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June 10, 2021 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
02:22:00
Journalist or Heretic? | Bari Weiss | EP 175
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Time Text
Hello everyone.
I'm pleased today to have as my guest, Ms.
Barry Weiss, whom I haven't seen since she interviewed me for the Aspen Ideas Fair, and that was, I think, three years ago.
Something like that.
Barry is a journalist and the author of How to Fight Antisemitism, which won a 2019 National Jewish Book Award.
From 2017 to 2020, Weiss was an opinion writer and editor We're good to
go.
That's a lovely combination.
In 2019, Vanity Fair called Weiss the Times star opinion writer.
Despite that, Barry now writes on Substack.
Follow her work at barryweiss.substack.com.
Thanks very much for agreeing to talk to me today, Barry.
It's a pleasure to have you here.
It's a pleasure to see you, Jordan.
I've been exceptionally curious about exactly what happened with you since I was out of sync with the entire world for a good long time.
But I did know that you left the New York Times to start on your own, start as an independent journalist on Substack.
And that's quite the turn of events, let's say, especially given that Vanity Fair called you the Times star opinion writer.
That feels like 100 years ago.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's not so long ago, though, is it?
But many things have happened in the interim.
So should we start with something easy, like just exactly what the hell happened at the New York Times?
Sure.
Okay.
Sure.
Well, I guess I should start with what drove me to come to the New York Times in the first place.
I came to the New York Times following the, well, it was shocking in the context of the New York Times, the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 election.
There was a brief period of soul searching that happened after Trump won.
I would say inside the New York Times, but inside the legacy media in general.
And there was a sense of, wow, our job is to hold up a mirror to the country as it is.
And we sort of failed our readers.
We haven't exposed them, let's say, to views or to the zeitgeist outside of places like the Upper West Side and Berkeley.
In a way, I was an intellectual diversity hire, along with Bret Stephens.
I had been at the Wall Street Journal editorial page for years in two different stints.
And as viewers may or may not know, the Wall Street Journal editorial page is conservative.
Its motto is free people, free markets.
And I was always the squish in the context of the journal's editorial page.
I was always on the leftmost flank.
So you were a diversity hire at the Wall Street Journal as well.
I've always just been on a fringe in one place or another.
Weird to be fringe and in the center.
Well, not weird.
I feel like that's increasingly where anyone who's in the center is these days.
You're politically homeless and you're sort of forced to choose between one side or another.
It's maybe unique insofar as, you know, the kind of jobs that I had, but the number of people I know who feel that way, who feel politically homeless, who feel like they have to sort of contort themselves To fit into one of these two tribes is growing by the second.
And so in that sense, I don't think my experience was that unique.
So anyway, I get to the New York Times, and I want to be clear, I didn't go into the New York Times naive.
I read the paper for years.
I saw, you know, what's obviously it's liberal bias, but I felt fundamentally like the paper was still trying to adhere to what it claims to be all about in its mission statement, you know, pursuing the truth, even when it's hard.
You know, the famous ad that the Times has, the truth is hard.
It's all over tote bags.
Striving for objectivity.
That tells you how hard it is.
Right, right, exactly.
Striving for objectivity, even though we know none of us are objective.
You know, telling people the truth even when it's inconvenient.
So, right, still nested inside this idea that journalists, for example, could represent a viewpoint that was actually objectively true rather than expressing, inevitably expressing their...
Their association with an arbitrary power structure.
I mean, it was still an enlightenment idea, as far as you were concerned, that reigned at the times.
Right.
And specifically on the editorial page, I was an op-ed editor, so what What the public saw that I did was write columns, but the majority of what my job was, was to commission and edit op-eds from people who wouldn't otherwise think of the New York Times as their natural political home.
So that meant conservatives, God forbid.
It meant libertarians, it meant heterodox thinkers, it meant High schoolers and first-time writers and dissidents, you know, across the Arab world, which is a subject I'm particularly passionate about.
So my job was specifically to expose our readers to views that would not otherwise naturally appear on the op-ed page of the New York Times.
Okay, and that was an explicit condition of your hiring.
Everyone knew that to begin with.
That was my job description.
Okay, so you weren't a fifth column.
Or if you were, it was something that everybody had agreed upon.
Yeah, the goal was for me to bring in pieces that would otherwise make maybe even my desk mates uncomfortable.
And why did they pick you?
Do you think?
And why did the Wall Street Journal pick you to begin with?
Those are very difficult positions to attain.
And how old were you when you started with the Wall Street Journal?
So I started at the Wall Street Journal.
I had a fellowship there the summer that I graduated from Columbia University.
The way that I got to the Wall Street Journal is very serendipitous.
I was very much a, I would say, center-left liberal when I was a student in college.
But I was very passionate on the subject of Israel and fighting anti-Semitism, which is the book that I ended up writing.
I sort of had been writing that book for a very long time.
And I would frequently host debates on campus with the socialist group or the sort of anti-Zionist group.
And there was an older gentleman that would come to some of my events.
And one day, you know, he definitely was not an undergraduate.
And one day he came up to me and said, you know, my name is Charles Stevens.
You need to meet my son, Brett Stevens.
He works at the Wall Street Journal and they have this amazing summer internship.
I had never really heard of Brett.
I had never heard of the Wall Street Journal, but that was how I ended up getting there.
It started with a summer internship called the Bartley Fellowship that's still in existence today.
Like anything, I worked really hard and worked my way up into a job.
That internship became my first job.
What did you study at Columbia?
I studied history.
I wanted to be a Middle East studies major, but found that what was happening in Classrooms was not conducive to exploration.
It was more about indoctrination.
Okay, so I want to do a little divergence here.
Sure.
I want to tell you a story.
I spoke with Yeonmi Park about three weeks ago, and she wrote, In Order to Live...
Now, she wrote in order to live, well, because she had a horrendous life.
That's one reason.
Even though one of the things she told me while I interviewed her was that she'd met people whose life was so much worse than hers that she felt blessed, which was quite the bloody catastrophe of a statement, I'll tell you.
Anyways, her book ends in 2015, so I asked her what she had been doing since 2015.
And she went to Columbia to take a humanities degree.
I talked to her about this recently, too.
Oh, okay.
No, but go ahead.
Go ahead.
She told me.
Yeah, well, she said...
I mean, I thought that was quite remarkable.
He had this young woman who was raised under the most horrifying totalitarian conditions.
Well, not the most, because that's a deep hellhole, but bad enough.
And then was a slave in China along with her mother.
And then...
You know, managed to get to South Korea and then did all her pre-university education basically in one year, virtually hospitalized herself with effort.
And during that time, she read Animal Farm by George Orwell, and that sort of motivated her to write.
And then she went to university in South Korea, which is no joke.
It's a very competitive place.
And then she went to Colombia to take humanities degree, which in her words was part of her father's wish that she become educated.
And so she went to this stellar institution in the center of what's arguably the greatest city on earth to pursue the sort of enlightenment To pursue the spark that had been lit in there by Orwell, let's say, and by her introduction to freedom.
