The Right Wages Its Own Cancel Culture War: Lee Fang, Thomas Chatterton Williams, and Leighton Woodhouse on the State of Civil Discourse and More
The right has unleashed a cancel culture of its own in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination. Lee Fang, Thomas Chatterton Williams and Leighton Woodhouse discuss the state of civil discourse and threats to free speech in the US. --------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
I'm a journalist based in San Francisco, and I'm your host of System Update.
Glenn Greenwald is out of town.
Last week, the conservative commentator and organizer Charlie Kirk was brutally assassinated as he was speaking in Utah on a college campus.
This event has caused a ripple effect in our politics for good reason.
Much of the conservative movement has grieved.
The Trump administration has ordered flags flown at half mast, and he's been treated almost as a member of the administration or as a dignitary with a quasi-state funeral.
But there is also a more sinister element at foot.
Within moments of this assassination, there were calls, demands on the conservative right for retribution, for a destruction of civil liberties and a crackdown on political dissent.
We now see similar rhetoric and a demand from JD Vance, from President Donald Trump, from Pam Bondi and others to use this tragedy as an opportunity to crack down on Democrats, on political donors, on left-wing donors to magazines and other forms of media, and an attempt to crack down on what they describe as hate speech,
a form of censorship that for many years, people, including Charlie Kirk, identified as a slippery slope towards government censorship.
Who defines hate speech?
Who defines what is harmful speech?
These are the debates we've had over the last 10 years as the left has used this cudgel of censorship in the name of protecting the public from dangerous or harmful speech.
I want to dedicate this episode to a discussion of cancel culture and the kind of evolving politics coming out of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
We've seen a demand for a national database, the creation of a national database of individuals who are accused of making offensive remarks around the Charlie Kirk assassination, celebrating it or somehow not dignifying it in the proper way, and a push to have these individuals fired, or in some cases, not even these individuals who made these remarks, sometimes in private, sometimes in private chats,
but their family members fired or ostracized from their community.
There's a push from Stephen Miller to utilize the resources of the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security to crack down on political opponents on the far left or on Democrats.
The rhetoric is hazy, but the direction that they are going does not seem like it even reflects the facts on the ground.
We don't know yet.
And there's been no evidence presented that the accused killer of Charlie Kirk, Tyler Robinson, was a member of any coherent political organization or that he had any connection to National Democrats or left-wing donors.
That hasn't stopped many from demands and a push to investigate and to engage in McCarthyite hearings that look into National chat platforms, Discord, Twitch, social media platforms in an attempt to view these outlets that allow normal people to game, to communicate,
Democrat Push for Social Media Regulation00:02:31
to broadcast their views or engage in journalism as a dangerous form of radicalization.
In many ways, this harkens back to the last five years of violations of civil liberties and government overreach.
During COVID and during the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, we saw Democrats using their power in government to demand investigations of Amazon and Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms as dangerous platforms for misinformation and hate speech.
We saw Democrats pushing to have the FBI and other arms of the U.S. government, including the Department of Homeland Security, infiltrate into major online platforms so that they could nudge various forms of censorship, whether outright bans of users accused of hate speech or misinformation, or the shadow bands of figures that they accused of spreading harmful speech.
If we look across the landscape today, that same process is being replicated at lightning speed.
We're seeing a variety of social platforms targeted by congressional committees, the Department of Homeland Security, and others.
And we see the return of cancel culture as hundreds are being targeted for engaging in inflammatory speech that the right accuses of being hateful or disrespectful in some way.
To talk about this topic and others, I have two guests today.
One is Leighton Woodhouse, a frequent commentator on these issues.
He was one of the original Twitter files reporters.
He's written a lot about cancel culture, about censorship, and the social media platforms.
He'll be joining me as well as Thomas Chatterton Williams, an author who spoke out against cancel culture and wokeness during the summer of 2020, who has a new book on the subject.
He'll join us as well.
Stay tuned.
Our next guest is Leighton Woodhouse, a regular on system update and someone that I podcast with regularly.
Narrative vs. Reality00:13:25
We host our own podcasts on our respective substacks.
Layton is a former union organizer.
He's a journalist.
He's a writer.
Layton, great to see you again.
Great to see you too.
Well, I want to get into a lot of different topics about this kind of sprawling, all the kind of sprawling issues attached to the Charlie Kirk assassination.
I mean, this has completely dominated the media.
It's kind of rippled through our politics.
But first, before we get into kind of the meta issues, just the prosecution, the FBI's role, the way the media is covered, the motivations, even the suspect, it just seems like it's been bungled over and over again.
We haven't seen many credible reports.
And now finally, the attorney general has put together a prosecuting document.
Could you talk a little bit about what we know versus what we don't know?
Yeah, well, we know very little.
I mean, at this point, what, it's been five days since the crime.
It seems strange that we know as little as we do.
That said, you know, when the authorities claim to know things in the first opening days of the investigation, they were wrong and in the process maligned a lot of innocent people.
So maybe it's good that this information is slow rolling out, but it seems from the charging documents that, I mean, from my opinion, in my opinion, it doesn't seem like the investigation knows all that much either.
Or it's just that the facts just are murky and not a clear-cut narrative.
We've been, you know, both sides are exploiting this.
I mean, particularly the right is insinuating that this guy was a far leftist.
That seems certainly credible in terms of his, insofar as his political motivations were clearly the motivating factor here.
But he also doesn't seem to be any kind of extremist at all.
Meanwhile, the left was pretending he was a Groyper.
That doesn't seem to be borne out whatsoever from any of the evidence.
Just to kind of lay this out for the audience, I had to explain to some family members and friends over the weekend what a Groyper is.
