Once upon a time, there was a golden age. A time when the news media was fair and balanced, unbiased and honest. But we've lost all that to the corrupting influence of big money, political correctness, and woke censorship. Blame the radical left.
Not to worry: the online charisma of heterodox new media figures like Bari Weiss and her plucky, centrist, truth-telling little start-up, The Free Press, has come to Make Journalism Great Again.
Yet their supposed heterodoxy is neither neutral nor journalistically rigorous. It's pure culture war contrarian sensationalism that wastes little ink critiquing the rise of right-wing authoritarianism.
We trace these tangled threads by listening in to the supposedly non-partisan The Free Press election night livestream, which giddily praised Trump for being the consummate bullshitter that will take an ax to Democratic institutions.
Show Notes
The evolution of France’s left and right politics, from the 1789 French Revolution to this year's election
What to Know About the Origins of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in Politics, From the French Revolution to the 2020 Presidential Race
Our American Zion
When a Terrorist Comes to Your Hometown
Columbia's Own Middle East War
Bari Weiss’s Unasked Questions
TFP latest round of funding
Thiel/Lonsdale and UATX funding
UATX huge cash injection after pro-palestine protests
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Nobody listens to Paula Poundstone.
You probably know that I made an appearance recently on this absolutely ludicrous variety show that combines the fun of a late night show with the wit of a public radio program and the unique knowledge of a guest expert who was me at the time, if you can believe that.
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hey everyone welcome to conspirituality where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults pseudoscience and authoritarian extremism I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
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Conspirituality 232, Gaslighting the Election.
Thank you.
Once upon a time, there was a golden age, a time when the news media was fair and balanced, unbiased and honest.
But we've lost all that to the corrupting influence of big money, political correctness, and woke censorship.
You see, it's the radical left that's deranged the discourse.
But not to worry, the online charisma of heterodox new media figures like Barry Weiss and her plucky, centrist, truth-telling little startup called the Free Press has come to make journalism great again.
telling little startup called the Free Press has come to make journalism great again.
The problem is their supposed heterodoxy is neither neutral nor journalistically rigorous.
It's pure culture war contrarian sensationalism that wastes little ink, if any, on critiquing the rise of right-wing authoritarianism or Trump's criminality.
Follow the money and the lie of being anti-elite, independent champions of truth and freedom very quickly wears thin.
We trace these tangled threads on today's episode as exemplified by the supposedly non-partisan the Free Press election night livestream, which giddily praised Trump for being the consummate bullshitter come to take an axe to democratic institutions.
This Week in Conspirituality.
Last week, YouTuber turned boxer and always shit poster Jake Paul, who will hopefully get destroyed by Mike Tyson this weekend.
I don't have my hopes up, but hopefully.
I'm very concerned, actually.
I don't know if I can watch it.
I only say that because someone's paying for a longer fight.
I just have to believe that given how boxing is.
So I would rather just see Mike come out and put him down in the first round and just end all the nonsense.
Anyway, Jake tweeted the following to his 4.6 million followers.
Trump, 48 hours, not even in office.
Call with Putin to end Russia-Ukraine war.
Ceasefire in Iran.
Hamas calls for immediate end to war.
China hopes for peaceful coexistence with America.
Kamala Harris, four years as VP. Yeah, he just ended it with that silence.
And so I found that tweet via religion scholar Dan McClellan, and he shared it on his Instagram feed.
And then he replied, maybe somebody can help me find info that's closer to what Jake has claimed in this tweet, because based on everything I can find, as of today, these are the realities.
And then he lists the four.
Trump only ends the Ukraine war by capitulating to Putin's demands.
Iran called on Israel to cease fire before the election and is awaiting the response.
Hamas simply repeated the same call for Israel to cease fire that they have repeated many times.
And then finally, China only insisted the US and China have to find a way to get along.
And I wanted to flag this as we transition to this week's main story because it really represents how low-information propagandists are able to manipulate people's comprehension of the world.
And I'm not sure would Jake source this information.
I doubt he came up with it himself.
He probably saw it on Twitter.
But it's indicative of someone in a disinformation media bubble who perpetuates faulty news.
And I'm guessing the source of these tidbits knew exactly what they were doing, even if Jake did not.
I have a lot to say about the state of media now in today's episode, but also in the coming months.
And I recognize that all of us are in our algorithmic bubbles, but it's still possible to not get it as wrong as Jake did.
And one thing that's jumped out at me this week is how quickly news outlets coalesced around the narrative that Dems just didn't speak to the working class and focus too much, for example, on transgender issues.
When it's abundantly clear that the right-wing media ecosystem is responsible for taking what's a predominantly non-issue for most people and blowing it up to epic proportions, Of course, this has been noted that Trump spent $30 million Creating an advertisement about how Kamala Harris posted a transgender in prison put forward policy to allow prisoners to get transgender surgeries.
That actually came up during Trump's administration.
But he never acknowledges that.
And that was a driving force behind his campaign.
And to understand how all this works, we need to look at data.
And Trump didn't win on policy or statistics or ideas.
He won on affect.
As Media Matter reports, As they also point out, and it is well known, Kalief is not transgender.
She was born female.
There has been another recent test that supposedly came out in the last week, but I checked and the BBC and a few other news outlets have not been able to report on the validity of that test.
So bigger picture, when Fox News goes on these frenzies, there are a total of five transgender athletes competing on girls teams in K through 12 sports in the US right now.
So there are credible debates about whether or not these athletes should compete in sports in the age of transitioning, but right-wing media isn't actually concerned about that.
Their goal has long been to dehumanize the very concept of gender identity, which they do by obscuring factual information.
So that's the grim reality of the media question we're dealing with today and for some time to come in America.
Jake Paul can tweet out bullshit and most of his followers aren't going to fact check it.