And I said, well, how was it at Columbia?
And she said, it was a complete waste of time and money.
And like, she's a reasonable person.
She's not actually prone to statements like that.
It quite surprised me.
And I said...
Surely that can't be the case.
I mean, you know, that's a damning global statement.
You must have had one professor, one course, that spoke to you, and she said, well, there was a human biology course where I studied evolution, but even it got politically correct by the end, and I felt that I was never able to say anything I actually thought.
And I pushed her and she was adamant that it was a catastrophe going to Colombia and that she felt, I hope I'm not exaggerating this, but I do believe that this is what she was attempting to put forward.
She didn't feel any freer in her speech and actions at Colombia than she did in bloody North Korea.
And I wasn't dancing with glee hearing that, you know, noting that my prognostications about political correctness in universities had manifested themselves.
It's terribly shocking to me and terribly saddening that that's actually the case.
And I've interviewed some older people recently, they'd be my age, who look back on their humanities education with nothing but...
Nostalgia and the fondest of memories for the professors that opened up their lives and started them on their careers.
Great journalists in Canada and businessmen as well.
Jocko Willink as well, who took an English literature degree and was illuminated by it.
What was it like for you at Columbia?
You know, Jordan, it was a mix.
On the one hand, Columbia has, and who knows how much longer this will be around, but it has what's called the core curriculum.
It's basically a study of the classics.
Freshman year, you read classical literature.
Sophomore year, you study classical philosophy.
That was the reason that I went to Columbia, and those classes for me were exactly what you described, that spark that Yeonmi felt when she read George Orwell.
Why were they that for you?
Well, first of all, I had never read those books before.
You know, knew who Plato was vaguely, knew Socrates was, you know, knew Go down the line.
I'd heard who Virginia Woolf was.
All of these books, they were soul expanding.
And it happened to be that I got extremely lucky, especially in that second year course that I described, the philosophy course, to have a teacher who was genuinely committed to, I think, what education is supposed to be about at its best.
And what is it supposed to be about at its best, as far as you're concerned?
What did it do for you?
Teaching me how to think and think critically and read a text and allow it, I mean, at the deepest moments, have it transform me, rather than what I encountered, for example, in the Middle East Studies Department, which was like, More like hearing a preacher.
I mean, it was more just propaganda.
What do you think the difference is between propaganda and education?
I mean, especially, I'm asking you this because the claim, one of the claims that is splitting our culture down the middle Is that there is nothing but propaganda, essentially.
And you just think the propaganda on your side is the truth, because it serves your purposes to believe that.
So it's very, very important to make a distinction between propaganda and education.
Now, you had two different kinds of classes, as far as you're concerned.
One of them you describe as opening yourself up, and the other you describe as being preached at.
Okay, so what's the difference there?
Didn't I just describe the difference?
Well, not so much on the preaching side.
What were you being compelled to think in the Middle East?
Okay, first of all, you're making the case that you were compelled to think in one set of classes.
What were you compelled to think?
Well, let me give you an example.
The course that I was thinking about in my mind as I just described this was a course called Topics in Middle East Studies.
So it's the entire region of the Middle East for going back thousands of years in a sort of general 101 course.
It was part of a requirement if you wanted to continue on in the major.
And that course basically, here's what you had to accept.
That the sole source of maladies in what I think we all can agree is a very complicated and blood-soaked region of the world are all the result of essentially European or American colonialism.
That everything goes back to that core idea.
And that even things like, let's say in India, you know, widow burning could be connected to colonialism.
Even things like honor killing could be connected to colonialism.
Everything had to do with this sort of one lens with which you could understand an extremely complicated thing.
And then the second part, and this is again, like, I think oftentimes this is the case.
If you know something about one particular topic, like let's say a lot about it, And you don't know a lot about Saudi Arabia or Iran or any of the other places you're studying, but you know a lot about this one place.
And for me, that was Israel.
And you hear that what you're being taught about it is so out of line with reality, then you start being skeptical about everything else the person is saying.
And that was very much the case with me.
First of all, Israel is one of dozens of countries in the Middle East.
It was obsessed on in the course.
And the one text we were asked to read about this complicated, very interesting place with a history that goes back thousands of years, which is the cradle of Western civilization, was a book by a guy called Maxime Rodinson, I recommend people look it up, called Israel Colon, A Zionist Colonial Settler State?
And suffice it to say, the question mark was superfluous.
And everything was just sort of driving toward the, I felt, the political view of the professor that was teaching the course, whereas, you know, in contrast, the philosophy course that I was describing to you, or even I'm thinking about an intellectual history class that I took, I didn't really know what my professor thought.
And we were always obsessed with like, what do they really think?
And that made it It just felt like they were trying to, as much as possible, remove their own views to teach texts and ideas to us in the most capacious way possible.
Now, it turns out with the intellectual history course, you know, that professor is now on Twitter and I see what he thinks.
And it's very much, you know, not my view of the world, but I really admire the fact that he That I didn't know that when I took his class and that I was able to sort of come to my own positions without feeling like if I wasn't parroting what he said, that I would somehow be punished, whether it was, you know, in the grade that I received or in the seminar section part of the lecture course.
Okay, so there's a couple of things there that I think might be worth highlighting, or they strike me as worth highlighting anyways.
I wrote a chapter in my last book, which is Beyond Order, called Abandoned Ideology.
One of the propositions that makes up the argument in that chapter is that you have to be aware of unifactorial explanations for complex phenomena.
If you look at anything, perhaps you might look at the wage gap, say, between men and women, the purported wage gap.
Well, the probability that there's one Exactly.
Reason that that occurs.
Well, first of all, you have to ask the question to begin with, is the gap real?
There's a measurement issue there, and so you can take that apart because you don't have to accept the proposition that the phenomena even exists to begin with.
That happens in psychology all the time, where people will use a term in common parlance, but not necessarily be able to translate that into some, like, objective reality.
Like, for example, we experience an emotion, the emotion of shame.
But it isn't obvious that there's a shame system neurobiologically.
Maybe it's the interaction of a variety of neurobiological systems.
Whereas for anxiety, there looks like there's a neurobiological system.
And for play, there's a neurobiological system.
And so there's not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between a word and the objective world.
So you can always question that.
But then when you look at a complicated phenomena, the probability that there's multiple reasons for its existence Or even if there isn't, that there's multiple theories about the single thing that's the cause of its existence, that's a necessary part of sophisticated thinking.
And so maybe one thing for people to beware of is...
A totalizing viewpoint.
All of this plethora of complexity is a consequence of this one thing.
And that's the hallmark.
That's one of the hallmarks, perhaps one of the hallmarks of propaganda, when it's not utilizing just outright deceit.
And so, and then I think there's another...
Something that you pointed to more implicitly, which is that maybe it's also necessary to cast an extraordinarily skeptical eye on totalizing theories that identify a convenient enemy.