And I'm not even sure if I have a great definition of the term, but this is basically an online subculture that is far right, that kind of is associated with some kind of like chat forums with 4chan that believes that kind of the existing far right is phony and that they need to troll other conservatives for being insufficiently right wing.
But that's probably not even fully representative of it.
I think a lot of the narrative rested on the fact that Nicolas Fuentes had gone after Charlie Kirk publicly just on those grounds that he was too moderate.
And so the theory was that this guy was a follower of Fuentes, I suppose, or at least kind of within his valence.
And the only evidence of that was that, as you mentioned, that Fuentes was a critic of Charlie Kirk, really kind of got his start trolling Charlie Kirk.
So people assumed motivation there.
And then the other shred of evidence that there was any connection between the suspect Tyler Robinson and this movement was a single Facebook picture from his mother claiming that he had dressed up for Halloween one year, imitating a Pepe meme photo that kind of references the Slavic squat that people in Eastern Europe dress in Adidas and squat while smoking cigarettes.
Something not particularly political, either right or left-wing, but on Blue Sky and on liberal Twitter, there's a lot of, aha, gotcha.
This is a Groyper.
This is someone that uses Pepe the frog.
Therefore, they're a far-right group, you know, or a member of a far-right group that it's not one of us.
It's not a left-winger.
Right, right.
So I think, I mean, clearly there are some online elements to, I mean, that's obvious, right?
He etched these memes into his bullets and acknowledged, you know, in his conversation with his roommate, he referred to them as memes and seemed to be indicating that they were meaningless and was some kind of a decoy.
At least that was my interpretation.
So I think that there's little that can be read into the etchings on the bullets from what it seems other than that he was steeped in online culture.
So then, of course, you're led to this narrative that he must have been radicalized within these within these chat groups he was in.
He was on Discord.
He had a Twitch account, et cetera.
And that doesn't seem credible to me.
I was kind of trying to run that down.
I know very little about gaming, but I talked to some folks over the last 24 hours who know much more than I do.
It seems to me as if, you know, Discord is a place where it's like Slack.
It's like it's not a public-facing social media platform.
It's a bunch of discrete rooms, essentially.
And so it's very hard to cast any sort of general statement about the culture on Discord, but each room presumably is much different.
The gaming ones in particular, I think that there's a case to be made that they actually have a moderating influence on politics because most of the users are focused on gaming.
And if people start getting into fights over politics, that becomes a problem for the community.
And usually the moderators won't stand for it.
At least this is according to somebody I spoke to today.
So I question the idea that he was radicalized in Discord or any other platform.
That seems unlikely to me, you know, given the scant evidence we have, which all paints the picture, which to me is perplexing, of a guy who is sane.
He's clearly lucid in the exchange that he has with his roommate in the charging documents.
He doesn't appear to have been some lonely incel type.
I think he was popular, well loved by his family.
And he doesn't appear to be any ideological extremist, unless you're going to define that circularly and say anybody who assassinates somebody over their political views is therefore an extremist.
But when you look at all the other sort of indices of it, it doesn't look to me as if he was calling Trump a fascist and was constantly tweeting and writing about Trump all the time.
Not that case at all.
He seems like a fairly apolitical normie who didn't like what Kirk had to say about transgender people.
That's what it seems like to me so far.
Right.
So political in the sense that he didn't like Charlie Kirk's comments in the context of politics, but there isn't a single piece of evidence connecting Robinson to a movement, to a group, to even expressing any overt political views or ideology.
Ken Klippenstein obtained some of the chats, the kind of broader chats.
So, you know, we have a little bit more of a view into his private life and not a single message about MAGA or Trump or Biden or the Democrats for that matter, except for kind of just noting the news around the impeachment or the election.
I mean, just nothing with any intent or belief behind it.
So, you know, that leaves, as you mentioned, the kind of speculation around being a political terrorist just kind of stranded there.
What do we have left?
It's just, you know, actually, you know, you mentioned maybe he wasn't lonely.
You know, we have a, it's a, it's a, perhaps maybe a form of loneliness that is common today that young men in particular, but really people all across the board, don't socialize in person anymore.
They don't go to church.
They don't go to parties.
You look at Gen Z and Gen Alpha statistics where they're not going out even to the movie theater anymore, but they are finding friendship online in chat rooms and on video games.
So, you know, he was, he had maybe a large number of friends in the virtual world.
It's not clear if he had a ton in the real world.
Well, he liked to go camping.
We know that from Ken Klippenstein's reporting, and there's a picture of him.
He's out with friends camping.
So it seems like he touched grass, quote unquote.
Also, you know, I agree with you, but I also feel like this is a thing that we do in the discourse where some heinous murder happens, school shooting, whatever, and we pathologize the entire culture of a given generation, which, you know, besides the fact that we've done that a million times and we used to do it in the 90s with like regular console video games, et cetera.
It doesn't really explain anything because obviously everybody from that generation is not out carrying out political assassination.
So the question is, what sets this guy apart from millions and millions of other young people who live the exact same lifestyle he lives?
And that's where I can't find any kind of purchase on this.
And the thing that actually I find to be maybe the most disturbing explanation is that he is actually a normie.
And this is a new phenomenon because I think we had the same kind of like head-scratching bafflement around Luigi Mangioni, who also was like, you know, famously good looking, popular, charismatic, smart guy who didn't seem to have, who had heterodox politics, didn't seem to be an ideological extremist in any way.
So like, is this a phenomenon?
His book lists, you know, the kind of when internet or journalists kind of observers are looking for a motive, they're scavenging social media and especially looking for the types of content that someone reads.
