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July 18, 2020 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying

01:36:57

Bret Weinstein and Matt Taibbi: Corruption and its Consequences

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	Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
	I have the distinct pleasure of being here with Matt Taibbi, who is a reporter for Rolling Stone and Substack.
	Many of you will know him.
	For those who don't, you should definitely look into his writings.
	He has been utterly fantastic and consistent for decades on some of the most difficult topics that there are to report on.
	I would say he is a singular voice in journalism today.
	Welcome, Matt.
	Thank you so much for having me on, Brett.
	It's an honor.
	Well, I'm not quite sure where to start, I have to tell you.
	2020 is proving to be a remarkable year, and I think you and I are both seeing a disturbing and complex picture emerging, and I suppose the thing to do is just to figure out whether we can make any useful sense of it.
	Yeah.
	I think the first place for me that's interesting is I think a lot of us in journalism are coming around slowly to the fact that we missed some big stories that took place on campuses a few years ago.
	You know, yours, obviously the one in Yale, but really, you know, we've heard from academics over the years about
	Certain things that were going on, and I think the reflexive reaction among most people in the press, and most of us are kind of liberal-leaning in our political orientation, was to say, okay, well, that's a right-wing talking point, and, you know, we're gonna have trouble selling that story anyway if we try to do it, and so let's not even bother.
	So there was a combination of not taking it seriously.
	And then there's a little bit of like cancel culture already working in, into the thought process with journalists.
	Cause we just knew that we couldn't get that past editors.
	Right.
	Um, but now, you know, this is, this has come into our business in a huge way, uh, in particular in the last couple of months, as you know.
	So, um, you know, people like me, I think, Oh, people like you an apology for coming around to this late, if anything.
	Yeah.
	Well, I have a rule of thumb when it comes to such things, which is I welcome anybody, without the need for an apology, who recognizes that they got it wrong and says so.
	My feeling is there's a point at which you didn't get it, and this is true for all of us, and then there's a point at which you do.
	And, you know, you didn't see it as close up as we did on campuses.
	But anyway, thank you for acknowledging that there was something to see, and that it wasn't seen by you and others early enough.
	I have to say, from my perspective, you know, it emerged and became very apparent, and there was this experience of trying to alert people to what was coming.
	And there were so many ways of dismissing it, as it's a free speech issue, it's a college campus issue, you're making A mountain out of a molehill, you're a grifter, all the things that get thrown at you.
	And now we're in a situation where I don't know what kind of blindness you would need not to see that the thing that happened at Evergreen and elsewhere is suddenly in every institution that we've got and spilled out into the streets, but it is the least satisfying I told you so imaginable.
	I mean, I'm just watching civilization burn because we couldn't make this point, you know, a few years ago and Wow, what are we going to do now that it's at this scale?
	It's really interesting.
	I think there is going to be some blowback in the media world because obviously I think what happened, and I'm only just starting to do the research on what happened in academia because I think that's now the important background for all of us who are trying to figure out what's going on in institutional America, but You know, the things that are happening in the journalism world are kind of similar to what happened in academia.
	There's this schism between people who kind of believe in the traditional fact-finding mission of the news that can't be linked to any kind of ideological imperative.
	And then there's a new school that's coming up, and it's being expressed by people like Wesley Lowery, who are talking about something called moral clarity, which I think a lot of young journalists really believe in.
	And they believe in it for different reasons.
	I think some of them are just very socially committed, and they really believe they want their work to be impactful.
	But there's a There's a lack of understanding about what the purpose of the old model was, and why it was good for audiences and for the institutions themselves.
	And I think only now is it starting to dawn on some of the people who are kind of in the middle, like what those changes are meaning.
	So I do, I have a little bit of hope because, and I didn't a month ago, but I'm starting to see people within a lot of these institutions, you know, say things that I hadn't heard before.
	And you're seeing voices like Matt Iglesias at Vox, who was kind of on the other side of this issue, you know, come around.
	And I don't know, I'm hoping there's sort of a reckoning within the media world, although You know, who knows how successful that will be.
	But I mean, what does it look like to you from the outside?
	Well, I'm fascinated to hear that you have hope.
	I'm thinking that, you know, with an hour's investment here, we should be able to kill that off without trouble.
	So, yeah, I mean, to be honest with you, Matt, I've been an admirer of yours for a long time since the financial crisis and your courageous reporting.
	About that, and I do think, I mean, you're gonna see what I'm seeing soon.
	And at that point, this is a, you know, it's a break glass in case of emergency moment for the Republic.
	I just see almost no decent way out of this if we don't thread a very particular needle.
	But I do see what you're seeing.
	I mean, you know, Matty Iglesias is a classic example.
	He did come around to his credit.
	He acknowledged that he had gotten it wrong.
	But I'm reminded a little bit of, remember the Boxing Day tsunami in Asia?
	Oh, uh-huh.
	Yep.
	There were all these videos.
	So the thing is tsunamis were not regular enough in the Indian Ocean for people to have a sense about what they were and, you know, most of these people had not been living on the coast for generations.
	So when the water receded, people walked out.
	They looked at the fish flopping around on the seafloor that had suddenly been exposed and it was all very curious until the water suddenly came back and there are just all these videos of these people just getting completely engulfed in a tsunami from which they never emerged.
	And I have the sense that the hope that you are seeing with people waking up in journalism, I've already seen this movie.
	I know about the little glimmers of hope and I know what washes over them.
	And we're there.
	So there's now going to be a phase in which, and I think we saw this in the Harper's letter, there's going to be a phase in which people who thought that they were safe or that this wasn't a big deal are suddenly going to recognize that they have no mechanism whatsoever to protect themselves from the movement.
	That the quality of the arguments the movement is making are not high, but the quality of the strategy is, it's spectacular.
	Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's got this viral power to it.
	Um, and you know, one of the only reasons that I, I feel like I was a little bit more wise to it maybe than some of the other people in the business is cause I spent 10 years of my life in Russia.
	I went to school in the Soviet Union.
	Um, I remember, A lot of these thought patterns, you know, I don't have a terribly distinguished academic career.
	One of the few things I do know about is Russian history.
	And, um, you know, the ideas can be dangerous, you know, they, they, they can be more dangerous than really anything.
	And I, I think the, you know, there, there's an imperative that we have in, in reporting and it's very reinforced by Twitter, which is, When you veer off into a topic that the majority of your colleagues decide is not important or not as important as something else in the Trump era, this comes up a lot.
	Like, why are you looking at this when we have to deal with Trump?
	You know, there's so many more.
	There's kids in cages.
	You shouldn't be paying attention to X, Y, and Z. And as a result, things that actually are really important often get short shrift.
	And I do think, I think you're right.
	This whole thing is really about intellectual freedom.
	It's about the values of the Enlightenment.
	It's sort of about the core ideas of the American experiment are now under fire.
	And there's a lack of a willingness to look at what that means or what that might mean going forward.
	I think because people just don't recognize How serious it is.
	And it's, again, it's similar to what happened in Russian history.
	People thought that this little clan of, you know, super motivated Bolsheviks were never going to go anywhere because even within the relatively small minority of socialists who were very active, they were considered, you know, nuts.
	But they had a way of thinking that was very difficult to counter in an institutional setting.
	And this is kind of a similar thing, I think.
	And people are seeing this, that, you know, once it gets into an institution, it's just really difficult to oppose.
	Like, you know, people don't want to be the person to stand up and say, I'm against anti-racism measures, or I'm against, you know, the expansion of the equity, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, because it just sounds bad.
	And they don't want to risk the You know, the possibility of public canceling as well.
	Well, a couple of things.
	One, I heard a little bit of hope bubble up there for you.
	You said it's very difficult to counter.
	I think if there's one thing we know, it's that it's impossible to counter.
	The way we know that is that no institution resists.
	The best examples in terms of, let's say, a college that resists is the University of Chicago.
	And it's not a shining example.
	It's barely ahead of its competitors.
	So, when you have something that washes over every institution, you know that there isn't, at that level, a solution.
