Lately a lot of folks (including us) have been doing the fascism comparisons.
The questions we ponder this week: How long it takes for fascism to fully dig its roots in, how varied is the opposition along the way, and what role does the media play?
Show Notes
165: Outrage Machine (w/Tobias Rose-Stockwell)
16 October 1919 | Hitler Archive
Konrad Heiden
Fritz Gerlich, publicist and prophet – how did he resist the Nazis?
Fritz Gerlich
Nazi Germany’s Schriftleitergesetz: The End of Freedom of the Press - Arolsen Archives
The illegal press – Verzetsmuseum
The Liberal Media Always Fails Against Fascism — Robert Evans
Can a news media that doesn’t really oppose fascism ever cover it well?
Against Normalization: The Lesson of the “Munich Post” | Los Angeles Review of Books
The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler
Fascist-Sympathizing Newspaper Barons Were the Blueprint for Today’s Right-Wing Media
Media's Failure in Times of Crisis: Election Coverage in the Interwar Period
How Journalists Covered the Rise of Mussolini and Hitler | Smithsonian
How Britain's Nazi-loving press baron made the case for Hitler | The Times of Israel
Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2016). Is there a “postmodern turn” in journalism? In C. Peters and M. Broersma (Eds), Rethinking Journalism (pp. 97-111). London: Routledge.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I've got an incredible podcast for you to add to your queue.
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.
Brace yourself for a rollercoaster ride of wildly diverse topics, from Paula's hilarious attempts to understand QAnon to riveting conversations with a bona fide rocket scientist.
You'll never know what to expect, but you'll know you're in for a high spirit.
So, this is comedian Paula Poundstone and her co-host Adam Felber, who's great.
They're both regular panelists on NPR's classic comedy show.
You may recognize them from that.
Wait, wait, don't tell me.
And they bring the same acerbic yet infectiously funny energy to Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone.
When I was on, they grilled me in an absolutely unique way.
about conspiracy theories and yoga and yoga pants and QAnon and we had a great time.
They were very sincerely interested in the topic but they still found plenty of hilarious angles in terms of the questions they asked and how they followed up on whatever I gave them like good comedians do.
Check out their show.
There are other recent episodes you might find interesting as well like hearing crazy Hollywood stories from legendary casting director Joel Thurm or their episode about killer whales and killer theme songs.
So nobody listens to Paula Poundstone is an absolute riot you don't want to miss.
Find Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
This is Chris Christensen from the Amateur Traveler Podcast.
The Amateur Traveler Podcast is about the love of travel.
It's about where to go and why you should go there.
We're going to open up to you different destinations you haven't heard of or places you have heard of but things you didn't know to do while you were there.
Each episode is about 45 minutes long and it's typically an interview with someone who wrote the guidebook on that destination or who has been there or who's a local tour guide or someone who is an expert on that destination and knows how to tell you what to do to get the most out of your precious vacation time.
So if you value your vacation time and you want to use it wisely, listen to Amateur Traveler and learn about destinations both domestic and international, places you've heard of and places you haven't.
Amateur Traveler has almost 900 episodes talking about different destinations, so if there's a place you want to go, odds are we've already covered it and can help you plan a trip there.
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, where we investigate the intersections of conspiracy theories and spiritual I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remski.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can find us on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, as well as individually on Blue Sky.
You can search our names there.
I know I spend most of my time there.
You can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
You can also just get our bonus episodes every Monday via Apple subscriptions As independent media creators, we really appreciate your support The newspaper world was roiling with intellectual changes and market pressures that encouraged a shift away from old-timey propaganda,
scuttlebutt, and sensationalism toward the ideal of objectivity in reporting.
But to the extent that the intellectual desire for fairness was complicated by the economic drive to reach across political demographics and sell ads that would appeal to everyone, a critical challenge emerged.
What did truth in reporting and fairness in opinion mean in relation to escalating power and class struggles?
By the 1920s, this challenge peaked in the problem of how one should write about Hitler and Mussolini.
How much will you risk versus how much will you normalize and hope for the best?
Are you there to observe fairly from both sides, pretending your hands are clean, avoiding confrontation whenever possible?
Are you there to call it as you see it from a commitment to human rights?
Sound familiar?
Lately, there have been a lot of folks, including us, doing the fascism comparisons.
And sometimes the Twitter hot takes are helpful, but often the compressed format obscures dimensions of time and chaotic variability.
How long it takes for fascism to fully dig its roots in, and how varied the opposition is along the way.
In terms of speed, Hitler gave his first speech to 111 thugs in 1919 and was jailed for eight months after the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. It took him another decade to consolidate power under the Enabling Act and another six years after that to invade Poland.
Now, it's not clear where we start the clock on Trump, given that he ramped up his presidential run in 2015, but wherever it starts...
And however fast he seems to move, the road is long enough for there to be opportunities to stand in the way, or stand on the curb and wave as the tanks roll by, or even offer the soldiers sandwiches and the tanks fuel.
But first...
Conspiracy-minded MAGA supporters who bought into claims about the corrupt deep state, Creeping woke Marxism and the stolen 2020 election, and maybe some form of the wild Pizzagate slash QAnon fantasy about satanic pedophile Democrats, finally had their day in the sun on February 27th.
I wonder if they were served sandwiches, Matthew.
Or did they?
On that day...
The new Attorney General, Pam Bondi, released what she called the first phase of declassified documents on pedophile and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
An elite group of conspiracy influencers were invited to the White House to receive and then pose for socials with their special Epstein Files phase one binders.
The group included major Pizzagate booster and noted great replacement theory white supremacist anti-Semite.
That's a lot of descriptors.
Jack Posobiec, along with fellow Pizzagate early adopter Mike Cernovich.
Then, for some reason, there was the vicious anti-gay and anti-trans activist Chaya Ratchik, Stop the Steal organizer Scott Pressler, and unhinged OANN personality Liz Wheeler.
Within hours of their photo op, they would take to social media to complain that their binders contained only information already in the public record, complete with...
Now, are these different from Mitt Romney's binders, Julian?
Well, they're binders full of women, but in a much more disturbing way.
And this prompted an embarrassed Pam Bondi to publish a detailed letter on Justice.gov scolding Kash Patel and ordering him to deliver all documents related to Epstein by 8 a.m.
the following day.
During the 2024 campaign, we know that Trump threw red meat to his conspiracies' base by vowing to get to the bottom of the mysterious New Jersey drones and to declassify UFO information.
And alongside this, documents about the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., Robert, and John F. Kennedy.
And he repeated those assassination document promises at the MAGA victory rally the day before his January 20th inauguration.
But some noted that the Epstein topic was absent from his list of promises.
And there was a Fox News interview from June of 2024 that featured this telling exchange.
Would you declassify the 9-11 files?
Yeah.