And a convenient enemy would be someone that you're clearly not.
And so I've become very leery of conversations, for example, where people rely on the word they.
And I don't mean that as a gender-neutral pronoun.
I mean, when you talk about the they that are at fault when they're doing the things they're doing, you think, well, it's kind of convenient that that doesn't include you, because a lot of the really complex problems that we face Are all our problems and all our doing in some sense, in some broad sense, or at least all our responsibility.
So there's the totalizing element, there's the oversimpl- and it's so psychologically rewarding also to do, in some sense, to develop a totalizing theory That means that you have an explanation for absolutely everything because with minimal cognitive effort, you have a map of the entire world.
And it means you have a community.
I mean, I don't think we can overstate how comforting it is to feel like you're part of a tribe and that you're aligned against those people over there.
Yeah, well, the first part of that might be beneficial and positive, but the second part, which tends to go along with it, is the danger of that communal drive.
You know, there is evidence, for example, that people who are high in empathy are much harsher in their out-group evaluations than people who are low in empathy, because, you know, we think of empathy as an untrammeled good.
Well, it unites people, and it unites them with love, essentially.
It's, biologically speaking, it's a Manifestation of the affiliative circuit that bonds mother and child, and that's elaborated up into pair bonding for adult humans, but then it extends out to those who are your kin.
That all sounds lovely and positive, but, you know, you don't want to get between a mother grizzly and her cubs.
So there's that side of it.
Now, the distinction between the propaganda, let's say, and a real exploration, or a real class, or a real education, I think, hinges on something like exploration.
So let's think about these podcasts as an example.
I mean, I find...
A podcast discussion particularly useful when the two people who are involved in the discussion are exploring at the fringes of their knowledge and trying to further what they already know instead of trying to hammer home a point to convince the person they're talking to or themselves or the listener.
And in my classes, you know, when they were going well, I stepped through a variety of psychological theories in my personality class, right?
So it started with Freud and Jung and Adler and Rogers and all the great clinicians.
And I would put forward their case as strongly as possible and trying to explore what they meant.
But that wasn't my viewpoint.
It was an attempt to explore, and then I could pull the students along with it.
And that seems to be much different than...
Here's the problem.
Here's the perpetrators.
It's a soul.
And you experienced, like, there was a phenomenological experience that you had that made you contrast those two approaches.
Yeah, and it was also, I mean, this connects it back to your initial question, which is what the hell happened at the New York Times.
In a way, that answer to that begins with In college, because that was the first time that I started to encounter what has been called critical social justice or critical race theory or wokeness or what Rod Dreyer's called soft totalitarianism or really cultural and moral relativism, to put it more simply.
I remember very, very clearly getting into an argument with another friend, also identified as a feminist, and she was justifying female genital mutilation to me.
Because that's other people's culture and we need to respect it.
I'm being crude, but that was the basic argument.
And I remember thinking, What the hell?
How can you possibly call yourself a feminist and believe in defending the rights of women and believe that women should be safe and have equality of opportunity to men and also believe that female genital mutilation can be justified in any universe?
And so it was the first time and it was very uncomfortable, but in a way I'm grateful for it because the ideas that I started to encounter Both in classes and also socially at school.
Those are the ideas that have now swallowed the culture and have swallowed the institutions that are meant to uphold the liberal order.
Okay, and now let's talk about that for a minute, because why are you so convinced that that's true?
What's true?
That they swallowed everything?
Yes, exactly.
Exactly, right?
Because this is a major question.
So our culture is facing this extreme division, or that's what it appears.
But the question is, is it as serious as you might...
Perceive it to be, or is that a consequence of the information sources that you're availing yourself of?
And of course, exactly the same thing applies to me.
I mean, I saw this coming, as far as I'm concerned, you know, well, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, but more particularly five years ago, and, you know, that's got me in all sorts of trouble, but it seems to me to be something real and something dangerous, and I'm trying to put my finger on exactly what it is and to warn people about it, but it's not like I don't have my doubts about Whether this is just my conspiratorial idiosyncrasy making itself known in the world.
I don't think it's a conspiracy.
I think the question is whether or not the optimists are right and this thing is a moral panic and it will burn itself out just like panic around satanic child molesters that burned out in the 1980s in this country and maybe in Canada too, I'm not sure.
Yes, definitely.
Well, we always do things a little less extremely, but we follow along in your wake.
Right.
So the question is like, are those people right?
You know, will wokeness, I hate that word, but I don't know what else to call it, will it recede on its own, like a fever that burns itself out?
Or will it only sort of...
Let's say, lose the battle over the culture and over sense-making and over the elite institutions in America and more broadly in the West if it meets another force that pushes against it.
I don't see it receding on its own.
And the more I look inside, you know, certainly the press, I have the front row seat to witness that and we can talk about it.
Let's talk about it.
But education, science, Big tech, the HR departments of major corporations in this country.
It's touching everything.
I got a notification from my university department today.
They developed a contract for undergraduates who are going to work in labs, which seems to me to be completely unnecessary anyways, because that was something that was always handled by individual professors.
But most of it's just...
You know, care of data and the sorts of things that you might expect that might be made explicit if you were going to work in a lab.
But of course, two-thirds of the way in it, there's a huge statement about all the groups that you're not allowed to be prejudiced against in your conduct and so forth.
And so it's just another example of how these ideas, these, let's call them anti-racist ideas for the time being, Anti-group prejudice ideas are...
There's an insistence that they manifest themselves everywhere.
And you might say, well, you know, who isn't anti-racist?
And so why object to that?
And my sense is that, well...
They don't stand on their own.
They're part of an entire system of ideas.
That's the thing that's always bothered me, is that there's a whole system of ideas here.
And I mean, maybe it's best exemplified in critical race theory.
That's sort of its most extreme...
Yeah, I also really don't believe in ceding the language, like in saying, just call it anti-racism, because...
I'm not ceding that language to an ideology that is insisting on resegregating the culture.
Why not cede the language?
Because it's a war of language.
It's a war of language.
I mean, if you're going to call what's essentially neo-racism and neo-segregation anti-racism, like I'm not going to go along with the lie of that.
I'm just not.
I am going to insist on a version of anti-racism that is rooted in our common humanity and is actually about eradicating racism, not on obsessing on the social construct of race and reifying it and making us pitted in a kind of like zero sum War against each other based on our immutable characteristics.
I'm sorry, I'm not doing that.
I'm not giving in to their language.
Yeah, well, then the question is right where you draw the line.
I mean, I didn't want to use identity politics language in reference to personal pronouns in Canada, and that's pretty much done in my career as a researcher and probably as a clinical psychologist as well.
So it's not a trivial battle to undertake.
And people, of course, asked, well, why did you pick that particular hill to die on?
Because what weren't protections that were already built into the law for other groups merely extended to another deserving group?
But what I saw was a terrible misuse of language at a very fundamental level.
So part of it was an issue of compelled speech.
I have to use the terminology that you demand, and you claim that it's only about your...
