25: Waking Up from Cancel Culture (w/Clementine Morrigan & Jay from F*cking Cancelled)
On Election night, Mikki Willis, JP Sears, Del Bigtree, and the conspirituality glitterati gathered in Austin for a prayer meeting for Donald Trump. Willis pitched his new documentary and complained about Marxist professors pied-pipering children towards BLM before a new-age preacher sold allotments in a new alt-health ranch community in Texas. Derek covers this ultimate reveal of the conspirituality grift: predict the apocalypse, then sell off-grid cribs on a five-acre manmade lagoon. Fill the swamp, indeed.
Meanwhile, Julian covers the election of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn, QAnon arrests in Philly, and the shitstorm of irate comments against YogaGirl as she stands up for decency.
The election over, our critical work continues. How do we keep it on target? How do we make sure that we don’t become so cynical—or so attached to the process of criticism itself—that we can’t find solidarity? And how do we look for solutions while enthralled by social media, as opposed to being invested in society?
Our guests this week are Clementine Morrigan and Jay from Fucking Cancelled. Matthew will be asking them about the work that the digital Left can do to foster solidarity, loyalty, and freedom. It’s an important conversation because we have to assume that some of the redpilled were already being pushed out the door. Why? Because among the woke-ish, it can be easier to fight each other than to punch up and get things done.
Show Notes
Yoga Girl boosts Black girls as President on Instagram
My Dark Journey Into the Soul of a Model Young Republican Candidate
QAnon goes to Washington: two supporters win seats in Congress
Armed QAnon follower arrested in alleged Philly convention center threat linked to far-right Va. senator
Karl Marx: The Fiddler
Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand
Clementine Morrigan on Instagram and her website and Patreon
-- -- --
Support us on Patreon
Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada
Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian
Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
And stay up to date with us on all of our social media channels, including Facebook.
We have a YouTube.
Our Instagram is back.
We've been told by the overlords at Instagram that we will get our old handle, but that has not yet happened.
Conspiripod is where you can find us, and a lot of you have found us already, so thank you.
We will continue the conversation there.
I also want to make two brief announcements.
Thanksgiving is a Thursday, of course, in America here, and we will run an episode that day, but in preparation, we wanted to do something a little bit different in that we've been talking about doing an AMA and Ask Me Anything for a while, so We are going to launch that, so we're going to start fielding questions on our social channels and then we'll pick a bunch and we'll just have more of a free-flowing conversation that day.
And finally, we are on Patreon, where we do offer bonus Content every weekend.
And given the amount of work we've been putting in, we've decided that the Monday bonus episodes are going to be Patreon only, meaning that this Thursday episode, everyone will always have always for free, because that's why we started this.
But we are producing and putting that time in.
So for the $5 Patreon level, you will get access to all of our bonus episodes starting in December.
So the next three weeks, we're going to keep it open.
We are also going to be launching some merch that month for Patreon subscribers.
So people who commit to three months, a three month engagement on Patreon will get some merch that I am working on right now from the design perspective.
We'll be announcing all this on social in the next few weeks.
So just keep in touch with us there.
Lots of fun stuff happening.
OK, Conspiratuality 25, waking up from cancel culture.
On election night, the conspirituality glitterati, including Mickey Willis, J.P.
Sears, Del Bigtree, gathered in Austin to hold a prayer meeting for Donald Trump.
Willis pitched his new documentary and complained about Marxist professors pied-pipering children towards Black Lives Matter before a New Age preacher Derek pitched the sale of allotments in a new alt-health ranch community in Texas.
Derek covers this ultimate reveal of the conspirituality grift sequence.
Predict the apocalypse, then sell off-grid cribs on a five-acre man-made lagoon.
Fill the swamp, indeed.
Meanwhile, I'm covering the election of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn, QAnon arrests in Philly, and the shitstorm of irate comments against Yoga Girl celebrating our new Veep woman of color.
The election over, our critical work continues, but we have some questions.
We ask, how do we keep it on target?
How do we make sure that we don't become so cynical or so attached to the process of criticism itself that we can't find solidarity?
And can we look for solutions while enthralled by social media as opposed to being invested in society?
Last week, our guest Tada Hazumi spoke about landing clean blows in politics and justice work, arguing that dignity and nobility in conflict depend on good faith and better will.
As we survey the bloody post-election landscape, especially in progressive and wellness spaces, we have to dig in, especially if we're going to enter the conversation over situations like the embodiment conference.
Our guests this week are Clementine Morrigan and Jay from the podcast Fucking Cancelled.
Matthew will be asking them about the work that the digital left can do to foster solidarity, loyalty, and freedom.
It's an important conversation because we have to assume that some of the red-pilled were already being pushed out the door.
Why?
Because among the woke-ish, it can be easier to fight each other than to punch up and get things done.
This week in Conspirituality, you may have noticed, unless you've been in a coma, that we had an election that consumed everybody's lives.
With Biden and Harris winning, most reasonable people in the world heaved a sigh of relief as 45 retreated to his Twitter bunker.
Personally, I waited on tenterhooks hoping we wouldn't see a Q-inspired domestic terrorism event.
Despite a fair amount of ominously well-armed protest with contradictory chants of either stop the count or count every vote depending on the state, no violent attack happened.
This may to some extent be thanks to the Philly police arresting two armed men and impounding their Hummer Q-Mobile.
This election, we also had two Q supporters elected to Congress, along with the youngest ever congressman, 25-year-old white supremacist Madison Cawthorn.
And just in case you thought the yoga conspirituality phenomenon would fade now, popular influencer Yoga Girl, Rachel Brathen was subjected to huge backlash on Instagram for reposting Oakland lawyer and vice president-elect's niece Mina Harris' tweet that her four-year-old daughter had jubilantly cried out that black girls are welcome now to be president.
You know, I saw that post about the black girls are welcome to be president and it was such It just reminds me of something throughout my entire life that I would see and be like, oh, that's awesome.
It was such a happy post.
And I didn't realize the backlash until someone pinged us and we started talking about this.
Like, can you go into detail a little bit more about what the backlash was about?
Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right, Derek.
So a post that is basically a mother saying, my little girl cried out, black women are free to be are welcome to be president now.
And then you just have this incredible backlash.
You know, it was it was the real.
Classic pastel cue, kind of regurgitated conspiracy assertions, as well as what Alex Odair skewers so well, the accusatory question, how can you call yourself a yoga teacher, right?
So how can you be political?
How can you not care about sex traffic children?
Why are you repeating the propaganda of the mainstream media?
The election was stolen, all of that kind of thing.
And some of you might remember that back in August of 2018, Brathen, a yoga girl, was called out for cultural appropriation because she had an OM symbol tattooed on her foot and she posted a picture of that.
And she handled this actually really well.
She apologized, she invited Susana Barkataki onto her podcast so she could learn more about the topic from an expert.
Really nicely done.
And then with regard to this onslaught that she received for posting the Mina Harris tweet, She did really well, too.
She posted a statement on her website that really neatly educated and eviscerated Trump supporters who accused her of not creating a safe space for them.
And we're talking about 2.1 million followers on Instagram that Yoga Girl has, right?
Yeah, she's big.
Like, incredible reach.
I'd also like to point out that Barkhataki has also become, I think, a faculty member on her YTT program.
I remember her traveling to Aruba a couple of times.
I mean, this is a really amazing example of somebody firmly in mainstream yoga culture who would be You know, subject to all of the criticisms of people in social justice discourse around things like cultural appropriation and ableism and, you know, thin privilege and beauty privilege and stuff like that, who's actually like taking on the material and saying, okay, well, this is what I'm learning and this is what I'm going to do.
It's kind of extraordinary to see.
Yeah, graceful.
Let's move on to the elections.
I want to start with 25-year-old Madison Cawthorn.
He's from North Carolina, he's a gun rights advocate, and he had several red flags raised about him earlier this year because of several of his social media posts, but most notably Get this one, guys.
Fulfilling a bucket list dream of visiting Hitler's Eagle's Nest, along with a photo of he and his brother grinning in front of it and a fanboy caption about how the Fuhrer's vacation home did not disappoint.
I read that article you shared when it came out and the fact that this is the level of people as happy as I see people in my community, meaning more liberal minded people about the election right now, it's just a reminder of how much work we have to do right now.
Yeah.
Incredible that he could get anywhere near.
Anywhere near government.
And then along with her, we have someone we've talked about before, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, as you might remember in social media videos, has said that Q is a patriot.
She's made disparaging remarks about blacks, Jews, and Muslims on her social media videos.
She has a campaign ad, and this campaign ad is truly something to behold.
If you haven't seen it, you can look it up.
Listeners, where she's lock and loading an assault rifle as she stands on her porch in a leather jacket and she warns Antifa terrorists to stay the hell out of Northwest Georgia.
Yeah, Antifa was everywhere.
She also makes a spectacle.
You can see a lot of her press photos.
She always has an entourage surrounding her of people that are very loaded with guns.
That's like her brand.
Incredible.
It seems to be the new thing, you know.
She has also referred to Trump's presidency as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take out a global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles.
So you don't get more on the nose than that.
Another really colorful character that won election for the first time, Lauren Boebert.
She owns a restaurant in, I kid you not, you can't make this up, Rifle, Colorado.
It's the name of the town she's from.
In the restaurant, all of the staff are strapped with handguns.
It's part of the... You used to wear a handgun while waitressing, right?
Yeah, totally.
And all of our staff do, yeah.
Like you see, you know, women in skirts with a gun strapped to their thigh.
So it's a uniform as well?
It's like a...
It seems like it.
Yeah, it seems like it's just part of the internal culture.
She has said publicly that she hopes that Q is real because it means Americans are getting stronger.
Well, it's kind of a douchier version of the 50 throwback restaurant where you have to be on roller skates, I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah, it reminded me of swingers here in LA, but just, you know, with that extra twist.
And so on those same lines, but now escalating further, right?
Two unlicensed Beretta-toting Virginia men were arrested outside the Philly Convention Center when police flagged their parked beige Hummer with Q stickers on it.
And inside, of course, they found ammunition and an AR-15 with the serial number shaved off.
These are interesting guys.
Social media posts by them featured attempts to fundraise for a group called Virginia Armed Patriots posing in front of that Hummer.
The two men, Antonio LaMotta and Joshua Masais, I may be pronouncing that poorly, I apologize, appear to be close associates of Senator Amanda Chase from Virginia.
They were photographed alongside her on multiple occasions at rallies, so part of her entourage, essentially.
And those rallies, of course, denouncing quarantine measures, promoting gun rights.
I looked up LaMotta's Twitter account, it's worth having a look, Antonio LaMotta, and found it was home to a series of really quite beautifully drawn black and white outlines for a fantasy comic book inspired, you guessed it, by the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Chase, of course, commented this week that those men were there to peacefully observe the ballot counting.
You know, I don't want to preempt what's coming, but I do want to just stick a pin.
I'm going to stick a pin in something I say and what you say here, because again, later on in the heart of this episode, when we talk about cancel culture and we talk about digital hygiene and how we should act toward people and all of the things we espouse in yoga and wellness about compassion and kindness.
It's just another reminder that there are a lot of people who don't see the world through that lens, and you have to sometimes be ready to fight.
Like, sometimes physically, actually, but just in general.
You can't enter this territory so Inflexible in your feelings of how to treat people, because a lot of people, as we're discovering, are not playing by the same rules.
I mean, we have two different America, like if we thought we had two different Americas before, watch how conservative media is acting right now to Biden's victory, which they still won't acknowledge.
Yeah.
Compared to reality, where he won by a landslide.
Oh, absolutely.
And if we're talking about cancel culture, you have this massive, uh, sort of opposite staking out of the spectrum there, right?
Where, where you can be your, your, your life can be over, your career can be ruined for, for using the wrong word.
If you're on the left from an internal inquisition, uh, whereas on the right, look at, look at all the, I mean, you can show up outside.
Philadelphia Convention Center's votes are being counted with an AR-15 that has no serial number on it, and the Virginia Senator will get up and defend you on the steps of the government building.
And you'll get a spot on Fox News as a new host.
Totally!
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, and it's a fascinating thing that's happening right now at Fox News, where there's a complete contradiction and sort of split personality between the opinion hosts and the news anchors, right?
That has been fascinating to watch, just how depending on the hour that you tune in, they'll be advocating for Biden and just for Donald Trump to just honor democracy, the very basic tenets of democracy.
And then you get to Sean Hannity later, and it's just it's another it's a completely different world.
It is fascinating the bifurcation of that news network as we're seeing it right now and how they can actually even Pretend that I can I can't even find the words to be to be honest, because I've never seen anything like that internally at an organization that under Roger Ailes was so disciplined.
And now it's just completely it's a shit show.
The other thing that you see, of course, is that because they've they've been they've tried the news wing has tried to be fair about how they're covering the election and the and the empty accusations of voter fraud.
All of the Trump supporters are now lumping Fox in with the mainstream fake news and moving to further right for the conspiracy driven sources of quote unquote news, right?
Well, yes.
And there's there's this flooding of the new sort of alternative social media channels with
Conservative exiles now or mega exiles in parlor and me we and gab and all of those places are filling up but In an organizational sense zooming back a little bit Could it be possible that Fox is also hedging its bets that that not in some sort of organized way but in a way that allows them to sort of play the field of possibilities with regard to whether Trump actually does walk away which is possible and
Because if he does, there's a certain population that is going to stick by the news reporters who are vindicated and who say, well, yes, it was right for him to concede.
What do you think?
Is it possible?
They're playing live?
It's absolutely possible because notice that Trump will often contradict himself between sentences.
Right.
And what happens there is that when he wants to reference back to something he said, he can split the sentence in half and say, here, I said it right here.
And so Fox is just taking that approach on a wider level, which is, which they think can work for them and to a large segment of the population.
It probably does work.
I want to give a shout out to Julian for ruining my day on Tuesday.
Anytime, anytime.
By sharing a video that was filmed, I believe in Austin, definitely in Texas.