	And I'm not arguing there's no solution possible.
	In fact, I want to talk to you about a possible solution later on in the podcast.
	Obviously.
	But, there's a clear pattern here.
	You don't think that this is serious until it comes for you, at which point it's too late.
	Right.
	It's like that formulation.
	And you said a bunch of things I want to bring into the mix here.
	One is you say you're familiar with some of this from Russian history.
	In part, the parallel to Russian history is a little misleading, because it's really Chinese history that is the relevant example.
	The mechanism, the social mechanism of action is much closer to the Chinese version of this.
	And, you know, a lot of the parallels are just incredibly close.
	And then there's obviously parallels to the French Revolution as well, the Reign of Terror, But, you know, it's not going to be any of these things exactly.
	It's going to be a new version.
	The real question for people like you and me, I think, is...
	Does this process that we are watching unfold in 2020 land on that list of remarkable tragedies brought on by movements?
	Does this land on the list with the Bolshevik Revolution, with the Nazis, with the Cambodian Revolution, with the Rwandan genocide?
	Do we end up in one of those or is there some conceivable way out of this?
	Yeah, I have no idea.
	I mean, you know, obviously those movements were more violent to begin with.
	They were taking place in more open, more openly destabilized political environments.
	Although this one's pretty bad as well.
	But so far, The penetration of this has almost entirely been intellectual, right?
	And bureaucratic.
	And when we talk about cancel culture, what we're usually talking about is people losing their jobs and then the accompanying problem of people being afraid to speak out.
	You know, it's not yet at the level of people going, you know, being dragged off to basements and put up against the wall as they did, you know, in the early days of the Soviet Union or, you know, thrown into ditches or whatever it is.
	So, you know, it's not that yet, but, you know, just in the last month, we've seen so many headlines suggesting that institutional America is already almost completely consumed by these ideas.
	And we saw yesterday, I saw you tweeting about this, but the federal government, you know, is adopting ideas that are, you know, frankly, crazy, right?
	It's very troubling.
	You know, the July 4th letter to—open letter in Princeton, which is something I'm looking into now.
	Like, if that could happen at Princeton—and it hasn't happened yet, right?
	Like, the things that they're asking for in that letter have not yet been approved.
	But, you know, if the person who is speaking out against that can be denounced by the president, In a place like Princeton, which actually was one of the few universities to adopt the University of Chicago principles that you talked about, then that's a significant blow, right?
	I mean, it speaks a lot to the problem that's going on across the country.
	And as a reporter, I'm finding out all kinds of stuff that I never knew.
	Like, if you're an academic now and you're applying for a job, in probably half the cases, you have to submit a statement to HR with your sort of diversity ideas.
	And that's a prerequisite before your application even gets to the department that might even be interested in you for whatever the subject matter is.
	So this idea of having like these political commissars in the middle of, you know, sort of every level of intellectual work in this country, I think it's just people don't recognize the extent to which it's already happened.
	And, you know, from the journalistic perspective, we have a long way to go to get people to understand that.
	Yeah, one thing I want to just adjust about what I heard you say earlier.
	You said that it was about free expression and enlightenment ideas, and in one way I think it is about that from the perspective of those of us defending those things, because we know how important they are.
	From the point of view of the movement, I don't think it's about those things.
	It's almost purely about power over material things, and the ability to speak openly about what's wrong with this plan, the ability to invoke something like science in order to demonstrate that a claim might be false, the ability to appeal to normal rules of due process in order to establish a claim.
	All of these things have to be disrupted in order for a movement based on fictions, in order for it to take over.
	So I think the, I believe he was an ex-NSA officer, William Binney, described many of the structures that were put in place after 9/11 as a turnkey totalitarian state.
	You know, the idea being that the structures were in place, but the key hadn't been turned.
	So it didn't feel totalitarian, but it could at any moment.
	And this movement actually has that element to it, where it is disrupting the things that would allow you to get in the way of its power grab.
	But the key hasn't been fully turned yet.
	It's, you know, why do you want to get rid of the police?
	Right?
	Well, there's an excuse for why you want to get rid of the police, but then there's also what you're going to do after the police are gone, because the police are really the mechanism through which all of the other mechanisms keep people from just taking what they can.
	So, I guess as bad as things are, for the things that are very important, I don't think, I think eliminating those things is a means to an end, and I worry about not only the disruption of the essential foundational stuff, but the end that is ultimately being pursued, which I don't think most of the people participating even know about.
	Yeah, I think you're right about that.
	A lot of people who are marching, who are protesting, and think they're Talking about one thing, and maybe there's a minority of people who actually know what it's about.
	But the important thing is what's going on institutionally, and both in terms of the sort of explosion of new administrative staff that has taken place on campuses, but increasingly also is taking place in companies like media companies.
	There's sort of new decision makers who are inserting their imperatives into the work, right?
	So even in media, we're having situations where like the Intercept, right, which is one of the most liberal media companies there is, you know, there was a strong push to put in the charter of the organization that Its journalistic mission was to advance anti-racist causes.
	Now, they haven't quite gone there yet.
	They sort of took a little bit of a left turn before they went all the way there.
	But that's something that's being pressed in a lot of media companies right now, is this idea of writing it into the mission.
	And that's more important, I think, than how many people are on the streets.
	It's like, Is the institution now fully captured?
	Is it already demonstrated that the leaders of these institutions will respond to letters and calls for firings by indulging them, right?
	And I think, as you pointed out, in pretty much every case, that's already been proven to be true, right?
	So until somebody starts standing up and resisting some of these things, And showing a way to do it, it's just going to spread to everything.
	Big tech corporations, big media companies, academia already.
	So yeah, it's hard to know what to do.
	I do think some of us have demonstrated how you resist, and it's not a pretty picture.
	My wife and I were both driven out of tenured positions that we thought were secure and we discovered they weren't.
	That said, we're surviving and we're not the only ones, but there's a limited number of spots for people to famously get ejected from an institution and make it in the outside world.
	It's just not a program that can support all of the people who need to stand up, so that's really frightening.
	I think it gives people a false sense of hope because they see an example that works out and they think, okay, maybe that's the way, and it just can't be.
	But that said, the real problem is not that nobody stands up or that there's no way to do it.
	There is, and it's a learning process.
	Every time I look at a tweet and I look at the button that sends it, I think, is this the one?
	Am I about to end my ability to earn a living by hitting that button?
	And so far, it hasn't worked out that way, but it could at any time.
	So, the problem, though, is that no institution can resist.
	And so, yes, The Intercept had a frightening encounter with this thing.
	It did not go... Oh, it's ongoing!
	It's ongoing.
	I mean, I should say, for my audience, you wrote an excellent piece about this being widespread in journalistic institutions, and it is absolutely worth a read.
	I would recommend Everybody sign up for your site and look at what you're writing because it really is like the front lines and it's so well described But the point is okay the intercept showed some sign of being able to resist but the way the game works
	All of the institutions that show no sign of being able to resist topple, then the ones that do show some sign and some inclination to resist have called attention to themselves as needing particular pressure and higher quality tools brought to bear, and ultimately they all fall.
	What are we going to do when all of the voices that make sense exist outside of the institutional structure?
	Because if they had stayed, they would have been compelled to go through this struggle session kind of nonsense.
	You know, what happens when the institutions are all captured and everybody who knows what's going on is no longer part of them?
	Well, it depends on what field you're talking about, because in journalism, It might end up being a positive process, because I think what we're seeing now, look, there was already a huge collapse in trust in traditional media.
	In fact, I would argue that was one of the major factors that got Donald Trump elected in 2016.
	You know, journalists rarely talk about this, papers like the New York Times rarely talk about it, but Trump really built his campaign around campaigning against us, the people who are covering him.
	I remember I was one of the people in the, you know, following him around and he sort of organizes speeches around the press as a representative of a corrupt elite that doesn't speak to the ordinary person.
	And that process has been growing on both the left and the right for a couple of decades now.
	It's been sort of a curiosity for me to watch.