Emotional well-being and your identity, but for me, it's part and parcel of a complete ideology.
And then there's also the...
Smuggling in of a particular view of identity that I don't believe has any credence whatsoever, because your identity is by no means only who you feel that you are.
Your identity is a complex game that you negotiate with others, and what it is exactly is very difficult to elucidate, because it's central to the nature of human existence, what your identity is, but it's certainly not the simplistic group A signifier that you conveniently hang your hat on, especially when you want to exercise arbitrary power over other people without them noticing that that's what you're doing.
So I don't want to cede the language either.
And part of the discussion we can have today is just about exactly what the language implies.
We could talk about systemic racism for a minute or two, if you don't mind.
Then we'll get back to the Wall Street Journal story and sort of move biographically.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, well, so I've been thinking about the phrase systemic racism.
And it's a very interesting phrase because it's sort of systemic.
Racism.
Systemic racism.
And you can't hear racism.
Well, it's important.
It's important.
You can't hear racism.
As soon as you hear racism, there's a moral issue, a major moral issue at stake.
And the proposition, essentially, is if I come up to you and say, this is racist, I instantly put you in a position where if you disagree with anything that I'm saying, you have to defend yourself morally right to the basis of your soul.
Because it's such a terrible thing.
Arbitrary prejudice is such a terrible, devastating thing.
And virtually everyone recognizes that.
And so there's a club that comes along with the use of the phrase right away.
And the club is, well, I'm on the right side of history here with my claim about opposing this terrible, satanic...
An ethnocentric viewpoint.
And then I can say systemic.
And so I've been thinking about systemic.
Now systemic means pervasive.
It means everywhere.
That's what systemic means.
It has its connotations and its explicit meaning.
But it means that it's the central tendency of the system, let's say.
And that's just wrong.
The central tendency of functional Western social institutions is not racism.
The central tendency is something like cooperative endeavor towards productive ends, and the aberration is deception and power and racism.
But the central tendency isn't that.
And this is the crucial issue here, because systemic means central tendency.
And if you accept systemic, not only do you accept that the central tendency is racist, let's say an exclusionary, and that also means in support of the privilege of certain groups, because that's part and parcel of the entire argument, but you also accept the proposition that the motivations that drive people to success in the systemically racist system also have to be power and And systemic racism,
hence the use of tests like the implicit association test.
So not only are the institutions systemically racist, but the psychological motivations of those who are striving to move forward within the systems are all of a sudden now tyrannical power and systemic racism.
And all that's packed into that word systemic.
And it's just snuck in there because racism is so loud and so vicious and so horrible that you're not allowed to object to anything that manifests itself within its vicinity.
It's unbelievably, what would you call it, Well, propagandistic is probably the right word, but it just blows people out of the water because they're hit with this racist issue and that just, you know, it rattles them up so badly ethically that they can't stand forward and make a reasonable argument.
Well, there's a ton there, Jordan.
I guess I would say that I think there is a way to acknowledge that, for example, this country had In the way that, let's say, Black Americans were deprived of building generational wealth because they were deprived of loans.
They weren't allowed to buy homes or redlining or Jim Crow, or we could go all the way back to 1619 or slavery.
Oh, we could go back a lot farther than that.
Meaning it is true that there were systems in America that were...
I don't know what other word to say it.
Systemically racist.
Well, you could say there were systems in America that were racist without saying there were systems in America that were systemically racist.
There's no doubt whatsoever that arbitrary prejudice is a blight upon mankind and that it manifests itself everywhere.
But it's not just arbitrary, right?
If you look just at one discrete example, like the drug war, the disparity between the punishment in the 1980s between being caught with crack and being caught with cocaine.
I don't know what else to call that.
We call it racist.
Sure, but that's not just whatever the adjective you used before was.
Just before.
Well, we should argue about this a lot, because it's the core point, so it's a good idea to do this.
So, there are definitely systematic manifestations of racism.
They inculcate themselves, let's say, into the legal system.
And some of them are more explicit and some of them are more implicit.
But that's not the issue.
Yes, that's not the issue when you're talking about systemic racism.
Because there's a tangle of claims in that term.
And so please do argue with me, okay?
Okay, so I think that we need to be able to acknowledge, I think as you just did, what I just said.
And also see that the way that that phrase is being weaponized right now is basically as an argument to tear down liberalism, America, and the West.
Okay, okay.
So now we're starting to unpack that.
So we'll look at the issue of racism first.
Okay, so people are radically ethnocentric, and that's a human universal.
Now, we have a tendency to trade with groups of people who aren't us, and we will investigate them and explore them, but we're also not so much terrified of them, because it's not exactly fear, but leery of them.
And we're leery of them for all sorts of reasons.
One reason we're leery of them, I just talked to a great biologist whose name is going to escape me momentarily.
He formulated the parasite stress theory of political belief, and so one of the things he points out is that As isolated groups of human beings came into contact with one another throughout our entire evolutionary history, we were able to trade ideas and goods, and that was greatly to our benefit.
But we also traded infectious agents, and that killed us a lot.
And so we have this terrible tension at the base of our being between being open to what's new and being killed by what's new.
And so that's part of what makes us ethnocentric.
It's not by any means the entire thing.
But we have this ethnocentrism built in as well as the desire to trade.
Slavery is a human universal.
It goes back as far back in time as you can possibly manage.
And so...
We can admit that all those things exist, and we can admit that they're powerful tendencies without having to take this next step, which is the one that you pointed to, by saying, well, that's the foundation of our institutions themselves, and because of that, the institutions have to be torn down.
Rather than saying, slavery has been with humanity for eons, and the exceptional thing about America is not that we had slavery, but that slavery was abolished.
Okay, and I would say that's the exceptional thing about Britain, not America, because the Brits did it first, and that's my understanding of the situation.
Now, that doesn't take away from the American accomplishment or the Canadian accomplishment, for that matter.
Right.
The systemic tendency is the eradication of slavery.
I'm simply saying that the thing that is being emphasized that I want to push back against That often comes along with the use of the phrase systemic racism is the idea that because the dead white men that created,
that wrote the Constitution, or that came up with these enlightenment values, or any number of other things that have allowed us to live in this Exceptional, let's say, civilization.
It's beyond just America.
That because of their moral hypocrisy, that somehow the things that they built are ill-gotten and need to be sort of rooted out, torn down at the core.
And I fundamentally reject that view.
Okay, now why should I presume that your fear of...
Okay, you've just characterized the relationship between the idea of systemic racism with a bunch of other ideas.
Okay, so, right, the idea that there's a lot more to the story than the mere emphasis on systemic racism.
There's a belief that the institutions themselves, the fundamental institutions of the West, are corrupt right to their core.
That is the implication often of the people using the phrase, but I think one should be able to use the phrase without implying all of that.
Unfortunately, right now when you hear it, it tends to be that the things I just described come along with the use of that phrase.
A little bit like anti-racism.