Of course, that cannot be dispositive or, you know, fully reflect on someone's character or motives.
But Luigi's book list was online.
And, you know, it's just like a perfect set of 10 or 20 very moderate mainstream books.
Some actually very conservative leaning.
But yeah.
Yeah, I remember being like almost like it just looked like from the New York Times like year of review.
Yeah, not the anarchist cookbook or some type of, you know, Bronze Age pervert, one of these kind of extremist tomes, just kind of normal books.
And yet he engaged in something that was still some type of political act.
You know, it was meant to send a statement around a policy and his manifesto, although a little bit disjointed, was still fairly coherent in what he was trying to argue.
Yeah.
So like, is that is that a new phenomenon that we need to look at?
And again, I'm not trying to like meme this narrative into existence.
We just, we have, there is no reliable narrative, but it does seem to me like if you can't fit this guy, just like you can't fit Mangioni into these easy boxes of, you know, alienated youth like the Columbine killers or just straight up insane like Jared Loffrin, whatever his name was, or, you know, political extremist,
like somebody who's just like so steeped and intoxicated, brain poisoned in their political ideology.
Like Anders Breivik or a character like that.
Or the guy who tried to kill the Supreme Court justice.
If you can't fit them into any of those boxes and they just appear to be normal, then what kind of, what are we dealing with in the broader culture?
Are we dealing with a normalization of these kinds of political crimes?
That also doesn't seem to really withstand scrutiny because, of course, this is exceptional and people aren't going to risk their lives and their freedom to do to do something.
Like you're not going to go casually kill somebody.
It's going to cost you your entire life.
So I don't know what to make of it, but I think that it doesn't fit any of the given narratives, which speaks to the overreaction of the Trump administration, which is now trying to fit it into a preconceived narrative in order to justify a massive crackdown on the left.
Yeah, they really wasted no time.
Really, when the FBI was still releasing the wrong names of suspects, you know, in the middle of last week, there were prominent Republicans who were, you know, I think justifiably going through deep grief and anguish, but they were really wasting no time in instrumentalizing and politicizing this tragedy to go after their political enemies.
Hypocrisy In Free Speech Advocacy00:11:38
And the hypocrisy is just, it's too extreme not to mention.
I mean, it's just incredible that a party that really kind of reformed itself and created a new national identity around anti-cancel culture, around fighting for free speech,
around making sure that people wouldn't be fired or unfairly treated because of their social media posts are now creating a database of 20,000 people who need to be fired because of their posts allegedly mocking or celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.
Many of these posts are not even doing that.
There's some of these posts, if you look at the database of people who are saying, look, I didn't agree with Charlie Kirk's politics, so I'm not going to grieve him.
It's like, okay, that's someone's right.
I mean, I don't share.
Of course, he shouldn't have been killed.
Right.
Yeah, there's, it seems like there's, there's, I've had this argument many times around the cancel culture stuff.
And it just seems like, so first of all, to return to JD Vance, we should just point out this is something that Zed Jelani, our mutual friend, among others, have pointed out that, you know, it was not, what, six months ago or something that JD Vance was tweeting about the guy who was fired from Elon Musk's.
Yeah, actually, I have it in front of me.
Marco Elise, a former space ex and ex-employee, one of the earliest hires to Doge, the cost-cutting department.
He, you know, journalists had discovered his social media where he posted things like, quote, I was racist before it was cool and quote, normalize Indian hate.
JD Vance was very firm, very decisive when he came out and said, we shouldn't reward journalists who are trying to destroy people.
I say bring them back.
And we shouldn't allow stupid social media activity to ruin a kid's life.
And so they rehired him, you know, without an apology, without any backtracking on these comments.
And around this time, JD Vance went to Europe to do this, you know, barn-burning speech decrying European politics and policy around speech, saying, oh, you know, you use the banner of hate speech and disinformation to engage in mass censorship, but this stops now.
You know, the American way is, you know, we're going to use the banner of free speech to, as part of our foreign policy and pressuring the EU not that long ago, back in February, back in March.
And now we have JD Vance guest hosting the Charlie Kirk show saying, call them out, call people's employers for social media posts, have them fired.
I mean, this is probably the most extreme reversal.
We could go through many other examples.
But I mean, to have the vice president giving his stature and just given the absolute intellectual inconsistency here.
Yeah.
So, you know, the arguments that I've had with people online about this, about whether this is cancel culture or not, which I think is not even an argument.
It clearly just is.
You know, the more the argument I kind of respect more is the one in which people just say, well, the left has been doing with us, so we're going to do this to them.
And I find it hypocritical, but at least it's self-consciously hypocritical and it's honest.
I don't agree with it, but there's not much you can argue with it if they're just saying we're going to fight fire with fire.
Although I think it's going to, you know, destroy our country.
And all those of us who don't identify with either of the extremes are the ones who pay the price for their little international wars.
And the other one is that this is not actually cancel culture because what these people are saying is just so much worse than giving an okay sign or whatever microaggressions were committed by the people who were canceled in the past.
And of course they cherry pick out the most extreme, ridiculous examples from 2020.
But those examples do abound.
But in fact, as you point out, you know, many of these people who are being called out and canceled did not celebrate Charlie Kirk's death.
And one could say that criticizing Kirk and saying, well, I think he was a bigot and a vile, hateful racist right after he's assassinated is in poor taste, maybe you could say.
I would push back against that and say, yes, it would be in poor taste if it was not the number one story in the country and that the administration was clearly making political hay over.
Then it's like you can have an opinion about the person who's being reported and all of it.
But even if you grant that that person, that those people were, that it was distasteful, distasteful is not a grounds for certain, of course, legally sanctioning people.