And as we know, it's harder to convince someone they're wrong after they've already accepted a fact than it is to give them good information in the first place.
And that's a struggle we're going to have to deal with for some time to come.
Sure.
I want to add here, Derek, that you said that their goal has been, right-wing media's goal has been to dehumanize the very concept of gender identity.
My sense is that their goal is to identify culture war issues that will have enough hooks in them to speak to their base, right?
They're looking for the red meat for their base.
And if, in the process, dehumanizing the concept of gender identity happens to be the outcome, they're like, okay, that's fine, as long as we get what we want, right?
I'd agree with that in terms of bigger picture.
Yes, they're always looking for those hooks.
But on this specific issue, they are playing very much to a Christian national base that only believes in the binaries of gender identity, not biological sex, but gender identity.
And they are trying to push forward a very heterosexual narrative about marriage because we know there's a lot of laws coming in states that Once upon a time,
a time when newspapers covered both sides of an issue, editorial endorsements may have moved a voter in Michigan or persuaded some undecided soul like my mom in Pennsylvania.
But those days are long gone.
We're continually told that America is divided into reds and blues, into MAGA and the resistance.
The staff of the free press is split almost exactly three ways in this election.
Between Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and, well, neither.
Some think democracy is on the ballot and are profoundly fearful of Trump.
Others are far more sanguine, making the case that we endured four years of Trump and four years of Biden-Harris and the republic survived.
My point is that at the free press, it's okay to be liberal or conservative or politically non-binary.
And though it shouldn't be, having a newsroom that reflects the politics of America has become extraordinarily unusual.
At The New York Times, every last columnist, even those who are supposed to be the conservatives, oppose Trump's election.
At The Washington Post, journalists' furor over Bezos' squashing of the Harris endorsement isn't because their independent journalism is being harmed.
It's because like most of their brethren in the mainstream media, they think it's imperative for Kamala Harris to win.
So isn't it just a little bit strange that the institutions that talk the most about diversity and inclusion can't stomach anyone whose views align with half of Americans?
At the Free Press, we flip this dynamic on its head.
The fundamental value we share here, with each other, and with our readers and listeners, is a commitment to seeking and telling the truth.
Sounds really good.
Notice how she got her jabs in there on being politically non-binary and how these hypocrites who claim to be about diversity and inclusion are so censorious and single-minded, right?
Yeah, so that's Barry Weiss.
She's previewing the Free Press' 2024 livestream coverage of election night.
Her invitation, which we just heard parts of, is a pitch-perfect summary of the new media both sides' false equivalency stance, which is touted as heterodox free speech.
As you can hear, this claims to be a corrective to biased and censorious left-leaning media by adopting a neutral commitment to covering all perspectives and encouraging voters to think for themselves.
But who is Barry Weiss?
Barry has an interesting arc.
She rose to prominence after her transition from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times when, in October of 2018, the synagogue she grew up attending in Pittsburgh was the target of an anti-Semitic attack in which 11 were killed and 7 were injured.
She appeared within days of that shooting on Bill Maher's show, where together they criticized Trump's repetition of conspiracy theories that trended towards scapegoating Jews and referenced his appeal to the Charlottesville tiki torchbearers, Jews Will Not Replace Us.
She was also quick, on the other side, to praise Trump for moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, but then also scolded some of her fellow Jews for the bargain they had made with Trump, saying, and I'm quoting here, they have traded policies that they like for the values that have sustained the Jewish they have traded policies that they like for the values that have sustained the Jewish people, welcoming the stranger, dignity for all human beings, equality under love of truth.
These are the things we're losing under this president and no policy is worth that price.
As we will find out later, In a perhaps shocking twist, Barry appears now to have found a price for which abandoning those values is acceptable.
You know, the thing for me that's most important to know about Weiss, because I think this is at the heart of the free press's independent and objective commentariat movement, or so they say, is that she finds her center of gravity and moral core,
which rings out in her voice, I think?
So, in 2004, it begins when she's a student at Columbia, and she really sharpened her free speech teeth on a campaign to get several Arab scholars of Middle Eastern history and politics investigated for claims of anti-Israel bias that her student group described as being anti-Semitic.
Now, these were profs who offered pretty standard postcolonial theory views on Israel as a colonial project with racist outcomes.
Weiss targeted a Jordanian-born scholar whose alleged bias she claimed felt intimidating.
But Columbia investigated the prof and ultimately found no evidence of anti-Semitic statements.
of this Polestar feeling that the Academy fosters antisemitism and that it's coming from the left.
It's a kind of strained idea that is foundational for her heterodox future.
In her 2019 book, How to Fight Antisemitism, she explains that this version is worse than the right-wing versions that we're familiar with from our reporting, the overt varieties, because it is hateful while concealing itself in a devious cloak of progressive care. because it is hateful while concealing itself in a devious
And I think this is really important to understanding Weiss's sense of wounded authority, because it's like the wokeness of post-colonial theory determined that the heroes of Israel, she knows, are suddenly more complicated.
Maybe they're not heroes at all.
And this vision of the institutional left as devious and hypocritical becomes a keynote in what we're going to hear from many guests on this live stream.
Because mantras are always, oh, you only say you care about people of color, trans people, the working class.
but you're all really just performing.
Thanks for that, Matthew.
Barry has, since her appearance that I referenced, been back on Bill Maher several times, so that, in fact, she and Bill could commiserate over the outrage machine of the woke left.
And at times, she had a point, I thought, but the dynamic presaged an increasingly contrarian slide.
Weiss would go on to publish a string of articles at the New York Times, which led to her becoming a lightning rod for controversy.
She wrote critically about everything from hashtag MeToo to the Women's March to, in a piece titled We Are All Fascists Now, the puritanical intolerance of some on the left, as she saw it.
