Catholic Challenging The Ruling Class | A Bee Interview With Sohrab Ahmari
Sohrab Ahmari is the founder and editor of COMPACT magazine, which bills itself as your home for journalism that challenges the ruling class. Kyle and Adam talk to Sohrab about working at the New York Post when they broke the Hunter Biden laptop story and were censored by Big Tech. They also discuss whether class analysis is just some wacky idea from that kook Karl Marx and when will Sohrab put a body positive swimsuit model on the cover of his magazine. In the full length show available to Babylon Bee subscribers, Sohrab talks about David French's statement about drag queen story hour being a blessing of liberty, getting interrogated for owning a copy of Star Wars in Tehran, and more!
That is the name of the person that we're interviewing today.
So he was with the New York Post.
He was with the Wall Street Journal.
He writes a bunch of hot takes.
And now he has a new publication called Compact.
It's a populist view on class and economy.
And it's kind of hard, I guess, tough for me to describe as not a smart person, but it talks about political.
He will describe it for us.
And it sounds like a very compelling magazine that you guys should check out.
But we talked about everything from Catholicism and Protestantism to class.
And as conservatives, do we need to worry about class?
Or is that all Karl Marx?
And we even touched on his famous debate with David French over Frenchism and drag queen story actors.
This episode has drag queens.
This episode has saints that you pray to.
This episode has fat people on the covers of magazines.
It's got everything.
Saurabh Amari.
Well, Saurabh, how'd you find yourself in this, you know, in this crazy world of commenting on news and being a thinker?
It must be hard for you.
You know, you're a guy who tries to think deeply about things and everything is so stupid.
There was a question in there somewhere.
Go ahead, Doc.
Well, no, it's not very hard at all.
I'm very lucky that I get paid to write takes.
And like to be a take worker.
We're not paying you for this, just so you know.
There's no money being exchanged.
Yeah, no, I know.
I had already written up a kind of an honorarium invoice to step by, but yeah, I mean, it's really, really nice that to do it the way I can do it now, especially kind of running my own publication as in a way you are independently.
I worked for a decade at various plants within the broad Rupert Murdoch Foundry.
So I started out working at the Wall Street Journal, was there for five years, then went to the New York Post, and then I left last year to launch my own thing.
And yeah, I mean, I was in law school.
I had gone to law school intending to practice law, but then at some point I started writing articles on the side.
And I enjoyed that much more than the prospect of writing memos for some partner who would never actually read them.
And so, yeah, I mean, despite having a lot of law school debt, I went into journalism, which, as you know, there's a buck in that racket.
There isn't actually.
I understood that.
I understood the joke.
Good.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Yeah.
So that's how I got into it.
And so how it started was initially, I happened to be from Iran.
I was born in the capital of Tehran, immigrated to the United States when I was about to turn 14.
And so I started writing about what I knew, which was Iran.
And so that's kind of how I got my foot through the door.
But my intent was never to become like an Iran guy, one of those people who professionally write about Iran from abroad.
That was just my entree to the business.
And so luckily I was able to just expand and become a kind of generalist opinion maker.
Cool.
What was the environment like working at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post?
A lot of good water cooler conversations there?
Or were you all remote?
You know, they have very different tone and mood.
And that's reflected in the office.
You know, the journal is very buttoned up.
And you have to wear a shirt at the Wall Street Journal.
Oh, you definitely, yeah, definitely.
Definitely.
And I, yeah, you know, I like that.
I mean, I didn't mind that.
The tone was because I was like, I started as a book review editor, and the editor who's above me is still there, one of the most talented editors ever, Eric Eichmann.
And his mode was very sort of like when he would send back something you had edited with additional touches, he would just be like, Well, it's not a crime, but there's a dangling modifier here.
And if you could just, you know, I'd suggest changing it.
Whereas at the post, which is a tabloid, the atmosphere is very yellow and it's just much different.
It's, you know, they're like, Give me pictures of Spider-Man.