Why are you convinced that your belief that the idea of systemic racism is associated with these other ideas is true?
Because I see it.
Tell me about that.
I don't know where to start.
I mean, that is...
I understand that.
So help push me toward what area you're interested in.
Well, I agree with you.
I mean, the reason that I took the stance I took five years ago, which I've had plenty of time to think about, by the way, is because I saw the linkage between ideas.
I didn't believe that this was just what it appeared to be.
It was associated with an entire ideology, and the ideology seems to me to be, I'll lay out some of its features, and you can tell me if you think it is in accord with what you see.
Yeah.
That inequality of outcome is evidence of systemic discrimination, for example.
Yes, that would be that inequality of outcome conveniently described for the purposes of justifying the ideology.
Yeah, let me describe how I like some of the features of this ideology and you tell me if you agree that inequality of outcome is necessarily a result of systemic discrimination or systemic bigotry.
Okay, and that's part of the equity issue.
Sure.
But again, that's another one of these words that's been hijacked.
I know.
Well, that's exactly why I brought it up, is because I've been talking to a group of people in LA who are liberals, on the left of me, I would say.
And we've been stuck on this issue of equity because I've been insisting, for example, that it does mean It's a drive towards equality of outcome defined in exactly the manner that you describe.
And their insistence is no, that's a view that only a minority of the people who are pushing the idea of equity hold.
Well, the majority of people that go along with, you know...
Equity.
Just think, I believe in fairness.
They're not thinking deeply about this.
It's like the person that says Black Lives Matter.
Well, of course, Black Lives Matter.
But if you look under the hood of what the organizations that are at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movement believe, well, they believe in abolishing the nuclear family.
They believe in abolishing or defunding the police.
They believe that capitalism is I mean, they believe in all kinds of things, but the majority of people that are saying or putting up a sign, Black Lives Matter, are saying racism's bad.
The majority of people that are saying, I believe in equity and diversity are saying, I believe in the dignity of difference and I believe in fairness and I believe in equality of opportunity.
So when the people in, these theoretical people in LA, when they're saying that, is that what they mean or do they mean something else?
No, they mean, they, I think what they mean is that The people who are pushing equity believe in equality of opportunity, and they don't see the lurking...
The Trojan worstness.
Exactly right.
And these are reasonable people, and they're not that happy with political correctness, I should also say.
So they're as reasonable a group as I can communicate with.
But I have to be honest, at this point, if one can't see the way that this language has been hijacked...
And has been used as a kind of Trojan horse, brilliant, I should say, Trojan horse strategy to smuggle in a sort of hardened, you know, zero-sum identity politics view of the world,
to smuggle in a view of the world in which we either have collective guilt or collective innocence, literally based on the circumstances of our birth, that smuggle in a, you know, I'm sorry, you have blinders on.
The evidence for this is so overwhelming at this point.
I'm really not sure how...
If you don't want to believe it, I think it's because the discomfort of believing it outweighs...
Let me say that again.
I think it's because admitting that that's true and that that's what's happening is extremely psychologically scary.
And it's extremely socially scary if you are a liberal.
Because all of a sudden it means that these institutions and let's just even say the social world and the culture...
That you took for granted as being a certain thing and having certain qualities is no longer what it appears to be.
And that is the perfect segue to connect it back to the New York Times.
Yes.
Okay.
So let's do that.
I agree with you.
Let's do that now.
So now you're at the Wall Street Journal and you're starting to write Yeah, and let's just fast forward that I get to the New York Times and suffice it to say that, you know, I was never popular.
I had already published lots of things.
I was known as being a Zionist.
I was known for, you know, views that put me outside of the, let's say, the cool woke kids table.
What do you mean by you were never popular?
You just, you glossed over that very rapidly.
Sure.
There's an experience there.
There was a skepticism of me from the beginning, but I mean, it was the New York Times.
It's the most important journalistic platform in the world.
And so I was more than willing to put up with, you know, getting the cold shoulder from some of my colleagues because the...
You just can't overstate how powerful that distribution system is, much more so than the Wall Street Journal.
And it holds a certain position, I would say, just beyond America, you know, in the West.
And so...
I was loathe to give that up, and I would be willing and was willing to put up with a lot in order to cling to that position.
Well, how do you think people saw you?
Because they assumed, they made a variety of assumptions about you, and that was what was alienating.
What is it that you represented or were in their eyes, do you think?
Heresy.
Heresy.
Someone who lived like them, went to the same restaurants as them, dated like them, you know, by all metrics, should have agreed with them on every tenant of this new orthodoxy.
Right, so you're worse because of that.
See, I just talked to Rima Azar Professor at Mount Ellison, who's an Arab immigrant to Canada, Lebanese, and she just got hung out to dry by the pathetic cowards at her university.
For what was her sin?
She doesn't exactly know, but apparently it was something like incitement to sexual violence and also insistence that Canada isn't a systemically racist country.
And she wrote some of this in her blog, which she thought was mostly for distribution to her friends.
But she's a heretic like you are because she's female and she's an immigrant to Canada.
And so it's incumbent upon her to adopt the victimized identity that people like her should know is good for them.
And because she didn't, although in quite a minor way, she really literally doesn't know what her crime was.
She doesn't really know who her accusers were.
They suspended her without pay.
She's a tenured professor.
It's a worse case than the case in New York with Paul Rossi.
It's much worse.
It's quite stunning.
I mean, if you met her, you'd think, really?
She's the person that all these institutions were hypothetically designed to protect.
But if you think about it in a way, it makes sense that it's sort of...
The people at the edges that are more dangerous than the people across the street.
Because if what your goal is, is to reshape, let's say, what it means to be liberal and progressive, which is what this is about, and if your goal is to sort of remoralize people into that view of the world, then you need to make examples of people and sharpen the boundary of who is in the community of the righteous and the good.
By making examples of people who don't go along with every part of it.
Because the point of the ostracisms and the point of what sounds like happened to this professor is to say, you know, it's not really about the person.
It's about sending a message to everyone watching it.
That if you don't fall in line, if you don't conform, if you don't obey, this is what's going to happen to you.
And you better believe that that is an extraordinarily effective strategy, unbelievably so.
So I think what I saw at the New York Times was, I guess the only way to describe it is this kind of ideological succession.
And it's not just a story about the New York Times.
It's a story about Nature magazine.
It's a story about Bloomberg.
It's a story about Harvard.
It's a story about the name, the institution.
It's probably about that institution.
And so what's maddening For someone who's seeing it is that for most people on the outside, they're just saying, wait, it's the New York Times.
It has this like vested authority.
It has the same font.
It has the same masthead.
And you're telling me that really the New York Times is no longer the New York Times.
And that's exactly what I'm telling you.
And it's.
Yeah.
And so then the question is, what is it?
Well, it's.
Well, what it used to be, it basically is.
If the old version of the New York Times was supposed to be, you know, telling the truth without fear or favor, now it's something more like MSNBC in print, right?
If you look at Fox or you look at MSNBC, it's very easy to see what those things are.