I believe in Austin because the person who filmed it lives in Austin and they referenced Texas a few times.
And part of the whole shtick of what we're going to get to right now is in Austin.
So I'm pretty sure it was there.
Also, the characters there.
So this was on Election Day.
And first off, it was Mickey Willis's announcement of his next iteration of Plandemic, which he is calling American Family.
And it's about the indoctrination of their children.
Who there is.
I'm not sure if them specifically or the people in the room.
There's probably 40 to 50 people I counted when he spun around the camera.
This is an election party, right?
Just to be clear, it's like a watch party?
It's a watch party where they were celebrating Donald Trump, which I know you'll get to.
George Soros is a target as evil incarnate of American family.
And actually, Matthew, from all your experiences with charismatic figures, What would you say to someone who repeatedly points out the same thing over and over again?
Well, in the two high demand groups that I was in, a breaking point for my own indoctrination was somehow realizing that the content window was extremely narrow.
that there was a certain number of stock phrases, that the jargon was repetitive, and that if you started to ask questions about one thing, that everything fell apart.
And so, yeah, I mean, Willis seems to have a big new project on the go, but all of the sort of keynotes are the same.
There isn't really going to be new content, I don't think.
There's going to be new packaging and new imagery, probably new film work.
But yeah, I mean, the repetition not only has like a hypnotic effect content-wise, but it also means that the range within which people can actually think about what the content means or question it is very narrow.
I also ask that because everything I've seen since Plandemic, when Mickey is speaking, and this is included, he says specifically about American Family, no one is profiting from this film.
And he said that before, over and over, how he fundraises, but all of the money goes back in.
And it's just one of those unconscious things where I'm like, why are you always telling people?
I know because You know, and this gets into a broader question of monetization, but like, I feel that people should be paid for their time and effort.
As a writer, I've often argued that because I've had a lot of people ask me to write things for free because writing is, anyone can do it, is basically the mindset.
And so I keep seeing this with him over and over again.
Well, if you want to say, if you want to say, uh, if you want to cover a grift, you're going to say over and over and over again, nobody is profiting from this.
I mean, that's pretty clear.
Uh, but we can get to that.
We can get to that.
Okay.
Well, yeah, I've noticed he constantly does this with his films and everything else.
Uh, so getting into, uh, the film, he, he of course Big ups, pandemic, which he repeats this again, which is, it is the most viewed and the most censored documentary in history.
I don't know where you get that kind of data or analytics from.
If it's the most viewed, if it's the most viewed and it gets deplatformed, then therefore, ergo, it's also the most censored, right?
Because somehow the accumulated 20 million views are somehow canceled or something like that because of the deplatforming.
Maybe that's the reason.
Well, he claims over 1 billion views.
And I maybe, you know, and interestingly, he then goes on to talk about how Plandemic 2, the follow up, had 1.9 million views.
Now, that could have been the live stream.
I'm not I'm not sure if that's cumulative, but it does also show the power of de-platforming.
Yeah.
Because if you have something up that has a billion and then your follow up has 1.9 million.
We'll get we'll get into that.
So, what was interesting, when he first starts presenting this, he also announces that he's behind a new project, which is a giant residential paradise that they're building in support of our families, our freedom, and our sovereignty.
Now, the video, which we link to in the show notes, it's hard to hear, but they mentioned that I believe it's somewhere near Lake Travis, which is outside of Austin, and it's called the Home Ranch and Gold Star Oasis, an eco resort and residential community in the nation of Texas.
Now, that wasn't really saying that.
Oh, wow.
I didn't see that.
I didn't see the nation.
What was the guy's name who followed up?
It's not his real name.
Joyous Heart?
Okay, so that was in the nation of Texas.
So I'm kind of combining, but, uh, and it will showcase a net zero lifestyle.
I don't know what that means.
I'm guessing it's carbon emissions, but.
But that's it.
As Julian said in the intro, they're building a five acre lagoon.
And apparently, from what Joyous Heart said, Del Bigtree and JP Sears have already bought in.
There is going to be some nightly stays.
There's going to be some But some ownership where you can buy between one and almost 10 acres of property.
So anyway, point being, right after Willis says that no one is profiting from the film, oh, look, I have this over here.
And I'll end with that.
But he then goes on to accuse the left of having a weaponized morality.
He calls AOC a progressive cult leader.
And he also announced that the president He saw a pandemic and shortly after said he will not mandate vaccinations.
They gave a shout out to someone named Marla who was right in front of the camera.
I don't know who she is.
But then and then there was just a huge eruption at that point.
Of course, we can believe everything Donald Trump says, because, of course, he took credit for Pfizer coming up with this vaccine this week.
So of course he's anti-vax.
Well, wait a minute, we can believe everything that Mickey says, and everything that Marla says, and everything that Trump says, right?
I just want to say... Mikovits, Mikovits, come on, we're all over the place with the names.
I'm so sorry.
I also just want to say, guys, no matter how zero percent your carbon emissions are, when your Waco, Texas 2 compound burns to the ground, that will be lost.
So there was a lot in this video.
And again, you can watch it.
I did.
And but here is I want to read an excerpt, which is really the heart of why I'm bringing this up this week, because This is the most disturbing aspect to me.
I did post a short thing about this prepping this on Instagram a few days ago, but this is Mickey Willis.
All of these ideologies lead our young ones to a place of hate and create division in the world, so it's very important to stop that.
These are just a few of the dangerous ideologies that have infected universities worldwide.
Marxist-trained professors have been poisoning young minds.
These poisoned minds are leading organizations such as Extinction Rebellion, the Sunrise Movement, and Black Lives Matter.
These benevolently branded groups gain popularity by appearing to stamp the critical issues that anyone with a heart cares about, whereas Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise Movement use fear of the climate clock to terrorize children into submission.
BLM leverages the volatile subject of race to shame our next generation who are risking their lives in freedom for causes that, in the end, only serve to amplify the very problems they seek to remedy.
The crowd erupts.
Wow, that's a lot of words.
It's amazing to trace the genealogy of some of this stuff because it's not coming out of nowhere.
What you can't know with the It's like Rebel Media.
It's Breitbart News.
It goes back.
It has a history.
All of this stuff around, you know, ideologies infecting universities worldwide and Marxist trained professors, that's all intellectual dark web stuff.
It's all like right out of the Jordan Peterson handbook.
It's like rebel media.
It's Breitbart News.
It goes back.
It has a history.
This isn't coming out of nowhere.
And he's taking it several steps further forward.
Like, some of those criticisms, I think, are valid.
Right, right.
But I mean, like, we have... Extinction Rebellion is benevolently branded?
It's called it's called extinction.
It's called extinction rebellion.
Black Lives Matter is benevolently branded.
I don't think so.
It's confrontational.
It's assertive.
It's kind of amazing, but I just want to focus on this last sentence.
Now, was he reading this off of his phone?
At that point?
No, off his screen.
He switched between reading off his screen and the phone, yeah.
But that was the screen.
Okay, so now he's reading off a screen and part of his presentation, it's kind of like a sales presentation for American Family, a new series of documentaries.
Okay, so he wrote this, he's reading this, so he wrote this which would imply to me that presumably he thought it made sense.
But the sentence actually is, BLM leverages the volatile subject of race to shame our next generation who are risking their lives in freedom for causes that, in the end, only serve to amplify the very problems they seek to remedy.
What's the subject and object here?
There's looping logic.
I mean, these are real red flags for cognitive scrambling and the sense, I think, within the audience that it doesn't have to be coherent in order for it to be charismatically convincing.
Yeah, and after that, he follows it up by saying, we're in a battle of biblical proportions right now.
And he compares the current educational system, which he had just referenced, to the Nazi party.
Of course he did.
And he said, he actually has a slide up.
But which educational system?
Like where?
What state?
The Marxist-trained university system, basically.
What, and that's just everywhere in the United States?
Apparently, because he doesn't know anything about the conservative institutions that have been putting the judges into place and the politicians into place, some of who Julian referenced earlier.
But he points out and he says, he specifically says to the Nazi, about the Nazi Party, and comparing it to what's happening now, where race Conscience lessons were being taught.
So he's comparing Black Lives Matter and these other movements about diversity of thought to white supremacy.
Like he's trying to make that cognitive leap and everyone's cheering in this room.
And it's all, as far as I could tell, besides Del Bigtree, it's all white people from, again, just a cursory glance, but definitely predominantly white people.
When I heard that sentence, I also had to pause and be like, wait, what is he actually saying?
And the part that jumped out at me was risking their lives in freedom.
And what I eventually interpreted it to mean was they're risking the possibility that their future will be under some kind of totalitarian rule, right?
They're risking losing their freedom by getting sucked into these benevolent seeming, but actually really dark organizations.
Oh, I see.
So that's how you're assigning the subject there, is that the people who are actually participating in BLM are, they have been pushed into it via shame and they are sacrificing themselves and they're being sort of exploited.
I see, okay.
Right.
But it's nuts.
Right.
That's what I got to.
And it was it was just transcribing that section took me a while.
Right.
It wasn't easy.
Now, to wrap this before we we talk a little bit more about the the prayer to Donald Trump, he ends his talk with a poem.
Now, here's the interesting part.
I'm not going to play poetry critic.
All three of us have a background in poetry.
We've all written.
I used to do a lot of slams.
That was a big part of all of our lives.
So poetry is meaningful.
And the thing is, every word matters.
And I don't know, things like metaphors and similes and imagery are all part of poetry.
When you hear poetry that's just sentences that could be nonfiction, it's not really poetry.
And what was fascinating about that, I'm not going to get into Mickey's poem.
Oh, I am, I am, yeah.
Yeah, I know, that's why I'm not going to.
But when he's talking about Karl Marx, he's trying to frame Karl Marx's character.
And he reads this sentence, this couplet, where he says, He goes, this is something that Karl Marx wrote.
Till hearts be witch, till sense is real.
With Satan, I have struck my deal.
And the whole room goes, what?
Oh, and right by the camera, a woman goes, did he really say that?
And the guy, some guy behind the camera goes, yeah, because of course he knows all of Marx's catalog in his head.
So of course he knew he said it at that moment.
And so I was like, okay, I have to, I have to figure this out.
And it wasn't very hard to find.
It's from a poem called The Fiddler.
And it, it reminds me of, um, this is before Robert Johnson, but there's an old, a famous story about how Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to become such a good musician.
There's also that, that great song, The Devil Went Down to Georgia.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Same sort of thing.
Yeah, so it's a common motif throughout history, really, with how did you learn to play like that?
And so it's called The Fiddler, and I'm not going to read the whole thing.
It's actually not that long, but just to give you an example of the context of that couplet, he goes, Why do I fiddle, or the wild waves roar?
That they might pound the rocky shore.
That I be blinded.
That bosom swell.
That soul's cry carried down to hell.
Fiddler, with scorn you rend your heart.
A radiant god lent you your art.
To dazzle with waves of melody.
To soar to the stardance in the sky.
How so I plunge, plunge without fail.
My blood black saber into your soul.
That art god neither wants nor wists.
It leaps to the brain from hell's black mists.
To hearts bewitched till sense is real.
With Satan I have struck my deal.
He chalks the signs, beats time for me.
I play the death march fast and free.
I must play dark.
I must play light.
Till bowstrings break my heart outright.
It is a song about the beauty of, it's a poem about the beauty of music and the parallels of the forces that come together to construct music.
And the fact that Mickey just took out two lines from that as it was some sort of overarching conspiracy with the devil.
Well, they're close!
They're a quote!
The narrator of the poem is quoting the fiddler, talking about why he fiddles the way he does.
It's like trying to call out George Lucas with a quote from Darth Vader.
He really believes what Darth Vader said, and this is what drives me nuts, and I know I'm a fucking snob about this, but...
The prevalence of people who don't read, who will take all sorts of quotes from poems and from literature and from philosophy completely out of context that they have no understanding of and use them as part of how they try to build an argument.
It drives me crazy.
But I want to thank Mickey because I didn't know Karl Marx was such a good poet.
It's a beautiful poem, and I read it and I was like, wow!
And that just boggles the imagination even more, the fact that how he constructed it.
And this is what I want to close with before we go to Donald Trump prayer hour.
And I've said this on previous episodes, but it's really important.
And again, I want to put it into the context of sometimes some of the criticism that we get.
People say, you're on Patreon, you're monetizing what you're doing and stuff.
And again, I have always tried to live a life where How I make my money is ethically sound, but it also matches up with the person that I am.
So when I say something, and I show you all of my receipts, they match up in some capacity.
And I think I've been able to do that my entire adult life.
When you have someone like J.P.
Sears, who is in the room, when he's going on anti-mask tirades and talking about the importance of building your immune system, and then he's selling supplements that he tells you does that, that's a red flag.
When Mickey Willis comes out and says, I'm not profiting from any of this, but hey, look at this new real estate I have over here for you.
Literally, it is that.
And that is what I want to point out about all this.
Because if you want to find out what someone is, look at how they're making their money compared to what they're espousing.
And I'm sure in their mind, they are building a Waco.
They are building a Utopia.
That's what they're going for.
So I'm sure to them, it's totally fine to do it this way.
But I have serious problems with it, especially when you try to pretend that it's something that it's not.
And that's indicative of what I just pointed out with the Karl Marx thing.
You've just tried to just wedge him into this tiny little box due to a beautiful metaphor that he had constructed in a poem.
That's a stretch.
I had another thought watching this stuff too, which is that, you know, we're all kind of the same generation.
You know, these are all, these are all guys in their late forties, early fifties, and, and we're all sort of people who have, who have been itinerant, you know, creatives, artists, yogis, comedians, what, you know, whatever the shtick is, right?
Trying to find our way in the world.
And I, and I, I was watching it and I thought, these guys really feel like they've arrived.
They feel like this is it now.
They've gotten this huge exposure, they're riding this train, and now they've arrived, and now they have fuck you money, like our friend Mr. Walsh said, right?
And now they're gonna do it.