Yeah, I mean, I was on the opinion page.
I was never doing it, but it was just sort of like, what the hell is this?
What have you written?
It sucks.
Do it again.
You know, it was not so genteel.
I feel like you should environment here.
More yelling.
We need more yellow yelling here.
Like, there's blasphemy in this article.
Blasphemy.
Edit it.
What was the worst book that you reviewed while you were a book reviewer?
Do you remember?
Is there one that stands out?
Oh, I reviewed a book very harshly.
I would have to remember the name, but it was by a BBC correspondent where it was her account of Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State.
And it was just, you know, it's sort of this adulatory, laudatory take on Clinton facing down the world's challenges.
I think that's the only way you're allowed to write about Hillary Clinton.
She's just the best.
And it was sort of like full of these little details that were almost designed to be obnoxious.
Where it was like, then we went back into her airplane and we were served soft, gooey chocolate cookies.
And it was just sort of like, you know, meanwhile, like Benkazi had had to happen and it's sort of the disaster of the Libyan intervention, et cetera, et cetera.
Like the chocolate cookies.
At least the cookies were good as the terrorist attack happened.
Young women in, you know, in Indonesia just looked up to her so much.
And it was a sort of girl boss genre before that was a thing.
So that was probably the worst book I reviewed.
So you were triggered by that book.
I was triggered.
Yeah.
Sad.
I gave it a good, you know.
So you've now gone and launched Compact Magazine, which is an all cap.
So I assume I have to yell it every time I say it.
Compact magazine.
Yep.
And I'm always interested when people have a nice job at, you know, in a field and then they decide to go launch their own thing.
Because I feel like there's like two types of people and very few people are the type of person that goes, no, I'm going to go start my own thing.
Like I started writing at the Babylon B on day one, but I wasn't the guy who had the initiative to be like, let's launch this.
Let's write, let's make Christian news satire.
Like that's going to be a thing.
Yeah, same here.
I always grab someone else's coattail.
That's what I was like, ah, that guy's got an idea.
I'll go follow him.
That's exactly what I did.
So I'm just interested, like, what caused you to have that entrepreneurial spirit?
Yeah, I have always been an employee, you know, ever since I just got a paycheck and you show up.
And I was always an opinion editor.
And as an opinion editor, okay, sometimes you publish something and it blows up online.
Everyone's talking about it and you're very pleased.
Sometimes, you know, the piece has sort of influence in a narrow policy community.
And even though it's not widely read, you're pleased with that.
Or sometimes things are a dud and that's it.
Nevertheless, you go home and you get your paycheck.
And these jobs are very, they're sort of semi-permanent.
It's almost like getting kind of university tenure.
So why take the risk?
Basically, my partner and I, Matthew Schmitz, has started talking about this as early as 2020 in the kind of the height of the pandemic where we are both men of the right,
but we felt that there's this unaddressed gap in conservative journalism, which is that a lot of voters who pull for the GOP or for especially GOP under President Trump are actually quite populist and they're not easily persuaded by the old kind of Reaganite free market low-tax orthodoxy.
In many ways, they want to preserve aspects of the New Deal and protect it rather than to try to smash it down, which had become kind of the GOP.
And so we wanted to explore that zone seriously and to publish writers who would who would talk about that forthrightly.
And that's what we did.
I mean, the idea of compact, the names evokes an alliance.
And the alliance name is people like me and Matthew, who are who are political conservatives, but populist inclined, and populist writers, including left populists.
And I have to make an important distinction.
Left populists are not like, you know, Ibram Kindi or the New York Times editorial page.
These are people who, you know, they're about workers' rights and about corporate power, about Silicon Valley's overweening kind of role in our life.
So, and that's the idea.
We just felt like these conversations were happening on Twitter.
You saw someone like Glenn Greenwald, who is on our editorial board, forging alliances with right-wingers because they now say, oh, yeah, Glenn was right.
The sort of war on terror created this vast national security apparatus that's maybe not so good.