	On the right, you started to see it, I would say, in the early 2000s, and then especially after the Occupy movement, and particularly with the Bernie Sanders campaign, there's been a huge amount of disaffection on the left, too.
	So the authority of institutions like the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, They've already crumbled just as consumer operations.
	They were already, I would say, basically in a state of failure before even this problem started to rear its head in a big way.
	And what we already started seeing prior to this year was that independent media voices, including people that you know very well like Joe Rogan, We're becoming hugely successful just by not being that, you know?
	Because the audience now, and I'm seeing this with my own site, a lot of other independent journalists are seeing the same thing.
	People are so disenchanted with the didactic, politicized tone of media, institutional media, that they're looking for anything that isn't that.
	So I am, I'm sort of hopeful that new institutions will grow out of that.
	And that has been a little bit the history of, of this business.
	You know, it's not, it's not like academia where you can't, you can't just wipe out Princeton and all the Ivies and another day build a whole bunch of new media companies.
	So there's a possibility that we're going to build something better, but it will just take a lot of energy.
	And then what's going to happen with those institutions once they get big enough is the problem.
	You know, so right now we have this model where there's no alternative big institutions really, but there's a lot of voices who are sort of growing in import.
	But they're all just individual people.
	I don't know if that's sustainable as a replacement for what we had in the press.
	I don't know if that answers your question, but it's a thought.
	It does, but I cannot resist pointing out where I think this goes.
	Because again, you even used the word hope, which at this moment, that's audacious, let's just say.
	Here's the problem, is that those of us on the outside, there are two phenomena that I think we need to pay attention to.
	One is that even the Joe Rogans of the world are dependent on the institutions of the world, right?
	Joe Rogan brings his message and his guests to the world via things like YouTube.
	YouTube, which has no accountability Definitely has this movement inside of it, on the mark, all the time, has incredible power to wield tools that we don't even understand as outsiders to it.
	And there's almost nowhere to go, right?
	You can abandon ship and you could go to some platform that is Not subject to these kinds of pressures, but then what happened?
	Well, okay, then you're grouped with all of the truly noxious stuff that also is not welcome on YouTube, and so you get tainted as alt-right or worse.
	So, kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't.
	The other factor that I want to point out, not only are there these institutions which have this revolution on the march within every single one of them, but there is the very real sense that there is a censorious instinct marching in our direction, and it's knocking off people.
	And some of the people that it started with were truly terrible, right?
	And then it's come to people who are much more In a gray area.
	And, you know, it's beginning, we can see it even experimenting with people that there's nothing wrong with at all, right?
	All they are is a bracelet.
	So, you know, James Lindsay found himself frozen out of his Twitter account the other day, right?
	And it's like, OK, it was Sargon of Akkad two years ago, and now we're at James Lindsay.
	How much longer is it before it gets to me, frankly?
	I mean, I think they would have done it if they could have.
	And the problem is at the moment, It's still it would be very awkward.
	You know, James Lindsay is still on Twitter.
	So apparently that's that's still not within the power of the movement.
	But of course, it would love to get rid of James Lindsay because he's a huge embarrassment to them because he just simply says flat out how their strategy works.
	So, between the institutions that have the ability, given that there's no real public square, the quasi-public square that we have is owned by institutions in which the revolution is on the march, or the counter-revolution, as it were.
	And we see this thing experimenting with how to come for those voices that you're describing who are independent and might constitute some kind of a, you know, a renaissance in journalism or an equivalent space by being independent and not subject to an institution.
	Yeah, you're right, you know, and I now I'm checking myself for the optimism because, you know, actually when You talked about the people that came for the noxious folks first.
	I mean, I think we're talking about probably Alex Jones was one of the first big ones.
	When that happened, I was one of the few people in media who popped up and said, hey, you know, this is not necessarily a good thing.
	I think you have to look at what this means for the rest of the business.
	Today, it's going to be Alex Jones.
	And if this mechanism proves successful, just by its nature, it's going to start looking For the next thing, it's going to decide Ben Shapiro is next, and then it's going to start looking around.
	Then there's going to be a process where groups are going to start demanding that we take the extreme version on the other side off to compensate for this person.
	And it's going to narrow the field progressively.
	That started to happen.
	And then additionally, right after, if you remember what the Alex Jones thing, some of the platforms started to, this was at the height of the Russia mania, They started to zap pages that they were calling coordinated inauthentic content.
	Um, and some of them were just regular old, you know, sort of alternative media sites who happened to be deemed inauthentic by Facebook and some other of these big platforms.
	And I, I tried to get people in the business interested in this problem, which was that, uh, The press traditionally got its independence from having its own distribution, at least print journalism did, right?
	So the newspaper in a locality built its power up over decades by having its own trucks, by having its own distribution routes, its own sales points, its own paper kids even.
	They were the only people in town.
	In the area who were able to reach all those millions of people, and so that's how they had their power.
	You couldn't take it from them.
	But in the internet age, that vanishes overnight.
	Distribution is now wholly in the hands of a couple of companies, basically.
	The overwhelming majority of people in this country get their news from Google or Facebook or Twitter.
	And so what happens if these companies start Making censorious decisions, which is what they were doing.
	And I was amazed, really, at the lack of interest in this topic among people in the press.
	I mean, I grew up, you know, my father was a reporter.
	I grew up around people.
	My first internship was at the Village Voice, so I remember people like Nat Hentoff and Wayne Barrett.
	Like, the standard position of a journalist in The 70s, 80s, and 90s was to be hypersensitive to any possibility of censorship or control over us as an institution.
	And that spirit has completely vanished from the press.
	In fact, they're actively asking to be controlled more, if you even see any op-eds about this subject at all.
	And so we're in a situation now where People are being removed or deranked or shadow banned or whatever it is constantly.
	There's no transparency about it.
	It's effectively a media regulator that is unelected and doesn't answer to the public at all.
	It's a very serious problem because, you're right, for all of Joe Rogan's success, at any minute, somebody could say, yeah, enough of that.
	You know, and, you know, he'd be reduced to, I don't know what, you know, sending CDs through the mail to people, you know, I mean, that could happen.
	Right.
	And we haven't seen very much of some other layers that actually will come into play here.
	So, first let me just say, one of the things that is most disturbing and that I don't hear talked about enough is that not only is there this desire to eliminate certain perspectives so that they just simply can't be voiced where anybody can hear them, but it's also Rather arbitrary, right?
	I can tweet that men are not women.
	I won't get tossed off Twitter.
	I think the only reason I won't get tossed off Twitter is that I can pull the biologist card and certain people would, you know, would riot in the aftermath of me being tossed off for that.
	But Megan Murphy's gone for saying that.
	And so I guess the question is, what exactly is this rule that some people can say it and some people can't?
	What universe do you think that's going to result in?
	So there's the arbitrariness, which results in, you know, the inevitable outcome here, which is just, there's going to be favoritism, there's going to be, this is going to be pure myth-making.
	We're going to decide certain perspectives are okay, certain people can voice other things, this is going to create advantages.
	It's just, it's every value that we hold dear evaporated all at once.
	But As far as the layers go, yes, there's Twitter and YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and Reddit and all of these properties, but then there's also the layers below them, right?
	There's...
	There's Mastercard.
	And we have seen this in the past.
	There are certain instances actually before the current cancel culture era in which we have seen the Mastercard piece pulled out.
	So I remember early in Wikileaks before they had been successfully portrayed as a Republican slash Russian asset in that role.
	Amazing story by the way, but anyway, yeah.
	Well, I want you to say more about that, but let me just finish it out here.
	In the early days of WikiLeaks, there was a point at which WikiLeaks, to many of us, looked like a very positive force that was doing something very important.
	It was bringing transparency to these really despicable processes, and it became impossible to donate to them.
	Right?
	I did donate to them at one point, and then there was some point at which it became too complicated to do.
	And so how much of a win was that against WikiLeaks that suddenly the fact that MasterCard couldn't be, or whatever, it was all the credit card things.
	And then there was another one, you know, totally unrelated.