Now they're gonna build the Eco Resort, which they probably dreamt of when they were 22.
You know, it really does sort of give some insight into the question of, well, how far were the conspirituality crowd going to push their rhetoric at the risk of alienating their progressive or liberal audiences.
And I think part of the answer that this gathering provides is that actually what can happen now is that they can take the money and run.
They can take the money to the country of Texas, to the state, to what do they call it?
The Republic of Texas?
Nation, nation of the nation.
Nation of Texas.
Right, and they can, you know, create their own sort of sovereign economy.
One thing that I want to make sure we point out is that one thing that Joyous Heart, the main picture of the resort timeshare, whatever it is, said was that the first 50 families that invest in the property were going to profit share on whatever said was that the first 50 families that invest in the property were going to profit share
And I'm wondering if that means other things as well and whether part of what can happen through an arrangement like that is that, you know, does Dell Bigtree's platform get that much stronger because JP Sears is doing, you know, affiliate work with him, but from the same property, is there something affiliate work with him, but from the same property, is there something going on So there's a real sort of concentration of power in that room that is kind of remarkable to see.
And they've kind of tipped their hand as well.
I'm kind of extraordinary.
I'm, I'm, I'm amazed that they let this video get out.
Yeah, it definitely, I mean, it's shot on a film, on a camera, you know, and there's no audio.
It's definitely somebody who just said, I'm just going to throw this up there.
I don't know if everyone, I mean, obviously you can see you're being filmed and there is a moment where he pans around and some people kind of shrink and some people wave like, So, you don't know exactly the dynamics of it.
The person who filmed it, I went to his page, he seems like some sort of life coach-y thing going.
Actually, addiction recovery, which is a great thing to get into, but he was providing commentary throughout saying hallelujah and doing the ayahuasca voice that we talked about, the ayahuasca breath.
So, he definitely is bought into everything that was going on there.
I don't know if I don't know if Mickey, if they wanted that.
So it's not certain.
We did capture the audio so that we have it for posterity.
Right.
Whether Willis wanted or not, the poem is on record now and I've got it here in front of me and I would like to share it with you all.
So after Mickey did his pitch for his film, he said, I have a poem to share.
It's not finished.
So I have a transcription here.
I'm going to read it straight because some things are missing.
I couldn't hear everything, but this is how it goes.
He says, this is a poem for those who voted regardless of political affiliation or which candidate you promoted.
Just a friendly reminder that beneath the noise and confusion, those people on the other side are still human.
After decades of being fed lies and fear, we can thank the media for the way things appear.
By broadcasting propaganda 24-7, they've raised hell and socially distanced heaven.
There was a big cheer at this one, at that line.
They pit brother against brother, sister against sister, and sadly, father against mother.
The division of family is all part of the plan to destroy America from within and control every child, woman, and man.
But one unintended consequence of the never-ending lockdown is the awakening of slumbering citizens within the biggest cities and smallest towns.
2020 is more than a code for perfect vision.
It is a year when humanity faces our most critical decisions.
To render our freedom to power-hungry lunatics or cut the strings that keep us dancing to the puppet master's politics.
We recall our soul's purpose for coming into being.
There's nothing more important and nothing more redeeming.
We all come here for a reason, despite popular belief.
It's not at all to... I don't know what is going on there.
Okay, so I didn't catch that.
While in the digital realm it's about being liked and followed, here in the real world that's a pill best left unswallowed.
There was a big cheer there too.
Follow only your dreams and live your truth.
Reignite that creative spark, that burning of your youth, when you see every person, regardless of color, creed, or age, as a friend, as a playmate, as a superhero, as a sage.
Let us rise and come together, whether big or small, and harness our collective power till slavery is ended for all.
And then there's a final couplet that I couldn't hear.
So I'm sorry, Mickey, I'm not finishing.
I'm not giving a full rendering of the poem, but yeah, there we have it.
And I'm wondering, I didn't actually read it aloud until now, but I'm wondering if it's going to be part of the homeschooling program and publishing platform for, what is it called?
Home Ranch?
The Gold Star?
All right, stop laughing.
Please stop laughing.
Home Ranch and Gold Star Oasis.
You know, what I find amazing about these... I'm sorry, but they offer a PhD program in limerick writing.
There was a young man from Nantucket.
What's amazing, even in just the beginning of that, he starts with the wellness yoga trope that there are these forces against us and we should be uniting.
But then he calls out they, which is never defined, but I'm guessing it's AOC and George Soros.
And so you're in a battle for biblical proportions Which if you've ever read the Bible, it's pretty bloody.
And, and then, but we're all supposed to come together.
Every human is supposed to come together, but they are also humans.
Like there's no, there's no clear line.
It's just a bunch of talking points.
And you're right.
I mean, Matthew, if you haven't watched the video, Matthew's right.
There were some eruptions during some of these lines afterward.
It's not just eruptions.
I want to be really, really clear that something else is happening that I remember from my cultic experience, which is there are full-on, kind of verbalized, contagious ejaculations from the audience after several of the couplets.
So a lot of, a lot of, mm, mm, yes, and, and, ah, ooh, and, and shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, So that's the ayahuasca.
So in the Shipibo tradition, there is a breathing that the corandero does, and that is what you're hearing.
And it's just sort of an emphasis.
Like in the ceremony, it has a purpose, but there's a feeling, honestly, when you're under the influence, when you hear that.
But when it's used in that context, it's more of just an agreement, something eternal.
It's like there's a spoken truth happening right now.
That's what it's usually signifies.
It's like saying, oh.
Oh, there was an oh-ho.
There was some oh-ho's on there too.
There was a bunch of them.
There was a bunch of oh-ho's.
But these, I can tell you guys, are standard vocalizations within the bodily contagion spaces of cults as well.
And this kind of really centered down for me when we can see a woman sitting on the floor in front of Willis bolt upright, her eyes closed and beatific.
At a certain point during his poem, she's actually folding her hands together in prayer.
And I'm telling you, Willis is going to start administering Shaktipat any day now with his Zoolander blue eyes.
He's going to start selling spiritual names along with the allotments.
We can expect tying on the red threads the whole bit.
But, you know, really, I felt also just warm and a little bit sad for Mickey watching this because he's so proud of this poem.
And it, it felt like, um, felt a little bit like fourth grade.
And you can see a little bit, a little bit like this is the poem that I, that I wrote and it's not finished yet.
And, you know, you can see how much he's looking out for validation.
You know, through this mixture of pride and hopefulness, a little bit of vulnerability, but he's all dressed up in a really crisp, crisp white shirt.
It's really, you know, it makes me wonder just how much rejection lifelong is being deceptively healed through this.
And I also wanted to ask both of you, what about the women in the room who obviously think this is great?
Like, is the bar really that low?
Or do men in particular just get away with mediocrity?
Because I can't imagine, it's hard for me to imagine any of the women in that room standing up and reading a poem as if it was from their fourth grade journal like that and getting the same kind of acclaim.
What's going on?
Is he some sort of darling boy, man-child in that room?
I mean, there's something childlike about JP as well.
And certainly about Joyous Heart, the preacher who I'll talk about in a bit.
But I don't think the women are allowed to be like poor eternists like that.
What do you think?
First, I just want to point out that I really you nailed it.
And I think we should track this and everyone who listens should recognize that this is a cult in the making.
Like this is this is it.
We're watching the they're actually bought land and they're doing it.
Right.
So watch out for that, because that's coming.
I strongly believe, obviously, I don't have any facts on that.
So I'll be honest about that in terms of I, you know, I definitely am.
to express things through the eyes of women because just being married and having been in so many relationships, I often see things very differently.
But I would say big picture, just in terms of anyone in the room, that there is a...
The guy is just...
I mean, he has the most censored documentary ever in history, right?
There is a charisma to that fame that has that I think transcends anyone because everyone in the room was taken by him.
But the documentary is just as bad as the poem, right?
It's like it's the documentary is incoherent.
It's the content.
The content doesn't matter.
Yeah, I know.
It's the it's the archetype.
It's the it's the aura.
It's the sense that this is the brave warrior of light who is saying the things that must not be said.
And here he is bearing his heart to us in this intimate moment.
And how wonderful it is that some parts of it actually rhyme and have a cadence, right?
And something we've talked about before, which is just the anti-vax movement is predominantly led by women because of the connection with the child.
Right.
And so everything you pointed out there, the boyish nature of that, plus the content matter itself, that all sets you up for success in a room like that.
It's incredible.
Well, you know, just to finish on this incredible meeting, I want to know a little bit more about Joyous Heart, who is a preacher slash entrepreneur.
I think he bills himself as an Illuminescence Architect on his website.
This is obviously not his name, so I'm very interested in the backstory there.
But, you know, he was actually providing the main details of the sales pitch for the Home Ranch and Oasis Star Organic Survivalist Resort, and he actually kicked off his sales pitch with the following prayer.
Right out in the open.
Okay, here it is.
Thank you, Donald.
Thank you for your courage.
Thank you for embodying the character that's required to stand up to this darkness.
May the world see that any of those perceived character traits that they may have an issue with are required to unshackle us from the servitude that we've been indentured to for so long.
May our amplified hearts and prayers call forth the angels and Christed beings who are here, the steward human liberation in this period of awakening.
May our apocalypse be a graceful one A lifting of the veil, the embodiment of divine light.
And with those words, I invite us all to tune into our breath, into our heart, and into our center, and to God and man.
As we hold the President and those protecting him, everyone in this room, our families in the highest light, that we may each be a lighthouse in this world.
And remember, heaven is on Mother Earth, needing us here right now.
So it is.
And then everybody repeats, so it is.
So all of our critical work, notwithstanding, we're also coming to realize that how we conduct ourselves online is super complex and...
And of course, we're all deep into it.
Now, for me, it's also become very clear that when it comes to criticism and taking political action, the medium is the message.
And as we'll hear in the interview that I did with Clementine Morgan and Jay of Fucking Cancelled, when the medium is social media, we're really hemmed in by the reductionism and flashiness of the hot take.
Complexity and nuance is flattened.
The whole thing becomes competitive and further isolating and stereotyping through a combination of identitarianism and personality branding.
And it all comes to a head in the ritual of the call-out, participation in which now seems to be a standard price of admission into left-leaning political spaces.
Now, last week I interviewed Molly Meehan, or at least I thought I did, and we put some of her materials into the show notes, but it turns out that the recording only took her voice and not mine, so I'm going to have to circle back around to her and speak to her again.
But we spoke about the behaviors that have made her reevaluate her participation in online activism in left-leaning spaces.
She gave this great list of observations.
She characterizes many online left spaces as promoting, first of all, unchecked expressions of outrage that devolve into personal attack.
And these can be over things that are very small like language, but that the personal attack emerges through a slide into a kind of essentialism whereby, you know, a thing that is identified as a racist statement becomes, oh, you are racist for making that statement.
And, you know, that was a problematic thing that you did to you are a problematic person by which a person gets tagged with a kind of scarlet letter for for the foreseeable future.
She also pointed out the prevalence of purity politics and perfectionism.
And it reminded me of this book that I read about living with people who have borderline disorder.
It's called Walking on Eggshells Shells.
And that's kind of what it feels like that.
You know, if you don't get things absolutely right, and if you don't express the purest form of a given ideology at any given time, that you're at grave risk from, you know, this other thing that she described, which is public punishment.
Humiliation, dogpiling, ostracization as a first line of defense instead of something that is a kind of last resort.
She pointed out the fact that in many left spaces, there are coercive calls for self-criticism, which made me think that it's important to remember that the confessional mode is also the cultic mode.
That, you know, when you're in any group dynamic in which you have to consistently evaluate yourself, You will probably be in a position of ceding a certain kind of emotional control to others.
And in the worst cases, that control becomes a kind of collateral.
And then finally, she wrote about waging threats of punishment in spaces that are actually created for education or discourse.
So it's a great list.
And yeah, but as you listen to it, how does this stuff resonate with you?
You know, in your response the other day to Bauhaus Wife, I noticed you had mentioned something we've talked about before, whereas, you know, I'm more center left and you guys are a bit more left.
And I think that stuff like this is where it comes out in me because I don't think every kid should get a trophy.
I've always felt that as a lifelong, as someone who grew up in sports, I understand the hard work and determination it takes to rise to the top.
And I think this idea that there isn't competition is biologically inaccurate and also just in terms of training inaccurate.
And it really, it sets up a dangerous dynamic that I think we see playing out.
And I think, especially the line where you said about purity, politics, and perfectionism, Ostracization as the first line of defense, that mindset comes out at that point in that there is no room for dialogue when everyone's on the same playing field.
And what has happened in the digital age is there's been this acceptance and allowance of because we have the world's knowledge in our pocket that we think we know everything.
Like, I could probably learn how to fix my pipes because we always have problems in here, but you know what?
I'm going to call a plumber for that, and I'm going to be very thankful that he's there.
And the way that it manifests online, especially the reactive mode that it's created in us without room for dialogue, is just extremely problematic.
And I have a good friend who I argue with a lot.
On a good level, because we have very different ideas, but we talk regularly about them.
And he doesn't think that cancel culture exists.
And I'm like, No, no, it's, you know, I push back on that all the time, because I see it all the time.
And it comes through in small, small ways and big.
But it's, it's, I think, I think it's a serious problem.
I think, well, I want to hear Julian first, before I get into that.
Well, I wanted to just participate in this with both of you right now and what you're raising.
And I want to also say that I feel like Jonathan Haidt, H-A-I-D-T, for anyone who doesn't know him, has done excellent work on this, on a kind of generational thing about how kids, especially in privileged cultures, have grown up.
over the last couple of decades and, and, you know, some of the, just the cultural trends around how they handle conflict and how they feel about language and disagreement and the need to sort of go to authorities and have people punished if they, if their feelings have been hurt.
It's good stuff.
I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to make it sound disparaging because I don't, I don't think it is.
But I think often the pushback from people, the people I know who are really involved in social justice, their pushback, as you were alluding to Derek would be cancel culture is just calling people out when they're being bigoted.