But the argument in 2020 was that it wasn't a grounds for socially punishing people, or at least not in kind of the mob justice way that was being done back then.
And it's just the exact same thing over again.
Yeah, I mean, I'm of kind of a divided opinion here.
On the principle of, hey, using someone's social media to browbeat them and cut their employment, you know, over a political expression, I'm against.
There are some cases where it's a little bit more hazy, like for a journalist or someone who works in the public sphere where social media is part of their personal, their professional identity and what they say matters.
You can make the argument that, okay, if you're violating basic professional standards in journalism, it's part of the job.
Your speech and expression is part of it.
Where it feels both unprincipled and very nasty and cruel is to go after folks who are posting on their private chats, private Instagram, private social media.
That's not part of their profession.
The free press has a great piece where there was a social media mob that got someone fired from a Texas roadhouse who not because of anything they said, but because of something their spouse said.
We were seeing so many random blue-collar workers, people who work in the trades or work at restaurants or what have you.
Okay, someone might have an extreme viewpoint that cuts either right-wing or left-wing.
But why does that matter if you're a waitress at a restaurant?
I mean, it's just absurd.
It seems like it's just vengeful.
It's just designed to hurt.
And I guess hurt people hurt others.
I get that there's a lot of anguish around the Kirk assassination, but it's just incredibly unprincipled, especially in light of the last 10 years where, you know, I'm just, you know, it's worth just kind of remarking on some of these examples.
Matt Walsh, popular conservative podcaster and social media influencer.
This is in 2016.
Seems that if you pretend to be a, quote, free speech advocate, you should always oppose anyone getting fired over a controversial tweet.
Matt Walsh, this week, it is good that these people lose their jobs.
It is good that they are shamed and humiliated and must live with the repercussions for the rest of their lives.
Yada, yada, these are barbarian savages, et cetera.
Free speech does not mean that we should act with anything but revulsion and disgust.
Look, what's the principle here?
And there's also the argument that I've seen online and that, okay, these are private.
This is the cancel mobs are private individuals expressing their free speech.
These individuals are privately employed.
No private employer is obligated to associate with someone with repulsive views.
Okay, sure.
But then we see people like member of Congress, Clay Higgins, Republican of Louisiana, who this is just two years ago.
He sponsored H.R. 140, Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act, which would prevent the federal government from using their positions and resources from pressuring private companies to silence people's free speech.
And he released this quote saying the American people have the right to speak their truths and federal bureaucrats should not be dictating what is or isn't true.
We must uphold the First Amendment as our founding fathers intended.
Well, here's Clay Higgins responding to the cancel culture mob.
I'm going to use my congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate an immediate ban for of life, for life, of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Cook.
This is not even celebrate, but just belittled.
Someone who might disagree with the kind of nearly state, the lying in state kind of government ceremony around honoring Kirk's life.
So, you know, again, there's many, many examples of this.
I mean, obviously it's clear cut that the government can't go after you for your political expression, no matter how distasteful.
But also, I want to push back, I'm not saying that you're making this case, but the idea that these are people saying really vile things and therefore, you know, it may be their free speech, but it's really gross.
And so they should suffer the social consequences for it is true in some cases of people who literally were celebrating his death.
And there's no shortage of those.
There were plenty of those.
But for the people who said, look, the guy couldn't have been shot, but he was a racist.
I'm sorry, that's not vile speech.
That's just political speech.
And it's the same when people on the right vilify, I don't know, Linda Sarsour and say that she's a communist agitator or whatever.
It's mean, it's rude, it's probably inaccurate, but it is not, but it's completely inbounds political speech.
Charlie Kirk, whatever your opinion of him, and I don't have a strong opinion of him one way or the other, but he wasn't a saint.
He was a public figure.
He said some incendiary things and profited off of it.
And he also said some very nice things and like, you know, has some very cordial conversations with people who disagreed with him.
Both of those things are true.
He was an influencer.
That's what he does.
Of course, he didn't deserve to be assassinated.
He didn't deserve to be punished in any way.
It was his First Amendment constitutional rights.
It's disgusting what happened to him.
But let's not pretend that disagreeing with him or even expressing strong contempt and distaste for him is somehow like beyond like whether or not it's legally punishable.
It's beyond polite speech somehow.
This is normal political speech that a lot of these people are.
These are normal people who are dental assistants and waitresses have engaged in and are being punished for.
That's right.
And Charlie Kirk, to his credit, has been very vocal on the free speech issue.
The one time I went on his radio program, we briefly talked about it among other issues.
He has a tweet that's kind of gone viral in the last few days as people point out the hypocrisy of many of the Kirk supporters in the government and elsewhere.
Pretext for Surveillance00:06:50
Here's Kirk last year in May.
Hate speech does not exist legally in America.
There's ugly speech.
There's gross speech.
There's evil speech.
And all of it is protected by the First Amendment.
Keep America free.
Why is where to live by?
But, you know, it just, it kind of just, all this gets back to the human condition that, you know, those in power, they see a moment of trauma.
They see a moment of crisis and they see an opportunity to suppress their political opponents to kind of get their agenda passed or to harm people that they oppose in the political realm.
We certainly saw an ugly side of people come out during COVID with the left attempting to censor their political opposition with certainly around the George Floyd uprising or protests or riots in summer of 2020.
Now we see a similar dynamic.
It's just there's a different tinge to it, although I think the human condition is similar.
To see Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Donald Trump himself coming out and saying, look, we're going without any evidence so far that there's any connection to Democratic billionaires or Democratic institutions or organizations.