They're political heroine for their side.
That's increasingly what the New York Times is.
You don't have to believe in an ideological conspiracy to understand the push for that to be the new product.
Go back to the age before the internet, when the group that the New York Times had to appease were the advertisers.
That was who you had to fear pissing off.
Well, now that advertising is basically a dead letter, Who do you have to appeal to?
You have to appeal to your subscribers.
Those are the people that are paying the bills at the end of the day.
And lo and behold, 95% might be 92%, but it's something along those lines of New York Times subscribers identify as liberals, progressives, or Democrats.
So you better believe that I think that the only reason that it's But why did it work before?
Like, if this is necessary to appease your consumer base, for example, I mean, you made a bit of a case there that it was the advertisers, and you said that the advertisers in some sense now have been replaced by the direct consumer, and they're more arbitrary.
But it still begs the question, if the New York Times was a reasonable paper of record 20 years ago, or Time magazine for that matter, it's quite shocking to look at a Time magazine from the 1970s.
It's about a quarter of an inch thick and it's all text, you know?
It's a real magazine and that's, of course, gone by the wayside.
But...
Why did it work before?
Why was there a market for, let's call it objective journalism, five years ago or ten years ago and there isn't now?
Well, social media has a tremendous amount to do with it.
I mean, because there's no longer...
What Martin Gurie has called like secret knowledge.
And for those who haven't read his book, The Revolt of the Public, it is the best description of everything that we are talking about.
You no longer need Walter Cronkite or, you know, or The New York Times, for that matter, to tell you about the anti-Semitic attack that happened in West Hollywood the other night, because by the way, they're probably not going to cover it.
All you need to do is follow the right accounts on Twitter.
And so when information becomes democratized, And you don't rely, let's put to the side, for example, The Times' excellent China coverage or its foreign policy coverage, where you really do need an enormous budget and people flying to the other side of the world, oftentimes infiltrating closed societies to tell you what is genuinely closed information.
But for by and large, let's say on domestic issues and a number of, and certainly style and opinion, You can just get that on the internet.
And so what am I subscribing?
What is the reason to pay for the New York Times?
So the reason for that has changed.
It's no longer so that you can find out what happened in West LA the other night.
Increasingly, first of all, it's products like Crosswords and cooking and documentaries and all these other things that are more like entertainment.
But it's also to rah-rah for your team.
That's another enormous reason for it.
And I'll just add one more thing about Twitter.
You cannot overstate the effect that social media has on editors and reporters.
They are people like anyone else.
And you know very well, Jordan, as I do, How bad it feels to get dragged and slandered on social media by often thousands of people.
And if you know that in advance and you know that writing about a certain topic or writing about a topic that's ugly or writing about a topic that has a perspective that the majority of your followers or the subscribers to your paper don't agree with, It's like you don't need to be told don't write about it.
You talk yourself out of it because you don't want to experience that punishment.
Why is it worth it?
Why should I die on that hill?
It's easier to commission the 5000th op-ed about why Donald Trump is is horrendous.
And so every incentive just pushes you in that direction.
The social incentive, both social online, but social in your real life.
And the economic incentive, and frankly, the incentive of the people that you're literally surrounded by.
And so resisting all of those forces is extremely difficult.
it's like the only way it becomes possible is if you know that the people who are running the paper and the people that are in charge and the people who are in the end of the day writing your paycheck believe in that mission that goes against those incentives and supports you.
And once that falls away and once you see, as I did, that you could no longer rely on those people to support and sort of defend you, including against other colleagues at the paper, then you just knew that you weren't going to be protected anymore.
Okay, so I want to split this now into two.
I want to continue with the biographical.
Am I making sense?
Yes, absolutely.
I want to continue with the biographical, but I want to go back to the propagandistic issue too, because there's still something that we haven't explored.
So you and I, in this discussion, have fleshed out this structure of ideas that's lurking behind the claim of systemic racism.
We haven't done that thoroughly, but we've done it to some degree.
We've linked it with such things as propagandistic education and tried to contrast that with the genuine exploration of ideas.
But what we haven't...
And something that's quite mysterious to me is, well, what's driving this?
Like, what's in it for the people who are pushing the critical race theories?
Well, it's strange, though, because the proposition that is being put forth by people who hold these theories is that it's power that's fundamentally driving all social institutions, and that that's the fundamental manifestation of human ambition.
But then to turn around and say, well, it's power that's driving the ideology seems to be adopting their theoretical stance to criticize their theoretical stance.
It's like, I still don't get it.
Well, let's try and steelman their argument, right?
The idea that for all of human history, up until five minutes ago, that people like you were at the top of the, let's call it the caste system, and You know, a Black transgender disabled person is at the very bottom.
There is an understandable impulse to say, let's remedy that.
Like, you've had your day in the sun, Jordan.
So is Brad Pitt and, you know, Jon Hamm and all of the other cisgendered white males.
And let's give a chance and elevate voices who historically, let's be honest, have been kept out of the pages of The New York Times.
You think that 70 years ago I would have been able to walk into the New York Times wearing a Jewish star?
No, I would have taken it off before I walked in.
So there is a...
Right, but you could now, except perversely you couldn't for any length of time because of the influence of the ideas that we're describing.
Well, okay, so you made a steel man argument there.
So I would first say, well, let's take it apart carefully.
All throughout history, those who have shared some of my immutable characteristics have had a higher probability of attaining positions of status.
But those positions can't be confused only with positions of power, because status is about much more than power.
And when systems are working properly, status is conferred upon people because they're productive and generous and cooperative and useful, not because they're arbitrary holders of tyrannical power.
And that's so true that it's not just true for human beings.
It's also true for our nearest non-human relatives, like chimpanzees, who are often parodied as power mad, but If you do the analysis there, you see that it's reciprocity that keeps even chimpanzee social organizations going.
So the first thing is that it was not merely the arbitrary bestowal of power.
And the second thing is that merely possessing those immutable characteristics was in no way a certain avenue to the top.
Of course it wasn't certain.
But the point is that if you didn't have those qualities, you weren't even allowed to enter the race.
That's the point.
No?
I'm just trying to understand, like, what is drawing people to these ideas, okay?
Good-hearted, well-intentioned people.
And I believe that the thing that is drawing them to these ideas is a sense of historical repair, is a sense of justice.
Well, okay, look, fair enough.
The reason I think it's important to understand what's drawing people to these ideas is because I want to defeat these ideas.
Why?
Because I believe they are fundamentally illiberal and because I do not believe in a world of caste.
I believe that we should be fighting for a world in which there isn't a caste system, not where we reverse a caste system.
Okay, well then I would say that the systems that have privileged people like me in the past are also the same systems, for whatever reasons, that have in fact led to the freeing of the people who Weren't allowed to play the game increasingly across time, and that that's a universal truth, not a particular truth.
And that's the point, right?
Well, and you accept that argument.
You accept that argument.