Would you declassify JFK files?
Yeah.
I did a lot of it.
Would you declassify the Epstein files?
Yeah.
Yeah, I would.
All right.
I guess I would.
I think that less so because, you know, you don't know.
You don't want to affect people's lives if it's phony stuff in there because it's a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.
I don't know about Epstein so much as I do the others.
Yeah, we wouldn't want anything phony to be declassified.
I love the change in his tone of voice there.
He couldn't hide that.
So think of the people that might hurt if something would get out there that was, you know.
Of course, we all know that his equivocations about Epstein having – because Epstein has said on tape that for a decade he was Trump's best friend.
And there's plenty of photo and video evidence of the two of them together around young women acting in very kind of seedy ways, as well as of Trump making risque statements about Epstein liking them young.
This is a fact that would lead to the conviction of Epstein in a 2008 – But notice the list that the Fox interviewer presents to Trump.
9-11, assassinations of the new head of Health and Human Services' father and uncle.
And then Epstein, alongside, of course, the election fraud staple that's always going to come up.
This shows the popular belief that conspiracies have been covered up by their government, and they will be exposed once declassified documents are released.
And so far, there's been absolutely nothing new on any of it, despite his promises to his base.
But meanwhile, this past Saturday, prominent MAGA mouthpiece Dana White, head of the UFC, That's that mixed martial arts promotion some of you know about.
And now also board member of Facebook, Meta, hosted two front row guests.
They were also at the UFC-run Power Slap event, which is one of the most god-awful things you never ever want to expose yourself to the night before, where White hugged them before the show began and said loudly on a video that was captured and shared on socials, Welcome to the States, boys!
You may know that I'm talking about Andrew and Tristan Tate, who were until recently forbidden from leaving Romania as they awaited trial on rape and sex trafficking charges.
Well, now that Andrew has announced he's living in Los Angeles, Julian's going to be going and finding him for some exclusive footage for the podcast.
Yeah, I'll invite him on a nice walk with my dog and we'll see what we can talk about.
Right, Matthew?
Well, I think you should power slap him.
Power slap him.
The Tate brothers arrived in the US, here's the irony for you, on the same day as the Epstein-Binder conspiracy influencer White House visit.
After their case had been brought up by top Trump officials during a visit to Romania.
Remember, they were forbidden from leaving as they were waiting to stand trial.
And then all of a sudden, here they are, flying into Florida.
Andrew Tate is best known for luring young women into his web by pretending to fall in love with them.
He calls it the lover boy method, gaining control over their lives and then coercing them into working for him as webcam sex performers.
He's made millions by running online and in-person courses that teach other men how to use these cruel and deceptive methods.
And he drew a lot of criticism, kind of high profile in 2023, for having gained huge and worrying influence over young boys by creating viral, misogynistic social media videos and a whole network, actually, of young boys who were posting that stuff for him on a basis where they would get paid if people signed up for his courses.
And also in attendance at the UFC this past Saturday, snapping pics with the same Dana White was the new FBI director.
Well, they want to start a training program, right, for FBI officers based on UFC-like fitness techniques?
Yeah, something like that.
I mean, one of the things about this Tate visit is I really have to wonder whether there's an incipient culture war within the culture war here because, you know, Tate is literally on tape bragging about torturing girls, people nobody's done.
This is the kind of person who if he goes to prison, he needs 24-7 protection from the other prisoners.
So, you know, I just have to wonder how upside down does the white scene have to be for them to be celebrated, you know, let alone safe in public?
You know, I wonder about that.
I wonder if in prison he arrives as a hero, as a kind of, you know, powerful figure, someone who is aligned with Trump.
I think in terms of the people who are at the UFC who are Trump supporters, who don't maybe have as much access as we do to a lot of this information, they may just see the Tate brothers as victims of woke cancel culture who are being censored by the left and by weaponized lawfare, just like all of the they may just see the Tate brothers as victims of woke cancel culture who are being
Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster.
Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster.
If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast.
I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.
Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention and then your mind lets you drift off.
Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.
Moving on to our main story today.
I've covered the history of news a few times on this podcast, so I'll drop those episodes in the show notes if you want a more holistic view on...
What news is and how it was created.
What's important for our conversation today is to remember that the attempt to convey objective reporting is pretty new.
It was started by a group of reporters in 1851 pushing back on the sensationalist misinformation.
Think of stories like Bat Boy on the Moon.
That was circulating around New York City and also in the Boston area, and as well as nationally, but those were the two vectors for where news was covered.
New York Times, which I know we'll be discussing today, really made the first regular attempt at giving readers the objective news.
And I say regular because the Bat Boy paper, the New York Sun, began publishing nonpartisan reporting a good 20 years earlier when Benjamin Day, who was the publisher, realized he could get more advertising money if he played it straight.
Still, the reporting was mixed with those sensationalist stories that kept readers purchasing copies, and the New York Times was founded as an attempt to remedy that.
But listen, I put a pin in that because Benjamin Day realizing that there was more money and playing it straight, that has big implications.
I want to add a caveat here that I'll return to, and it's my belief that there's no such thing as purely objective reporting.
Even when I used to work for daily and weekly news outlets in the 1990s as a reporter, the topics that I chose to cover and the questions that I asked politicians during interviews were part of my own reporting bias, and no one can escape that reality.
But that said, I'm going to offer an important heuristic for what I believe to be identifying good journalism.
If the reporter sets out to tell one story and the facts lead elsewhere, you have to at least honor that fact or chase that trail down to weigh out as many sides and takes as possible.
A lot of great journalism is not linear, and writers willing to update their own perceptions as new information is acquired reflects the original spirit of that New York Times team in the mid-19th century.
Before that attempt, newspapers were generally gossip broadsheets.
The news, put that in quotes, that started in Europe a few centuries earlier, in Italy specifically, and this involved men going to the docks interviewing ship workers who had traveled to faraway lands on the trade routes, and then they repeated verbatim what they said, predominantly to an upper-class audience.
Because this was sold to local business owners and landlords who all paid a subscription fee to access those rumors that might in some way help their businesses.
There was no fact-checking.
There was no real investigative reporting.
Wealthier people paid for access to information before those stories spread throughout the public in part to control the narratives when they did spread.
Now, only later, when those broadsheets became advertising vehicles for local businesses, did the public start to have more access to information.
In this light, opinion journalism is much older and more pervasive than actual investigative reporting.
Some argue that Socrates and Aristotle were the OG opinion writers, which laid the ground for a form of structured public discourse.
Well, we should check in with Mickey Willis because he loves to say that Plato said that he who controls the narrative controls the society.
So Plato was the first columnist, that's what you're saying.
So as I flagged earlier, early broadsheets were gossip-driven, but also gave an opportunity for local religious leaders and business owners.