	His name is Daniel Siebert, a chemist who actually isolated the hallucinogenic molecule in salvia, which is a legal hallucinogen, which he was distributing.
	Suddenly it became impossible to buy from his site with any sort of normal currency.
	So my point is there's a failsafe underneath the platform layer, which can be pulled out from under everything.
	And then below that, there's another one.
	And I have a feeling in the end we're going to discover that net neutrality was about something we didn't really understand.
	That in the end, the ability of ISPs to take certain people out of circulation will be invoked if nothing else works to silence them.
	Hmm.
	Yeah, that's interesting.
	I hadn't thought of that.
	All very possible.
	And, you know, we haven't gotten there yet.
	It probably hasn't been necessary.
	But I think the embarrassing thing is it hasn't been necessary because we just haven't seen Oh, anything like a wide scale rebellion on the part of the people you would expect it to come from.
	I mean, you know, the people in Maoist China or Soviet Russia who worked in the press, they had an excuse for not raising a ruckus about certain things.
	The thing that's always bothered me about journalists in the United States is you don't even really need to offer them anything to make them conform.
	There's no, particularly even any special benefits that you get from doing so.
	It's just a very timid, un-inquisitive group of people, and they're uniquely ill-suited, I think, to the mission of trying to oppose this thing.
	But you're absolutely right, I hadn't thought about those other layers, but those will probably come into play as well.
	They will if they need to.
	You know, it'll stop short of them if it can do it with the other layer.
	But the problem is, you know, you say exactly the right thing.
	It hasn't been necessary yet, but the same principle applies.
	As soon as it's necessary, it will be too late.
	Right?
	You have to see it coming.
	What you describe in journalism, I call the epidemic of cowardice, but it's also a kind of learned helplessness.
	And that's exactly what I saw in academia.
	And I think the problem is it's civilization wide, that our developmental environment has cultivated these weaknesses, and now they are being exploited.
	Not for nothing, a lot of people are saying, this is the evergreen of the United States right now.
	Your story is kind of The great metaphor for all of this stuff.
	And I remember, if I remember correctly, there was that vote, initial vote, where you objected to that one provision where they were, I guess, they were asking you to put down on paper your thoughts about Equity, diversity, inclusion, or something like that, right?
	No, it was to reflect on our own progress relative to our internal racism annually in a document that was then going to go into our file.
	First of all, I just can't even imagine being a person and thinking that that would be a good idea, for a variety of reasons, putting any of that down on paper.
	But anyway, the notion that the vote ended up being 70 to 2, or whatever it was, That kind of speaks to all the things that are going on now in the press.
	You hear a lot from journalists who are saying, you cannot believe what's going on in our shop right now, right?
	They're meeting out after work in bars.
	Sometimes people are only willing to talk about what's going on at work if they work with their spouses, right?
	So this is, again, Rick recalls the kind of the Soviet cliche of the husband and wife who spoke under the covers at night, you know, about what was going on at work.
	You know, that stuff's going on in this business now.
	And yeah, I mean, the problem is that People keep thinking that it's not going to come for them.
	That if they just go along, that eventually, like, they'll get to keep their job and, you know, it's not going to be a problem.
	But eventually it does.
	You know, it stiffs you out.
	And people are mistaken if they think they're not going to end up having to collide with it at some point or another.
	Yeah.
	Eventually it's going to come for you and eventually is like by the end of July.
	Right.
	Exactly.
	Exactly.
	So here's the thing.
	You're right.
	Everybody you can imagine how many people are telling me, my God, we're all evergreen now.
	Right.
	It's like, OK, yes, you are.
	Now can we go the next step?
	And it's like, I just I want just emblazon the word extrapolate.
	Right.
	On something that I can hold in front of people, because the point is, OK, If this is Evergreen, and it is, I mean, the parallel is almost too close to believe, right?
	If this is Evergreen, what happens next?
	I mean, first of all, look at Evergreen, right?
	Evergreen is a failing college.
	It has a quarter of the students it's supposed to have, it has no plan going forward, and it has continued down this road without ever acknowledging it made a mistake.
	Right.
	That's the Democratic Party.
	Right?
	Joe Biden is George Bridges, and the United States is about to be evergreen, except that in the United States there's another force that this is going to collide with, which is the well-armed rural population that has a right to be terrified that this is coming for it.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	I saw a news article yesterday that not only are gun sales going up, but that 40% of the sales are for first time buyers, which I thought was pretty amazing statistics because we've seen in the past, you know, various moral manias that come up in the press, convince people to go out and buy guns, but it's usually the people who are already buying guns.
	Yeah, exactly.
	This is, this is something new.
	I don't know what that means yet.
	I think, I think you're probably onto something that, People are gearing up for some kind of conflict that they imagine will happen, which I hope it doesn't.
	But yeah, absolutely.
	There's that.
	The only thing I would push back on with the metaphor of Biden as bridges is that, you know, for all the craziness of all of this, you know, Trump is an extraordinarily ineffective vehicle for harnessing The discontent and anger towards all of these processes.
	He did fairly well with it, I would say, just cynically watching him in 2016, but he was an unknown quantity then.
	And his total, his incompetence to deal with, you know, this unique crisis that we're in right now is, I mean, obviously I'm not going to make the same mistake of predicting Again, that he's gonna lose, but it's very possible that Biden's gonna win.
	And even though the Democratic Party is, intellectually, I think it's just completely broken.
	It doesn't stand for anything anymore except for not being something else.
	And even that doesn't stand for that all that strongly.
	It could still sputter on for a little while.
	And I guess what I worry about is that It will succumb to the same institutional pressures that happened at Evergreen and have happened more recently at the New York Times.
	Because it's not strong in its own identity, it's susceptible to being taken over by zealots.
	And I don't know how much you would worry about that, but I worry about that a little bit.
	Oh, I think it's far worse than that.
	Yeah, this is becoming a theme, I guess.
	But the Democratic Party stands for nothing because it has become an influence-peddling racket, as the Republican Party is.
	And as such, The only thing it does is protect its access to power.
	And what has happened is it has lost its argument for being awarded that power by voters.
	And what it is now going to do is it is going to rally a constituency by giving it something real.
	But what it's giving it is power over other citizens.
	In other words, and this is why I say it is George Bridges, right?
	Joe Biden is the George Bridges play, because what it's going to do is it's going to empower this counter-revolution that is now marching in our streets and marching in every single institution.
	It is going to empower them to keep them from going after the real culprit.
	So, you know, the anger in the streets is about something real.
	Americans have been frozen out of a large fraction of the well-being that they've created.
	And in an effort to stave off the French Revolution yet one more election cycle, the people with the pitchforks and the torches are going to be awarded rights to extract stuff from other citizens, and that is what's... I just don't even see how that will be avoided.
	It's not that the zealots will take over the Democratic Party, it's that the Democratic Party will foolishly empower them, will cynically empower them, in order to win this election and potentially future ones, and that will be the final straw.
	Yeah, I think you're probably right.
	I remember in 2016 watching, you know, when Bernie was first becoming a thing, and it was surprising to see how well he was, I guess it wasn't surprising, you know, because the Democrats are, their message is just so unsuccessful when they try to present it, you know, unvarnished in front of audiences.
	It's amazing the lack of response they get.
	So Bernie starts doing well, and one of the first things that starts happening is that the Clinton campaign starts dusting off the language of campus intersectionality to go after the Sanders movement, which I thought was fascinating because I had watched Hillary do exactly the opposite in 2008 when Barack Obama was the candidate.
	You know, she was basically trying to run as George Wallace in places like Pennsylvania, Now they figured, because this is how they're wired, that, well, let's just go for whatever cynically will get us through the night.
	Bernie is vulnerable.
	We'll call him a cis white man.
	We'll get all of our aides to whisper in the ears of journalists at night.
	Hillary publicly says things like, yes, if we broke up the banks tomorrow, would that end racism?
	Which was an extraordinarily effective line, because Bernie didn't know how to answer that for some reason.
	He was afraid of the connotation of answering that charge.
	And he backed off from it, and that became successful.