We've seen the chat logs so far, no connection, but they are quickly releasing their agenda here.
Stephen Miller saying we're going to marshal the influence, the resources of the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department to go after the far left.
Trump saying, name-checking the Democratic billionaire George Soros, saying he wanted to consider RICO charges against him and to investigate him and put him potentially in prison as a terrorist supporter.
JD Vance name-checking a very bad editorial in the nation saying that people should not grieve over Charlie Kirk, saying that, okay, rather than just disagreeing with this editorial or condemning it or debating the issues that are raised in that editorial, JD Vance saying, well, the nation's nonprofit arm gets funding from George Soros and the Ford Foundation, and we're coming for your donors.
Which you mentioned, the nation denies that that's even the case, that they're getting funding from those two sources.
Well, you know, I don't know the exact, I haven't looked at the documents myself, but I think JD Vance was referring to the nonprofit arm, which might, but the magazine itself might not.
Right.
Like a lot of institutions has a for-profit and nonprofit arm.
Regardless, the intent here seems a little bit sinister, right?
Like it's not to say that Democrats and the left haven't investigated conservative donors and potentially had a political motivation there, but this all-of-government, all-of-government attempt to just immediately go after and fairly openly go after the political opposition and threaten to put people in prison who had no connection to this, at least no known connection.
Yeah.
I mean, this seems like something different.
And for those who have no sympathy for the media or the NGO industrial complex, which I would say what you should have is concern for the rule of law, not whether the victims are worthy or unworthy.
But also, this is a pretext for going after the tech platforms, which means going after you, means going after the public.
I mean, there was talk about investigating Discord, Discord.
Again, these are private chats.
This isn't like, it is bad enough if you're monitoring Facebook or Twitter where you're announcing your opinions to the world.
Even worse, if you're talking about essentially private chat rooms where you're expressing opinions behind a virtual closed door, this is always the pretext as it was on the left.
You know, it's like we shouldn't forget that the left, the cancel culture stuff on the left with COVID ended up becoming state policy with the Biden administration jawboning the social media platforms to censor people and kick them off for expressing dissent over COVID vaccines and COVID origins.
This is just that, but in a much more flagrant way.
This isn't backdoor jawboning.
This is just doing it straight out in the open, or at least what's being threatened to be done.
This stuff is always a pretext for more surveillance of social media and of the internet.
And I feel like that's what's right around the corner, which means more surveillance of you, not just the Ford Foundation or Soros or the Nation magazine.
You know, one thing that I've reported on a great deal during the Biden administration was that there was a constant push to break encryption, right?
Encryption allows us to chat privately.
We can message each other on Signal, on WhatsApp.
We can go into private rooms and Discord.
And, you know, barring a court order, the government can't just be constantly monitoring everything we say to our friends and family, to our colleagues, or to people we work with in politics or the media.
There was an attempt that there were reports saying that, look, encryption is how disinformation spreads.
You know, the government needs to be more alert about the dangers of encryption.
Same with hate speech.
There were liberals who were pushing to force tech companies to provide a backdoor to encrypted platforms because of the danger of hate speech.
And then finally, there was the Discord leaker from two and a half years ago who took all those military and intelligence reports around U.S. government surveillance of foreign governments and dumped them onto a private Discord server.
And you had Mark Werner and others on the Senate Intelligence Committee saying, well, look, maybe we need to think about the ability for these private chat rooms to have any encryption.
And I think we dodged a bullet because so far, we haven't seen any new laws passed that would break encryption like that has been attempted in the UK and much of Europe.
But I got to say, looking at the media coverage the last few days, reading the tea leaves of what the government is already saying, I think this threat is completely back on the table.
Yeah.
And I would say, you know, regardless of what your politics are, because right now it's the Trump administration, someday a Democrat will be in office again and they'll have the same tools at their disposal to go after a different population.
Consensus And Excess00:15:39
I have no relation to this company, no investments, but switch to Signal.
People should be communicating by Signal.
Like in this kind of an environment, it's just, it doesn't, WhatsApp is owned by Facebook.
It's not as, it's somewhat secure, but not nearly as secure.
People should be doing their communications on Signal.
Well, I second that.
All right, Layton, I just want to say thanks for joining System Update.
Good to see you.
Thank you.
Good to see you too.
Our next guest is Thomas Chatterton Williams.
Thomas is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
He's the author of several books, including Self-Portrait and Black and White.
His most recent book, which you can buy now, is Summer of Our Discontent about the 2020 Cultural Revolution and how it reshaped society.
Thomas, thanks for joining System Update.
It's so nice to be with you, Lee.
Great to see you.
Well, could you first just talk a little bit about what motivated you to write this latest book?
I was thinking about all of the kind of upheaval that we lived through in 2020, in 2021.
And I started writing the proposal then, you know, this moment I thought was a hinge point in which there was a kind of before and after.
And the book was originally titled Nothing Was the Same.
And I thought that Wokeness, the Great Awokening had achieved a kind of lasting victory.
And I'm really glad that it took me 18 months beyond the due date to complete the book because I was able to see that there was no such lasting victory in the culture war.
And in fact, I was able to anticipate by the end of the writing process the kind of enormous backlash to the Great Awokening that we're living through now.
So it started with a kind of critique and frustration with the social justice movement that had really dominated institutions and culture between, say, 2012 and 2023.
And it's ended on a note of realizing that that was a moment of excess that begat a new moment of what I think looks like even greater excess and authoritarianism.
You write about how this wokeness or whatever you want to call it really tested our commitment to liberalism, small L liberalism, this kind of enlightenment ideas.
And it's trickled into not just media and political activism, but artistic creativity and to education and to employer-employee relations and certainly policing.