In the early 19th century in America, the New York Post, which was actually founded by Alexander Hamilton, was explicitly tied to political parties.
Then, as I also mentioned, Benjamin Day understood he could pull in more advertising revenue if his New York Sun reflected a range of ideas that was sort of a response to the Post and other papers that were very partisan.
This set the stage for the modern incarnation of what we call news today.
But it wasn't until 1841, when Horace Greeley introduced the editorial page in the New York Tribune, that opinion writing became a separate section from news reporting.
Opinion and news reporting have always been separated in media organizations since that time, for the most part.
The New York Times introduced the op-ed page only in 1970, and to this day there remains a wall between news reporting and the op-ed page, which is overseen by the editorial board.
So when people complain about opinion writing that they don't like in the paper, that's totally fair.
That's part of the whole point of expressing an opinion.
In an ideal world, it should be removed from the news reporting division, and I know we're going to discuss the roles of each section soon.
So you can imagine how propaganda spread through the publication of news.
In fact, while the New York Times was doing on-the-ground reporting during the Civil War, most newspapers were little more than propaganda machines for whatever political climate the government of their region espoused.
Confederate commanders refused to have published stories about Union victories in an attempt to keep the morale of their soldiers high.
Papers in all regions regularly publish stories to shame deserters in order to ensure loyalty to their army.
My feeling is that objective reporting is not indicative of how news functioned for most of its history since inception.
And while we had a brief period in American history where the three major television stations generally relayed consistent stories, which, to be clear, had their own biases, That's more of a misnomer than the reality of what role journalism has played in societies for most of time.
To put it another way, the bifurcation of media between left and right that we're seeing today is more natural than we sometimes portray it.
And this has been accelerated by social media and the creation of thousands of small media organizations and podcasters with no media training sharing the news from their angle.
And this has hindered our ability to recognize the differences between reporting and opinion because the latter is sometimes, sometimes often, I would argue, treated as reporting.
This is especially true when someone has a political agenda and then uses their opinions to justify their views under the guise of reporting.
And yes, in my opinion, that includes us, which is the framework through which I'm viewing this episode.
Yeah, so, Derek, I have two questions for you or comments.
Like, you're naming this heuristic on the reporter's side.
If they have the integrity to pivot on new information, they're legit if they're doing that work.
I think the paradox is that for the reader, the process is usually in a black box.
Like, it's hard, if not impossible, for a reader to know whether the reporter pivoted from their priors, you know, unless they say so openly or unless the reader has some familiarity with sort of like the longevity of the reporter's work and how the editorial process works in general.
But that gets into conversations around like transparency in modern journalism or the practice of revealing your positions and biases within the reporting.
But even if readers do have access to that process, like let's say the facts don't lead the reporter elsewhere.
Like, the reader is stuck with not really knowing whether or not the bias or the reporter's lack of curiosity that they started out with is actually still running the show, that they didn't actually just write the story that was already in their head.
Well, I don't really understand how you would rectify that.
I mean, from what I'm hearing here, it's sort of like, first off, let me say that...
Because most news is accelerated through social media, how many times have we come across people who read a headline, maybe the lead, and that's it.
They don't actually read the story.
I mean, so many times I've posted something and somebody will reply, what about this?
And I'm like, well, it's in the third paragraph of the story.
If you actually read it, you would have known that.
So we're already dealing with that sort of barrier to entry.
But then beyond that, when you're talking about reporting bias, I mean, I don't even understand how that would operate.
I mean, does the reporter have a sort of...
positions?
And then would you expect a reader to go check that every time they read a story about that person?
Or are they supposed to list their biases within every single article so that half the article is now a sort of anecdotal reflection on who the reporter is?
So I just don't understand how that would function in reality.
Yeah, I guess that's what I'm bringing up, right?
Because I think, like you, I don't believe in the objectivity of reporting, right?
And so then the question becomes, like, how do I show...
How do I show that I'm having my work checked?
How do I show that?
Because this is at the heart of whether or not a media organization or a particular journalist can build trust within a readership or the institution can build institutional trust, right?
I mean, in terms of us, we've already talked about, in terms of our podcast as media, we try to fact-check each other, but that is not a very huge firewall as compared to when I did a story for Mother Jones, for example, where I spent a month writing the story and then two months fact-checking and going through editorial.
When we worked with Time Magazine, we know how long, when we published our book with Hachette, we know how long that process was with lawyers.
So we know as reporters or as writers in that situation, but we can tell the public, but then it's up for them to believe it, right?
It is kind of up to them to believe it.
And that's a bit of a problem, right?
Yeah.
It strikes me that fact-checking is one thing, right?
Have the facts been established?
Have they been backed up?
Can we cite good sources?
Bias to me seems like usually something that's unconscious, right?
So how do I report out my biases?
It's like saying, how do I report out the contents of my unconscious every time I go to express an opinion?
So yeah, it is a very difficult thing.
I can imagine a reporter in the vein of what Derek described tracking down a story and saying, you know, at first when I found out these facts and I talked to this person, it seemed like it was this.
But then I found out this initial information and it seems like it's this.
Now, let me be clear.
I support this point of view because I think it would be better for society.
However, in this case, the story has taken a different kind of shape.
And so here's what I have for you.
My second thought is related because it's from the readerly side.
And I'll just take myself as an example.
Like I cannot engage with the content from a mainstream paper or.
I know that, you know, the news direction, the editorial sort of biases, and the opinion sort of...
Scope of what's reasonable is going to be within a certain pocket.
And so I guess we're troubled about this firewall between news and opinion all the time.
First, I just want to go back to say something about the objective.
To qualify, I did say purely objective.
I do think that reporters can be better at it than others, just to be clear.
That's my stance.
So I don't think there's any purely objective.
In terms of your recent one, I mean...
What you've just expressed is a feeling, but I don't know how many newsrooms you've worked in.
I've worked in two of them for the largest newspapers in New Jersey, and there was the firewall.
Now, not only was there a firewall between opinion and between editorial, there's also a firewall between advertising and those two departments.
They were not allowed to speak to each other.
Not only that, there was also someone who worked on staff who was not allowed to talk to other people who wrote the headlines for every story back then because they wanted to keep it consistent.
So what I'm saying is, I've experienced those firewalls.
I know that they're real.
But again, first off, you have to take my word for it as someone who's lived through this.
And then secondly, you know...
Every paper is going to be different.
Now, there's been reporting on some legacy media that is more porous, and I totally believe that.
I worked for a magazine as an editor where that firewall between advertising and stories definitely did not exist.
Now, that was in music magazine, but I can imagine that existing elsewhere.
So I think in these situations...
Sadly, it really is a case-by-case basis, and it's going to be corrupted in some organizations by pressures from advertisers, for example.
So it's a really hard landscape to navigate.