	And I think that was the seed of what you're talking about, where the trade for the Democrats became... Alright, so to stop us from having to deal with Offending all of our donors in the health insurance industry, in the military-industrial complex, on Wall Street.
	I mean, this is our power base, right?
	And they transparently, if you talk to people in the party, they transparently see their job as finding the middle ground between getting elected and making sure that the donors are happy.
	And their donors are, you know, not people, they're these big institutions.
	So they saw that the way forward was to start adopting the language of wokeness.
	Um, I don't think at any level they ever believed it, uh, in any meaningful way.
	Um, but they, and they did it again this year, even, you know, with Bernie, um, again, but I think you're right.
	I think what they're going to end up doing is rather than go forward with Medicare for all, or, Any other kind of serious structural reform, or breaking up the banks on Wall Street, or any of the other things that people have been asking for, they are going to give them something.
	I think they're going to give them this institutional revolution that some people are asking for, which conveniently will exclude some of their biggest donors from impact for a while, you know?
	And I think that's a good analysis that you have of the situation.
	It troubles me that we don't see that in the press very much when they're talking about what the Democrats are doing with this language.
	Why is Nancy Pelosi, you know, dressing in kente cloth scarves and, you know, they're participating and they're talking about knocking down all these statues, where only a few months ago they were denouncing Sanders on patriotic grounds.
	As being a Russian agent, like they don't see the contradiction there.
	It's just it's it's an odd thing.
	It's odd.
	Again, reminds me of those people walking out to look at the fish flopping on the sea floor.
	Exactly.
	Well, that perfectly describes the Democrats in like a million ways.
	In a million ways.
	Right.
	Exactly.
	Um and you know uh of course in 2020 that just puts us in such an amazing bind because nothing stands between us and this revolution getting its every wish which you know I guess on the bright side the fairy tales it's talking about aren't going to function so it's not going to be long-term successful but it can wreck everything in the process and
	You know, not only are Americans depending on all of the things that's going to wreck, but the world is depending on us to keep it together.
	Because if we don't, I mean, look what we're doing to the international picture.
	Yeah, that and also another huge issue there is what happens when we don't get a fake Trump The next time, what happens when we get a real fascist in response, which for sure is going to happen if things continue in a certain direction, right?
	Because if Trump, for all of his faults, and you could list them from now until tomorrow, he's everything that a lot of people have said about him, his personality is sufficiently disorganized The inward focus that he was never able to commit to any policy of any kind.
	He was not even, you know, even when he brought in Steve Bannon, which I thought was a dangerous moment because it wedded an actual strategic mind to the horsepower, political horsepower that Trump was capable of bringing.
	He just couldn't get along with that person for very long.
	Trump is like, he's so profoundly insecure in his relationships that he can't have any for any extended period of time.
	So it prevented him from doing a lot of the dangerous things that people predicted that he would do.
	But there's going to come a time when someone is going to try to get elected using the same formula that Trump used, but is going to be not a dummy and not a narcissistic, you know, sort of psychologically disabled person. sort of psychologically disabled person.
	And, you know, that's going to be a serious problem, right?
	Because there's all those people who are buying guns for the first time, you know, they're going to be receptive to the message that comes from, you know, the face in the crowd, Andy Griffith figure who's inevitably going to rise from all this.
	No, I exactly agree with this analysis, that as troubling as Trump is, the fact that, you know, he's a narcissist or the equivalent actually limits the damage, right?
	Because, you know, his objective function is not to turn us into something else.
	He's, you know, he's not an organic fascist.
	He's selfish.
	Right.
	Yeah, this is coming and it's like somehow we're having this incredibly foolish argument where people see that they don't want Trump and of course they are blinded by it and you know Trump derangement syndrome is real, right?
	And it is the entire argument for the Democratic Party winning at this point.
	It's not a good argument but But it's like, it's like quitting smoking, right?
	The argument against quitting smoking cannot be, it's very, very hard to quit smoking because it's going to get harder, right?
	Right.
	So, right, if Trump is the focus, it's the only thing you can see, then the answer is, well, now is the time we have to break out of this duopoly nonsense because the next time it's going to be way worse.
	It's going to be the thing you said it was this time that it didn't turn out to be.
	Right.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	If I could nerd out on the coverage of Trump for a minute, because this has bothered me a lot ever since he got elected.
	The storyline about Trump should have been the extraordinary black comedy that happened in 2016.
	Like, here was a guy who basically was not trying to win, who was running for a variety of reasons that were Preposterous on multiple levels, who was actively sabotaging himself multiple times throughout the campaign, and yet he wins anyway, right?
	In other words, he's trying to lose, but America does not let him lose.
	And rather than focus on, my God, how could that possibly have happened?
	What profound structural flaws in our system, what could possibly have disenchanted people so much that they would even override Trump's natural self-destructive urges to put him in office.
	Nobody did that analysis.
	They immediately went for this other thing, which was to portray Trump as something that he wasn't, which was this sort of otherworldly Hitlerian existential threat who was, you know, any minute now going to be putting us all in concentration camps any minute now going to be putting us all in concentration camps or surrendering us to Russia, which created this air of unreality And I think that's a good thing.
	Um, and I think like, like all misleading, like sort of journalistic efforts to, um, to try to put paint Trump in a bad light.
	They went too far, and ultimately did damage to their own cause in doing so.
	They discredited themselves by painting Trump as something that he isn't.
	The entire argument for Donald Trump now, the best argument, is that institutional America has lied about him.
	And if he ends up getting elected again, it'll be because of that.
	Anyway, that's a private thing that really, really bothers me about that whole narrative is that, you know, they got him elected the first time and they're going to do it again if it happens again.
	Oh, I completely agree with this.
	To the extent that you have Trump derangement syndrome, you should be looking at the Democratic Party and saying, how could you have done this to us?
	And how could you possibly put us in danger of this again?
	Because there are actually two arguments for Trump now.
	One is that he has faced a conspiracy to eliminate him from office from day one, which is true.
	And I'm not saying that there was nothing to the impeachment.
	I think there was, but the point is they would have impeached him whether or not there was, right?
	It was impeachment first and then let's find grounds.
	So that's one thing.
	But the other thing is by delivering us Joe Biden as the alternative, Joe Biden in his enfeebled state, they have created another argument.
	A rational person could say, well, At the end of the day, I want somebody in the Oval Office who is capable of processing the information necessary to, let's say, avoid a nuclear conflict.
	I don't want it to be Trump because he could get us into a nuclear conflict.
	On the other hand, Joe Biden two years from now, as compared to Donald Trump two years from now, who is going to be more capable of integrating information?
	I can't say that I think it's Joe Biden.
	Maybe I can say that I think that he's going to step down, but then the point is, since when is electing a president really a means of getting a vice president into the presidency?
	This is party rule.
	I'm certainly not voting for Trump.
	I'm also not voting for Biden.
	But I can see now the Democrats have created arguments for voting for Trump.
	And that ought to tell us something is way off.
	Yeah, I think you're you're exactly right.
	If the pandemic hadn't happened, I would be betting a lot of money on Trump to win.
	Oh, yeah.
	The the his inability to deal with this.
	Well, you know, all of his worst qualities have come out here.
	And so, you know, they're going to make the argument that, yeah, well, Joe Biden is basically a corpse, and we all understand that, and that's why we're not going to put him on television at all, if we can avoid it.
	But we're really electing the people behind him, and those people are going to, you know, be relatively sane, which is going to be a new thing for this country, you know, at least going back four years.
	They're going to make that argument, but, you know, for a lot of people, for a lot of voters, they don't think, you know, that many levels down.
	They look at what the images they see on television, and Biden next to Trump, you know, it doesn't look great, you know, to the ordinary voter.
	So, yeah, you're right.
	It's very frustrating that they have created this condition again.
	Yeah.
	So let's talk a little bit about what we should do and what we might do.
	One thing I wanted to go back a little bit in our conversation and talk about If we look at the fact that there are all of these layers where we have a vulnerability, and these layers can be triggered.