Could you talk a little bit about this profound impact of this movement?
Well, you know, the idea that politics and political disagreements are the only framework through which we can see all of our kind of public and private lives really, I think, gained ground in this moment.
If you're talking about, you know, I'm really tracking it between, say, like the death of Trayvon Martin.
And I would say, you know, I really see an end date on it around October 7th, 2023.
I think that that was, you know, when the culture shifted again, and then it was firmly closed with the re-election of Donald Trump.
But, you know, there was this idea that everything could be reduced, that, you know, everything could be fit into a neat binary: oppressor, oppressed, colonizer, indigenous, racist, anti-racist, and that we could just identify what was morally clear.
We could see it clearly, and we could force our opponents to see things the way we understand them, or we could permanently silence them and drive them from the public sphere.
This kind of oversimplified idea of the way that I think human life works is like the great achievement of the woke era.
And it's really allowed a kind of perverse mirror image of it to either infect the right or to be really cynically utilized by the right.
You know, I've just been amazed in what has happened in the past, say, week even with the kind of open abandonment of, you know, a kind of disagreement with censoriousness, with cancel culture.
The right is openly celebrating all that they decried that had been going on for the past 12 years or so.
Let's talk a little bit about that.
You recently wrote a short essay, commentary for The Atlantic, noting that there's this gleeful attempt to fire anyone celebrating or being perceived as celebrating the Charlie Kirk assassination.
Many of the people who have been identified in this kind of cancellation campaign are not even celebrating.
They're simply saying that they didn't sympathize or agree with Charlie Kirk's viewpoints or that they would not pay homage to him.
That's kind of all been clustered together with extremists who are celebrating his death.
And you open the piece by pointing out that in February, the very influential conservative activist Chris Ruffo put down a flag post basically arguing that no more would social media posts, quote, no longer should they be grounds for automatic social and professional annihilation.
That was only a few months ago.
Now he's leading this campaign, or at least among the leaders of this campaign, calling for the mass firings of mostly liberals, people on the left and extreme left, based on social media posts.
What does that say to you?
It says to me that the principle was never dearly held, that it was an expedient way of protesting when there was less power available on the right.
But once the sword of censorship was available to Rufo and his allies and people in government power now, they didn't have the ability to resist or they didn't want to resist using the weapon.
And that piece that I wrote in The Atlantic was actually in reference to something else that had happened before the death of Charlie Kirk.
That was about Rufo's campaign to get fired, Doreen St. Felix, a staff writer of the New Yorker, because she wrote about Sidney Sweeney in a way that kind of excited the right.
And then there was a kind of cancel culture always or tends to operate with this desire to then to identify a kind of transgression and then dig through the wrongdoers past for further evidence of wrongthink or wrong speak.
And so they go back 10 years to when St. Felix is fresh out of college and find kind of stupid and I would say even racist tweets.
But that she posted 10 years ago before she was even in her current job.
And then there's this kind of online pile on and campaign to try to force the employer to terminate the wrongdoer's livelihood.
And so it's just classic textbook cancel culture.
And the piece was done and happened to publish right after this horrific, truly horrific assassination in Utah.
The piece comes out and it's one of those situations where people look at the headline and they deduce what the piece is about.
And so everybody was arguing about the piece, including Rufo himself, in the context of this new and refreshed call to censor speech around Kirk's assassination, even though that was not something that the piece tackled.
But I've been amazed.
And even today, just before we're talking, Vice President Vance gave a kind of astonishing address while hosting Charlie Kirk's guest hosting Charlie Kirk's program, asking Americans to inform on each other if they hear someone even speaking in a way that seems to celebrate or make light of Kirk's assassination.
He's asking Americans to relay that information to those people's employers.
It's one of the most hair-raising things I've ever heard an elected official say in my lifetime.
You were also part of an effort to kind of champion the principle of free speech in 2020 in the midst of this mass cancel culture of people fired for making the okay symbol that was associated, I think, wrongly with the far right or with white supremacy, people accused of wrongthink in their workplaces and on university campuses.
If you look back at the people who associated with this Harper's letter on free speech and some of the kind of affiliated efforts to stand up for this principle, it seems like some of those folks are completely silent now in this kind of campaign of censorship we've seen over the last year.
We've seen dozens of student groups shut down on university campuses for criticizing Israel or expressing pro-Palestinian sentiment.
We've seen movie cancellations.
We've seen people fired from their jobs for posting free Palestine or posting the Palestinian flag.
We've seen students who are here lawfully on green cards arrested and dragged into vans and put into some of the most draconian ICE facilities in Louisiana and Texas, at least one of whom simply for writing an opinion column calling for nonviolent protests of Israel.
And as you mentioned, the Sweeney phenomenon and now the firings around Kirk, we've seen example after example over the last year and a half of conservative-led cancel culture campaigns or censorship campaigns.
Are you concerned that some of the folks who were standing for free speech in 2020 were fair weather supporters of the principle?
Very much so.
It's actually been astonishing how difficult it is for, I think, even people of good faith to maintain a kind of consistent position on free expression and viewpoint diversity.
It seems to be something that most humans really are not fully in favor of when the rubber hits the road on issues or groups that they particularly care about.
That's not to say all.
There are many people who have been exemplary, people like George Packer, who was one of the leaders of organizing and writing the letter.
Yasha Monk, there are multiple people.
I think you, Glenn, are people who consistently defend free expression.
And I can't think of an example of coming down on the side of repression.
But it seems that a lot of people always have a kind of point at which they see us an exception.
And my issue is not like that issue.