And I don't think, you know, you can ask that question of the totality of journalism, but I do think in terms of specific organizations, you can...
Go to the people and you can try to assess for your own.
You can do journalism on the organization.
You're asking a lot of people, though.
Yes, I believe what you're saying about your experience in newsrooms.
You have experience that I don't.
But I would also have to believe that from the top of the organizational structure, that there isn't some sort of...
You experience the firewalls as the journalist, but as you get up towards the editorial or the board of directors top, there isn't some sort of unified vision about what's going to be chosen, what direction the entire ship is gonna sail in, that sort of thing.
So that's there too, right? - Well, that's kind of good in my sense.
Like, look at, again, the New York Times editorial board.
I went through in preparation for this and looked at all of their histories, and they're diverse, and I think that would create healthy journalism.
If I saw a board where everyone believed the same thing, then I would be more worried.
I also want to add here, too, that in terms of any topic like this, And then,
therefore, ironically, I end up...
Trusting whoever I get the vibes from that resonate with my gut.
Well, it all comes to a head in the 20s and 30s, doesn't it?
Because journalists have the chance to use this new model of truth-seeking opposed to commentary to sharpen their ability to say two things if they could.
On the reporting side, fascism is verifiably happening.
On the opinion side, fascism is verifiably bad.
And a lot of...
People didn't go in that direction, but a lot of people did, and it cost them a lot up to being interned and being murdered.
And so I want to ping a few of the good guys off of the top before getting into the more depressing fact that a large chunk of the news and opinion biz either went passive or they protected their own asses, at times invoking principles of fairness or...
Some sort of blind hope that you can strike a deal with madness and stay sane.
So here are some notables who got the memo from Pete Seeger singing What Side Are You On?
In the late 1920s, there's a guy named Karl von Oziecki.
He's the editor of Die Weltgebüne, who exposed Germany's violation of the Treaty of Versailles by building up what would become the Luftwaffe.
So they jailed him over and over again for these reports, but he kept running these stories of illegal militarization, and they kept jailing him until they let him die in jail of tuberculosis in 1938 in Berlin.
He wrote these immensely useful books about the Nazis.
Out of his deep experience, he covered Hitler from 1923 after being a student protester in Munich.
By the way, Trump has just announced that the University of Munich is losing $400 million in federal grants.
Actually, sorry, that's the wrong timeline.
Haydn actually coined the term Nazi.
Did you guys know this?
He took it from an old Bavarian term that means bumpkin or yokel.
So Haydn did try the weirdo tactic, actually.
It didn't work.
It didn't work, yeah.
So then there's Fritz Gerlich, who was a hot-headed proto-fascist and anti-communist to begin with.
But then he flipped when he saw what went down at the Beer Hall Putsch.
And he became one of Hitler's chief irritants, but his audience was conservative, maybe comparable to Never Trumpers.
He attacked Nazi criminal activities, but he also shitposted about Aryan racial theory as if it could be applied to Hitler himself in articles like, Does Hitler Have Mongolian Blood?
So, you know, he's a big troll.
And talk about it takes all types.
This was a conservative who was also a staunch opponent of anti-Semitism, but then he became enamored of the German Catholic stigmatistic Therese Neumann, who he consulted on all of his business decisions.
So the Nazis killed him at Dachau in 1938. But the core journalistic resistance to Hitler congregated at the socialist paper, the Munich Post.
Hitler called it the poison kitchen.
In line with his broader epithet of Lügenpresse, or the lying press, which pretty much lines up with fake news and enemy of the people.
But actually, the Munich Post was the first to publish a Nazi document outlining a final solution for Munich's Jews.
Their headlines also slapped.
Nazi Party hands dripping with blood was one, and outlaws and murderers in power.
This is all before their offices are destroyed in 1933. This is six years before Poland.
Stormtroopers destroy the offices, and that echoes the destruction of the Avanti Socialist paper by Mussolini's men.
This is about a decade prior, I think, 1923. At the same time, Goebbels is driving the passing of the Schriftleitergesetz law, which outlaws any journalism by non-Aryans and makes all journalists subordinate to his ministry of propaganda.
So this effectively stitched up resistance media for the following decade, except for an incredibly brave underground network of newspapers and pamphleteers, often Jewish holdouts before they got swept up.
There was solid resistance press in other occupied territories.
The French communist paper L'Humanité published throughout the war.
It's still publishing today.
In occupied Holland, amazing stories of 1,300 underground resistance papers pressed on home presses, sometimes using cardboard to make prints of metal plates.
So they weren't using movable type.
They would take the metal plates, they would press them into cardboard, take the cardboard etching into their briefcases onto trains so that they could carry them between secret sites.
So crazy stuff.
Wow.
Then we have a turn because there's the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the JTA, which provided early evidence of mass violence against German Jews.
It's the example to pivot on towards this path of lesser resistance.
Or, you know, as Robert Evans puts it in two excellent Behind the Bastards episodes I'll link to, the liberal media always fails against fascism.
So I'll link to that.
From the outset of getting JTA cables on Nazi violence, the New York Times and other publications were often dismissive of the service as Jewish anti-Nazi propaganda.
So the Times stopped using JTA's content altogether in 1937. Terrible time to cut them off.
And that meant that they largely ignored the Telegraph Association's reporting on the unfolding Holocaust.
So, for example, the Times did not publish JTA's reports on the Babi Yar massacre in 1941, where 52,000 Kiev Jews were killed.
So readers of the New York Times were long protected from news about cattle cars and gas chambers.
Now, there are countless reasons for this happening, but the consequences are the consequences.
A lot of histories describe distinct patterns of underestimating the fascist threat, minimizing violence against minorities, a kind of cross-our-fingers and hope for some kind of return-to-normalcy policy.
And then plenty of pulling punches on criticism for fear of losing access to sources.
Then, probably, you know, one of the more uglier parts was a craven fascination in the stories about economic and infrastructure gains, right?
Like, nice trains, bro.
And those things were actually inseparable from the remilitarization that was outlawed under Versailles.
And then we come to the outright...
Nazi sympathizers who were all very wealthy, you know, so maybe that sounds familiar.
And I'll link to a Jacobin interview with historian Catherine Olmsted about her book, The Newspaper Axis, Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler, because she shows how the top UK and US media moguls of the 1930s were all aboard the fascism train, and they either celebrated or they normalized Hitler.
So the UK tycoons were aristocrats.
They boasted about 50 million readers at the height of fascism in the UK. The Americans had family dynasties amongst them, and they reached equal or more numbers.
So among them we have in the UK, Harold Harmsworth, who's the first Viscount Rothamir, owner of the Daily Mail.
Max Aitken, the first Baron Beaverbrook, the owner of the London Daily Press, which becomes the biggest paper in the world for a while.
William Randolph Hearst in the States own 28 different newspapers and movie reel distribution services.