That last article required a later correction by the Times because she used an Antifa account on Twitter and As an example of this woke overreach, the problem was the account had been debunked a year previous as a fake account set up to discredit the protest movement against Trump.
Next, when the George Floyd riots happened in the summer of 2020, GOP Senator Tom Cotton was published in the Times calling for Trump to send in soldiers because protesters had plunged, this is him speaking, plunged many American cities into anarchy, end quote.
And over a thousand New York Times staffers signed a letter condemning this piece.
And the editor, who was responsible for publishing it, resigned after saying he hadn't really read it before he published it.
Now, Weiss characterized this as a woke civil war within the New York Times and made a big show of publicly resigning with a post on her own website about how the paper had caved to the Twitter mob, had failed to protect her from internal bullying, thereby creating a hostile work environment, and had betrayed the ethos of free speech.
Weiss made Weiss the darling of a then-emerging centrist podcast and YouTube set, whom she actually had profiled before her resignation in a now-much-parodied article titled Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web.
Some will remember the photo shoot.
She also drew a lot of support from more overtly right-leaning outlets and commentators while being further critiqued by the left, which didn't do us any favors in terms of her continuing slide.
Striking out on her own, she would go on to create a podcast called Honestly, and then a sub stack that would evolve into what is now this media company called the Free Press, which as of this year brings in around 8 million in paid subscriptions.
So a little less than us.
Yeah, a little less than us.
And certainly like many other people who have done this, Matt Taibbi comes to mind, and there are quite a few others, Glenn Greenwald, she's making a lot more money than she did before she took the censorship martyr track into heterodox free speech champion.
The posture amongst these folks is one of fearlessly asking the questions on which the mainstream media is too partisan or totally avoids because they are ideologically inconvenient.
So some examples in the free press include these.
The kindergarten intifada.
Gail Schreier, in which she reported on the anti-Israel indoctrination from teachers in LA schools.
And then Douglas Murray, noted anti-immigrant right-winger from England, Recently wrote about the UK government's cover-up of the Muslim identity of a mass killer, supposedly, because they are dishonest about the problems with immigration.
And then Nellie Bowles penned a quite jokey piece, which is her style, about democracy dying in darkness and election day being the end of the world and Biden calling all Trump supporters garbage.
So what I'm describing here is not exactly a broad ideological spread.
We're going to talk about their election night coverage specifically today.
But I'm just going to round off the examples I've been given by sharing that last Thursday, Madeleine Kearns titled a free press article, Democrats Picked the Wrong Women's Rights Issue.
And this dovetails with what you talked about, Derek, because it turns out boring old reproductive freedom fell flat in the election in comparison to the culture war excitement of biological men in women's sports.
I've heard some criticisms that Harris didn't respond to Trump's fake information in that $30 million ad spread.
We can debate that or not, but we're really talking about the bifurcation of the media ecosystem right now.
In a sense, it's always been that way.
If you want a deeper dive on this topic, You can go back to episode 165 where I interviewed media scholar Tobias Rose Stockwell.
But for now, before we get to the clips, I just want to point out that Tobias turned me on to a few books on media history that have been extremely valuable in my understanding how the work that we do today has evolved over time.
And what we call journalism is roughly 500 years old.
And then, as now, early reporters had to figure out how to make a living doing it.
Initially, it was guys collecting information at the docks from boatmen who had just come over from foreign lands, and then they would charge landlords for a written summary of that information.
As that practice evolved, broadsheets eventually included advertisements.
The funny thing is, the two ways that journalism is monetized now are the same as then.
You can support it by paying for it, or you get advertising, or sometimes both.
Now, in fact, the only real new development you're going to get to in a bit, Julian, which is partisan venture capital funding it, but that's not even actually that different from state media, which is a very old concept, because it serves the same function, which is controlling a narrative.
Now, it was Barry's old boss, the New York Times, launched in 1851 as the New York Daily Times, that really set the tone for modern journalism, this objective journalism that Weiss is pretending to really care about and champion.
It was started by two New York Tribune journalists who were tired of the misinformation and propaganda in all the other outlets, like the New York Sun, who constantly published Bat Boy on the Moon front page stories for like 20 years leading up to the founding of the Times.
Now, the Times really did try to be objective, but it's never been a reality for them or anyone.
Now, that said, there is still really good investigative journalism happening right now, but Barry claiming that the free press was born from that tradition is laughable, as you'll hear as this episode evolves.
I'll offer an example when we get to her wife, who you flagged a moment ago, Nellie Bowles.
But make no mistake, the free press has a very specific slant and to pretend that they're doing objective journalism is a farce.
Now, I'll go one step further here and quote Jon Stewart, because in his interview last week with Heather Cox Richardson, he said journalists need to accept their role as activists.
Both sides in policy issues and trying to be objective is fine.
But when it comes down to fighting to save democracy, the media has tilted very heavily towards centrism in their pre and post election coverage.
And that has distracted from the very real existential threat that we face as Americans.
So my feeling is that we'll be better off being objective with facts, like, for example, something I cover often, clinical vaccine studies, but also admitting that we have our own objectives.
And I just wish that Weiss and her crew would own up to their own.
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I'll set the scene.
Head honcho Barry Weiss was flanked by former Vice and Daily Beast journalist Michael Moynihan and new Free Press regular Batya Ongar Sargon.
They hosted some 50 guests over four hours.
And these included some mainstream political commentators like journalist Frank Bruni and polling expert Frank Luntz, as well as Congressman Richie Torres and Dan Crenshaw from different sides of the aisle.
Thank you.
who's also been an editor at flagship libertarian magazine Reason and is the co-host alongside another election night guest, Camille Foster of the popular Fifth Column podcast.
Now, Batya Anghar-Surgon, who is the other host, is the current Newsweek opinion writer, and she identifies as an anti-woke left-wing socialist.