So it was happening organically, and we wanted to institutionalize it.
In terms of, you know, and then the kind of entrepreneurial aspect, I still, I still have, I'm sort of marvel at the fact that we managed to sort of raise money for this thing and get, I've, you know, to do payroll and pay taxes.
Yeah, again, we're not paying you.
Just I just want to make that clear.
I understand.
I understand.
I'm saying.
And for me, it's just very new and cool and interesting.
And we'll see how we do with it.
We're very pleased with it so far.
But that's the genesis.
In finding writers for this magazine, do you ever find that you find more common ground with the sort of populist people on the left rather than the sort of traditional Reagan GOP kind of people?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Look, I mean, there are cultural issues where there isn't agreement, right?
There's not common ground.
And we're, you know, Matthew and I are both Roman Catholics and we are orthodox, small orthodox in the sense that we, you know, are serious about the church's teaching on all the things that make cultural liberals and leftists uncomfortable, sexuality, abortion, et cetera, et cetera.
But we're also on prudential questions, things that the church leaves up for individual men and women to decide given a particular context, like the economy.
There's no rule that says Christians should be avid fur marketeers.
Free markets, as we know them, as sort of the ideology of free markets, emerged two, 300 years ago.
So it's a modern invention.
And so there's no commitment there.
And if you're kind of open-minded, you can, I do frankly find common ground with them because there are certain things about, you know, if you read economic history and you're like, well, why, why did we, why did we have a new deal, for example, or why did labor unions become an important part of the American economy in response to industrialization, vast power gaps between the individual worker going up against a large employer,
those were real problems that had to be addressed.
And so the dogmatism of some on the right now get on my gets on my about these things, which are not, you know, they're not of the essence of what it means to be a Christian or an American, I think.
Okay.
Now, will Compact Magazine have a swimsuit edition and will you put a fat lady on there to promote body positivity?
We are painfully serious for the most part.
If you visit our tone, it just that would not fly.
So, no.
I mean, at least not now, maybe a few years down.
Occasionally, okay, look, I used to work at part of my career, I used to work at a tabloid.
And there are certain pieces where I'm like, my New York Post instinct to put something salacious, at least for the picture, and then we'd be like, no, but that's not, that's not us, that's not compact.
Like the Hunter Biden laptop story.
That was too far, in your opinion, for the post.
Well, as a piece of journalism, it was no, no, no, no, that was normal.
That's a great achievement for the post.
Well, you know, like, yeah, I mean, the post occasionally just has a picture of a babe on the cover.
You know, we're not going to do that.
Or three of them with Hunter Biden, maybe.
Well, one of the things I find hard, I don't know if this overlaps or not, but it brought it to mind.
Like at the Babylon B or when I'm doing stand-up, it's like I try to kind of work kind of clean and from a Christian perspective.
But a lot of the stories that are out there, when it's like Hunter Biden doing crack with prostitutes or when it's transgender people going into locker rooms with, you know, like little girl, there's like a salacious aspect to everything that's going on.
And it's like, if you want to talk about these stories, you have to kind of decide how far down that road you're going to go.
I'm surprised that this is you trying to be clean.
I've told you this before.
When I go out to regular comedy clubs, people come up to me and go, I can't believe how clean you are.
Then when I come to Babylon B or conservative outlets, they're like, oh, that's so dirty.
That's, I can't believe you said that.
Yes.
So anyway, oh, so Rev is here.
So you so in Compact, you call it your home for journalism that challenges the ruling class.
So who the heck is the ruling class?
What the heck are you talking about?
Well, I mean, we definitely do have a ruling class.
Every society has a ruling class.
But ours happens to be, I mean, you know, the owners of owners of capital, frankly, very large owners of capital.
And then there's a kind of layer of professional managerial kind of classes that services the assets of those others.
And then there is everyone else.
There is, you know, kind of like downwardly mobile professionals in the cities.
There is wage workers, et cetera.
So, I mean, we have a kind of material analysis of this.