	If the institutional layer fails to create the requisite power that the movement wants, it can be the payment layer, or it can be the ISP net neutrality layer, but there are a lot of places.
	One thing that we should say is, if you were smart, You'd build now, right?
	So cryptocurrency, for example, provides a solution to the payment layer, but you want to build it now.
	The problem with crypto, or at least one of them, is that it's not simple enough for it to simply replace a compromised credit card layer.
	It needs to be that simple in order for it to actually constitute a solution.
	And the other thing is you have to figure out how you're going to navigate the internet without the major platforms, which have organized it for us and given us access in a way that is fundamental to how we actually use it, but it's a Faustian bargain because it gives them control over who has access and, you know, it's in this murky gray area where, you know, it's like a public utility except it isn't.
	Right.
	So anyway, we should be building those things now, rather than waiting to discover that those layers are insecure, because they're definitely insecure, and it's definitely coming, and it's marching faster than we think, which we can extrapolate from everything we've seen so far.
	I mean, we've just gotten there very quickly.
	So anyway, I don't know.
	There's much more to say, except if we were smart, we'd be building those alternative plans now, rather than assuming, you know, or crossing our fingers, or whatever it is that we're doing.
	Yeah.
	I've never been very much in the solutions business.
	I'm always much more into describing the actual misery that's happening side of things.
	But clearly, people definitely need to start thinking about whatever the alternative structures might be.
	One thing that gives me, I'm not going to use this word because it triggers you clearly, is hope.
	During the more or less ineffectual Occupy Wall Street movement, but one thing that did come out of that was a lot of thinking about, well, if we don't want an oligopoly of massive transnational banks running the economy, what do we want?
	And there were some ideas that came out of that.
	Public banking, some of the cryptocurrency stuff, Came out of some of the problems that took place.
	There were people who were pushed in that direction, I know, by some of the events of 2008.
	So maybe that will happen here, too.
	There will be a political crisis that will cause a bunch of people to get together.
	I know you've got a political solution that you've been pushing, which I think is great.
	But clearly after the spectacle of 2016, people are going to be very ready for some kind of alternative political movement in a way that they probably haven't been in this country for a very, very long time.
	So it's probably a good time for people to get those ideas ready for mass presentation, it seems.
	Well, I agree.
	It's a good idea to, you know, to sketch those things out for the moment at which they could be introduced.
	But I'm very concerned that there's just a general pattern where you have two things fused together, right?
	This movement is an organic rebellion against a corrupt system and it is a coup.
	In one, and you know, the Organic Rebellion doesn't really understand that the coup is not about making things better.
	It's about taking power.
	And that's what all of these false syllogisms are about that it portrays.
	But I think the problem is A, this is Occupy 2.0, but it's not the Occupy that started after the financial collapse and had legitimate complaints and had some idea what direction it wanted to go with structural change.
	It's picked up from the end of Occupy, which was thoroughly infused by this anarchism And this belief that the structure has to be torn down in order to make a new one.
	And of course that is an argument being deployed by people who I don't think know anything about how international relations work, how a nuclear reactor functions, that a nuclear reactor requires power 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and you can't screw that up for even a day without it turning into a nuclear volcano.
	It's for people who don't understand what the Haber-Bosch process is and what it has to do with beating more than half the world's population.
	So the idea of tear it down is a very naive one, and it is now gaining power at an amazing rate.
	And so those solutions you're talking about, I'm on this path.
	I don't see how they actually end up in a position to make positive change.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Well, there are some general ideas that might That would help, right?
	So one of the things I like about your unity idea is that it introduces the idea of politics as not a purely adversarial process, right?
	That this is something where you would get a bunch of people in a room and they would have to come up with a A thing that they would agree on in a collaborative way, which is what Congress used to be, right?
	I mean, if you talk to people in Congress, I've done a lot of reporting on Congress, where they talked about how in the 60s and 70s, it was a much different situation.
	The politicians would get up and give a speech on Friday, but then on Saturday, the Republicans and Democrats, their families would get together, you know, they would Sometimes play golf, sometimes do whatever it was.
	And they would actually work out the thing and they would sort of patriotically have in mind how that works.
	And that all started to break down in the nineties and everything became, you know, just shouting at each other.
	The media has broken down in the same way, right?
	Like, so now it's just basically two camps of monocultures that are yelling at each other.
	Uh, I think there's a strong urge, and you talk about this in the stats that you cite about how people self-identify politically, if you could just attach a political idea to, or express it in a way that all those people who identify as independents and don't identify as far left, far right, could have a place where they could, you know,
	Vote and put somebody in power.
	I think it would be very, very successful.
	I'm the optimist in this conversation.
	Well, here I like your optimism a lot.
	Yeah, the thing is, we know, I mean, you can intuit if you talk to people, but we now know from careful study that the vast majority of Americans actually agree and that this is the fringes driving the discussion and most of us don't sign up for either of the perspectives that we see being broadcast at such a high decibel level.
	So yes, that constituency, were you to try to make a political move, the obvious way to win every election is to agree to represent the American public.
	Right.
	That's a slam dunk, as a strategy goes.
	Now the reason that our parties never find that strategy is they can't.
	It's mutually exclusive with their business model.
	Right, exactly.
	They're not supposed to have a business model.
	I've written about this many times, yeah.
	Of course you have.
	It's your stock and trade, or at least one of them.
	But here's the question.
	What stops... I mean, look, Occupy, in my mind, did one useful thing.
	Really just one.
	But it was important.
	And it was the idea that there was something, that you could even plausibly describe the conflict as between the 1% and the 99%.
	How does a democracy get rigged against 99% of its population?
	Right?
	That tells you it's not a democracy.
	That tells you some other force has taken over.
	So the point is, You can't interfere, you can't honorably interfere in a normal election cycle because you're told that if you do, if you try to represent the people and get elected on that basis, that you will elect the party that is less in line with your values rather than more.
	So you're going to do more harm than good because of the lesser evil paradox.
	So, Unity 2020 addresses that, so that we don't have to face the lesser evil paradox, and we can reach the public and say, look, we've got a plan for actually having your interests represented at the highest level of government, which frankly I see as the only thing that could conceivably head off the calamity to which we are currently aimed.
	That requires this other thing that we talked about earlier to somehow be knocked out of its normal pattern of resonance, which is to say that same pattern of cowardice and of passivity.
	Basically, I see it as people having been turned in their own minds from being citizens into being consumers.
	You know, a citizen is an active thing.
	A consumer is a passive thing.
	And because people consume everything, including the political landscape, they don't understand that actually the thing that is necessary to escape the trap that has been set for them, in which they will vote for one or the other terrible and highly corrupt options, is that they have to actually take ownership of the choice to do something different.
	They have to figure out how to talk to their friends, for example.
	Right.
	So, I don't know, you're an interesting guy, and I want to find out a little bit about how you ended up there.
	We know a little bit about your background in Russia, which I think gave you a very different perspective on the West.
	But it is also the case that your focus as a journalist has created immensely powerful enemies, or it has put you in their sights.
	Yeah, that's true.
	And yet here you are.
	That's a little bit surprising.
	So you have beaten the odds in a way few journalists have been able to by reporting accurately and courageously on phenomena that are deeply embarrassing to the most powerful forces in our system.
	And you have stayed afloat.
	So A, do you know how that happened?
	Uh, well, you know, in terms of why you do that, um, you know, my, again, my, my father was a journalist.
	Um, and I, I grew up in an atmosphere, my childhood was a lot like the movie Anchorman.
	Uh, I, you know, he was a TV reporter, all the bad facial hair, everything.
	Um, but reporters, when I was growing up, They came from a different class of people than they do today.
	A lot of them were kind of more working class, like they were more likely, their parents were more likely to be plumbers or electricians than they were to be doctors or lawyers.
	Like this thing where, you know, the journalist is an Ivy League grad, that's a relatively new thing that I think came about in the 70s and 80s with my generation.
	But reporters basically just instinctively hated Rich people, they hated powerful people.
	Like, if you put up a poster of a politician in a newsroom, it was defaced instantaneously.