Well, we'll see.
On hand as panel guests were climate denialist and free press columnist Michael Schellenberger of Twitter Files fame, prominent black anti-woke authors Coleman Hughes and John McWhorter, And others included former Democratic Senator Tina Turner as well as Course in Miracles presidential hopeful Marianne Williamson and transgender video game developer and
culture war commentator Biyana Wu as well as high profile recently Why I Left the Left Young Turks co-host Anna Kasparian.
Dr.
Phil also zoomed in to give his folksy tough love self-help takes.
And the proceedings were seasoned with the transgressive droll irony of Anna Katyan and Dasha Nekrasova of the infamous Red Scare podcast.
True to the both sides ethos, there was a moment in which one of the few Democrat guests, Richie Torres, It's not just the If Donald
Trump doesn't win, but equally you had Oprah at Kamala Harris's closing rally in Pittsburgh, I think yesterday, along with Katy Perry and others, a lot of other celebrities, saying this might be the last time that you get to vote and that's why it's essential that Kamala Harris wins.
Do you share that view?
Like, let's say we wake up tomorrow morning and your disfavored candidate, Donald Trump, has won.
Is it the end of the world as we know it?
The world will survive, and I'm confident that the American Republic is strong enough to survive even a demagogue like Donald Trump.
But I do believe that Donald Trump has shown nothing but contempt for the norms of liberal democracy.
I sometimes wonder, what if Donald Trump had an attorney general that was willing to open a sham investigation into those false claims of election fraud?
Or what if he had a vice president who was willing to delay or block the certification of the Electoral College?
And so I do have faith in the American system, but at the same time, I do worry about Donald Trump's temperament.
I do think he's temperamentally unqualified to be president.
Congressman, you are a credit to your office, and I know that many in our community really, really admire you as a hero, including myself, and I know Barry as well.
Thank you so much.
The bar for heroism is low, but I appreciate it.
Yeah, so Taurus actually gives the correct answer here by disambiguating baseless propaganda on one side from Trump's openly anti-democratic actions and statements on the other.
There's no response, though, from Bacha and Barry to this substance of distinction.
They just kind of deflect into fangirling on him as a hero, not because he dares to speak truth about Trump, as he just did five seconds previous, but because he's also been very pro-Israel.
Well, I'll say that the end of the world did happen the evening that they're flagging, which was when Katy Perry tried to cover Whitney Houston.
I missed that.
Oh, go find it.
It is a treat.
It is an absolute pleasure, which will make you hate Katy Perry's music even more.
All right, moving on.
Here's Nellie Bowles.
She's Barry's wife and co-founder of the Free Press.
She's a former journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle, Vice, Guardian, New York Times.
And this is a choice moment that she has about the phenomenon of new media and the fall of the old institutions.
How do podcasts play in this?
Well, I was going to say, one way to look at the fall of the old institutions is to see how silly it was when the Washington Post decided they weren't going to endorse a candidate.
And they act as though, I mean, the reporters acted as though that's like the fall of democracy.
It's a huge ordeal.
And it's like, guys, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
And it matters actually a lot more when Joe Rogan endorses a candidate.
And that is the realignment.
That's sort of the mess of the old world and the rise of the strange new.
And I think we're just at the beginning of it.
Hits me on a different level anytime I hear her speak.
But her wife, Barry Weiss, is a very polished speaker and a decent writer, honestly.
But Nellie is neither of those things.
And it's funny how often both women lambast the New York Times when Nellie's 2017 article for that paper, which is about tech workers finding spirituality, and it's actually called Where Silicon Valley is Going to Get in Touch with His Soul, was basically a laughable propaganda and it's actually called Where Silicon Valley is Going to Get in Touch with And she's writing about Esalen, which we covered on episode 117 with our friend Natalia Pretziozella.
And Nellie positions herself as an investigative reporter, but she ended up writing a puff piece about the spiritual ambitions of a small group of elite techies that read as being completely detached from the social calamities their technologies produce.
I don't disagree with her that at this phase of our society, Rogan's endorsement is more important than the Washington Post.
But the fact that she's trying to cosplay as some media expert is really laughable.
Yeah, and Joe Rogan makes a lot more money than most of the biggest anchors at the legacy media institutions that you're calling elite, right?
Oh, probably makes more than the staff of reporters by and on himself.
Absolutely.
Now, earlier I flagged that the Free Press is not objective journalism, and it isn't.
And that falls as much on the editorial decisions as the columnists themselves.
So in April, Nelly announced a new column called Free Press Health.
I haven't seen any further columns on this, but it's still up on the site.
And it was filled with pseudoscience and health misinformation under the guise of objectivity.
She opens by criticizing Time Magazine's coverage of, ironically, Petruzella's last book, which, like our book, looks at the white supremacy that sits at the origins of physical fitness culture.
Now, Nelly actually uses that idea as the reason she's launching this column so...
Thank you, or you're welcome, I guess.
As in, Petrozzella's argument is reason enough to begin an entire investigation of wellness journalism.
Yes, correct.
Now, Nellie's column is a bullet-pointed list of health stories, some credible, really, but others not.
And I'll just give one example.
That rehashes the long debunked idea that COVID vaccines cause high levels of myocarditis.
And I just want to flag these three sentences.
Julian?
The argument is basically that while the vaccine triggers some amounts of inflammation that causes myocarditis, COVID itself triggers even more.
I wanted this one to be true.
But for all these topics, I turn to Dr.
Vinay Prasad, professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco.
Unfortunately, he gives it a thorough debunking.
Yeah, so the idea that she's starting this very serious health column and then she cites Prasad.
We've covered him so many times.
He is one of the worst anti-vax contrarians ever.
In October 2021, he compared America's COVID response to the Third Reich, and he's been at peak trolling levels since Trump won last week.