So, So, you know, why are you saying that's a bad thing?
There's no such thing as cancel culture.
It's just, you know, holding people accountable for their words.
And what I found so great about this interview, Matthew, and you bringing up this topic was that this is, This is an analysis and a really humane, intelligent critique of cancel culture and everything that sort of surrounds it in terms of our social justice or woke landscape from within it and from the left, right?
So very often what I found online is that if you're at all critical of any of that stuff, you immediately get labeled as being alt-right.
And that's part of the strategy.
Right, they're really clear about that, that in order to investigate this properly so that, you know, left-leaning spaces and progressive spaces can actually become safer, that we have to take this criticism on, this behavioral criticism, and really sort of examination on ourselves.
And, you know, with regard, Derek, to, you know, the discussion with your friend about whether or not cancel culture exists, they address that, Clementine and Jay address that as well.
From the perspective of the lived experience of watching people's lives get torched and watching people be isolated from their communities and having their businesses destroyed and often sometimes leading even to self-harm.
So, it's a very real thing.
I think the proposition that it doesn't exist is a more complicated question around, or where there's daylight to understand that, is in the complexity of whether or not accountability actually exists in the way that we want it to.
So, you know, when Louis C.K.
sexually harasses his fellow comedians over a number of years, how long does it take before he's redeemed and do people or were, you know, before he's able to do a show again and do people feel that that's a long enough.
And from the perspective of, you know, the attitude of, well, cancel culture doesn't exist.
Well, he's on stage again.
He didn't get canceled.
Right.
And so, and so Clementine and he's still, he's still alive.
He's still alive.
So Clementine and Jay take that apart a little bit and say, you know, the, the, the, the problem with the cancel culture doesn't exist statement is that not only that does it, does it ignore all of these less visible people who do have their lives destroyed online, does it ignore all of these less visible people who do have their lives destroyed online, but it also reveals the kind of end game carceral attitude of some of its proponents, which is, you know, if you're not completely destroyed as
I think if you are able to come back and do anything with any kind of dignity, I'm not talking about whether or not the person is repentant, which is another issue, but if you're able to restore anything in your life at all, then you haven't been cancelled.
And they really sort of show that for what it is, as well as the notion of what accountability actually means and who can prove it.
Which is an undisguised, sort of like an undefined term that gets thrown around, and I'm realizing as I'm talking to these people that there's all kinds of terms in this discourse that I don't actually understand, but I have very clear feelings about in relation to whether or not I'm going to get in trouble if I stray into certain territories.
Exactly, and the thing that I often find myself wondering about, and I don't know if I can fully articulate it, but it seems to me that there's some sort of set of overlaps that happen between, like, workshop-y kind of spaces, where, for example, white people are learning what they need to learn about how to have more social justice awareness, for example, some of which I think can be really good, that workshop kind of space, and then the academic space,
In which people are going to various universities and learning what they're learning in a way that then imbues them with a lot of jargon.
And then the online world and how all of that is supposed to be interacting with the culture politically.
But I think very often what's happening is it's just these little enclaves of people who have taken these workshops and now they have the language and they know how to do a struggle session and they know how to call people out and they're keeping up with the ever-changing lexicon of what is and isn't okay to say.
And if you say it, then you have now outed yourself as secretly deep down really being the worst kind of person.
All of that is where I think it gets very dark.
Yeah and one of the things I when I hope to speak to Molly again that I think that we can talk about is that you know she actually comes right out and says that it was because of her online experiences on the digital left that she never actually got into in real life organizing and that's like incredibly tragic to me is that
Is that the fear that your your your life would be as contentious, as fraught, as stressful in the world of organizing in your local community as it is online is just like horrible.
I want to just point out one example of what I think where I think this gets really problematic.
And the fact is that this story was predominantly only shared in conservative media.
That's the only place I saw it.
Which was in early September, a USC professor named Greg Patton was suspended because he was teaching a class where he was teaching Chinese, and he taught a word that sounds like the N word in English.
It's N-E-G-A in Chinese.
And he repeated it a few times because he was teaching a lesson about the Chinese language, and he got suspended because some of the students recorded him.
And because it sounds like the N word, He was suspended.
That is where I have a serious problem.
Because when you can't understand the difference between a racial slur in America and trying to teach a foreign language, that is only leading us into a very dark territory.
It's interesting.
It goes back to what we were saying about the piece of Marxist poetry, right?
The piece of poetry by Marx.
You know, the example that Jonathan Haidt uses, Jonathan Haidt was suspended, I believe, from NYU or it may have been University of Georgia when he was there.
But he was suspended because he teaches moral psychology and his work on moral psychology is fantastic, especially if you want to understand the divide between liberals and conservatives.
And in one of his moral psychology courses, he raised, he showed some video of research where he was asking questions of people to try to ascertain their sort of reflexive moral reactions to things.
And as part of that video footage, he had a conservative Christian who was disgusted by homosexuality.
And this is part of what he was talking about.
This is huge.
And his work is how conservatives tend to have more of a disgust or fear response than liberals do to social issues.
And so this is what he's talking about in an academic institution.
He's studying it.
He's studying it.
Yeah.
Yeah, he then is suspended because one student in the room reports him as being homophobic.
What, for platforming the student?
For sharing video footage of the research that showed a particular student expressing their disgust for homosexuality.
And what's important to point out with Hayat's work is that he also does a lot of work on, he's been done groundbreaking research on one and two months old and their cognitive awareness and how we learn language and how we learn pantomimes.
And that transcends race, but he has a lot of work on culture and how we fill our children with meaning.
It's fascinating.
So I didn't actually know about that suspension story.
Yeah, this is exactly the problem.
Yeah, and of course then you're suspended, then there's a whole investigation, your name is tarnished, and then typically what happens on a lot of these campuses that tend to be more liberal, and I'm very liberal, is that amongst the student body then there becomes this agreement that this particular teacher is A racist, a Nazi, a homophobe, and it's just as you're saying, Matthew, and I think that the bringing in of that text, Stop Walking on Eggshells, is kind of perfect.
That book actually saved me a long time ago in a very difficult relationship.
Oh, wow, you too?
Oh, you too?
Right, okay.
Because it's about personality disorders and it's about that particular tendency to have a relational kind of style where it's all or nothing, black or white, angel or devil, and once you have disappointed me in some small way, I will now demonize you completely and banish you to the outer ring of hell, right?
Right, because you have abandoned me in a catastrophic way that I will never recover from, is the basic feeling that is underlying it, right?
Yep.
Yeah, you know, I wanted to say two more things, or two more little bits, which is that, and then be a little bit self-reflexive and solution-oriented before we head into this interview.
You know, one of the things that's been really hard for me to figure out in my own online life, which is very active and to which I owe my entire career, you know, when I make mistakes or when I watch others make mistakes, it seems like there is You know, the intersection of three accountability spaces that intersect.
But again, what accountability actually means and how it's achieved is something that the fucking cancelled guys really break down.
But the three areas are, you know, the socio-political realm of the actual issue at hand.
And then there's the interpersonal thing that's happening between the participants.
And then there's the intrapersonal thing that nobody can see.
Now that first bit, the sociopolitical realm, has all of these evolving rules and codes of language and etiquette.
And, you know, if you're a good faith actor, you do your best and it's hard because, you know, as, you know, very often the jargon can be set up to create some sort of dominance hierarchy between that separates the the woke from the sleeping or the woke from the non-virtuous.
But the other two spaces are just black boxes.
Like you never can know what's really happening between two people who have a history together, unless you're part of it.
And you definitely can't know whether a person is having a bad day, whether they're having mental health issues or substance issues.
And so I find that many people in a given online action that turns into or spirals into a kind of dog pile of conflict, A lot of people are pretending that they know something about those black boxes.
And sometimes I think that the silence of the black box, you know, the fact that you don't know what's happening between two people or within somebody, it can provoke yet more speculation, more accusation.
It's almost as if the empty digital space, just the empty comment box, just is Waiting for you to say that next thing about the person.
And you don't know what it is.
And you make something up.
And if you want to be active and visible in the conversation, then the medium itself encourages you to be inflammatory.
But, you know, in the end, if you jump in with a hot take that is flexing on the sociopolitical issue, but then it erases the interpersonal or the intrapersonal layer, it might be that you're really just captivated in the spectacle of the conflict and your own role in it, and that that's become, at least temporarily, more important for you than the humans who are most directly impacted.
I mean, this is all on the nose right now because, you know, we and primarily I just participated in criticism of Mark Walsh's behavior in relation to the embodiment conference.
and we're going to have a lot of And it's making me think long and hard about how to do criticism in these spaces.
I mean, I do that A lot anyway.
I'm always reflecting on that.
But part of my answer is the discipline of journalism itself, or at least that amount of it that I've been able to learn.
So, you know, I'm not talking about reviewing Mickey Willis' media, but with somebody like Walsh, and if you didn't hear the bonus episode on Monday is what I'm referring to, There's a deeper story that I have some access to and involvement in, so more care is in order.
So some of the things that I try to do when I enter into a critical space would be to check in internally for blind spots and emotional motivations, because they're always going to be there.
If I'm activated, if I'm upregulated, I try to wait.
I never publish anything that I can't support and stand behind 110% and I also however recognize that I come with a history and baggage and so I'll have an angle and the notion that journalism is going to be objective is just not a thing.
It doesn't work.
What you have is a bias, a view, a point of view, an orientation towards a set of facts, but then you have guardrails that allow other people to verify whether or not you're even talking about the same set of facts.
And then, you know, I always reach out for comment, especially if things are very direct.
And, you know, the other things that I've learned along the way is that, you know, the closer one is to the person that you want to, you know, make responsible or make them aware of something, hold them accountable make responsible or make them aware of something, hold them accountable for, the closer you are to them, the more important it is to connect with them And, you know, I think that's a
And then if you don't know the person in real life, it's crucial to be absolutely clear on the difference between the person and the behavior, because as soon as you get into ad hominem or speculation about their intentions,
You're starting to essentialize them as a racist instead of somebody who has some racist behaviors or trainings or entrainments or as a misogynist instead of somebody who might have some misogyny hanging around from their past or they might even be activating it.
But like, you know, the personal stuff, that internal, intentional stuff, you don't have access to it.
And so to speculate on it is just BS.
It's also none of your business because you're not going to be able to fix it.
What you're going to be able to address is the behavior.
So that's one section.
Another thing is, like, never, ever punch down in publication.
So, I would say that when we, you know, go to town on this election party in Austin, you know, we're talking about a room filled with people and the net worth there is tens of millions of dollars.
With somebody like Mark Walsh and the larger issue of the embodiment conference and what that does, we're talking about a million dollar budgeted event that has incredible cultural impact.
far more than this podcast ever would, far more than us individually ever would.
And so, you know, to criticize the director of the conference itself is just not punching down in any way.
However, you know, I think we also have to be careful that the identity of the person, you know, I think we also have to be careful that the identity of the person being called into criticism is not the only category that determines who holds social power and what defines punching up or down.
According to strict identitarianism, I shouldn't be criticizing Kelly Brogan, Kelly Brogan, or at least I should be extremely careful when doing so because my male privilege is somehow going to be assessed against her marginalization as a woman.
But no, I don't accept that.
I I don't accept that I have to be any more careful than with any other public figure because we're talking about someone who made $4,000 per psychiatric appointment in her Madison Avenue office.
And class-wise, which is important to me, I never net more than $40,000 per year.
So it doesn't make sense to just look at the external, identitarian picture to try to figure out who holds social power.
Yeah, it's that intersectionalist hierarchy, right?
Right, totally.
Also, like, don't punch sideways.
I think we can all easily identify if the basic values of a person aligns with our own.
So it's just never worth the destruction of solidarity to compete for space.
Within the same sort of value system.
It just doesn't work.
And, you know, as Jay points out at the end of the interview, we just don't have time for it.
We just don't have time for it.
You know, there are really, really, really pressing issues like climate collapse.
We don't want to be arguing with each other about, you know, who has the most perfect take on Facebook.
Yeah, it often seems like a misplaced sort of identifying of who the enemy is, right?
If I agree with you on 90% or 99% of things and there's a group over there who disagree on all of that stuff and I choose instead to fight it out with you on the 1-10% that we disagree on and demonize you and say you're actually like those people over there, those people over there keep on advancing their cause, right?
Right, right.
And we've spent a lot of time doing something else, which, what does it have to do with, really?
Obama had a, had something that was floating around about a year ago where he referred to it as the circular firing squad.
I was really privileged to sit down with Clementine, Morgan and Jay of the podcast fucking canceled.
I learned a lot from them.
I hope that this is a useful interview for you.
Their bios that they sent to me are very cool.
Jay says that Jay is a problematic podcaster, writer, and shelter worker from Montreal with a background in political anthropology.
They are a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a couple of 12-step fellowships, and the anti-fascist sludge band called Grails.
Jay enjoys long walks on the train tracks and starting shit with haters.
Clementine Morrigan is a writer.
She's the author of Fucking Magic, Love Without Emergency, You Can't Own the Fucking Stars, and The Size of a Bird.
She's also the creator of the Trauma-Informed Polyamory Workshop and a co-host of the podcast Fucking Cancelled.
She is an eco-socialist and an anarchist.
And I also have to say, please check out her Instagram page, which is fantastic.
Clementine and Jay, thank you so much for taking the time to be on Conspirituality.
It's really a pleasure to meet you.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, thanks for having us.
Yeah.
Let's cut right to the chase.
In the first episode of Fucking Cancelled, you outlined something that you call the Nexus.
So, you know, a trifecta of identitarian politics, social media and call-out culture.
And I'm wondering if you can just run us through how you see that working and how you would like to see it change.
Maybe that second part of the question is longer, but what is the nexus to begin with?
Sure.
So basically the nexus is a system.
It emerges from the interaction of those three things that you mentioned.
Identitarianism, cancel culture, and social media.
And it's conditioned by its historical position in late capitalism.