And then there's a family.
Robert McCormick owns the Chicago Tribune.
His cousin, Joe Patterson, owns the New York Daily News.
And Joe's sister, Sissy, owns the Washington Times-Herald.
So those are Catherine Olmsted's six press barons.
I think all of this is...
Really important to consider given the current stakes.
I'm also thinking, because I'm trying to catch up to you guys, I'm reading Paxton's "The Anatomy of Fascism" right now.
And something early on he cites that I think is really relevant is that fascism cannot be replicated exactly in any country due to nationalist interests, so that there's no way you can do a one-to-one.
But using, as he does in the book, Mussolini and Hitler and Hungary for precedent, sort of points out patterns.
We should note this was written decades before Trump even started to think about power.
But this nagging question remains in the back of my mind covering this, is how precise is it to compare right now where there were...
There were relatively few reporters on the ground, sorry, to compare this time in Hitler's time, especially American reporters on the ground.
So you had to rely on secondary and tertiary accounts.
And today, the opposite.
There's just so much access to information and yet so much more access to inaccurate and biased gossip and propaganda that's being spread through social media.
Isn't ground-level reporting here, though, being destroyed as we speak?
Or is it what you're saying, that social networks are providing just more of everything from eyewitness accounts to propaganda?
More of everything.
I mean, yes.
Well, yes, from local and you can argue national newspapers, ground level reporting is being destroyed.
From people who decide to start their own, like Scootercaster is a great example.
She goes out and she shoots where a lot of media organizations won't.
It's actually a really fertile time in on the ground reporting.
But then you get what else you hint at here, Matthew, is that a lot of people with no experience of what reporting means...
Yeah, so I agree with you that the technological changes, the coverage changes are immense.
They disrupt any simple comparison.
Paxton speaks about that a little bit with regard to time periods and technology.
I think the overlap that I see most is this philosophical adherence to the marketplace of ideas notion, plus the affinities between oligarchy and fascism, and those seem to be consistent.
Yeah, and one of the places where I think the comparison is quite strong is with Ukraine, and with the number of people, especially in the digital new media sphere, which I'm going to talk about in a minute.
Who are willing to get into these conversations about how, well, if we want peace and we want the war to end, then Ukraine really does have to come to the table.
And it's like they're completely blinded to the reality of Putin as a really dangerous expansionist, invading, completely power-hungry force in the world right now that's dangerous for everyone in the way that Hitler really was, maybe not quite to that level yet.
So Julian, Julian, we know all about our current media tycoons who have that old-timey big money firepower, but that's not where the majority of outright MAGA apologetics is coming from today, is it?
No.
As we know, there's been this huge sea change in how the media shapes the discourse.
Even when it's not straight MAGA apologetics, there's a lot of enabling, and there's a lot of whataboutism in the name of some kind of heterodox open-mindedness.
In November of last year, Pew Research did a really excellent study.
They published data showing that one in five Americans get their news from social media.
Okay, is that people reading headlines in their feed, as we were talking about before, or are they actually clicking through?
That's a research poll, so that's people saying they get their information from social media.
So it's saying that they read the headlines or they clicked through.
We don't know.
Yeah, we don't necessarily.
I mean, we'd have to read the study in depth to get to answer some of those more granular questions.
But essentially, it's like when people are asked, where do you get your media from?
Newspapers, TV, social media.
That's the percentage of people who are choosing social media as their primary news source.
And for people under 30, that number is actually 37%.
Voices from across the political spectrum, as we know, have flocked to become online creators.
But I would say the medium really does favor propagandists who rely on populist appeals and emotional appeals and care very little for the facts.
In 2021, NPR reported, case in point, that conservative personality Ben Shapiro's Facebook page had more followers than the Washington Post.
And in May of that year...
Daily Wire, his organization, got more Facebook engagements, we're talking about likes, comments, shares, than the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News, and CNN combined.
This trend moves away from journalistic standards and fact-checking and qualifications towards the sticky news influencer content that has clearly been optimized for the algorithms.
New media's blurred lines between influencer, salesman, political pundit, and preacher are a propagandist's dream.
You talk about no firewall, right?
They also drag the Overton window toward misinformation and conspiracism.
So I want to talk briefly here about three examples from today's digital new media as it has sort of evolved.
PragerU, The Daily Wire, and The Free Press.
In 2009, this is just five years into the existence of YouTube, PragerU was co-founded by conservative talk show radio host Dennis Prager, who'd been on the radio since 1982. And contrary to the name PragerU, which suggests the university, it's not a school of any kind.
What?
Nope.
Sorry.
I know you've been laboring under that illusion.
I spent $60,000 there for my diploma.
You'll be paying off those student loans forever.
It's actually just the website built around a YouTube channel.
And estimates vary, but their view count is certainly in the billions.
Seed money for PragerU came from the fracking billionaire Wilkes Brothers, whose grandfather founded an ultra-conservative Jews for Jesus-style church called the Assemblies of Yahweh.
They preached that abortion and homosexuality are sins that should be punishable by law.
Other funders include Sheldon Adelson, the National Christian Foundation, and the DeVos Family Foundation.
So no doubt about their orientation.
People who love public education across the board.
Absolutely.
Has relied quite heavily on short, explainer-style animated videos about politics, history, and religion.
Their budgets run over $25,000 per video, so roughly what we spend per podcast episode.
Experts say that they propagate falsehoods about climate, slavery, racism, COVID, immigration, and fascism itself.
As an example of cultural penetration, in 2015, PragerU developed a school partnership program that provides secondary school and college teachers with lesson plans to accompany the already available videos.
And in 2023, they became an official education vendor to the Florida education system.
As of 2024, New Hampshire, Montana, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Louisiana have all followed suit.
So what this means is as a generation of kids who are growing up, With Prager Hughes ideas about government, civics, political history, all being sort of taken as a given in terms of what they learn in school.
This impact matters, I think, as an example of a transition from the old opinion media of talk radio, where Prager came from, into a YouTube channel serving viral political propaganda to young people, and then becoming institutionalized into the education system.
Which is supposed to teach kids facts.
During this overwhelming political period that we're in right now, the only coverage we see from PragerU is pro-Israel and anti-trans commentary, as well as culture war stuff about education and how climate change is a hoax.
So that's PragerU.
Next in this timeline comes The Daily Wire.
And The Daily Wire is co-founded by Ben Shapiro in 2015. But the Wilkes Brothers once again provide the seed money.
And not only that, they become majority owners of what has now become a media company.
Shapiro also came in through the doorway of a much shorter run on traditional talk radio.
And The Daily Wire differs from PragerU in that most of their content repackages news stories through a conservative culture war lens.
So they're topical in terms of what's going on in the world.
Even though Shapiro is the top dog, they've also actively developed a stable of TV host-style personalities with social media influencer aesthetics.