So the idea that Prasad is a go-to expert on COVID is absolutely ludicrous, and it shows you how unserious of a writer and a thinker that Nellie Bowles really is.
Fearlessly asking the difficult questions and being open to heterodox opinions really always translates into, let's have the biggest crank possible show up As long as they have some sort of claim to expertise and we'll just take their word for it.
It seems to always go that way, doesn't it?
So next up in our clips, we have from election night, Peter Savodnik.
Now he's written for Harper's New York Times and Atlantic Monthly.
He was also based in Moscow for years where he wrote a book on Lee Harvey Oswald.
Here he is talking about Trump's secret sauce.
The secret sauce that the Trump sort of thing is, is this fundamental?
I know this is going to shock all of our colleagues in legacy media, but it's fundamental honesty, sort of seeing things as they are and talking about that, right?
He had this brilliant podcast just recently, last week, about the difference between lying and bullshit, and he completely nailed it.
Trump bullshits constantly, but when it comes to sort of saying what he's thinking and what he means and what he is saying, I think he's been consistent and he's gone about it unabashedly.
People love that.
And remarkably, at the same time that he's kind of gone on and kind of hammered away at that, the Democrats have become Less honest.
Culminating with, as Barry was talking about earlier, the whole lie around Joe Biden and how he's sharper than ever, and then the switcheroo.
The contrast is crystal clear, and you can't govern.
There's no governing contact if you're telling the people that 2 plus 2 is 5.
over and over, you can say it over and over, and it doesn't make it true.
And I think there's so much disdain for the deplorables that it never seemed to occur to the Democrats that maybe people would realize that they're being lied to and they hate that.
I think there's all kinds of things to say on another episode about dissembling and Democrats speaking out of both sides of their mouths.
But he's referencing Eli Lake, another free press contributor, giving a podcast that I listened to the first 10 minutes of.
I was wondering, oh, in this distinction between lies and bullshit, is he going to reference the philosopher Harry Frankfurt?
And yes, he does, because that's the expert.
And he unrolls Frankfurt's distinction that the bullshitter is the person who doesn't have to care about the truth, because he's speaking for affect to have some sort of impact.
Their only concern is attention, whereas the liar has to pay some attention to what is true and what is false.
Yeah, and Harry Frankfurt is making that distinction by way of saying bullshitters are worse.
Well, yes.
So Lake completely misses the moral dimension of Frankfurt's argument.
The bullshitter is the worst person in the world because he destroys the possibility for truth.
And the first example that Lake gives of ha-ha-ha, you know, Trump is a bullshitter who's actually secretly telling the truth – Is the lie about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats?
And his actual argument, Lake's argument is, this is total bullshit, but it revealed a secret truth that Americans weren't paying attention to, which is that we have a big problem with illegal migrants, blah, blah, blah, which of course also is a lie.
But yeah, completely intellectually, morally bankrupt.
Yeah, I don't know who Svodnik is, but...
Get better sources, dude.
Yeah, and at one point he says it's crystal clear, but he himself is really stumbling to make this argument.
Oh, yeah.
Because I think he's probably only heard it for the first time.
He's never heard of Harry Frankfurt.
He doesn't know what the moral dimension of the argument is because he only listened to Eli Lake about it.
It's just like, it's just nothing.
It's nothing all the way around.
Yeah, on this podcast, this was kind of totemic, several times.
Oh, did they?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
It's brilliant.
It's like the most amazing thing that's happened at the Free Press.
Okay, so it's a brilliant thing, and the guy just totally got it wrong, and they're all citing him.
Isn't that perfect?
Perfect.
Perfect.
It's like the Wakefield study.
Totally.
Totally.
And the article of faith here is that the art of the bullshitter transcends the distinction between truth and lies.
It's not that it erases it in some ominous way.
It's that it's able to transcend it just absolutely brilliantly.
Eli Lake says that...
This propensity for bullshit is not Trump's liability.
It's actually his superpower.
His supporters all know it's fake, you see, because all politicians lie anyway.
He's just the greatest to ever play the game.
Don't hate the player.
Here I'll just point out that these are the same people who for years have referred to legacy media as Orwellian.
I want to know whether Lake was also an ex-Sanders voter because then something would be going on with the perception of who's actually telling the truth or whether it actually matters or whether bullshit is just ubiquitous.
I just find this, I find it incredible, this argument he makes.
Journalism was an appearance by Eliana Johnson.
She's formerly a journalist at Politico, but she now works for the Free Beacon.
She's an editor-in-chief for that conservative publication.
She discussed how the mainstream media ignored things like Kamala Harris's plagiarism scandal and about her potentially having lied when she said she had worked at McDonald's.
The sort of intensive scrutiny that you would typically see of a presidential nominee, we simply didn't see from the mainstream media.
And so you basically ended up with the most well-known and covered nominee maybe in history in Donald Trump, and one of the least known because Harris, not only was she not covered, but she simply didn't tell us.
A lot of what she would do, she made a calculated risk to remain a blank slate.
And so some of the coverage we did at the Beacon, I think, was filling that white space left by the mainstream media in terms of investigating her, not taking claims from her campaign at face value.
One of them was the story of her plagiarizing congressional testimony that she delivered in her capacity as the District Attorney of San Francisco.
And some of the other reporting we did was just scrutinizing claims she made, like to have worked a summer job at McDonald's and trying to examine why the campaign's stories around claims like that shifted and things that, you know, ended up becoming major storylines in the race.
And this is because, like, the mainstream media left, you know, outlets like the Free Press and the Free Beacon a lot of room to operate.
Michael Hobbs on Blue Sky posted, you know, Kamala Harris' website is still up.
You know that, right?
And he shared a screenshot about, it was about the whole working class, like we don't know what Harris stands for.