And so then we have another problem here, Barry, still, which is you're making the case that well-meaning people want this.
And I understand your point, and it's not like I don't feel for the dispossessed.
You know, and grasp the argument.
But my sense is, is that the very institutions that are under assault by people who purport to be standing up for the dispossessed are, in fact, the best antidote to that dispossession that the world has ever produced.
And it seems to me that if you don't see that, then you have blinders on.
And if you have those blinders on, then the question is, why?
Are you more interested in tearing down than in building up?
Let me tell you a brief story, okay?
And you tell me what you think of this.
I had this debate with Slavoj Zizek, and in the beginning of the debate, which it was a strange debate because he basically declared himself not a Marxist, even though that was what the debate was about.
And I say that with all due regard for Zizek, who was very kind to me when I was ill and who seems like a fine person, and so this is not an ad hominem attack at all.
People are complicated.
It was a delight, actually, to have the debate with him.
But in any case, I started the debate with a 15-minute critique of the Communist Manifesto.
And at one point, I said, it was a call to bloody violent revolution.
And the crowd cheered and laughed for about three seconds.
And a substantial, maybe 10% of the crowd.
And so there were a lot of people there who were on the radical end of the Marxist distribution, and they had come to hear their purported champion, you know, give me a good stomping.
But it was so interesting, especially for someone who's psychoanalytically minded, because it was a great Freudian slip.
I thought, it put me back for about 10 seconds, because I thought, really, you sons of bitches, you cheered...
Violent, bloody revolution, knowing full well what happened over the course of the 20th century with all the absolutely catastrophic horrors that laid out as a consequence of Marxist ideas because you're hidden by the crowd.
You can let your laughter, you can let your resentment, your desire for nothing but upheaval manifest itself because it's invisible.
But it wasn't invisible because there were thousands of people there.
And so they laughed away about bloody violent revolution.
And so on the one hand, and then I've been talking to people.
I talked to Stephen Blackwood this week, who's starting a college designed to Teach people liberal arts again.
Well, you know, he insisted that people are always pursuing the good.
And a number of people on my show have insisted that even if it's warped and twisted, it's analogous to the argument that you were making.
And this isn't a criticism of you.
You know, you said, look, you can see why these ideas are so attractive to people.
I know you are.
I know you are.
And I'm not going after your argument.
I'm just trying to elaborate it.
It's You know, there is this concern for the dispossessed, and that's what gives the radicals the moral high ground.
So often, we're concerned for the dispossessed, aren't you?
It's like, well, yes, as a matter of fact, we are.
And so they start out, the wielders of these ideas start out with a moral advantage.
But the evidence seems to suggest that the very systems they're attempting to tear down are, in fact, the best antidote to the problems that they're Laying out.
So then the question pops up again.
So if that's the case, why the hell is there so much force behind the ideas?
What's driving it?
And it's associated with that laughter at the thought of violent, bloody revolution.
Because we're so removed from violent, bloody revolution.
That's why.
It's a luxury to flirt with these ideas.
That's a really good idea.
If you think, if you are so, if you take the fact, let's just take an example, that I can, you know, I'm not wearing long sleeves, you can see my collarbone, and that I can walk down the street here with my wife and go get a falafel at the end of the street and not be stoned to death.
Okay?
Like, that's the reality.
That's a miracle.
That's right.
And that's what divides people, is whether or not they know that's a miracle.
Yes.
And if you are so removed from the truth of that miracle and from gratitude for everyone and every idea, every piece of scaffolding that allows for that to be my reality, then you will have...
The foolishness, but it's really the luxury and the decadence to flirt with ideas about doing away with it.
And I just, I don't know why some people feel...
Okay, I'm going to steal men.
I was going to say one thing.
Okay.
I am so curious about why certain people Feel in their bones how thin the veneer of civilization is and why other people are so nonchalant about it.
I feel it's a psychological question, but I don't know it.
I don't know either.
I don't know either.
You know, when I was in graduate school, I was obsessed with the finitude of life and with mortality and death.
I mean, I'd wake up every morning and think, there's no time, get to it now.
And I had friends Who I would say were more well-adjusted than me.
That's certainly part of it.
Like, they were more emotionally stable, technically speaking.
Less prone to depression and anxiety.
So that's part of it.
And they...
It was that those ideas never entered the theater of their imagination.
Right?
They just weren't a set of existential problems for them.
For me, it's always been paramount.
And I very...
I read...
Oh, I can't.
He worked for the New York Times, too, a great journalist.
He wrote, but I can't remember the book.
Anyways, he had spent a lot of time in Beirut during the catastrophes in Beirut.
And then he talked about going to a baseball game in the United States.
Right?
And he was at this baseball game with all these people who were sitting there doing what people do at baseball games.
Chat nonchalantly, drink a bit of beer, have a hot dog.
It's like I went to a...
I've hardly gone to any baseball games.
And I went to one in Boston and I was thinking, Jesus, this is boring.
Nothing's happening.
Why are people here?
Don't they have something better to do?
And then I started to look around and I thought, oh, I see.
I'm so wrong.
They're here because this is nothing to do.
It's just leisure.
It's like you don't really have to pay it.
But it's deeper.
It's channeling those human forces that want us to go into tribal warfare and putting it, you know, into supporting the Red Sox or the Yankees.
Right, right.
Which is a miracle!
Yes, that's exactly.
But the whole thing is a miracle is that we can go out there and play out these tribal antagonisms at a completely peaceful level.
And sit there and have it be benevolent and calm.
And then I realized, well, people do this for leisure.
That's why they're doing this.
You're the idiot, not them.
But the commentator, the author, he had a hard time going to baseball games after he had been in Beirut because the thinness of the veneer was always apparent to him after that.
Because he couldn't drive across the city without being stopped by armed gangs constantly.
And I guess it's also maybe to some degree whether your view of humanity tilts more towards Hobbes or more towards Rousseau.
You know, and I like to think of myself as balanced between the two because I think people do have the capacity for good and that, you know, it's not a war against all in the state of nature.
but I certainly am...
Sensitive to the state of nature argument.
It is always a miracle to me when I go outside and there isn't a riot in the streets.
And I do think it's a thin veneer and we have to be very careful with it.
So Dostoevsky said in Notes from the Underground, one of the most insightful passages there, sections, talks about the flaws in utopian thinking.
He said, well, people are constituted such that if you provided them with utopia, The first thing they would do is break it to pieces just so that something interesting would happen, so that they could have their own capricious way.
And that's very much akin to the argument that you're making, the luxury argument.
And so then there's another problem there that we could delve into that I've talked about with the sort of rational optimist types like Matt Ridley and Bjorn Lomberg and so on, is that we offer young people This luxury that produces the kind of decadence that you're describing, but what they're deprived of is the opportunity for romantic adventure.
And so part of the positive thing that's driving them to shatter the veneer is the desire for something more than, you know, the calm...
Yeah, yes, yes.
Yes, I completely agree with you.
Yeah, it's a desire for...