They also have a children's video branch as well as an on-demand video subscription service that generates at least $15 million a month.
That's not all.
Daily Wire has a film studio that has produced six documentaries and one feature film and has announced plans for more, and documentaries there, of course, should be in quotes.
Consistent with the many overlaps between the two companies I've been describing so far, Daily Wire bought PragerU's entire library of content for 2020 to include as available in their subscription service.
Now, we've been talking mostly about right-wing media so far, but my sense is that there has been an evolution.
From PragerU's fun but pseudo-educational and sometimes wonky propaganda to Daily Wire's slick, camera-ready personalities and well-packaged culture war shows that are frank about their political stance, we have something that emerges next – Joe Rogan's I'll Talk to Anyone Interesting Dominance Inspired other comedy, MMA, and health optimizer, bro culture type podcasts.
Centrist YouTube channels that cover news synergized a similar vibe.
I'll talk to anyone as long as it's interesting.
And then you start to see the cancel culture gripes, the free speech heroism, censorship martyrdom, all priming this online subculture for COVID contrarianism and the conspiracy theories that flared up in 2020. And during this period, my favorite person in the world, Barry Weiss, made a very public show of resigning from the New York Times to start her own podcast.
And she cited the left-leaning bias and the censorious wokeism of the New York Times.
And when she started her own podcast, it was called Honestly, and then the Substack blog called Common Sense.
Which would eventually turn into what we now know as the free press, currently valued at $100 million.
And in some places, it bears the tagline, think for yourself.
So I'm citing all of that honestly.
Common sense, free press, think for yourself.
This is all the vibe that captures the appeal of heterodox digital media, which claims to sort of be in the middle and objective and willing to have the difficult, complicated conversations.
Barry Weiss is the queen of this domain.
Vanity Fair has called the free press a salon for the disenfranchised, and that positioning brings in over $10 million a year in subscription fees alone.
You'd also be hard-pressed to find another news and opinion outlet that's actually more completely intertwined with the right-leaning big tech billionaire class than the free press.
Mark Andreessen and David Sachs are investors.
So is British hedge fund billionaire Paul Marshall, who owns The Spectator, but other outlets similar to this, UnHerd and GB News.
These are all conservative outlets based in England.
Between the free press and the misleadingly named University of Austin, Which is really an anti-woke think tank she co-founded.
What?
Yeah, I know.
I spent $100,000 to get my diploma there.
It's terrible.
It's terrible, Derek.
You're going to be working multiple jobs to pay all of this off, and it's all a grift.
Yeah, it's really just a think tank that masquerades as being some sort of academic institution that's going to reform the problem with woke tertiary education.
She's also enmeshed here with Peter Thiel and his Palantir protege, Joe Lonsdale, as well as legacy GOP donors like Harlan Crowe and Jeff Yaz.
Now, with Barry Weiss, her salaries and net worth are not publicly available, but her position and profile in relation to these investors suggest to me that financially all of this has turned out very, very nicely for Barry Weiss.
No surprise then that right after the 2024 election, Weiss had Peter Thiel on her show to preen about the death of woke elitism.
But then in the conversation, as it often does with Thiel because he's so awkward and incoherent, it took a turn because he proceeded to critique the Democrats for not being elite enough.
And this led Barry and her team to title the video, The Triumph of the Counter-Elites, which to me is just amazing.
And Derek, we covered this for Conspirituality 242, gaslighting the election.
And to be fair, the free press does occasionally push back a little and host conflicting opinions.
Like right now, if you look at their website, there are a couple opinion pieces criticizing the MAGA stance on Ukraine, as well as criticizing Trump dabbling in cryptocurrency.
But the free press's clickbait model also thrives on a stream of culture war pieces, like why aren't young people having sex?
How California leaders caused the wildfire devastation?
How Tiger Mom beat the woke mob?
And my favorite, 1950s sex culture got it right.
And then you have, of course, I don't know if you guys have noticed this.
There was a whole wave of this while all of the Trump speedruns toward authoritarianism has been happening where all of these outlets are covering the UK grooming gangs, which is a story from about 10 years ago and the cowardice of the West in terms of dealing with the grooming gangs, right?
Yeah, so with the triumph of the counter-elites, is there an impending crisis coming over none of these positions actually being counter-cultural anymore?
Like, the heterodox is now orthodox.
Do they need to exist?
Has Thiel's investment just paid out?
Has it peaked?
Yeah, that's such an interesting question.
I think one of the trends that I notice in this whole heterodox sphere is they're continuing to recycle all of this stuff about wokeness and trans issues and how the universities have been taken over and then, of course, how the pro-Palestine protesters are anti-freedom and anti-Western civilization values or something like that.
It's a tricky spot they're in.
While we record sometimes, I like to open up Blue Sky and just thumb through because I like to see if anything happens.
It's kind of like a roulette and see if anything happens that resonates with what we're talking about.
And as soon as I opened Blue Sky a moment ago, I see that Carolyn Levitt has just announced, quote, The Washington Post is overhauling their newsroom structure.
It appears that the mainstream media, including the Post, is finally learning that having disdain for more than half of the country who supports this president does not help you sell newspapers.
Oh.
Pretty good timing there because – Rounding up here, the last section we're talking about the opinion sections of the Washington Post, which has been owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos since 2013, and the LA Times, which has been owned by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong since 2018. Now, both owners refused infamously to endorse presidential candidates in 2024. And both have their hands on the scale when it comes to the opinion section.
Now, they're not identical stories.
Washington Post staff, I've heard Eugene Robinson talk about this, for example, they've generally stated that Bezos was mostly hands-off with the paper for most of the time that he's owned it.
Which ended up being a net positive for a legacy paper that was bleeding cash.
Now, with the LA Times, their staff has long been suspicious of Sun Xiong and have been in public about it, and many people have left the paper because of it.
The common speculation is pretty simple.
Access to power and money.
This resonates back with what Matthew was bringing up about the oligarchs owning papers during Hitler's time.
So, in this example, Bezos' Amazon Web Services has billions of dollars in government contracts that I'm going to guess he would like to keep.
Sun Xiong's company is called Immunity Bio, and they have numerous products that need FDA approval at the moment.
Now, given the pay-to-play environment that the Trump administration has created, it would be easy for him to tell Bobby Kennedy to make sure those products are not going to be approved.
There are likely other reasons around access to power, but those two jump out in my mind.
So what's the scale of immunity bio like?
Does Sun Xiong really need it to fly?
Yeah, I would argue, yeah.
They're a biotech company.
They have a market cap of $2.5 billion.
It's the reason he's a billionaire.
They have investors to appease.
And the only pathway that a biotech company has forward is FDA approval for their products, devices, or drugs.
So yeah, I would say he needs it to fly.