Like, you just read the first couple, cut taxes for working people, lower food and grocery costs, lower healthcare costs, lower prescription drug costs, lower energy costs, lower costs by protecting consumers from fees and frauds.
It goes on, it keeps going.
And The idea that she didn't let us know what she was going to do is absolute garbage.
She also did in her rallies.
The problem is that was not clipped and shared by all of these influencers and most media outlets, unfortunately.
And the idea that they missed her summer job at McDonald's, that's basically the type of Fox News bullshit non-story that whips their base into a frenzy.
And here she's treating it like the free press did a fucking water game.
Yeah, the Free Beacon uncovered the most crucial aspect of this election season, which is that Kamala Harris copied and pasted some text within legal documents in her department from people who were working for her in preparation for a case.
And this is called plagiarism.
And we think that she lied when she said she worked at McDonald's.
Meanwhile, it's not as if you had to dig through page after page or a stump speech, several long minutes in stump speeches talking about transgender issues.
I don't think Kamala or Biden before him in this campaign— Nope, they didn't.
No pronouns, nothing.
It wasn't there.
It just wasn't there.
Yeah.
And yet this is the reason in the exit polls that a lot of people said, well, I thought Kamala focused too much on cultural war topics like transgenderism as opposed to helping working people.
No, she ran to the right of all of that.
She didn't do that at all.
And again, it just gets to the bigger point of this issue.
They were all there.
There's going to be a lot of postmortems.
There's a lot of well-deserved criticisms about the campaign and the Democratic Party.
We'll cover it.
A lot of intelligent people will cover it.
Rebecca Solnit wrote an Absolutely amazing piece in The Guardian about it.
But the idea that she didn't speak to the issues that matter to the working class most is just bullshit.
And it lines up squarely with the propaganda that the free press and other outlets are using to try to deflect.
Yes.
In fact, that was the entire central plank of the case they tried to make to the electorate in those two months.
So, as I mentioned earlier, the hosts of Red Scare showed up and they had this kind of typical moment for them while discussing their shift from being all in on Bernie Sanders.
To coming to see, and I'm quoting here, that all reasonable people could tell that Trump was a better candidate than Hillary, that Trump was a better candidate than Biden, Trump was a better candidate than Kamala.
So here's what they say after that.
In 2016, Bernie was running on a very different platform than...
But there's a lot of that overlap, like tariff stuff, working class stuff.
I mean, I interviewed Bernie Sanders, and I said this to him, and he was offended.
And he's like, well...
And he didn't say the policies were different.
He said, but no, but he's lying.
That was the only thing.
That's my other big thing.
When people...
Take umbrage with Trump on a character or personality level when they're like, I'm undecided and I like some of his policies, but I just can't go there because he's so vulgar and chaotic and he's such a liar.
There is a very meaningful difference between how Trump lies and the Democrats lie.
When Trump lies, he's speaking in hyperbole, superlative, or otherwise he's sort of...
Speaking in service of his record or reputation, when the Democrats lie, it's a very coordinated, collective blob where no one has responsibility, no one is liable, and they're not only lying about the issues themselves, but they're lying about which issues are important.
Yeah, I mean, this particular argument, combined with some of the stuff we've talked about with regard to bullshitting, It's one of the reasons why this term gaslighting jumped out at me for the title of the episode and for what I think is somewhat what's going on with this election coverage from the Free Press.
That is the characteristic slow and eloquent voice of Anna Katjian.
She's the co-host of the hugely popular Red Scare podcast.
Which pulls down $50,000 a month on Patreon.
She and Dasha Nekrasova, who we heard briefly at the beginning of the clip, Are the transgressive, red-pilled, former lefty darlings of the heterodox scene who somehow managed to blend anti-intellectualism with graduate-level vocabulary?
No.
No, they make fun of people.
They call people retards.
They make fun of autistic people.
I don't hear anything highbrow in what they say at all.
When I hear Anna talk, I very often hear some Pretty well-crafted sentences that have various points of intellectual academic reference.
But yeah, they do all that other stuff too.
Yeah, I think that's part of the gig.
That's part of the shtick, yeah.
So Michael Moynihan here, when he's talking to them, reports accurately that Bernie and Trump both deploy populist messaging.
When he asked Bernie about that similarity, Bernie pointed out essentially that Trump was lying about being a champion of the common man.
Yeah, absolutely.
And we don't have to focus on this too much, but the tariff reference that Moynihan makes here underlines his superficial grasp, like Trump, of how tariffs work.
But Kacchan goes right to the same talking point of the set, which is like, obviously, Trump lies, but not in a bad way, not like the Democrats do.
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Okay, so as we cruise towards the end here, I just want to take a moment to clarify some terms, or at least start to do that, because there's a kind of imprecision that we've danced around in previous episodes.
We haven't taken the time to address it.
But now, post-election, I think it's really crucial to get clear on the difference between the left and liberalism, because there's a sloppiness in American political discourse and journalism that's a huge part of the problem.
It degrades our ability to tell one thing from another, I think.
Like, one case in point, when you noted, Derek, that some mainstream pundits criticized Harris for not speaking to the working class, I mean, what they're missing is that Trump only speaks to them with lies about tariffs, and, you know, they're also ignoring this history of class de-alignment that's happened over the past decades of neoliberalism and which Trump simply exploits.
Like, he's not speaking to working class issues either.
But if we don't know what we're talking about when we're talking about leftism and liberalism, I don't think we can really say what people are responding to, why they are mad, what they're not being offered, what they think they're being cheated of.
Now, we've noted that a lot of these free press guests will describe themselves as being on or formerly being on the left.
And they'll also accuse legacy media of being on the left of this and that.
And it's generally gibberish because what they're usually inveighing against is the wishy-washy centrism and sometimes hypocrisy of liberalism.
It's not a mistake that many of them were former Bernie supporters and now they feel homeless because he had a point of view.