So, intersectional identitarianism provides its conceptual content, cancel culture serves this kind of gatekeeping and disciplining role, and social media provides the infrastructure for the system to function.
So, you can think of it as an ideology, plus a praxis, plus an apparatus.
Yeah, and the apparatus is not just holding it, but also fueling and exacerbating it.
That's correct, yeah.
Yeah and like I think um there's like kind of there's critiques of each one of the three components um and all of these critiques sort of um at least like Jay and I um in like thinking about this stuff or like each one of these critiques
sort of fails to capture the entire picture because for example people will take issue with cancel culture but when they are critiquing cancel culture they kind of hit a wall if they are unwilling to also critique identitarian politics because cancel culture is often like held up by identitarian politics so for example people will
Ground the legitimacy of their claims and their right to like tell someone what you're doing is not okay and I'm the one who gets to say that because I am X identity and you're this identity so you don't get to have an opinion about that.
And we see this playing out with like you know centering marginalized voices or like There's many different kind of catchphrases that people use.
But yeah, so they're always like in relationship with each other.
And also it's playing out on social media.
Yeah.
And an important element of it, too, is that the three components, like each one on their own or even in like two of them in combination, don't don't make up the nexus.
Like the nexus is really all three of them together.
So this isn't something that could have existed in the 90s?
No, and I think that people who were around in sort of the like anarcho-punk scene, even just like 10 years ago, before social media really penetrated like every element of our lives, were exposed to this kind of thing where, you know, people were cancelling each other on these sort of like political grounds, right?
And I mean, even something like that can be seen as having played out in these like little Marxist groups that were constantly schisming and sort of like outcasting people and all this kind of thing.
So that's something that's played out over and over again, but the particular character of it as being very, like, identitarian in focus, so all those sort of, like, takes are coming from an identitarian lens, is specific to this time and place in history, and also the way in which its reach is really magnified by social media is also specific to right now.
Right, and is there something particular about the way in which the social media persona intersects with identitarian politics that amplifies both or one uses the other or there's, I mean, there's something about, you know, everybody has a handle and everybody is unique with that handle and so everybody is uniquely positioned already within a technological identity and it seems there's an overlap there.
Yeah, there's this weird way in which with social media, like we're all kind of expected to act as if we're brands.
Um, and so like we are all sort of performing like our own personal brand, which like for some people it's like more, um, like for example, I'm self-employed and so like, you know, I literally am sort of advertising and like using my social media presence to like sell my work.
But even people who are just like normal people who their social media actually doesn't have anything to do with their job still kind of relate to social media in this way where they're like performing an identity and they're kind of like trying to get followers, they're trying to get likes, they're associating themselves with other accounts that are like similar.
There's a weird way in which the performativity of identity also plays into this.
Within the nexus, there's this idea of collecting identity points.
The more oppressed identities that you can claim, The more sort of validity that you can use to back up what you're saying, right?
So you'll see this actually play out in people in their social media profiles will literally list like a number of often usually oppressed identities but now you'll also sometimes see people listing A few of their more like oppressor identities, which they're trying to like be responsible for or like be accountable as a white person.
So you'll see people, you know, being like, I'm so-and-so.
These are my pronouns.
I am a white settler.
Like I am queer, bisexual and neurodivergent or whatever it is.
And I would also just add to how this plays out on social media.
I would say that social media really conditions it in a number of ways.
It means that politics within the nexus really stays as this kind of extension of people's social media brands.
It provides these individuals with a simulated community that's tailored by AI algorithms, right?
So there's all these little pictures of people who look a lot like you with haircuts that look a lot like yours, saying a lot of the same things that you say.
It keeps the expression of a lot of political ideas really short and simplistic because that's like a huge part of like Instagram in particular.
Right.
Right.
It's designed to be like social media is designed to be addictive and to keep people in this cycle of reward and anxiety.
Right.
Also, social media makes it really easy to connect with new people.
I did a little bunny ears around the word connect, but also to discard them because you can just unfriend, right?
So, it really changes the way that social relationships function, right?
It also provides this record of your statements.
Yeah.
You know, that people can, that they can peruse.
Also, the tech companies and the government can peruse.
Right.
But yeah.
Yeah, there's like a weird element of surveillance to all of it where we are building a brand, like we're building this like online identity and that is also like connected with the various identity categories that we're expected to like perform along with the brand that we're building.
Right, now maybe I'll jump to a little bit of an elephant in the room question, which is that identity-wise, if we use that lens, we're three white people talking about identity politics, and I'm wondering how we do that in a respectful and open way.
Like, do you face criticism for taking these stances?
So I think an important piece about critiquing identitarianism is actually separate identitarianism from identity because there's this thing that happens where we sort of naturally assume that people of particular identities believe in an identitarian ideology, right?
And so that's not necessarily the case, right?
So there's this idea that like, for example, Queer people, women, people of color, so on and so forth, are going to be the ones who are pushing for an identitarian perspective.
And people who are in more of the, quote, like, oppressor categories are the ones who would naturally critique that or have an issue with that.
Not necessarily so.
It's not necessarily so.
And, like, a huge... Like, actually, I think that very few people are...
I'm really stoked on identitarianism.
I think that most people in general in the world think that it's kind of confusing, incoherent, sometimes silly, and sometimes offensive.
Yeah, just in terms of regular people who are not super online, who are not spending all of their time thinking about this, for sure.
But even intellectuals and people who are overtly political and who are spending their time thinking about Um, systems of power and how do we dismantle these systems of power?
There are a lot of people who critique identitarianism.
Um, and those people fall into many identity and identity categories.
Um, and so like I, I mentioned this like often, um, but like, and when I'm talking about this topic, but like Adolph Reed is, um, a famous, uh, controversial anti-identitarian thinker Who, you know, recently had a talk canceled at the DSA because he was called a class reductionist because he critiques identitarian thinking.
And he is very articulate and can really explain what his political issues are with identitarian thinking.
To slow down a little bit, he's a class reductionist because he's emphasizing class over identity as political valence.
Because he opposes identitarianism as the main focus for leftist politics.
Yeah and he does this in a number of ways so it's like I don't think I could like sum up his body of work very concisely in a couple sentences but like the talk that he was that was cancelled he was actually talking about COVID and he was talking about the racialization of COVID and the way in which people were
Talking about black people and brown people as being disproportionately likely to get COVID and he was saying that instead of looking at racial categories you should actually look at the causal factors such as people being You know, doing jobs that are having them out in public, taking public transit, living with lots of people.
And actually, yes, it tends to be people who are working class who are in this position.
And if black and brown people are like disproportionately working class, then that might explain these numbers.
So his thing is that he's like, Often, identity is used as this stand-in or this simplified way of looking at an issue that actually has a lot more factors.
And he's like, if we really want to address things, we need to look at the actual factors and not use this stand-in.
Because, for example, if you are a Black person but you are really wealthy and you don't have to go out and you're not taking public transit, you may not actually be at a higher risk of getting COVID.
You are not at a higher risk of getting COVID.
That's the thing, right?
And Adolph Reed is black.
And there's, we've noticed in looking into a lot of this stuff that actually a lot of the main thinkers in anti-identitarian Marxism in the United States are black Marxists.
And there's this big, there's a whole lineage of these thinkers, right?
Right.
And so, yeah, I think the idea that, yeah, like the question is sort of like, how can we criticize identitarianism in a respectful way as white people or straight people or men or whatever, I think the answer is the normal way.
Just be respectful of other people as you always should be.
But also I think it's important to point out that it's racist to pretend that all people of a given identity would think the same thing.
And it's also racist.
And I think like a big, a big fucking problem to make basically trans women of color be the only critics of identitarianism, because that's sort of the logical conclusion of saying that people from sort of like oppressor identity should not talk about it.
I also think, and Clementine and I talk about this all the time, that it's our responsibility of Well, we're three white people.
It's our responsibility as white people to think deeply about racism and white supremacy and what identity means in our lives and to come to our own conclusions informed by the thoughts of other people and, you know, important scholars that are thinking about these topics.
But we do have to have our own opinions about this.
We can't just make other people do the work and then sort of like piggyback on their thinking.
Yeah, and like I guess It's important to say that being against identitarianism as a framework, you know, does not mean that we do not think that talking about racism, talking about sexism, talking about homophobia is not, like, an important part of political struggle.
Like, absolutely.
We just think that liberal identitarianism is not the way to solve those problems.
Yeah, and it's like, um, it's like, in fact, a lot of anti-identitarian thinkers would say that this kind of, um, identitarian politics is actually, I mean, in many ways it's kind of, it's actually kind of frightening the way in which it is, um, increasing things that, for example, anti-racist struggle have worked for a very long time to dismantle, such as essentialism.
Like, for a long time, you know, we understood anti-racism to be the work of coming to understand that race is a construction and it isn't real and it doesn't actually fundamentally tell you something about a person.
You actually need to know a lot more about a person and you shouldn't be making these grandiose statements about a particular group based on what they look like.
That's racism.
And so anti-racist work, like over like, you know, many generations of anti-racist work has been like dismantling essentialism.
And now with identitarianism, we're seeing like a really big increase in essentialist thinking.
Yeah, a big resurgence.
Yeah, where, yeah, things are just sort of being really reduced.
People are treating race as a real thing.
Yeah, and things are being really reduced to identity.
So, yeah, like just the idea that, like, when people say, for example, which was really common this summer, for example, to amplify black voices, it's like, specifically, what do you mean?
There are billions of black people in the world.
There are many, many black conservatives.
You know, there's many black people who believe in, like, identitarian thinking, for sure.
There are black Marxists who, like, highly critique identitarian thinking.
You know, there's a huge wide variety of perspectives in any given group.
And so it's really...
Like, to be honest, it's pretty insulting and to diminish a huge variety of ideas and to boil them down into this one thing.
Like, it isn't.
It isn't one thing.
Yeah, like Adolph Reed is basically always saying, like, why is it that black people aren't allowed to have Different kinds of politics.
Like, you know, like we only get to have like a black politics.
Like, why is that?
You know, whereas white people appear to, they're allowed to be liberals or conservatives or Republicans or Marxists or Christians or whatever.
I can see why.
I have another question.
No, no, it's, it's, it's fantastic.
I'm, I'm glad to get some, some definitional like clarity around identitarianism from, from you guys.
Another sort of big upfront question though is, Like, how do you do this critique without providing ammo to the alt-right?
So the alt-right already thinks that the left is basically a bunch of people who are obsessed with, like, identity politics and silly subcultural things, right?
That's already what they think.
Right.
So I don't know if we can, like, convince them further of that.
But there are some things to point out.
Like, one is that the alt-right is also obsessed with silly subcultural things and identity politics, just from the right and from a racist perspective, right?
Right.
And I don't know, I think that we should figure out a way to provide a place for people to stand who are sick of identitarianism and who want something better and who are sick of identitarianism and also this capitulation to neoliberalism that permeates both the alt-right and the identitarian left, where people have just given up on the concept of an economic system that doesn't just crush us under its fucking boot, right?
I also think that, I don't know, it's not hard to not provide ammo to the alt-right.
The alt-right are fucking Nazis.
They want to kill your friends and enslave your mother.
That's not appealing to people.
And I mean, obviously there are elements of the alt-right that are appealing to some people and people get into it, but I think that once they really reach the core of the alt-right and they figure out that these people are literally just Nazis, there's nothing special about them, they're just Nazis with fucking shittier memes.
Or like with memes in general, like skinheads don't really care about memes, you know?
I mean, I think that then you're just at this place where you're like, okay, like, I don't know, people don't really want to stick around.
And I think that we've seen a bit of an exodus from the alt-right proper.
But where are people going to go?
Like, I think that also people are trying to leave the identitarian left and they're looking around and they're like, there's nowhere for me to stand, you know?
Either I become like a fucking basic vanilla liberal again, or I join the right, whether it's the alt-right or the conservative right, you know?
And we're like, actually there's like another option, you know?
There's socialism, non-identitarian socialism, that is, you know, anti-racist and anti-sexist and not homophobic, and is actually like quite gay.
Yeah, it's quite gay.
In our experience, you know?
But that isn't this sort of like sad, pathetic, weaselly, nexus bullshit, you know?
I think that we can offer people something that's a lot more fun, a lot cooler, and a lot more, you know, fulfilling to be a part of.
And also we can challenge the conditions that are creating both identitarian leftism and the alt-right, which is alienation under capitalism, And the fucking lack of meaning that is just permeating every aspect of our lives, you know?
People want to feel authenticity, they want to believe that they are part of something, they want to have meaning in their lives, and they don't, right?
And so what are they turning to?
They're turning to these kind of totalizing ideologies that give them something to do, something to think, and something to say.
And we're just like...
Identitarianism and the far right are both just ways for capital to control the narrative.
Either way they win and we can offer you something better.
Yeah, and I think it's really our responsibility on the left to be critiquing the nexus, to be offering a critique, because the thing is, is that there are lots and lots of people who feel deeply alienated by the current culture on the left.
People are really afraid of their friends, they are afraid of being fired from their job for something that they posted on Twitter like three years ago, like they're watching these These cancellations happening they're feeling like really overwhelmed about the constantly changing etiquette and the changing language.
They are tired of being told like that they are you know inherently um they need to be constantly like um repenting and like uh identifying themselves with these like oppressive structures.
And it feels bad.
They actually would rather to be in solidarity with people, to feel good about themselves, to be moving in a positive direction on the left, but there really isn't much of an option for that.
And the thinkers who are critiquing this stuff are heavily, heavily censored.
And so what happens is, and because of the way that algorithms work, if somebody is really fed up and exhausted and burnt out from all of this.
And they go on Google and they type anti-identity politics.
What do you think is going to come up?
Right.
And so in this, in this way, we on the left, by not allowing for a diversity of opinions, for not allowing for there to be a number of different perspectives on how we fight this stuff from a leftist point of view, what we end up doing is we literally give a monopoly what we end up doing is we literally give a monopoly to the right to be the ones to critique this And it's dangerous.