And I've been amazed at how many people identify speaking in a way that might make light of someone's even like terrible murder as a line that you can't go beyond with speech.
But that strikes me as strange.
It just came out of thin air suddenly.
Like before last week, I had never heard that argument being so widely held.
And now all of a sudden, that has become the bright line that everybody says a new consensus has to be formed around.
But it's never been the case.
I mean, when Martin Luther King was assassinated, there was widespread celebration about that.
And, you know, there was widespread, quite callous talk online and in person after Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown were killed.
I mean, on and on and on.
George Floyd, there was not unanimous respect paid for the dead after George Floyd.
I mean, this new notion that is coming from the very highest levels of government down that one may not say even offensive things about the dead, it's crazy.
And you also mentioned, you know, points of vehement disagreement on international affairs when it comes to Israel and Palestine.
I mean, I think we should all be very concerned about this.
And it does seem to me that there's a very small and smaller than I would have thought a few years ago group of thought leaders and public intellectuals and academics who are fully committed to viewpoint diversity and free expression the way that organizations like FIRE are.
You know, it seems like we don't have many people who are really willing to defend that principle to the end.
It seems like we, for a lot of, there's this cycle of revenge dynamic that leftists, if you certain activists associated with the racial justice movement, whatever you want to call it, there was a sense of betrayal that because of historical grievances that were very real, going back to slavery or Jim Crow and other associated forms of discrimination and oppression in American history, there was a claim that,
hey, you know, civil debate is out the window because of this.
What's the point of liberalism or kind of pluralistic consensus building?
Because we didn't experience that in the past.
And rather than assert themselves and try to create To try to bring us back to these Enlightenment ideas around civil discourse, free speech, equality under the law, individualism, the right is now taking those kind of excesses from the period of woke and using as their own kind of grievance past, saying, oh, because the left stopped caring about free speech, stopped caring about individualism,
stopped caring about the principle around colorblind viewpoints.
Now we are kind of affirmed in our own kind of excesses that there's no point in defending liberalism.
How do you break out of the cycle?
And what do you even think about this kind of analysis of the cycle?
Well, I couldn't agree with you more.
I mean, the pendulum swings and it seems that whenever it swings in the direction of the side that was out of power, there's no real desire to steady it somewhere in the center, somewhere to the left or right of the center.
There's an urge to push it as far as it can go.
And it's really moved to the right in the past six months, I mean, eight months.
You know, it's swung so hard.
And it seems that there's a kind of an exuberance in saying that now is not the time for restraint.
Now is the time for an over-correction that was long overdue.
The foolishness in this kind of thinking, I think, seems evident to me, is that there can really be no permanent culture war victory.
So however long you maintain the pendulum far to the side that you prefer it on, it just guarantees that it will gain more momentum when it swings back the other way and you will eventually reap what you sow.
And so I think that, you know, somehow the only way to break it is that some consensus on the group that is ascendant has to disavow using this weapon that is now in their hands.
Challenging White Supremacy Online00:13:20
And that seems very difficult to do when you have a kind of political leadership that we have.
It's not enough that intellectuals, I think, argue this point.
You actually have to have some very responsible leadership that actually can get into power.
And I don't think that that is possible so long as Donald Trump is the dominant force in American politics.
He won't be forever.
But whoever succeeds him, you know, they would have to do quite a lot to change the tone and tenor of this polarization that we're all enthralled to.
And I don't think it will come in the near term.
You know, you're someone who interacts with students.
You've been a visiting professor and lecturer at a number of institutions.
A lot of the discourse around political violence and just kind of these arguments around free speech and cancel culture centers around universities.
Are the students too left-wing?
Are they too censorious?
Are they too extreme or anti-Semitic?
Are they breeding grounds now for extremism or violence or the celebrations of violence?
Could you just kind of just sort fact through fiction?
When you talk to students, does the discourse, the national discourse, fully reflect in today's culture on university campuses?
You know, I really don't think it does.
With the caveat that I haven't taught everywhere, I've guest lectured at a dozen colleges and I've taught mostly at one small liberal arts college.
So it isn't representative of the whole country.
But I have interacted with a lot of students.
And in my experience, students can be quite politicized and they can have a kind of sense of moral righteousness that is probably characteristic of the young.
But in my own experience, the real kind of ideological rigidity is much more in administration and faculty than it is with students.
you actually run into an enormous amount of group thinking conformity and fear and kind of hostility towards independent thought among faculty and administration.
And you can actually get students, in my experience, much more often to change their minds than you can grown adults whose, you know, whose career incentives rely around not becoming an example.
So I actually feel very optimistic whenever I'm in a room full of 18 to 22 year olds, truly, on any of these campuses.
I feel a lot less optimistic sometimes when I have to interact with some of my peers.
You know, I also just want to, since I have this opportunity to talk to you, talk a little bit about racial identity.
I took a lot away from your memoir, Exploring Your Own Racial Identity.
I'm mixed race as well.
And I kind of had this moment where I spent much of the early the campaign for 2016 and the first years of the first Trump administration battling with my coworkers at media outlets and with other people on the left and far left around kind of dogmatic views around race, race essentialism, and just kind of toning down the temperature.
There was this kind of automatic assertion or reflexive position that any conservative was a white supremacist, that Trump was simply elected through white supremacy and appeals to white identity.
And now I feel like it's less clear because potentially the last 10 years of overreach in terms of kind of chauvinistic view of minority identities, that people have kind of donned the mask of Asian or Latino or black racial nationalism, there's a retrenchment among whites where white supremacy or overt views around white nationalism were truly a fringe ideology,
not to say that it didn't exist.
But now they seem to actually be taking stage.