But I don't even think they seem clear on what that point of view was and what the left means.
I think they liked his vibe.
So, On the left originally means, you know, the absolute bare bones of it is that during the French revolutionary period in 1789, you were on one side or the other.
You were a representative in the National Assembly, and if you wanted to severely limit the power of the monarchy, you sat on the left side of the chamber during debates.
And specifically, that meant that you demanded that the king not have veto power over democratic legislation, i.e.
you would not be in favor of unitary executive theory ever.
It would mean that you favored strong revolutionary structural change unencumbered by religion, aristocracy, and the clergy.
So you don't want J.D. Vance blessed by traditional Catholic freaks and bankrolled by Peter Thiel.
Like, fuck off.
That's not who you would want if you are on the left.
Now, as this division inspires the political theory that follows, on the left becomes associated with like proto-Marxist, then Marxist, then socialist and communist theories of organization and change, which are always opposed to the right side of that assembly configuration and the people who inherit it.
Where the apologists for the old order sat and they advocated for incremental change through limits on government, but also a perpetuation of the kind of liberalized kingship ideal that everybody could have now access to through an emphasis on individual and property rights.
Now, we might think of that right side as conservative, but the real conservatives back then were trying to hang on to even more of the old powers.
So the right side of the National Assembly was really a mixture of liberal and conservative elements.
But the thing we should keep in mind about how this gets confused in American discourse in U.S. history is that during FDR's New Deal, there was this blending of leftist nationalization redistribution projects with liberal reforms.
And then during the Cold War, it was both increasingly dangerous to identify as a leftist.
And so reactionaries found these new targets in liberals who they claimed were secretly leftist.
And now we have this 50-odd-year policy, or legacy rather, of right-wingers in the U.S. using the terms interchangeably.
And legacy media, for the most part, accepts that phrasing so that now the Democratic Party can be said to be on the left by news anchors in legacy media with a straight face while the actual party is doing what liberalism does, which is facilitating capitalism with not much resistance.
So, when Barry Weiss and this whole crew gets together to support Trump and complain about Democrats on the left, this is bullshit.
Because they are not complaining about ideas like wealth redistribution, nationalized energy grids, full socialized medicine, guaranteed employment, because those are things that would require considering giving up or reorganizing all kinds of social and economic privileges.
They're not even on the table, especially in a democratic campaign that is running to the right to try to capture moderates.
So not naming liberalism for what it is, is a way of taking left ideas just totally out of circulation, off the table.
And so if they say, this is the craziest one to me, if they say they are Trump leftists, what can that possibly mean?
I mean, what they are complaining about are the identitarian and culture war issues that social media and legacy outlets keep churning up to the surface of the discourse, course, with the result being that the more basic issues of political philosophy are obscured, such as is capitalism working?
Are social hierarchies inherently unjust?
Are imperial projects okay with us?
Should we keep funding them?
And things like that.
You give a good, succinct distinction there, explaining left and right, which I think, you know, we can discuss perhaps...
Left and liberal.
Left and liberal.
The evolution of...
I think, is also an important component because something that I come across often is I cite the original meaning of allopathy, for example, which was opposite cures like, whereas homeopathy is like cures like, but it has evolved to mean something else.
It's generally used as a slur against evidence-based medicine.
So I think we could have a separate discussion about why that matters in terms of defining terms in this moment as compared to hundreds of years ago.
But I also think you're flattening capitalism here a little bit because when you criticize the conflation of left and liberal above, you do that very well.
But capitalism is a spectrum, if not definitionally, than in practice because there's more small businesses that were started in America in 2023 than ever before.
And I just read that there's expected to be 5.4 million new small businesses started in America this year.
I mean, we're a small business.
We operate within the market forces of podcasts and media.
Entrepreneurship is a hallmark of American society and a lot of other cultures.
So in that respect, whether or not capitalism is working, it's an important question.
But if it wasn't working, we wouldn't have a career right now.
So separating entrepreneurship from unfettered capitalism, which results in billionaires paying lower tax rates than the three of us as small business owners, and governmental regulations being so lax that corporations can pollute without fear of retribution, I think that's an important distinction to make just as you were kind of separating terms there as well.
Yeah, I think this is good.
And I'll just go on for a bit because I think the point that you're making is actually demonstrating a liberal left distinction as well.
Like, I understand what you're saying.
But when you say that capitalism is working for us, for example, the trio on our platform, you know, I guess...
What's true is that we're making a living wage for now.
We're delivering value to a market that we have found but also created.
We're not corporate assholes.
We're not polluting stuff.
But to me, those things are cold comfort because all I can think about really is what sheer precarious luck is.
Well, that's a really good point.
I appreciate that.
I guess what I'm asking in that, in the way that I'm framing that, and it might be a binary, but it's one that I think is just important to hammer out because the argument, what's the other argument?
That all of our salaries are paid by the state and they have control over everything?
If you want to jump right to that, that's a big bridge.
But I just want to describe the conditions that make me a leftist instead of a liberal.
I am one blood clot away from having to quit this job.
being vulnerable to the point of destitution.
Like in Canada, with socialized medicine, there's still nothing that would keep me in housing should I lose this job.
Keep us in housing.
I'm thinking about like, what has Apple just done to our Patreon?
What is it that they've tacked on 30% or something like that?
How did that work?
Irrelevant to this.
I mean, irrelevant, but yes, Apple is trying to suck money out of Patreon because apparently a trillion dollar market cap isn't enough.
That's correct.
But yeah, okay.
Well, my point is, is that, is that it's, that's, to me, that's precarity, right?
Like what other switch can they throw?
Interest rates go up by one more point and hundreds of thousands of families default on mortgages.
So I'd, What makes me a leftist is that I have a conviction that when things seem to be working for regular people like us under capitalism, it's just luck, right?