It's pretty important.
I don't think he's making his billions from the LA Times.
Which brings up the question, should billionaires own media companies?
Now, as Julian just flagged, that's been happening in new media, and we can debate how much power the legacy media has compared to upstarts like the free press.
I mean, you pointed out that in terms of social media and that awareness, the Daily Wire is trumping the Washington Post and New York Times.
So I would say they have a lot of influence here.
But my personal feeling about this is that no, keep oligarchs far away from the fourth estate.
So even if Bezos was a good owner for some period, and to be clear, I'm not claiming it was ever a utopia because other former reporters are on record about its approach to news, but we see what happens when their other business interests become entangled with the news.
In an ideal world, which I fully recognize we do not live in, but as someone who's been in media for over 30 years and does appreciate what it aspires to and what it often accomplishes, I imagine three ownership models that could work.
You have nonprofit media.
In my opinion, one of the best outlets around is ProPublica.
They are nonprofit.
Any form of organization that does not maximize profit in exchange for reporting is good because The other way around always seems to be corrupted on some level.
So keep single owners out of any income level out of the news.
So no matter what you're making, whether you're a billionaire or this is your business, that's a dangerous path.
Then you have cooperative media.
And we already have a huge one, the Associated Press, which is owned by 1,700 newspapers and 5,000 TV and radio broadcasters.
Then you have smaller organizations like Defector Media.
They're not cooperative specifically, but they use a similar collective ownership structure because all 19 founding employees each own around 5% of the company and they all have an equal voting rights share.
And finally, you have publicly funded media, which is honestly a tougher sell in today's climate, given that any media that has ties with the state is likely to be compromised.
Project 2025 actually has a whole chapter on how it wants to dismantle and control Voice of America, which is...
America's publicly funded international news organization.
But like I said, in an ideal world, media that's taxpayer-funded yet actually remains separate from government intervention would be a boon.
And again, I'm having humility here.
I know how hard that would be to accomplish in reality.
Well, we actually have nationally funded media here in Canada with some revenue from advertising.
But as you're mentioning, in this current political climate...
If you have a single source, as opposed to a donor base, because NPR and PBS are majority listener and small business funded, that makes it really vulnerable to any Trump wannabe who wants to turn off the tap.
And also, here, the pressures of capitalism are always fucking with our socialized programs.
There's always a downward pressure.
On the content side, CBC works okay, but it's going to be prone to the same confirmation and selection biases.
That any centrist project is going to have because it has to keep everyone happy.
And more than often, that just defaults into sort of like passivity.
Like nobody is going to look to the CBC for like strong opinions.
What they can be good for is the support of regional and marginalized news.
Like, some of my tax dollars go to a programmer named Rosanna Deerchild of the Cree Nation in Manitoba.
It's like she reports on First Nations issue.
Her show's called Unreserved.
And the feds pay me to, or pay her, well, they pay for me to listen to news from somebody like that, and I think that's pretty cool.
You said a moment ago the sort of market pressures that centrist media is beholden to.
Fully agree with that.
But what type of media doesn't?
I mean, I feel like conservative or leftist or all the organizations that Julian flag, like the free press, are also beholden to their messaging.
So I don't see any media existing that isn't.
discussing.
Would that be correct?
Yeah, that would be correct.
I would say that the broader you want your reach to be and the broader your advertising base has to be, the more pressure there's going to be to sort of generalize and, I don't know, centrist-ize your menu of options and sort of like the framework of general conversation, centrist-ize your menu of options and sort of like the framework Well, I mean, so let's just briefly define that since this is sort of the peak moment here.
Like, in terms of centrist, is the view having as broad of an opinion as possible to try to pull apart the story?
And I'm separating this for the march to fascism, which I'm fully on board that that's a problem that some organizations don't recognize right now.
I want to be clear on that.
But like when I hear centrist, I just hear also sometimes, let's look at this range of opinions and weigh them out and present them in a way that makes sense holistically.
Well, in an ideal world of balanced reporting in which you want to come to the sort of closest approximation of truth from many different sources, then yeah, that's the reporting practice.
But that's not really the story of the type of media that was able to, like, very specifically resist the rise of authoritarianism in the early 20th century.
And, like, we see it, we see the sort of complications in these three floods of news and this subtext that we're chewing on that we're ultimately taking out, you know, our own positions within.
You know, two of the things that we've talked about, two floods, are pretty toxic.
There's an oligarch class that will take an obvious side.
There are heterodox disruptors who pretend to offer some sort of scrappy countercultural take that just happens to be reactionary most of the time.
And then the third carries these contradictions like legacy media outlets who are trying to abide by these old rules of engagement, noble rules of engagement, which depend on trying to or pretending to separate reporting and opinion and trying to maintain the sort of marketplace of ideas principle which depend on trying to or pretending to separate reporting and opinion and trying to maintain the sort of marketplace of ideas principle
And I think that's the situation in which there are pressures for some reason for the New York Times to platform Steve Bannon and Curtis Yarvin for hours in feature interviews that go out on video channels as well.
And during those, and it's not like that's my entire take on the New York Times, to which I subscribe because I value a lot of the on-the-ground reporting, but why is he there?
How does that choice get made?
And Bannon absolutely rolls Douthat, by the way, right off the bat.
His opening statement that Douthat makes, he introduces...
I've interviewed other people from the right, including Mark Andreessen, who's a right-wing thinker.
And, you know, Bannon interrupts him, takes the wind out of his sails right from Jump and says, you know, I have to correct you and say that Mark Andreessen and the oligarchs are nothing but a bunch of progressive leftists, right?
I find it disgusting and revolting that they're trying to, like, co-opt this movement.
So this guy is really caught flat on his feet.
He doesn't challenge the bullshit.
David Marchese does slightly better with Yarvin, but he still ends up in a very exasperated way debating the benefits of slavery.
Yeah, I mean, Matthew, this is very interesting, right?
Because I've been very public about my criticism of The New York Times for hosting Curtis Yarvin.
I think, you know, obviously he's an awful human being, and he's also not a good-faith interlocutor.
You're not going to actually get a coherent, honest conversation about political philosophy from the guy because he's a troll and he's a really, really ugly human being in every aspect of what he talks about and what he tries to accomplish in the world.
And I think it's an example of New York Times podcasts, especially including the fact that they have the video version on YouTube, really trying to lean a little bit more in the direction of the kind of heterodox media success, right?
Yeah, but let me say this.
I think that Bannon and Yorvin are awful human beings.
I don't like to see them getting more exposure.
I don't like to see them legitimized.
But I do think there's something going on in both of those interviews that maybe is a good thing.
With Steve Bannon, we get to hear from him, oh, here's this fracture line within the coalition around Trump.
There really is tension between the Bannon-style kind of faux populism and the tech billionaires, and he's threatened by that.