	Like, there were darts on it, you know.
	The reporters saw it as their job to stick it to the man, right?
	Like, that was the attitude.
	I think it's very ably embodied by people like Cy Hirsch, if you've ever Seeing him in public, like, that's just a person who just lives to make people uncomfortable, right?
	And by digging and digging and digging.
	And so that was the ethos that I grew up around.
	And I always understood it, the purpose of the job to be to look in all directions and say, like, where's the biggest, most obnoxious thing that's happening right now?
	And, you know, what Well, how can I have an impact that other reporters maybe aren't paying attention to, you know?
	And so, you know, with something like the financial crisis in 2008, one of the first things that I learned about that is that the only people who are covering Wall Street were sympathetic to Wall Street because nobody else understood it, right?
	So there was an opportunity there to To do this kind of work where we're just basically translating things for ordinary people, and that's very revelatory.
	But that mode of understanding the job to be that, and being willing to take all the crap that comes with it, it used to be, I think, standard in the profession.
	And I don't really see that so much anymore, although there are a lot of people who are coming up who You know, are that way.
	You know, people like Lee Fong at The Intercept.
	Glenn Greenwald is different.
	He's like, he'd come from the reporting tradition, but he's got that same personality quirk of just wanting to piss people off.
	But mostly, the job is different now, right?
	Like, I think, have you ever seen the movie Primary Colors?
	It was sort of a book that was made into a movie.
	It was about the Clinton campaign in 1992.
	It was written by a journalist named Joe Klein, who initially was anonymous.
	He wrote it as a novel.
	But the fantasy among reporters in the 90s about politicians started to be, I want to be the person who hangs out with the candidate.
	After the speech and has a beer and it's sort of close to power.
	And that's, that's kind of the model.
	That's where we're at right now.
	That's kind of the problem is, is that basically people in the business want to be behind the rope line with people of influence.
	And, um, you know, it's going to be an, it's going to be a problem trying to get us back to other adversarial posture, uh, the past.
	Yeah, I agree.
	And in some sense, I mean, that's important history, and I think it's useful insight, and I'm glad to hear it.
	But, you know, it is the easier part of the puzzle.
	I understand why you would want to do what you do.
	What I don't understand is how you've succeeded at it.
	Just as with institutions, we see there's almost not an institution, and maybe really not an institution, that has shown us how to resist this movement.
	There's very little indication that what you do is possible, which is to confront these very powerful entities and live to tell the tale and not be driven off the map or co-opted or I don't know what.
	Well, I mean, I've definitely been, you know, bruised a little bit over the years.
	I've gone through a couple episodes that haven't been all that pleasant.
	But I think if you, you know, in terms of What I've done to try to retain an audience over the years, there's only a couple of ways to really do it.
	You either have to do what Sy Hersh does, which is get the story that no one else can get, and that's just, you know, a way of amassing power in this business, right?
	Like, you have something that no one else has, people are going to come to you no matter what.
	And incidentally, he's basically been driven out of the business.
	If you notice, he only publishes in like the London Review of Books now.
	And, you know, this is a person who from Mili to Abu Ghraib has always gotten the biggest story, right?
	So there's even for the best of us, it's a very difficult road.
	But the other way to do it, I think, is the way that I and I take probably the easier road, which is just You know, I focus a lot on trying to make the work entertaining, clear, and have some kind of popular appeal to it, which is very difficult to suppress, right?
	So if you, if people just, if you've got a little bit of humor, you know, it's difficult to get people to stop
	Reading something that they just enjoy reading, you know, and so, uh, that mixed with being super careful about the investigative stuff, like you don't want to, you know, in this business, one bad mistake that labels you as dishonest, um, is usually fatal, uh, or it used to be anyway.
	So that's been my, that's been my formula is like be, be really, really careful and then try to, Try to think in terms of how you're really, really think in terms of rhetorically how to reach a wide audience, which is a lot harder than people think it is.
	It's, it's a very difficult thing to do.
	But, you know, that's the job, right?
	I mean, so it's, I've been lucky that also that there are processes like, you know, this subscription site that I have available now that Make it possible to be a little bit braver than maybe I would be if I was only working in an institution.
	But there is a way forward to do it.
	It's just it's not terribly easy.
	That's all.
	All right.
	So there are a couple lessons in there that I resonate with strongly.
	One is you've built this site outside of your day job, as it were, at Rolling Stone.
	And I believe this is actually a fundamental mechanism for surviving in this era.
	Because if everything, if your mortgage, your health care, your retirement, your income, if all of that stuff comes through your employer and something catches the attention of your employer and decides to go after you, then you have very few options.
	Whereas if you have built something on the outside ahead of time, then the point is, well, you may not want to lose your day job, but at least you're not starting from scratch at the point that you do.
	So this was true for Heather and me when we got driven out of Evergreen, which is that we were already, we were not well known, but we were already reaching out and trying to figure out how to bring evolutionary biology to a wider audience.
	And it made a huge difference because we were not at square one.
	Right.
	The other thing you mentioned, which I think may be in some sense the most important factor in all of this, is I think you have pointed to a conspicuous lack of humor of the movement.
	It's amazing, actually.
	It's amazing.
	And it is, I think it is the thing that frightens me most.
	Yeah.
	You know, I have this, when students used to ask me, they asked me for advice about all sorts of things, because at Evergreen we knew our students really, really well, so many of them were friends at one level or another, and I used to tell them, You should not consider marrying anyone who does not have a sense of humor about themselves.
	They're just not marriage material, right?
	Because you're going to need the sense of humor.
	Everybody's got to have a sense of humor about themselves just to navigate something as complex as marriage.
	For sure.
	Anyway, that's an aside about marriage.
	But the point is, the lack of a sense of humor on the part of this movement Tells you something about a kind of rigidity of thinking and a, I don't know what it is, but it's a very cold, frightening absence.
	Yeah.
	And once you spot it, you can't miss it.
	You're absolutely right.
	I just wrote about this last week, actually, that, you know, the 60s liberation movements, They had this enormous power to spread because they were incredibly attractive to people, even who were politically resistant to them.
	The music was great.
	The comedy was amazing.
	Like, even people who were abject racists, they listened to Richard Pryor's comedy and they couldn't help themselves.
	They laughed, right?
	And I think it was because that movement was very much about celebrating The common humanity of people.
	They were trying to dig down and get to deeper truths about all of us.
	And even if it was kind of disturbing and unpleasant, they were going to put it out there.
	And that was really liberating for everybody.
	And it was a very attractive message, you know?
	What I was trying to do was contrast that with this, which has no art, no music, and certainly no comedy, right?
	There's no such thing as comedy in this conception.
	It's actually, it's almost definitionally impossible because comedy by its nature is daring and it's iconoclastic in all directions, right?
	The urge to be funny always ends up dressing down everybody, not just a specific target.
	Uh, you know, it's not just the emperor who has no clothes, it's everybody, right?
	So, uh, when you're trying to have a very didactic politics, comedy just doesn't go well with it, you know?
	And, um, and that's a conspicuous weakness of this movement.
	I think a lot about, there was a book I read a long time ago.
	It was a biography of Lenin called The Bolsheviks that was written by this historian, Adam Ulam, who is a very funny writer himself, but he was obsessed with Lenin.
	And it shines through in the book that the thing, it's almost an admiration.
	Like he was amazed by the scale of Lenin's humorlessness.
	And it was almost like a 700-page ode to a person who was incapable of laughing, right?
	And that feels a little bit like what we're dealing with, with a lot of this new ideology.
	You just can't believe that in every direction you look, there's no possibility of any kind of relief or looseness or anything.
	It just gets tighter and tighter.
	It's fascinating.
	Also, it's weird because young people by their nature want to joke and they don't.
	I don't know where it leads, honestly.
	It's strange.
	Well, so I have an evolutionary take on this, which is that humor is actually a mechanism whereby we discover what hangs out on the fringes of our consciousness.