And we don't deserve luck any more than anyone else.
It's like a mirage in a casino.
And what makes...
Harris's campaign, a liberal campaign, even though Barry Weiss and everyone at the Free Press thinks she's on the left, is that the best pitch, right, is the opportunity economy.
And that means small attempts at economic reform that you listed in her program, increasing bits and pieces of loans and the growth of small businesses that have to start up in an overall system that crushes everybody to dust, right?
Like, I don't want an opportunity economy.
I want a guaranteed employment economy or a basic dignity and income economy.
So that's what makes this sort of distinction really important to me because we don't actually get to talk about...
The possibility for fundamental change.
And the liberal sort of answer for things is that they can't really offer fundamental change because they don't want to give up on the individualism that collective action requires.
And moreover, usually they spend a lot of time thinking about how capitalism can be tweaked this way and that way, and it's actually really not that bad.
And meanwhile, it's a bus driving off of a cliff in terms of climate and other things, right?
Well, you bring up something...
You bring up something there.
Las Vegas has a guaranteed employment in the city code, so anyone who wants a job can have it, but there's still a homeless problem there.
Sure.
There's got to be full, holistic solutions, right?
It's not going to be one policy at a time patchwork stuff, right?
I have many problems with Vegas, but they actually do have better systems than most other cities in America, and they still have a lot of issues there.
I just heard, did you guys hear that the Harris campaign spent $450,000 a day to put the logo up on the Sphere?
I just want to say that in terms of the types of Reforms and transformations that you're talking about, Matthew, I resonate with that to the extent that actual countries that exist today in Scandinavia have been able to do the closest that I have seen to having a really well-functioning social safety net.
But they've done it within the context of still having a robust free market economy.
I can't think of anywhere else.
That depends on global inequalities, actually.
I mean, they're not great examples.
They're examples in isolation if you don't take all of the outsourcing into consideration.
But the reason I use them as examples is because they exist.
I can't think of another country in the world that exists anymore.
I know.
I know.
The quiet little leftists in the corner have been talking for a hundred years about what can work, what might work, why things don't work, in a very self-critical way, too, right?
Well, yeah, the quiet ones have been doing that.
The loud ones have been staging revolutions, and those have not gone well.
Yes, moving on.
So, is there any leftism in the free press?
I took a scan through the entire live stream, and I wanted to ask a couple of questions.
So, just to underline this point, did any panelists mention wealth redistribution?
Nobody.
Term didn't come up.
Was there any conversation about wealth inequality?
Not much in any solution sense, because most of it was sublimated into these vague things about the alienation between the elites and the working class.
Any talk of universal health care?
Yes, Marianne Williamson brought it up, and so did Nina Turner, Ohio Democratic state senator, former, I think, I'm very interested in why somebody like she is there and also Breonna Joy Gray and what they add to that kind of scene.
Was there any talk about labor unions?
Not much, except to gloat a little that Trump was up in labor support.
So what did they say about the working class?
Well, not really much because they were really just talking about young men who were alienated by wokeness.
How well will Trump help the working class is another question I had for the transcript, which they're not sure about, but mainly they talked about tax cuts and border security and getting rid of wokeness.
And then was there any mention of public works programming?
No, but tax cuts and border security and getting rid of wokeness will help.
Was there any talk of the green economy manufacturing?
No.
That's wokeness.
Right.
Did any panelist advocate for raising the minimum wage?
Yes!
Ding, ding, ding.
Nina Turner, you know, Bernie organizer, standout guest.
Must have been a very lonely night.
Yeah, window dressing in my opinion.
Yeah, with the exception of Turner and a few bits from Williamson, I think this is really a bunch of liberals and conservatives who tend towards libertarianism, complaining about liberal policies that are not deregulated enough, complaining about being silenced when they have millions of followers, complaining about being judged and browbeaten by political correctness.
There's plenty of vague mentions of the working class, but no substantial discussion of leftist solutions.
Like, you would think these ideas didn't exist, and they don't need them because, you know, they've found their media market, and I think they'll just be fine.
My closing comments here are about two things.
So far from their much-vaunted heterodox balance, as we've heard in Matthew's rundown, the tone of the free press's post-election coverage, their post-election coverage, has largely been mocking.
Essentially, this is the line.
Everyone in the legacy media who sees Trump's victory as an indictment of the electorate or what lies ahead as ominous and un-American is just an out-of-touch and condescending elite.
Barry Weiss wrote that there was better analysis from the nine-year-old daughter of their senior editor.
And they clipped this to put in the article after the election.
She's being asked on the live stream why Kamala lost.
And the nine-year-old girl replies, maybe it was the border.
Maybe it was her personality.
She did a terrible job as vice president.
So this is the analysis, the scintillating analysis from Barry Weiss.
You can get better stuff there than you're going to get on, say, CNN.
But the more important topic is this.
The free press presents itself as a plucky little independent startup, and they're against the elites.
But it doesn't take too much journalistic digging to expose some quite different facts.
Financial Times reported, for example, that in September, the free press were valued at $100 million.
And from the beginning, the funding for the free press has come from the same group of billionaires who have supported the campaigns of RFK Jr.
and J.D. Vance and other more ultra-right-wing political candidates.
These investors are the red-pilled Silicon Valley bros who, along with Elon Musk, have trended very heavily towards MAGA. One significant investor in the free press also owns several conservative anti-woke outlets in England.
There's more, but the names and the relationships would all be too dizzying a list for this short conclusion.
Call me the blue-pilled corkboard guy if you like.
But to me, what's noteworthy in all of this is how much of the time those presenting themselves as nonpartisan, heterodox, and independent, and as the trustworthy and brave digital alternatives to corrupt mainstream media and government, are actually bought and paid for to just ask questions on right-wing culture war talking points.