And perhaps that's a backlash, a backlash, a reflection of this kind of woke sense of identity that we all need to see race and reflect on race and see every kind of conflict through the lens of racial conflict.
What's your view on this?
And how do you view, I mean, this is a broad question, but how do you view this discourse around white supremacy?
Now we see that ICE and others kind of using white supremacist memes and there's kind of a wink and nod that just didn't exist in the first administration, but you don't want to call attention to it in a way that exaggerates its influence as well.
Yeah, it's a very complicated time because also, you know, a point that I try to, I do try to emphasize in the book in some of our discontent is that, you know, we do have to grapple with the reality that 2024 was the least racially polarized election since 1972 and Richard Nixon.
I mean, Trump has objectively grown a multi-ethnic working class kind of non-credentialed, non-professional managerial class coalition of people from all backgrounds and ethnicities who are kind of frustrated and exhausted from the kind of emphasis on racial essentialism and identitarianism that was pushed from the kind of anti-racist woke left side of the cultural debate in the past,
you know, 10 to 15 years, right?
So there is that fact that it is not just, it is too easy to say it was a, you know, just a white supremacist backlash.
But I also try to trace in the book, you know, this kind of moment in the aughts in the early 2000s when Obama was rising, when there did seem to be quite a lot of goodwill and interest in building and making real a post-racial American social reality that seemed to have been thrown away by many on the culturally ascendant left.
Thank you.
they grew disillusioned with Obama, as they saw these kind of, you know, really horrific and widely disseminated videotaped killings of often unarmed black civilians in police custody.
As that kind of Black Lives Matter and other movement, social justice movements gained traction and there began to be a kind of immediate kind of dismissal of the even the desire for a post-racial America.
You know, that I think set up a dynamic that has been really toxic.
You know, every identity group is to foreground their identity and to see themselves first in terms of this identity, except for whites.
A lot of us, and I think you did too, a lot of us warned that that was an untainable ask, that sooner or later, when only one group was supposed to be quiet, not emphasize their race or see their political interests through the lens of their racial group identity first and foremost, but other groups were encouraged to do that.
At some point, that group that's sitting it out would stop sitting it out and would play by those rules.
And I think what we have seen is that there's been a kind of exhaustion with everybody else doing identity politics and not whites.
And of course, I'm not so naive as to think that whites never did identity politics in the past, but this kind of this notion of a post-racial future was thrown away.
And now I think whites are organizing their political interests around white identity more explicitly than they ever had.
In my lifetime, I'm 44.
It had been for, you know, as long as I've been aware, it had been rather disreputable.
It had existed, but it had been disreputable for whites to organize politically around whiteness.
And that taboo was broken.
And I think it was broken in this age of the social internet and with all the social justice rhetoric around identity and race essentialism that was first and foremost a feature of the kind of new anti-racism that was institutionalized and glorified.
You know, I also want to get your comments on, you know, we know so little about the alleged shooter of Charlie Kirk, Tyler Robinson, the suspect.
There's been a lot of bad reporting, both from the FBI and from many media outlets and kind of social influencers who've attempted to kind of extrapolate his political ideology or in some cases just making up claims about him.
So we know very little, but from the very, from so much that has been confirmed, a college dropout attended one semester on several gun casings.
He kind of referenced meme culture, video game culture.
And that does seem to fit a pattern of social isolation and nihilism.
And although oftentimes we've seen political extremists, political shooters, and others who've engaged in this use symbols and logos and memes that reference political rhetoric, they themselves aren't part of what we would traditionally call political ideology.
They're not part of a movement.
They're not part of an attempt to change a policy.
They're not saying, oh, we need to change taxes or change our foreign policy or change our labor relations.
They're more kind of part of an isolated, angry, nihilist set.
And it's not terribly different than many people that are drawn to what they imagined to be a racial justice movement, but was also similarly not connected to any particular policies.
That was kind of this kind of assertion of identity online, disconnected from any material conditions.
I just wanted to ask your opinion of this and what's your viewpoint on this?
Yeah, I mean, with the caveat that, you know, this is still very early on, and I don't know a ton about this guy.
I know what other people know from, you know, listening to podcasts and reading the news, but it seems to me like this young man was a product of this kind of online culture that catches a lot of all of us, really, but catches a lot of young, impressionable minds.
And, you know, there's a kind of irony.
There's a kind of incoherent politicization.
But as you point out, it's also kind of intertwined with the kind of sense of self more than with the kind of well-articulated political project.
There's a kind of nihilism.
There's a kind of, you know, a sense of assertion against the kind of rigidity of the family that Robinson seems to have been raised in.
And there might even be like some aspect of neurodivergence.
I mean, we don't know any of this really, but it does seem to me that the one thing we can say with authority is that this kid was too online.
We see what being too online is doing to full-grown adults and the way that we interact, the coarsening of our ability to disagree with each other, the tone set by people like Elon Musk and President Trump and you name it.
You know, we don't have a very healthy online culture and this must at some point do something really undesirable to our kids, to youth.
And that's not to excuse or to say that he's not an agent, but it is to say that he seemed to have multiple references to a kind of digital toxicity that we do have to think through as a society.
There's untold, it seems also like, I want to say that there's untold like problems with like the kind of porn that these kids are ingesting.
It seems that that has to be part of any analysis of what was affecting his way of seeing the world.
The references that were engraved on the bullets, some of that stuff is coming out of a kind of porn culture that I had never even, you know, I've never encountered before, but that seems to be potent even.
Well, Thomas, I want to thank you for joining us on System Update.
Would encourage all of the viewers to check out your new book, Summer of Our Discontent, which is available online and major bookstores.