Thank you for letting us know that, Steve Bannon.
We know where one of the weak points is within that group.
And with Yarvin...
You know, there is a little bit of that sunlight is the best disinfectant thing where give him enough rope to hang himself where he's going to start telling everyone that's listening that he thinks slavery might have actually been good for black people.
That's a pretty awesome way for people to know who they're dealing with.
Yeah, except that Marchese knew that he said that before he invited him on.
So he says it, and then he invites...
Like, these are the types of interviews you do on background for the piece that you write, right?
Like, why would you work this out on air and then publish it?
Because you don't have control of the framework.
I mean, I can't imagine that either of those two interviewers want to promote the views of Bannon and Jarvin, but because they can't effectively, you know, curtail them because they're not skilled that way.
Like these people have made their lives out of rolling over, you know, mainstream liberal norms that I just don't see how it works.
The only way I can imagine it perhaps having a positive impact is that the kind of person who's listening to a New York Times podcast anyway may not fully know the extent to which Curtis Jarvin is as evil as he actually is.
Go ahead, Guy.
Tell us what you really think, and now people know.
I guess all I'm thinking about today is that the history that I know says that at some point the marketplace of ideas model, the sunshine is the best disinfectant model, is going to embolden bullies in some way because they're clipping those podcasts and they're going back to their own crowds and they're saying, look how I rolled Russ.
It's a format that's beholden to manners and processes, you know, or its own desire to be central or popular.
And it really wants to believe until it's way too late that it can debate and persuade people who are busy building and terming camps.
And, you know, from an anti-fascist point of view, the word has always been, if you want to argue the benefits of slavery, shut the fuck up.
No passeron.
I'm not talking to you.
And I also want to point out that Bannon and Yarvin and the whole heterodox sphere, they don't care.
About presenting their content via some kind of view from nowhere.
Their brand is.
You know exactly where they come from and what side they're on.
We have to listen to Russ Douthat for probably six months to really nail down where he's coming from.
That's not true for these people.
And their followers think they're producing knowledge and not propaganda.
So they blow past this objectivity.
And they hack into that audience that isn't buying the impersonal, archetypal, sort of classic American anchor.
Walter Cronkite, rather, Ted Koppel, Walters.
You know, it's like we have a model of American believability in the distant past.
I think, Derek, you referenced it with regard to the three television stations that everybody used to watch back in the 60s and 70s.
I think we still kind of remember that time of a unified epistemology, but I think too many people have doubted it at this point for it to work.
I don't know.
What do you guys think?
First off, in terms of, you are completely correct that people like Yarvin and Ben and their media ecosystem only care about propaganda and agenda.
I don't think that the opposite of that is to do the same.
When I think about my own work, if I'm wanting to think about how did we get to the place where we are in capitalism today, I'm going to go read Keynes, I'm going to read Schumpter, I'm going to read Pagliani, I'm going to read Hayek, because these are four of the main people who all have conflicting ideas about how the structure of capital was working in politics.
I don't know Marchese's metacognition.
I don't know why he chose that interview or what he was going for there.
I would lean toward Julian's sunlight theory, and we could definitely debate whether or not that's true.
But I think there's something very valuable about having those conversations.
And I know that...
Gavin Newsom, and this is his own podcast.
He's been doing a lot of shit.
I don't love that he platformed Charlie Kirk in any way.
But when you're thinking about instead of your very specific viewpoints on things and you look at what he's going for about having conversations with people, I'm not inherently against that because if we don't have conversations and we're not able to cross boundaries, we are I'm not inherently against that because if we don't have conversations and we're not able to cross boundaries, we are heading to some
So I'm a little more forgiving of media organizations that are willing to engage in such a way because without those sort of dialogues and conversations, I think a certain richness is lost in the creation of a culture.
Yeah.
And we talked about the Peter Thiel interview that Barry Weiss did like two days after the election, which which was basically just a victory lap, where she does the thing where she'll give one little pushback and then laugh about it and have no follow-up questions.
But she could have had Peter Thiel on and really held his feet to the fire, really asked him difficult questions, not let him wriggle out.
When he gets incoherent and starts making references to Star Wars, say, hold on a second, here's what I'm really getting at.
How do you possibly position yourself as being part of the Rebel Alliance when you and your friends are the wealthiest people in the world who have the most influence over our tech sphere?
There's a way to get in there.
And expose these people if you're prepared enough.
And I would say that Marchese and Douthat failed in that regard on those two interviews.
And I also am really uncomfortable with the fact that those people got that kind of seemingly legitimizing platform.
I just think these are difficult questions, especially for these times when everything is so polarized.
If we're never exposed to these figures, we don't know what we're dealing with, right?
You had a very compelling segment about how much exposure they get.
And so I'm just wondering who gets exposed and who gets won over by the open conversation that prevents civil war, which I think the train has left the station on, right?
Not civil war like, you know, shooting in the streets, but like, we're not at a stage where somehow, you know, Gavin Newsom and Charlie Kirk making common ground over anti-trans positions is going to help anything.
And it's not like it breeds mutual understanding.
Newsom did not express an anti-trans.
He expressed his reservations about trans inclusion in sports, which is its own debate.
But he also pushed back on Kirk about the existence of transgender people.
So this is what I mean.
It's important even in these conversations to reflect the nuances that are going on in these conversations, even if we don't agree with the overall vibe that's going on around them.
Well, to my point about who has to run to the center in order to maintain position and power, I mean, I think that's a really good example.
I mean, my answer is, you know, Derek, you said, I don't want to mimic something like, I don't want to mimic Steve Bannon and Curtis Yarvin in my own work.
I don't think you could.
I don't think I can either, because I would foreground my own...
I would be transparent in my sourcing because I want readers and listeners to understand where I'm getting information from.
I would be open about processes and biases.
I would always show how I'm looking at how economic and political pressure influence stories.
I'd be clear about what I don't know.
There's a whole range of tools that can position you as a political actor.
And a journalist at the same time that don't have to do with mimicking propaganda.
And I think overall...
That gives a chance to be clear that my reporting is driven by my values that say that fascism and conspiracy theories that drive it come out of capitalist crises.
And so I'm going to tell the stories from that particular place.
And so we can debate the values, or we can fact-check the story, or we can do both, but I just can't pretend that they are somehow separate or that I can transcend the politics of how I think.
I think in terms of the The overall idea of what you said is nice, but I also don't think it's how media functions in general.
Because Seth Godin, one of the most famous marketers of the last 15 years, arguably, he just talks about how he writes 100 blog posts or 1,000 blog posts for that one to go viral.
And so what you're suggesting here is presenting the biases and the background and everything of who you are.
I am going to advocate for a little bit more holistic in terms of centrism for the sort of reporting that I think actually Moves things along,
