the term has been,

is pretty meaningless, I think. And I am probably a problematic fave in many ways. Like, I don't think anyone has politics that anyone else completely agrees with. And that's fine. And I also think that like

some of the campus shit that happens is silly. But I also think that it's blown way out of proportion by the right way. Like, they take things like a handful of people are doing at liberal arts schools and try to frame it as this like huge assault on free speech. And it seems like very cynical. I think that that's sort of the heart of the problem with this. Well, there's a lot of problems with this wave of thought. But like, they take, like, the most ridiculous aspects of identity politics, and then weave an, like, a straw man out of that, and then somehow turn it around

so that they're the victim. It's very strange and annoying. I would differ slightly on that. I don't even think it's entirely a straw man, because I do think that it's hard to assess how big those identity politics factions are, but they're definitely vocal and they're definitely active in lots of corners of left politics. So I could definitely see somebody from a distance looking at that

being like, wow, this seems like a really influential trend in modern liberalism. I totally get that, although I also agree with your sense of disproportion, right? the idea that the intellectual dark web feels like a political mission forged entirely in response to that one time the Oberlin kids said that sushi was cultural appropriation. It feels, you know what I mean?

It's like if the Joker's origin story, it does. It's like if the Joker's origin story was, oh man, like somebody said that bond me sandwiches were cultural appropriation. And it was at that point that like I became a bright bar editor you know I just don't

it feels so out of whack but I don't know like that those elements of identity politics are definitely real I'm not saying that they're not real I just think it's it almost feels like the intellectual dark web and I would say conservatism broadly

are like they're kind of high on their own supply right because they're so it's so advantageous for them to just caricature the left as 100% behind identity politics, even though the left very, very clearly is not, right? Like, again, a lot of the socialists, a lot of the factions driving the socialist moment in U.S. American politics are hostile to identity politics.

The whole fight over class-based versus race-based and gender-based approaches to talking about inequality and talking to and converting voters back to the democratic column, like those are conversations led a lot of the time by people who think identity politics is frivolous or think that a lot of identity politics is frivolous. And I perceive that as a person who is on the left and makes fun of a lot of identity politics. And so I just, I find it surprising that there is this whole conservative project that is laboring under the delusion that everyone on the left agrees with identity politics when we very clearly do not. I agree with you that it's completely, but I guess it shouldn't be that surprising because, like,

they're latching on to a perceived grievance. And, like, grievance politics is what has driven success on the right wing for, like, five, decades. Like, that's how they win elections. And it's how they sway people to their side, is playing with this game, like, petting people against each other and trying to create an other. And in this weird instance, the project is to be, like, the iconoclast who hate social justice warriors. But what they're really doing is, is like traditional. identity politics. It's funny.

It's funny. You have to laugh. So wait, did anyone from Kla ever reach out to you about the time they called you the NAPC renamed Justin Charity? No. Oh, my, do you want to explain that? I forgot what it was. Oh, it was about Quinn Norton. It was about the whole Quint Norton being fired from the New York Times saga, I think,

is what I wrote a piece. It was kind of hot-headed. You wrote a piece that, quote, what objected to. And I honestly didn't read their takedown of you because I didn't want to, but I just remember that they called Judy and Natalie named Justin Charity. And it made me really happy. This is your piece. You did such a good job in this piece of explaining why these calls from, these calls to debate are so hollow because they're not meeting good faith.

and they don't actually want to engage you. And also, you know, there's really no point in having a conversation with somebody who isn't going to listen to your ideas. So curious if any of these people are going to actually try to debate you now. Did you get any direct responses from any of them? No. I mean, I saw a lot of people, like, tweeting and communicating about it in other. forums, but no. I mean, and you know what?

No one has a duty to debate me. That's sort of a sub-argument of the piece is that... Oh, and I don't even think you should debate them. I just feel like if they're going to be true to themselves, they should be trying to debate you. But that's sort of the broader phenomenon of the intellectual dark web that, and I did this inception move in the piece where Erie Harris at Quillette wrote this piece about the intellectual dark web that a lot of intellectual dark web people reacted very negatively to. But Uri Harris wrote this piece where the idea was him saying, look, the intellectual

dark web identifies as this movement of wrong thinkers of people who just want to be challenged and who don't want to be suckers for orthodox thought. But they have mostly just very chummy conversations where they all just, broadly agree that the left sucks and that they don't suck, right? And yeah, I don't know. I mean, there's value in community, I guess. But otherwise, it's hard to look at Quillette and feel like, or it's hard to look at the intellectual dark web and feel like

you're looking at a movement of people who are really interested in debate, right? You're like, no one, the people, the fact that these people, in terms of mainstream, like, porting, their views to the mainstream, the fact that they're rallying around Joe Rogan is one of the biggest tells there. Because again, even though Joe Rogan is not a conservative, he's also not a person you, he's not a person you launder your ideas through if you're interested in those ideas being challenged. It's not like people are going on Joe Rogan and finding lots of rigorous opposition or a lot of rigorous scrutiny for their ideas. They've specifically rallied around Joe Rogan

because they know that they don't give a shit about debate. They just want to go and have a, like, fun and slightly gullible former host of fear factor sort of tease out their ideas and market them as counterculture. And that, to me, has nothing to do with rigor and that has nothing to do with... That has nothing to do with the intellectual project

that the intellectual dark web otherwise pretends to be about. this is the last I'll say about this until someone offers to fight me yeah I just think crafting a political identity around being a brat right like you're

building a political identity around the idea of like I'm going to say this I'm going to say what I'm not allowed to say even though I say it in the pages of the New York Times the Atlantic you know it's it's

it's so it's such a bratie political identity. And the fact that it's such a bratty political identity that looks at the left as childish people suspended in a permanent state

of campus politics, you know, that's a paradox that I don't know that I will ever get over. But it's also a paradox that I have a lot of fun

engaging with, if only at a distance. If no one volunteers to fight you by the end of the year, I will. Oh, my God. My problematic fave, I have to And that's the thing.

That's how it goes for everyone in discourse is that we all in the end have to fight our problematic faith. It's the whole kill your idols thing. Yeah. You have to kill your problematic fave. Only then. Only then will you be truly woke.

The social justice for your circle of life. I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibb. Thanks for listening. We'll be back in two weeks. weeks.