	You know, if somebody makes a joke and it reveals, if people laugh and it's organic laughter rather than that stupid applause that you see people do these days when somebody makes a joke, if they earnestly laugh, you can actually tell That they know the truth of that statement, right?
	And it may not be a straightforward truth, but there's some truth in it, and they know it, and you know it, and now you both know that each other knows it, right?
	So, evolutionarily, humor is like a mechanism for exploring things that are at the fringes of consciousness, often because they're a bit uncomfortable, right?
	So it's like signing on to an acknowledgement that, yeah, we all know that thing is true, right?
	Um, and so the flip side of this is if your movement is composed at least at the level of what it claims of pure nonsense, A, humor is almost inconceivable because humor would reveal that you know how feeble these arguments are or you don't and that makes you even more of a fool.
	Right.
	Right?
	So the point is we're not going to even allow joking because if we allow joking That'd be it.
	Movement would be over in an hour, you know?
	Yeah.
	So that's the frightening thing is that the humorlessness kind of goes along with a power grab that cannot afford to be candid, cannot afford for anybody to be candid about what they see and know about how it functions and what it's after.
	Yeah, you're absolutely right, but I think it's a huge weakness though of this thing because people just They just can't go for long without laughing at something, you know?
	And this movement has gotten progressively more and more constrained and paranoid and unable to have any kind of sense of humor about itself.
	Even like commercial humor, like the Saturday Night Live version of humor, Um, it was bad enough when basically all the jokes that you saw on television were Putin coming down the chimney or some other thing, but there's like an overt, leaden political message attached to it.
	But you don't even really get that anymore.
	Like there's, there's just not even an attempt.
	And, um, you know, people want something, eventually somebody is going to be brave and funny enough to come up And just rip through it the way Richard Pryor did.
	There's going to be just a genius, a Lenny Bruce type, who's going to take advantage of this constricted atmosphere.
	And I think that's going to be devastating to it.
	Once the right comedian mixes with this material, which is amazing material, it's going to be devastating.
	Yeah, I think we can say two things for sure.
	One, you just said, which is that somebody is going to figure out how to do this and it's going to be devastating.
	And the other thing we can say is that it's going to be Dave Chappelle.
	Yes, that's true.
	That's true.
	Yeah, you can tell.
	I mean, he's the perfect person to do it.
	And he's uncancellable.
	So yeah, I think we await with interest to see how he, but you know, he's going to have to commit to it when he does it too, you know what I mean?
	It's going to have to be an ongoing like slugfest.
	Personally, I'm hoping that his August calendar is clear for that job because I don't know how much longer we can hold out.
	Absolutely.
	Yep.
	All right.
	So before we close this out, is there anything you think we should cover?
	I mean, I'd love to have you back anytime you want to come, but anything you think we should cover today?
	No, I think we went through most of it.
	I mean, honestly, I was going to ask you a few things because I'm starting to sort of look at a lot of the origins of this stuff.
	And, you know, one thing I'm really interested in, Um, is like the proliferation of administrative staff and what, when that started, like, why do you think that that happened?
	Like, so I've had some people suggest to me that universities suddenly became awash in money because of guaranteed student loans or whatever it was.
	Like, where did all these extra people come from?
	And, uh, what's, What's worth looking at if I was, you know, going to try to look at the origins of that?
	Yeah, I think George Bridges actually taught me the answer to this.
	And I'm trying to figure out whether, you know, he and I had a very adversarial relationship, but it involved a certain number of private conversations in which there was more candor than you might imagine.
	And, you know, he was the worst offender in this regard.
	He brought in, he Massively increased the size of the administration of the college.
	And he boosted some people to positions of power who weren't qualified for it, didn't bring anything to the table that would make you want them in those positions.
	And it became clear that in some sense, he was building a structure that was self-protected.
	A, you know, you can imagine you take somebody who, you know, I don't know, maybe they're earning, you know, fifty thousand dollars a year and suddenly you get them a job where they're earning a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year right that's going to be a loyal person when your malfeasance come to the surface that's somebody who's going to stand by you right um so i think the general rubric was in george's case
	he was solving a george problem and the george problem was he was going to do some stuff that was going to put him in jeopardy He needed people who could be sacrificed, and a large number of them, so that as people came for him, you know, heads could roll and they wouldn't be his.
	And he needed to have more votes than he had, and the way you get more votes is you get people who, you know, will Clarence Thomas to your Antonin Scalia, right?
	So, I don't know how general it is, but I guess I would say, game theoretically, I think the basic answer is Much of what goes wrong goes wrong because individuals are serving a narrow individual purpose and we look at the collective consequence of this and imagine that an institutional purpose is being solved.
	Right, right.
	Interesting.
	So that's my best guess.
	The other thing is, actually this is something At some point I had dinner, Heather and I did, with Jordan Peterson and he said that he had seen this phenomenon, which I'm sure you're going to be as familiar with as anybody, which is that you have an institution and it's constructed to solve a problem, but over time it evolves to continue to exist.
	That becomes its purpose.
	And so lots of things that are designed to accomplish some goal subtly shift to actually not solving the problem because that would be reason to go extinct.
	Right.
	And rather than do that, they come up with self-justifying explanations for the need to have them go on forever.
	And you know, you can even hear this in this movement.
	about how, you know, this contradiction.
	White supremacy is a terrible, critical problem in the United States that requires us to address it immediately and in profound ways.
	It's also an incurable problem, so there's really no point in addressing it.
	We will be doing this forever.
	Right.
	It's a lifetime commitment.
	It's a permanent job.
	It's the goal we will never reach.
	So, anyway, I think this, um...
	This tendency for things that have gained power, gained access to resources, to come up with reasons that they need to continue doing what they're doing, has more to say about why these administrations become bloated.
	Now why it suddenly took off, clearly there was some sort of a tipping point or phase transition that gave whatever it is that wants to create more administration the power to do so.
	And it's a little harder to spot what that might be.
	But somewhere in that neighborhood.
	The game theory is happening at the individual level, and the analysis is happening at the collective level, and so they don't meet.
	Right, right.
	Neither of the twins shall meet.
	Right.
	Interesting.
	Well, cool!
	Brett, thank you so much for having me on.
	I really appreciate it.
	Well, I really appreciate you coming on.
	I do want to ask you just straight out.
	Sure.
	Will you join us, Unity 2020?
	You indicated that you liked the plan, but frankly the problem is many people don't know what to make of it, and for Matt Taibbi to say that he sees what it is, understands its importance, and supports it would, I think, go a long way to convincing people that this is This is not performance art.
	This is actually an attempt to write our course and preserve the Republic.
	And, you know, the most serious of people take it seriously.
	No, I love the idea.
	I signed the petition on the way this morning or so.
	Great.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Well, thank you so much.
	We really appreciate that.
	And, you know, I'm already looking forward to our next conversation.
	Absolutely.
	Let me know anytime.
	And you should come on our show sometime, too.
	I would love to.
	Before we sign off completely, people can find you on Twitter at your... Yeah, I'm at mtaibi, and that's T-A-I-B-B-I.
	My site is taibi.substack.com, and then I'm at rollingstone.com.
	Alright, now I would personally add that I have signed up for your site and I've been blown away by the quality of your writing and the clarity of your thinking and, you know, there are a limited number of dollars that you can throw at signing up for stuff, but this is highly worth it.
	I would put it at the top of my list.
	Outstanding.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	Normally, I wouldn't be mentioning that, but in this climate, I actually do need the subscriber support.
	So thanks very much.
	Well, let's not be embarrassed about that.
	This is something I've learned a bit from my brother, which is, look, if you want this kind of stuff to happen in an environment where institutions are toppling at the rate they are, then you gotta support it.
	And the fact is, you know, you have three kids, am I right?
	Yep, that's right, yes.
	You've got a family, you have to support them, they have to come first, and yet you're courageously exploring this stuff as you have been for decades, so, you know, we can all feel good about supporting you, and I certainly do, and I know that my viewers will as well.
	Outstanding.
	Thanks so much, man, I appreciate it, and we'll talk again soon.
	Yeah, thanks, Matt.
	Alright.

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