That gives ammo to the alt-right.
That gives ammo.
To surrender the critique of, of like intersectional identitarianism to the conservatives gives ammo to the alt-right.
So to focus on how this plays out then within the Nexus, I was actually introduced to your work by Molly Meehan and she came up and she came up in, in, I think her zine with this list of behaviors that I think cross over with what you I think her zine with this list of behaviors that I think cross over with what you And I was just wondering whether we could walk through these, and if you could just comment on what you've seen or how they play out.
She describes, first of all, unchecked expressions of outrage that devolve into personal attack.
Does that track with what you've seen?
Yes.
I mean, yeah, for sure.
Yeah.
Um, totally.
And I mean, there's like a, there's a, there's a righteous and condemning stance that people take on.
Um, they make a post, um, and they, they call someone out.
They like let people know.
And it's this incredibly like hierarchical and authoritarian, um, way of thinking about things because we've literally stepped over the possibility of debate.
Like that used to be a thing.
Like you used to be able to be like, okay, we're both leftists.
We both agree, you know, that like, um, You know that these oppressive systems are bad and we don't want them to exist anymore but we should be allowed to have sort of different like roots on how to get there and to talk about it you know but now it's like if you post a bad take like that's the way that it's framed it's not even um like it's not framed as like a dissenting view it's a bad take and if if someone's letting you know that then you literally have to Say that it was a bad take and apologize.
And it could be a bad take, it could be... I mean, there's any number of things that people can be called out for.
And it does, like, inevitably devolve into this kind of, like, invective, just personal insults and attacks, often, or practically always based on identity, actually.
Yeah, so that's definitely a huge component of the Nexus.
Right.
Now, she also talks about purity politics and perfectionism as as being two factors as well.
Yeah.
I mean, it's interesting because I think that we we agree with Molly on on almost all of this stuff.
Like, I don't think that that doesn't happen in the Nexus, but I do think that we have kind of like a different idea of, like, why this is happening in the Nexus.
And I probably like name different different processes that are happening in the Nexus.
Right.
I think that, like, For example, like, purity politics and the way that plays out could be split into, like, two of these other processes that take place in the Nexus.
One is this kind of take economy that Clementine was just talking about, where you have to have the right takes, you're heavily rewarded for coming up with a good, like, new take, and you're heavily punished for coming up with a bad take.
So people tend to post, like, safe takes and...
Right.
And then some brave souls will come up with new hot takes.
Right.
And it's sort of like there's like the community decides like whether or not that's like a good take or they're like, yikes, sweetie, not a good take, you know.
And then you can and then you can lose points.
Right.
So that's like.
Slow down for a minute because because we're talking about we're talking about The piece of social media that is just offered as an opinion about a present circumstance.
This is what I see playing out in this particular political sector, or this is what this issue means right now for us.
This is what you're talking about with regard to the take.
Yeah, or it's something like, okay, like a piece of news happens, right?
Something happens in the world and people are like, okay, how can I apply an identitarian lens to this and use it to either like cancel somebody or or Like say something about identity.
And so it'll be something like, okay, um, there's like an event that happened.
Right.
And people are happy about the event, but somebody is like, okay, well, what can I do?
Uh, this event was not wheelchair accessible, even though they are talking about ableism in the event.
What about that?
You know?
Um, and so that's a take, you've made a take good job, you know, or, um, I mean, there's like millions and millions of examples of this.
Do they usually hinge on some sort of hypocrisy or, or perceived hypocrisy?
I mean, they're not even always about, like, a piece of news or something that's happening.
Like, often they're about, they could be, but they are often actually about language.
So that's, like, a really common one that happens.
And so people will just suddenly decide that, like, there's a correct way of talking about something.
And these things change all the time.
And so it's actually hard to keep up with them.
And sometimes there's literally contradicting ones that are competing for sort of dominance within the nexus.
So like a current example that just comes to mind is like they suddenly decided that the phrase, uh, sexual preference is homophobic.
Okay.
Um, did you hear about that?
That they decided sexual preference is homophobic?
I think it crossed.
Okay.
So I think it crossed my feeds, uh, because, uh, orientation was supposed to be the correct language.
But what I noticed about the commentary was that If I didn't think that orientation was the correct language, somehow I was 15 years behind.
Just as a consumer of that media, I felt like I was in the dark, I was ignorant in some way.
Even though we decided that last Tuesday, you know?
And I'm a queer person.
I am a queer person who has been out of the closet since 2002.
I have never heard that the term sexual preference is homophobic.
I am literally, I almost don't know any straight people.
I'm in a completely queer bubble, okay?
And like, I literally, I did not, I've never heard that, you know?
And what's the problem with preference?
It makes it sound like being queer is a choice.
I guess and I mean that's even like there's a long history within queer struggle about whether or not queerness is a choice and I think that there's like a particular kind of dominant strain right now that says that it's homophobic to imply that queerness is a choice but there's actually been like large parts of queer history in which queer people identified as queer.
So it's not a settled issue is what you're saying?
It's not a settled issue.
Especially if you look at a historical lens, and part of the way that the nexus functions as well is that it's totally ahistorical.
They will decide something now, and then they will project that back into the past.
But there used to be a whole movement of lesbians who strongly understood themselves as lesbians who chose to be lesbians.
That was a whole thing that happened.
And now we a lot of people think that that's problematic and so they act as if that never happened and as if it's always been the case that that sexual sexual orientation is has always been agreed upon as like a inherent biological thing or something.
I'm glad that you used the word problematic, because that seems to be a very, like, interesting way of vaguely framing something as being distasteful without really showing your hand.
What does, like, am I onto something there?
I mean, because it seems that problematic is, if you say that somebody is problematic, you don't actually have to provide receipts.
You don't really have to, like, point to what exactly they did.
It can be a way of kind of like, I don't know, judiciously or piously insinuating something, but nothing more.
Yeah, and I think that it goes to this function of the nexus that is actually very essentializing.
Actually, Natalie Nguyen, ContraPoints, talks about this in her video on cancel culture, so I would recommend people watch that because it's really good.
We'll put it in the show notes, yeah.
Yeah, but basically, like, she talks about how, like, a lot of these call-outs, like, they use this incredibly vague language, and it goes through these, like, stages of essentialism.
So, like, first of all, a person will make a statement that could be interpreted in a number of ways, but people will decide that that statement is, I mean, they might use the word problematic, they might be like, that is a transphobic statement.
It might be a trans person who's making this statement, but then they're like, that's a transphobic statement.
And now this person, it goes from that person made a transphobic statement to that person is a transphobe.
Right.
And same with problematic.
Problematic is incredibly vague.
Like what do you mean?
Right.
You can now say that person said or did something problematic.
And now you can say that that person is a problematic person.
And then this can kind of become like this vague accusation that can follow a person around.
And actually another way that I hear people using this language now is they're sketchy.
So like a person is kind of sketchy because they've had like a number of bad takes or They've said problematic things and when they were called out for it, they didn't repent and apologize.
And again, this is such an essentialist way of thinking about things because I'm like, there is no correct take of any, there's no correct take of any identity group.
People think different things.
There's also no agreed upon final decision that leftists have come to about what is the right way to deal with domination and violence and harm and all of these things.
But the essentialism that you're referring to here is not just the premise within identitarianism that all black people think the same thing or that blackness means one thing, but also that a behavior will then define a person.
Exactly.
And I mean, they're both they're different types of essentialism, but they both come down to the same idea that that a person can be reduced to like an essence and we can use these like really simplistic ways of understanding people.
Does that mean that over time, the person who becomes problematic, that they're unforgivable?
I mean, absolutely.
Yeah.
Especially, I mean, I think even if they do repent, but like there's sort of this, there's sort of this formula where somebody calls you out and says, you've said or done something wrong.
You have one choice that is acceptable.
And that is to say, yes, your understanding of what I did is correct.
I'm sorry.
I apologize.
I take on your understanding of what happened, and I do basically anything that I'm being asked to do to correct this.
And also thank you for canceling me.
Yeah, like, thank you for your labor in doing this, right?
Wow, right, okay.
And it's like, if you try to disagree, for example, if you say, um, thanks for your feedback, but what you're saying actually doesn't reflect my understanding of what happened, Or you're misunderstanding my argument.
Yeah.
Or we fundamentally disagree.
Like, in the case of someone like Adolph Reed, he would be like, these are my scholarly ideas about anti-racism.
And you're framing those ideas as racist.
But he would not agree that those ideas are racist.
You know, he would actually fundamentally think that the other person's ideas are racist because they are based in this like really essentialist type of thinking that he fundamentally rejects as racist.
Right.
So the fact is, is that even under these ideas of like, you know, we're like struggling against these like large systems.
There are differences in ideology around how to do this that are all on the left, that are leftist, anti-oppressive ways of looking at things.
And so it's like that's not allowed, though.
And so if you say like, um, thank you for your feedback.
Actually, I don't agree with your representation.
Um, I appreciate what you said.
I've understood what you said.
I think it's okay that you think that.
However, I disagree and I'm going to stand by what I said.
Like people will say that's being defensive, that's refusing to be accountable, and those will just be added on as like further accusations against you.
And further proof that that the accusations are correct.
I think also we've noticed a lot of some people try to apologize but their apologies like aren't aren't like totally fucking self abnegating enough so that like, um, people will be like, yeah, clearly, uh, you don't really mean it.
Right.
And so the apologies like, don't make it better.
Um, and then God forbid, if you double down and you say, uh, actually I'm not sorry.
Um, and I still think what I think.
And, uh, and like, I think that you're harassing me and I want you to stop.
Um, people don't like that very much.
Yeah.
And the other thing is that it's like, it's actually this whole, this whole formula, which is the only correct thing that you can do is to apologize.
Like, I hate to break it to people, but I'm like, it doesn't work.
If your goal is to make them stop harassing you, I'm sorry, but apologizing is not going to make them stop harassing you.
How many times have we seen this happen where a person makes this, you know, these long paragraphs where they're apologizing and they're saying, you know, I did the wrong thing?
Very often what ends up happening is people pick apart that apology and find like several more problematic things in the apology itself.
And then, yeah.
And that's where the surveillance comes in because it's all on record.
It's all in text and it's all, and it can be surveyed by anybody.
Uh, and so there can be sort of like a group doc that forms around in real time around how the feedback is going or not going and it's It's incredible, isn't it?
Because, I mean, what would we have been doing in the 1980s or the 1970s?
the 1980s or the 1970s.
The alternative take, the diverse view would have been expressed at the Wednesday night meeting or at a council or something like that.
And Or just talking shit.
Or just talking shit.
And then so there'd be a real argument about it.
Maybe friendships would be broken.
Maybe you'd come to the limits of your tolerance for somebody's, I don't know, their
Inability to see things your way, and you'd break the relationship in some way, but it wouldn't be done within this kind of stadium in which everybody is also kind of like gaming their participation and their, I guess, their appearance or their performance to be on one side or the other, or to be, you know, part of the righteous crowd, I guess.
That's right.
And part of the way that this works as well is that it's incredibly infectious or contagious.
So like once a person has been called out and they're marked as now they're problematic, Anyone who continues to, especially if they don't take accountability or if they say, you know, I don't think I did anything wrong, but even if they try to apologize and people find the apology to be problematic, like any person who continues to support that person, even passively, like continues to follow that person, or God forbid stands up for this person, that person now also can become cancelled.
Um, and Natalie Nguyen in her video on cancel culture, um, she talks about, like, she shows, like, this, like, five degrees of separation, where it was, like, literally, like, this person, like, she was cancelled, and then, like, oh, no, this person was cancelled who she had in her video, so then she was cancelled, and then, like, somebody who, like, was associated with her was cancelled, and then somebody who was associated with him was cancelled, and then someone who commented on that person's page also got, like, pushback, like, through this, like, hugely long chain, right?
Can I just pause and ask, we're using the word cancelled over and over again, but I've seen a lot of discourse around the fact that, well, cancellation doesn't exist.
That actually we don't see accountability when people are called out for But I think there's a division between whether we're talking about Louis C.K.
or Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby or people within our community.
Is it a problem about scale?
Because I can hear people in the background listening to you saying, well, nobody really gets cancelled.
I think that that's such an absurd statement to make, that nobody really gets cancelled.
Because I would ask, what does that mean?
When people say that no one gets cancelled, it actually reveals what they actually think a cancellation would be in the full extent, and it's quite a disturbing statement.
Because if you think that a person has not been cancelled, if they continue to exist, if they continue to have Right?
I mean, if they continue to have a life, if they continue to be visible online, that means they haven't been cancelled.
Or to be employed?
It means that cancellation is a very, very serious thing.
It means that you are trying to drive someone completely, basically off the face of the earth, out of community entirely.
And that if you have not succeeded in doing that, if they still have some kind of career, if they still have some kind of following, then that means they haven't been cancelled.
I think that that's Absurd and actually reveals how disturbing the intentions of these people are.
What I consider cancellation to be is a campaign of harassment.
When people are continuously over and over again filling this person's inbox Filling the inboxes of everyone associated with that person.
When somebody shares the work of this person and five people comment and say, this person is problematic, you shouldn't be sharing their work.
And if you do share their work, that makes you problematic.
That's cancellation.
And the fact that not everybody submits and that some people do continue to support this person, despite the pushback, does not mean that that cancellation isn't real.
It just means that it is not 100% effective.
Also, like, there are people who are driven from the face of the earth.
There are people who kill themselves because they have been cancelled.
It does happen.
And I mean, also, you know, when people, yeah, let's say, you know, they, whatever, they still have, like, a career, but they've lost, like, every single one of their close friends.
People in their family won't talk to them.
Their partner broke up with them.
And they had, they were basically chased off the internet or something like that, which like also happens to people.
Like, how could you say that they were not canceled?
You know, um, it's, it's an absurd statement.
It's, uh, yeah, it's one might even say gaslighting.
I would say that it's gaslighting, especially when it's like so, so visible, like the level of harassment that these people are experiencing.