And then beyond that, I mean, our ruling class is very much implicated in Hollywood, Wall Street, in academe, and of course, in media as well.
And over the past two, three, four years, I would say, it's become self-aware in a way that maybe it wasn't before.
In other words, in response to a populist wave that swept the United States and Europe as well, you know, Brexit, the Trump movement, etc.
Our elites maybe realize that they share more with each other than any of them do with kind of the populist constituency.
And they've reacted very badly, I would say.
I mean, in other words, instead of saying, why are people embracing Trump?
What does this say about the state of our society?
What has globalization done to working class lives, et cetera, et cetera?
The response has been: they are bigots, they're a threat to democracy, and they have to be sort of suppressed, and their speech has to be regulated online, et cetera, et cetera.
And so we, that's that kind of nexus of capital, media capacity, technological power that forms our ruling class, we seek to sort of expose it.
And in a new one, we criticize, I would say, both the mainstream right and the mainstream left because we think both of them ultimately serve this ruling class.
The mainstream left, although it talks a lot about equity and justice, all this sort of talk about race, gender, et cetera, has been easily accommodated by corporate America.
In other words, if it really threatened the interests of Apple Corporation, Nike, the trustees of Ivy League Universities, Brooks Brothers, et cetera, they would not be at the forefront of kind of race, gender, sex ideology.
If anything, this divides Americans and makes it harder for them to build solidarity across their differences.
And of course, the mainstream right too often is frankly just a party of flutocracy and low taxes, globalization, et cetera, at the expense of ordinary Americans.
So, you know, the New York Times published an op-ed or a kind of feature story about us on the day of our launch.
And the headline was taking on the left and the right too.
And I think that's pretty accurate about us.
Okay.
Yeah, we only make fun of the left, so we can't really relate to you there.
Yeah, there are things to make fun of about the right, but you know, in part because the right is culturally powerless.
It really is.
You feel bad making fun of it.
And I sometimes do on Twitter, and I'm like, you're punching down.
Well, I found, I like making fun of the right.
It's just that sometimes because there's so many like late-night comics and that's their whole shtick, like it gets boring just telling the same, like, oh, rednecks.
You know, you're like, well, they've already told that joke.
We come up with good jokes about it, I feel like, and some of it's self-deprecating, but then it feels like you're piling on what everyone else is already doing.
When I say making fun of the right, I don't mean the ordinary Trump voter, but I think, for example, Lindsey Graham is like a oh, yeah.
What would you make fun of him about?
What could you possibly make fun of him about?
Yeah, I mean, good, sir.
What was it?
He tweeted like two, three days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
He was like, who is it that's going to go assassinate Putin?
I'm like, this is, that's insane.
Don't say this.
Like, why do you want this kind of escalation?
So that's what I go after him for.
Not his infamous private life.
Now, you brought up class view times.
Now, socialists talk a lot about class conflicts.
You're not a socialist, are you?
Do you find common ground with socialists at all?
No, I'm not a socialist.
I don't think it's feasible or desirable to do away with private property.
But I do think you don't have to be a socialist to recognize class as a material reality that has kind of definitive role in how our economy is organized.
In other words, you can go to President Jackson to hear him talk about class.
You can go to Theodore Roosevelt to hear him talk about class distinctions in American society.
In fact, I say, look, in the 19th century, despite its obviously sort of gilded age opulence and its kind of class tensions, our politicians were much more comfortable talking about, they would talk about the money power versus the ordinary person, etc.
So, you know, it's a reality that certainly sort of Marxist economic theory recognizes, but plenty of non-Marxist economic theory recognizes as well.
That, you know, with the rise of industrialization, you had this class of people who emerged who could only subsist and reproduce themselves by selling their labor power on the market, compared to older forms where there were still hierarchies and so forth.
But in feudal society, sort of the nobleman was somehow responsible also for his serfs.
And obviously, that was a relationship of exploitation too, but it was different.