Um, and I guess like it's, it's a double, it's a double sort of argument that people make that's kind of contradictory.
But they say on the one hand, it's not real because it's really not that bad.
And then on the other hand, well, it's not real because these people really deserve it.
And that's the other sort of logic that is underlying it.
Yeah, there's also the proposition that, well, if they did accountability properly, then, you know, it would be fine.
Like, they do have a gateway back in, but what I'm wondering about is, what does accountability as a term and as a ritual actually mean?
Like, what satisfies... I don't really actually know what the word means.
I find the word to be quite, quite disturbing, to be honest.
Like the way that it's used, it's, I don't, I actually kind of stopped, I don't really use the word anymore because it's, I don't believe in what that word has come to mean.
When people say accountability, what they usually mean is that the person who's being held accountable has to do everything that is being told to them, whether that's like giving up their employment, Um, publicly, like, humiliating themselves on the internet, saying that they believe things that they don't believe, like, they're basically not allowed to have any boundaries.
They have to express their understanding of the event in the exact terms that their accusers are using, and they have to give up anything that they're being asked to give up.
Whereas, like, taking responsibility for something... As opposed to accountability.
Yeah, it looks totally different.
And like, as Jay and I talk about in the podcast, we are people who practice 12 steps.
And so 12 steps offers like a beautiful and clear model for what it means to take responsibility when you cause harm.
And in those cases, like I know, Hundreds of people who have done very bad things, objectively harmful things.
Like fucked up stuff.
Actually, like violent things, really just totally disrespectful and awful things have really caused a lot of harm in people's lives.
And these people through the 12 steps have gone through a process of, first of all, coming to understand what they did, how that was harmful to the other person.
Specifically, like really coming to deeply understand like what the impact of their actions had, looking at what caused them to to take those actions and then, you know, do the healing work that they need to do so that they can change their behavior in an ongoing way and then make direct demands and actions of repair.
I think it's a good thing.
And notice that at no point in this process is there like a gratuitous public spectacle of shaming people in front of their community.
Right, because the support structure for what you're talking about is anonymous meetings and then the sort of instructional component or the mentorship is the individual is being asked to undertake or advised to undertake specific actions in real life, not in public, but substantially in order to make amends.
So completely, I mean, yeah.
So the measure for success of taking responsibility would be the repair of the relationship, I guess.
And I mean, the relationship doesn't even have to be reparative.
If the person, I mean, I've made amends and I've experienced amends and I've witnessed many amends, I've sponsored people.
Sometimes the relationship is never repaired in its original sense.
Like the person may no longer want to be friends, but there is a deep recognition for the harm that was caused.
I mean, I have seen, like, such transformative change because people just really want to know and to understand that this person fully feels the weight of what they did and that they're sorry and that they're no longer doing that behavior.
And that is a real amends.
There's no humiliation involved in it.
It comes from a place of dignity and self-respect, as well as respect for that person that you harmed.
And very, very importantly, in 12 Steps scenarios, you're talking with a sponsor and also potentially with a group about these issues, right?
So if someone comes to me and accuses me of having harmed them in some way, and I'm like, well, it really, I don't know, it seems to me like what I did was actually justified.
I don't really understand like what I did wrong.
So I'm going to go talk to my sponsor about this, you know, and I talked to my sponsor.
I'm like, okay, this is what happened.
And I don't super understand like where I went wrong or like maybe I feel like this person might be kind of just overreacting.
Or I feel like this person might even be like making this up to harm me or something like that.
My sponsor is going to listen and like soberly help me work through it, you know, and I can make the decision as to whether or not I need to be accountable or responsible for my actions.
It is not someone else telling me that I have to be responsible that makes me be responsible.
It is me and my moral understanding of the world that allows me to be responsible, right?
And this is very, very different from the process of taking accountability and the nexus in which the idea of saying, actually, I did nothing wrong is not even... It's not allowed.
It's not even included in like the concept.
It's not a possibility.
And to me, I actually see it as so insulting to the sacred work that taking responsibility is.
Because it is actually not ethical for me to take responsibility for something that is not my responsibility to manage someone else's emotions.
If someone is mad at me, I should not apologize if I haven't done something wrong.
I actually need to be able to tolerate people being mad at me, people disliking me.
And if you do, if you apologize for something that you haven't done, what's the impact?
How does that disserve that person?
I think that it deserves that person because I'm lying to them.
I'm being dishonest with them.
And what that means is that that person, I mean, first of all, I just think that lying to a person is generally wrong and disrespectful.
But secondly, it means that that person is never able to do the reflection and the work that they need to do on their side to come to a deeper understanding of what happened.
And so like, I mean, this is just like, to like flesh out what I'm saying.
Like this is something I've written about but like I was in a relationship like a partnership that was like an unhappy partnership where my needs weren't met and I was really not happy and when that relationship ended I was like really really hurt and upset and as I talked about that with like friends It was suggested to me that perhaps that relationship was emotionally abusive.
And I took that on because I was like, you know what?
Understanding this as emotionally abusive makes me feel better.
It makes me feel like I was harmed.
And it's like regulating to my nervous system to think about it that way.
And so for a while, I did.
I talked about it that way.
And it was actually a therapist that challenged me on that and was like, actually, that was an unhappy relationship, but it wasn't an abusive one.
Fortunately, I did not call out my ex.
But I could have.
I could have said to my ex, I'm hurt.
My feelings are hurt.
You know, I'm not happy about the way that that relationship went.
And so therefore I'm accusing you of abuse and I need you to take responsibility for it.
And I don't think that it would have been.
OK, for my ex to be like, you know what?
I was abusive.
I'm going to take responsibility for it.
I can understand why they might do that, because strategically, it's kind of the only thing that's allowed under the nexus.
They'd be forced to.
So without this therapeutic intervention and under the influence of the nexus, you could have taken this interpersonal relationship and cast it in a particular way that really framed both of you in an unchanging and unforgivable Sort of identities for a long time.
And I'm grateful that my therapist challenged me on that.
And what that allowed me to do is it allowed me to go because I have complex PTSD.
I'm a survivor of child abuse.
So it makes sense that I experienced I had a disproportionate response to that relationship based on my past trauma.
And so my therapist being honest with me, like allowed me to unpack that and do the work that I needed to do to claim my agency, to understand the difference between just a relationship that was like kind of shitty and a relationship that is abusive, you know?
Um, and so my ex, like fortunately I didn't, I didn't cancel them, but like if my ex had tried to make a false amends, not only would that have been like really awful because they would have been taking responsibility for something that wasn't true and wasn't their responsibility, but actually it also would have robbed me Of the work of being in reality and figuring out what really was going on for me, right?
Wow.
And so, and the thing is, is that what my therapist did, I'm really grateful that I have such a great therapist, but under the current culture in the nexus of belief survivors, 100%, if a person makes an accusation, you have no right to question it.
My therapist would be canceled.
Like, my therapist making that suggestion is a totally cancelable offense.
However, that was a totally trauma-informed and, like, responsible action for her to take because I'm a person with PTSD and I have disproportionate responses to things.
So she very honestly told me that, like, abuse means a particular thing and what you're describing is not abuse.
Yeah, so that's just an example, but I think that these things play out all the time in many ways and so people shouldn't take responsibility for something that they didn't do or that is actually like a misrepresentation of what happened.
It's just fucking patronizing, you know, to just go along with someone else's feeling just because they're sort of like having that feeling at you.
I'm really grateful for that example.
That's really super clear.
It's occurring to me as you bring up your investment in and your learning in AA that One of the things that makes you familiar with is what it means to really harm people.
And I see that that's juxtaposed against the pseudo-harm that you're describing being named and labeled in the Nexus.
And I'm wondering if that is really essential for you, that whether AA and life experience actually puts the conflict of the Nexus into perspective.
I mean it is funny like we joke all the time that like people are canceling us for shit that like I don't know if they knew the kind of shit that we got up to when we're fucking drinking like they would be like it's a whole other ballgame you know what I mean because like You know, there's disagreeing with somebody about something political, and then there's like pulling a knife out on somebody, right?
Yeah, right.
And like those are different levels of harm.
When you're when you're hurting, when you're hurting and you're confused.
And no one's ever canceled me for pulling a fucking knife out on them.
Well, because they don't know about it, too.
But you just admitted to it on the podcast.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You know, the last time I pulled a knife out on somebody, he, like, kicked the shit out of me and broke my knife.
It was a nice knife, too.
But luckily, that was a long time ago.
But the point is that, like, that's a completely different level of harm than a lot of the things that pass as harm in the Nexus, right?
Clementine has a lot to say about this, I think.
Yeah, I feel like there's two, like, possible ideas that I have about this.
And, like, I usually don't think that anything is, like, one answer.
There's probably many simultaneous explanations happening at once.
But I think there's two things that play out.
I do think One, we've moved into the land that everything is rhetorical, um, and so we've really, um, we've really, like, collapsed all distinction between, like, rhetorical sort of, like, symbolic acts and, like, material acts, um, and so, yeah, this is where you can, like, get into the, the idea that, like, a, a, you know, a bad take or, like, A different agreement or a different like a disagreement is violence.
So I do think that for some people, it literally does have to do with not having had experience with this kind of stuff.
Right.
And so they don't know.
And then they're literally just assuming that this is like what violence is.
I also think on the other side of that, though, that there are a lot of people who have experienced violence.
And I think that there are a lot of people who have experienced Child abuse, there are a lot of people who are living under like really severe trauma due to like, you know, even just capitalism and also like all of these other systems.
If you're living in a situation in which like your needs are not being met, which is common under capitalism, If you grew up with any kind of child abuse or neglect, if you've had an abusive relationship, if you've had any kinds of like violent experiences in your life, then you probably have some trauma.
And part of what happens with trauma is that you have a disproportionate nervous system response whenever you feel threatened or like you're in danger.
Right.
And I think that this is something that plays out a lot in these scenes where people are like triggered.
And I don't mean that in like this, like totally insulting and dismissive way, like being triggered is like a medical phenomenon.
Like it means that you are perceiving life-threatening danger where there isn't life-threatening danger and your entire body.
Or like there might be, but like there isn't necessarily.
Yeah, but I mean if you're triggered, there isn't.
Like that's what the word triggered means.
It's like if you are correctly perceiving danger, then you're not triggered.
You're just, your nervous system is responding correctly.
Right?
But if you're, if you are triggered, it means that you're responding to a danger that happened in the past.
You're responding to something that was life-threatening, but that isn't happening now.
And so, this is like, I think, you know, applies to the example that I described with my ex, where, like, I have been in domestic violence-type relationships in the past.
I did come from a family in which I experienced abuse.
And so, it makes sense that, like, I Really did experience things in a disproportionate way and felt like I had a lot less power and agency than I did.
And so I do think that sometimes like online when I see people just kind of like losing it and sort of like going to this like really intense place making these really over-the-top accusations about things that are clearly like internet drama basically, I'm like it seems like this person is triggered.
So I kind of feel like both of those things are happening simultaneously, probably in different degrees for different people.
Yeah.
And I also think we have seen, and anyone who's been in 12-step programs for a while has seen people, like, I mean, we already kind of went over this, but has seen people who've done some really intense shit really, really change.
Like, and change on a level that, like, these sort of, like, transformative justice pods can't even dream of, right?
This is what I think, and this is my own experience, let's say.
Like, I have seen people try to do these sort of, like, transformative justice or accountability processes kind of things.
They never work, as far as I can tell.
Like, I've never seen one be like functional they're usually pretty sadistic or just don't make sense um but uh yeah like i've seen people um completely transform themselves and so i also know that when someone is telling me like let's say i'm somebody's sponsor and somebody's telling me like some some shit that he did that is just like it's bad shit like by any any way you look at it you know um i've I don't think that that defines him.
I know that it doesn't define him.
I've seen it not define people, you know?
Because if you thought that you'd have to, I mean, it sounds like your own involvement in recovery would be compromised if you thought that that person's actions define them.
Absolutely.
And I know that the last thing that that person would need would be for me to go on the internet and tell hundreds of people that he, I don't know, consistently didn't pick up his eight-year-old from hockey practice or something.
You know what I mean?
Nobody needs to know that.
Like he needs to deal with that.
You know, it's between him and his kid.
Right.
And like some other other people in his community or something.
But like, it's not a fucking public spectacle that would not help him change.
There is there's no purpose whatsoever.
You know?
Yeah.
So here's where you get into punishment doesn't work.
Yes.
Humiliation doesn't work.
Shaming doesn't work.
And the values that you lay out, especially in the last part of your first episode, all coming from AA are like, you know, loyalty, honesty, nobody is disposable.
It sounds like, it sounds like, you know, if you were to build a politics out of this very closely relational interpersonal practice of recovery that you're describing, that, you know, you would be able to take the politically harmful agent and, you know, bring them back somehow or not let them be defined by their harmful politics.
Is, so, do you see, is that, like, does AA sort of, like, macrocosm out to a politics for you?
Absolutely.
I think AA is the world's largest anarchist organization, and its most functional anarchist organization, I would add.
And that's in the way that it's run, for sure, but also in its praxis.
Like, AA is like, how do we, as a community, completely independent of the state and the market, right?
Deal with these instances of harm.
How do we become better people?
How do we live a good life, right?
And how do we do this?
We literally talk to each other.
We sit in a room, we fucking talk to each other over coffee, you know?
And we keep doing it and we have like this basically like one book that we read the first half of and like some other like little bits of wisdom and literature, right?
And it fucking works.
For lots of people it works.
Maybe it doesn't work for everyone, that's fine.
But for lots of people it does.
And I think in particular the The model and the ideas behind it are universally applicable, I think.
Not just for addicts and alcoholics, for all kinds of people.
And there's a reason for that.
It's that they're kind of distilled from a number of religious, spiritual, and pop psychology sources, and mixed in with a strong anarchist strain.
Because the people who started AA were Christian anarchists.