There's something happened with the rise of industrialization, rise of modern capitalism, where millions of people could no longer subsist but by selling their labor on the market.
And that was a position of profound insecurity for a lot of them because as individuals, right, it's much harder to negotiate, for example, over your wages, et cetera, versus a large entity.
And that wasn't the case when a lot of free market theory was formulated.
It was formulated in the late 18th century before the rise of industrialism on a vast scale, so that they had this sort of ideal models of what markets operate like, where there's multiple producers in any given industry and they compete enough that it means that not one of them can control the wages that are paid, et cetera, et cetera.
That was not industrial reality.
And so there had to be a correction of how we think about the economy.
And that was to recognize kind of these issues that I laid forward.
And there was to a great extent, right?
I mean, I'm going to make myself maybe unpopular among your audience or here, but I think the New Deal and the experiment of social democracy on the other side of the Atlantic as well was an achievement.
The idea that if you grant a minimum of a welfare net, it increases workers' bargaining power because they're not like facing starvation or take any job at any wage.
And those achievements were lost beginning in the 1970s, where there was a kind of massive pushback against social democracy, and that persists to this day.
And it's brought us to a point, this is inappropriate for a Babylon B compact discussion, maybe, but it's brought us to a point where all of us feel that corporate power is too strong, right?
I mean, big tech censorship is the most visible example of this.
And so we were comfortable talking about that.
And you don't have to go all the way towards sort of nationalizing every industry to recognize these realities.
That makes sense.
I think only a few of our commenters will call you a socialist after that.
Yeah.
But no, tech censorship is a big issue.
Have you had to deal with the big tech censorship at all?
I know you were involved with the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Have you encountered any more of that on Twitter?
Have I?
Yeah.
Well, no, I mean, not personally.
For some reason, I never get censored.
Not on your personal account.
You haven't had issues.
But of course, I was working at the New York Post when we broke the Hunter Biden laptop story.
And I mean, I remember the day, like it was yesterday, it was October 14th, five in the morning.
I always wake up to see what we have on our front page.
Sometimes I looked the night before, but in this case, I hadn't.
And I saw the story.
I was like, whoa, that's big.
This is huge.
And then four or five hours went by, and I saw this Facebook spokesman named Andy Stone post something like that.
Yeah, I remember that.
We've seen this despicable New York Post story.
We will.
Yeah, we're monitoring the situation.
We're monitoring the situation.
And pending fact-checking, we're reducing circulation of it on our platform.
I was like, okay, well, there have been lots of anti-Trump stories the past four years that were, you know, not such a thing.
That's false.
Yeah, and they would still promote them.
So that, okay.
And then an hour later, people started telling me I can't post it on Twitter.
And then more alarmingly, people reached out to me and said, can you send me this story?
I need to find it.
And I would send it to them.
But Twitter would block you from sending it in direct messages.
That's wild.
And it got blocked or sort of throttled on Facebook also, right?
They reduced circulation.
That was the Andy Stone guy.
Yeah, we have reduced its circulation on our platform or something like that.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I mean, that was a kind of a really wild 24 hours.
I mean, personally, I was not involved in the reporting of that.
Like I said, I'm on the opinion side, and New York Post, like many other newspapers, has a Chinese wall between the opinion and news section.
But I sort of started going on what wall?
Is that a racist term?
That sounded racist to me.
Is it?
I don't know.
What does it mean?
I've heard a firewall and I've heard it was an achievement.
It kept out the Mongolians.
Why would it be racist?
Oh, like the wall of China, I see.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So what is the Chinese?
Is that like an actual wall?
Is that an expression?
I've never heard that before.
Yeah, he was saying it's like the Great Wall of China, like dividing those two.
Dividing opinions.
They're an actual wall.
I want to know if there's an actual wall.
No, no, no.
There is not a physical wall in the building between news and opinion.
I just meant you don't, you don't interact with your news.
Okay, thanks, thank you.
Yeah.
And yeah, I mean, they suspended us for 14 days.