And I think that that Really, like, vibes with something that's deep inside most people, where they want to be treated as equals, they want to have a degree of autonomy, they want to be responsible for their own actions, and they want to have a chance to live a good life, you know?
I guess they also want their bad shit to be seen and accepted.
Yeah, they want to be human.
They want to be humanized and like, I don't know, like, I'm like, just as a traumatized person, as a person who's in 12-step programs, as a person who's like, I'm a bit of a trauma educator, like I help polyamorous people who have trauma, like, Be in their relationships, you know?
And I know that people do all sorts of shit that they regret all the time, like, you know?
And we aren't always acting as our best selves, and we are not defined by the worst things that we've ever done.
We are capable of so much more than that, and people want to know that the things that they're ashamed of do not disqualify them from humanity.
That the things that they're ashamed of do not make them permanently irredeemable and disposable.
There's just like one other thing that I wanted to comment on, like the framing of your original question, and I think that this is somewhere in the topic of cancel culture, like it's tricky because we are often talking about two things simultaneously, and this has come up a few times in the conversation.
One is like situations which are objectively abusive and harmful, clearly and obviously, and the other is
Differences in political strategy or differences in sort of like ideological framings which within the nexus are very often presented as bad and as violence and so there's this idea that like we should call people in and it's like sometimes I find it like really frustrating and insulting because I'm like
Calling someone in who is a leftist who doesn't agree with you is positioning yourself in this like incredible position of authority that you're the one who knows the correct answer into how we deal with this hellscape of a world that we're living in and the reality is is that there are many political lineages that fall under the umbrella of leftism and we don't all agree and so we can't take this stance of like
I'm going to let you know that what you think is bad, and I'm going to be generous about it, so I'm going to let you come back into the fold, but you're still not allowed to have your view.
You know, I hadn't actually considered that the calling-in framework or discourse actually proposes a pathology, that the person has already left, they're already outside of the island, that they're prodigal.
And so the patronizing aspect of, well, you'll be able to reconcile with the parents is pretty clear.
I hadn't really.
I mean, it's one of those phrases that just sort of prickles.
But yeah, I guess it kind of makes a lot more sense now.
People who position themselves as sort of like critical of cancel culture, but still one of the good guys, always, basically always propose that instead we just call people in instead of call them out, right?
And it ends up just doing the same thing.
It's the same fucking thing.
In some ways, it's even worse.
Yeah.
And I mean, it it again, it doesn't it doesn't make the distinction.
It's a very important distinction between abusive behavior in which, yes, I still believe that people who have been abusive deserve compassion.
And I don't believe that they should be cancelled either.
But also, not all disagreement or things that you don't like are bad and abusive.
And so, like, and this is really upsetting to me because I'm like, honestly, like some of Our best fucking thinkers on the left who are Marxists and socialists and anti-racists and who are intelligent and articulate and have incredibly important nuanced things to say are being silenced and being told that they are problematic, that they are class reductionists or whatever it is that people want to use to shut down what they're saying.
Their events are being canceled and it's, you know, like there's actually like, I mean, you know, I'm Canadian, but like I've been reading about what's going on with the DSA in the United States.
And there's been a lot of controversy about literally like, um, Adolf Fried and other like scholars of color who, who are being silenced on, um, the idea that they're racist.
And these are like overtly anti-racist and racialized scholars who are like, I just have a different ideology.
And it's just, it's just really crazy making to me because I'm like, it's very arrogant for any of us to assume that we have all of the answers and we absolutely are living in like end of the world timeline right now.
We need to be in dialogue with thinkers who we disagree with and who we share values with, you know, even, you know, Even if we are coming at it, you know, from different angles and we don't agree on every single thing, we can't just be shutting everything down and silencing each other.
And so unfortunately, this language of, like, abuse and harm and, like, you know, accusations of transphobia and racism and, like, whatever it is, Can be used to totally silence dissent and various, like, viewpoints within leftism.
And so we really need to make a distinction between cases of abuse and cases of disagreement.
And unfortunately that distinction has collapsed constantly.
Right, and I think it's almost as if the social media aspect of that collapse makes it a foregone conclusion because the visibility of your post is really dependent upon the inflammatory nature of your language.
So if you have a point to make about anything, you're going to ramp up, whether it's disagreement or abuse, you're going to try to make it as visible as possible.
Yeah, and I also have this sort of like half-developed theoretical take on this, which is, do you know the concept of the meme, but like the original sort of like Richard Dawkins version?
Yeah, right.
A meme is like this like piece of information that passes from mind to mind, right?
Yeah.
And basically they're more successful if they conform to certain parameters, right?
Just like a gene.
And I think that within the nexus there are these like There are also these sort of evolutionary pressures on ideas to make them conform to a lens that is more identitarian, that is more inflammatory, that is more likely in various ways to pass from mind to mind.
I think that's also why cancellations tend to get worse with each retelling.
Because if they're more bland, they don't get passed on.
If they're more intense, they do.
Can you just pause?
Cancellations get more intense with each retelling of what?
Um, so if somebody cancels you for being, um, let's say you were sketchy, um, then like the next time that like that round of cancellation, next time that accusation goes around, it's going to be like, you were sketchy and you were transphobic, you know?
And like the third time that somebody makes a post about it, it's going to be like, it is well known that you're sketchy and transphobic and further, you've refused to take accountability.
Because it has to!
Because it has to!
Because if the first two things didn't stick, or they got lost in the sort of data sea, they have to be amplified, you have to add color to it.
It's like anything else with regard to engagement and visibility on the internet.
You have to brighten it up.
Yeah, and there's, there's, well, there's evolutionary pressure.
If the first two were not, um, if they didn't stick, then there wouldn't be a third one.
Yeah.
Right.
And, and so if you're seeing a third one, it is one that has, that has grown.
That's mutated.
And like, one of the things that, that I find so like crazy making about this is that, you know, because of this whole narrative of like, believe survivors, people literally do not have to provide any evidence for the accusations that they're making.
And people can make really intense, really like life-changing accusations against people calling them, you know, really awful things and, and provide no, no information about where they got this information.
They, they can just say that it's known that this is the case.
Um, and they can just pass it on and it can continue to snowball and to grow.
And like, I'm an abolitionist.
That's probably clear from a lot of the things that I've said.
Um, and can you just define that briefly?
So basically I ultimately believe in the complete abolition of the present industrial complex.
I don't like locking people up.
I don't like cops.
I think that we should be moving away from that.
I don't think that's going to happen tomorrow, but I think that that should be the endgame.
Even more like fundamentally or philosophically, I don't believe in the underpinning logics of those systems that treat people as disposable, that define people by the worst things that they've done.
I don't believe in the present industrial complex and also the sort of ways we enact this carceral punitive logic in our day-to-day lives, you know?
Because you're saying that the nexus is actually carceral.
I do think that the Nexus is carceral, and I think a lot of people might get mad at me for saying that.
Well, you do have right at the header on your Insta account, you say, fuck the police means we don't act like cops to each other, which is pretty nice.
One of the things that always strikes me about this is I'm like, you know, everybody, like, abolitionism has become really popular recently, and I'm glad to see that more and more people are becoming abolitionist in their thinking, and I think that's great.
But like, one of the things that's always so bizarre to me is I'm like, you know, Even in the prison industrial complex, which is fucking awful, people have the legal right to defend themselves.
You know, if you're going to accuse someone legally of some of these things, you know, this person has the right to a lawyer.
They have the right and they are expected to defend themselves.
Like, of course, they would defend themselves against such accusations.
Whereas in the nexus, defending yourself is an accusation unto itself, you know, and no one is allowed to defend themselves.
And if you do, that's like further evidence that you are bad and that you are wrong.
And so it's, Really, I really wish people would be more careful about the things that they're spreading around on the internet and to think about the consequences that those things have for people's lives.
These accusations are like really, really serious.
If you're going to call someone, you know, A white supremacist, that's a really serious accusation, because white supremacy is a really fucked up thing that we want to be resisting, you know?
And you shouldn't be making that accusation lightly, because that's going to have profound impacts on that person's life, right?
And so, I think that we should be being specific about what our accusations are, what exactly it is that we're taking issue with, not making these vague generalizations that this person is problematic or sketchy, or even if you're going to say that someone is a white supremacist, you need to be specific about why it is that you think that.
What specifically did they say or did they do that is making you jump to that conclusion?
Right, you've got to bring receipts, you've got to show your work.
Yeah.
Or at least make a specific accusation.
Make a specific accusation as to what it is that you're actually saying.
Like the criminal justice system doesn't like just be like, uh, you're, you stand accused of being sketchy, you know, like it's not.
On May the 13th, you like went to somebody's house and you were sketchy at them, you know?
So you both are super lucid in describing a really complex problem in a very clear way.
Do you think that progressive culture, that the socialist goals that you have, do you think that organizing, the kind of organizing that you want to do, do you think that we Can do better with social media in the mix, or are we going to have to cancel social media?
God, it's a fucking rough question, man.
I'm off social media because it makes me crazy.
I'm also a fucking drug addict.
I can't be on social media.
I can't use it responsibly, you know?
They fucking make it addictive on purpose, right?
It's like people who design casinos design social media.
It's called the ludic loop effect.
Yeah, it's fucking rough on my brain, right?
Um, and I also think that, yeah, like social media is like fucking really detrimental to the left in like a lot of ways.
Then again, like, is it going to disappear because I don't like it?
No, like that's not going to happen.
Right.
So, you know, those of us, maybe those of us who are not fucking drug addicts can, can work on this.
Um, I do think that there's like maybe a place for social media for sure.
Um, because it does exist and we just have to, we have to, you know, use the tools that are at our disposal.
We can't live in a world that isn't the real world.
We have to live life on life's terms, as they say in the program.
So, yeah, I do think that social media has a place in leftism.
But like the thing that we need to do and the thing that we are doing, my friend, is we are going to make a new, cool left that is not that is not caught up in identitarianism, that knows what it thinks, that is not afraid of debate. that knows what it thinks, that is not afraid of That is not afraid of difference, that allows people a place to fucking stand on their own two feet, that doesn't try to shame people into submission, you know, that allows them to have their own thoughts.
And we're going to build that with your help, and it's going to be a much better More fun left that is going to get things done, you know, and we don't have a lot of time to do this either.
Like we cannot allow these fucking like Democrat light fucking liberals to dominate the left anymore.
We don't have time.
We're running out of time.
The planet Does not have time for us to be fucking around with this shit.
And also, I don't know, we're living at this stage of like the most extreme income inequality in history, right?
Through a fucking pandemic.
The West Coast is on fire.
It's really bad.
The planet is just in freefall ecological collapse.
And we're arguing over whether, I don't know, we're arguing over the most like just the silliest fucking shit, you know?
About sexual preference being a problem.
Yeah, and trying to sort of make sure that the couple thousand psychopaths who rule us are like 15% black and like 1% trans or whatever the identitarians want, right?
We don't think that that's a solution.
We think that the solution is to redistribute wealth And power from the ruling class to the working class.
And we think that will disproportionately benefit oppressed people because the working class is fucking intersectional.
Yeah, the working class is intersectional.
Just to say a little about the social media piece.
I don't know who said this, I wish I could credit this, but it was like a meme on social media and I don't remember who the creator was.
It just said, um, there's, there's not two yous.
There's not a real life you and an internet you.
If you're cruel on the internet, that means you're cruel.
Um, and I really like that struck me.
And I think that in terms of moving forward with people deciding to continue to use social media, I think we really need to change the social norms on social media and bring them back to the social norms of real life.
And one of the things I was thinking about, you know, in terms of boundaries, right?
Like, It's totally normal to like go onto a person's Instagram or their Twitter and to just comment over and over and over and over again, telling them what to do, saying, take this down or you have to do this or you have to do that.
And they could keep deleting it.
It doesn't matter.
Like you will send hordes of people to continuously post on their page.
I'm just like, if I stood on your front lawn and yelled at you over and over again until you did what I said, like that's overtly abusive.
Like everyone would be like, this is such wildly inappropriate behavior.
Like someone would call the cops.
You can't go to someone's house and scream on their front lawn.
It's just wildly disrespectful and inappropriate, right?
And so, I want us to start thinking about social media and the way we interact with each other more like how we would with other people.
And like, do you talk like that?
And if you do want to challenge someone, if one of your friends, you know, who you know in real life says something that you're like a little concerned about or something, like, how would you speak to them?
And like, how would you like to be spoken to, you know?
Because, I mean, I, you know, I'm like really grounded in my beliefs, but absolutely I can be challenged.
And I would expect the people that I love to like lovingly challenge me if there's ever things that I'm saying or doing that are like maybe not as in line with my politics and my ethics as I think, right?
And so how would I like to receive that feedback?
Obviously with kindness, with generosity, with respect.
Um, and so, and with like, with, with freedom, like with the, with the, with the, I want it to be allowed for me to disagree, you know?
For me to say, thank you for the feedback, I'll think about that, you know?
And maybe I will or will not change my behavior based on that process.
But like, we don't act that way online.
We're cruel.
We are punishing.
We are incredibly demanding and coercive.
We think that we can just tell people what to do constantly.
We think it's okay to mob people, to get hundreds of people to join in on harassing someone.
And I'm like, that's just not...
It's not polite, you know?
One last thing is I'll just recommend there's a really good talk on Jacobin, the Jacobin YouTube series called Log the Fuck Off.
Yeah, it's really good.
That you should put in your show notes because everyone should watch it.
It's like really, really amazing.
It's with Amber Frost, Matt Chrisman, and Ben Fong.
Thank you for listening to Conspirituality.
You can find show notes, resources, and more at conspirituality.net.
And stay in touch with us on Instagram at conspiritualitypod, on Facebook at conspiritualitypodcast, and at the same extension on YouTube as well.
You can also support us on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where you will get access to weekly patron-only content.
And we would truly appreciate your support if you're able to help.
All music you hear on Conspiratuality is by Earthrise Sound System, which is the partnership of David Duke Mushroom Shomer and myself, Derek Barris.