Now, keep in mind, the New York Post is America's oldest continuously published daily paper.
It was founded by Alexander Hamilton.
And so the idea that a few tech oligarchs could disappear this story, which turned out to be 100% correct.
That's not the most wild part to me, a 100% true story.
Like the New York Times, then, and this is the most infuriating part of it.
The New York Post, for example, ran a piece about it saying, da-da-da, insubstantiate this and that.
And we called them out on it.
We were like, what was insubstantiated about it?
And they ninja corrected insubstantiated.
What was that?
Did you say the Washington Post?
The New York Times.
Sorry.
New York Times.
I thought you said New York Post.
Okay, yeah.
New York Times.
Well, no, they had written about a, I mean, it was a complex case involving whether it was a violation of Federal Communications Commission rules for that censorship to happen.
As it happened, the FCC ruled that it was not a violation of FCC rules.
But in writing about it, the New York Times said the New York Post's unsubstantiated story.
And this was months later when, you know, after, despite like enormous efforts to discredit the story, nothing had been discredited about it.
So we were like, what's unsubstantiated about it?
And they deleted that word from their story without ever running a correction saying why.
Usually, if you change, alter a story in that sort of substantive way, you have to account for why you changed it with a correction or clarification.
They sort of just ninja edited that word out of the story without explanation.
Anyway, and then, like, six months after that, the New York Times ran a story being like, Yeah, it was all correct.
Um, who are your top five favorite saints to pray to?
Um, well, I mean, because I know you guys aren't Catholics, I just want to be clear: we don't pray to the saints.
I asked the question, answer the question, sir, yeah, to to to intercede for us, but I'm very fond of Saint Maximilian Colbe.
Um, I've never heard of that one, great choice.
I don't know.
I'll tell you the same Colbe's story in a second.
Um, you know, obviously, the classic St. Thomas Aquinas, um, Saint Augustine.
When I was received into the church, I took the same thing.
Um, can you see this?
This is our Augustine statue.
Oh, wonderful.
We don't pray to him, but yeah, we just have an idol.
We just have an idol.
Um, and then, you know, some of the modern popes, Saint John Paul II.
Um, how's he doing?
He's very talking.
He's still talking.
He's in heaven.
He's doing great.
Um, that's what canonization means.
Um, no, but St. Maximilian Colbe, my son is named after him.
Um, he was a Franciscan friar who was a Polish Franciscan friar was arrested by the Nazis in 1941 during the German occupation of Poland and was taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
And someone escaped from his prison block.
And the commandant had this rule where if someone escaped, he would pick 10 men to die of starvation as a sort of collective punishment for the one escapee.
And Saint Maximilian was not picked among the 10 to die of starvation, but he heard another man who was among the condemned.
He sort of cried out, like, my wife, my children, I have a family.
So he stepped forward from the line and said, I'll die in his place.
And so he was that's how he was, he was a martyr.
So he's a martyr of charity.
He was canonized by John Paul II in beatified in the 1970s and canonized in the 1980s.
So awesome.
And hence why my son is Max.
Cool.
And is he now like a patron saint for a certain thing?
Yes.
He's the patron saint of journalists and drug addicts, among others.
Oh, okay.
Overlap for the Hunter Biden story, both sides of it.
The journalists writing about it and Hunter Biden himself.
I'm sure St. Maximilian is praying for Hunter.
He's interceding for both of us.
Coming up next, for Babylon B subscribers, drag queen story hours, a blessing of liberty or not?
Boy, I never thought drag queens would be something that would be associated with my name.
In your bio, when you grew up in Iran, there was something where you said you got interrogated because you had a copy of Star Wars on videotape and it was banned at the time.
I want to ask you about that.
And then do you think we should ban the trilogy sequel in this country just because it's awful?
This has been another edition of the Be Weekly from the dedicated team of certified fake news journalists you can trust here at the Babylon Bee, reminding you that someone out there knows something about Carmen.