It's a desire for meaning.
Yeah.
Meaning.
And, you know, this is something, we could talk about this for a long time, but I think that there is a reckoning that needs to be had with, you know, the new atheists, or what was called the new atheists, in a group that I admire.
Yes, I've been having that reckoning.
So why do you say that?
Well, only because...
Let me back up into it this way.
When I look at the qualities of the people who have the strength and the fortitude to not go along with the crowd and to be willing to be slandered and to sacrifice for the stake of resisting this illiberalism, almost all of them are religious in some way or another.
Almost all of them.
We're deeply, deeply anchored, I would say, to I don't want to say spirituality, but something deeper is rooting them.
That's what Solzhenitsyn said about the people he met in the Gulag who could stand up to the Soviets.
And I think that's the thing I'm finding again and again now as I'm sort of making my way through all of these different sectors of life reporting on the spread of this ideology.
Who's willing to talk to me?
Who's willing to speak up?
And one of the things that I don't necessarily think that the atheist group, you know, who I admire on a lot of levels, that they maybe couldn't have foreseen is that robbing people of that religious impulse Both sort of soften the ground for the rise of this deeply illiberal ideology that functions in many ways like a new religion.
And also, it just deprived, in a way, it's deeply connected, I think, to the rise of this new orthodoxy.
So I've been thinking about the idea of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's and rendering unto God what is God's.
And it seems to me that if we blur the distinction between God and Caesar, then Caesar becomes God.
It's not that we dispense with God.
That's the thing, and at the core, that's what's wrong with the new atheist hypothesis.
So imagine just psychologically that we have a drive towards ethical unity, and that would be the same force that drives us towards a monotheism, right?
The idea that all is one, is that there has to be a unifying spirit That animates and unites all of our ethical strivings, and we picture that in all sorts of different ways, but it tilts in this monotheistic direction, and so that becomes a transcendent value,
and it's the value, the transcendent value from which we derive our notions of sovereignty and individual worth and natural law and all of that, but it's a psychological necessity, I would say, that rises from the requirement that we Build our ethical systems in a manner that's internally non-contradictory, because that drives them towards a unity.
Well, and then we have to worship that unity, or we worship something else that approximates it.
And that would be one of these totalizing systems that you discussed, where instead of there being God, who's mysterious and who we can't understand, and who we have some relationship with that we can't specify, and whom we have to struggle with Because that's the meaning of the term Israel, right?
To struggle with God.
We replace it with an idol.
We replace it with an idol that has exactly the same totalizing impulse, but lacks all the advantages of that transcendent that can't be identified with us.
That's the thing, is that, you know, if Stalin doesn't have God, then Stalin is God.
And that seems to me to be somewhat independent of whether or not there is a God.
That's a different issue, right?
The metaphysical reality of that unity is a different issue than the psychological necessity of that unity.
And I do think the new atheists, I mean, they're getting hoist on their own petard to some degree.
You see what's happened to Dawkins in the last couple of months.
Stripped of his award by the humanists because he dared to challenge this rising religious orthodoxy, and I do think it is that.
And so, now, I want to switch a little bit here and talk about your column you talked about.
You just showed it to me, but I had come across it before.
It's a call to what people need to do in order to resist this totalizing propaganda, let's call it.
And we've started to explore the reasons for its existence.
Now, the reason I want to bring it up is because We've also been making the case that people do need something like a romantic adventure.
And toying with catastrophe at the fringes provides that romantic adventure, right?
Because you're jousting with the dragon at that edge.
You can understand, if you have any sense, if you can remember what it was like to be a teenager at all, you can understand how exciting it would be.
Yes, well, that's for sure, and confusing.
But you could also understand how it's exciting to go to a riot and then to sit and drink a few beer afterwards and to talk about The incredible excitement that that generated, and especially if that's bolstered by your sense that you're on the moral frontier.
Now, you have had an adventure.
And your adventure, at least in principle, was a consequence of telling the truth.
And that, to me, is the replacement for that romantic adventure, is that if you embody the truth in your own life, you have that romantic adventure.
And the thing you straighten out is you.
Not other people.
So you don't get to have an enemy under those conditions.
And so you have a call in your column to...
And I explored this as well with Paul Rossi, who stood up against the incursion of the politically correct agenda into his classrooms.
So let's go back to the New York Times.
Now you're trying to...
I presume you're trying to explore the truth, to tell the truth.
What are you doing as a journalist?
I mean, all kinds of things.
I would say the thing that that got me the most national attention in the beginning were some columns that I wrote that I think subsequently have definitely become the commonsensical position, the most on Me Too.
So the biggest one was this piece that I wrote about Aziz Ansari and wrote a piece about called The Limits of Believe All Women.
It was basically saying, you know, We should just never, it's trust but verify, and that someone's gender shouldn't determine whether or not what they're saying is true.
It seemed to me a very basic point, but it caused a lot of controversy.
But I did lots of different pieces.
I wrote that piece about the intellectual dark web, of course.
I did deep features, like one on the City of David, which is the most important archaeological dig.
In Jerusalem, it tells us a lot about what Jerusalem used to be and says a lot about its future.
All kinds of stories.
But the thing that I love doing more than writing was commissioning pieces that other people didn't agree with.
And working with writers.
I mean, there's nothing that I love more than commissioning and editing, and that's still the case.
And I'm doing a lot of that.
Why do you love that?
What is it about it when it's working right?
Helping someone, first of all, if you've never published before, and then you get to be read by people in the world, go back in your mind if you can to the first time that that happens.
That happened for you maybe in your own life.
It's extremely exciting, the experience of that, and getting to engage with the reader.
Why do you think that's so exciting?
And you're making the case that you were opening up that avenue of opportunity to other people.
Well, I was.
Okay, so I want to comment on that a little bit, briefly, and then go back to...
Let me just say this one thing here.
I was going to give you an example.
I interviewed someone.
There were kind of panels of people that would interview new hires.
And I was brought in, as I always was, as the kind of intellectual diversity person.
And it really struck me because the first thing that this candidate, to be an op-ed editor, the first thing she said to me was, I don't know how you can edit op-eds from people you disagree with.
And I said, that's kind of the point of the job here.
And it's fun because not only for the pleasures, the personal pleasures of helping someone find their voice and articulate what they want to say in the most clear and powerful way possible, Why is that a pleasure?
Why is that a pleasure?
I don't know.
Why is like going for a swim in the sunshine a pleasure?
No, no.
This is a more crucial point.
I'll tell you why.
Because I've been thinking very hard about this proposition that our social institutions are predicated on power.
And power implies aggressive exploitation.
That implies forcing people to do things that are against their will.
And the proposition that our social institutions are predicated on power implies that there is pleasure, substantial pleasure, in forcing people to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do against their will.
Now, what I've seen instead in the functional institutions that I've been associated with Is that the best people are fundamentally motivated by exactly what you just said.
And that's why I'm honing in on it, which is that there's something unbelievably intrinsically pleasurable.
And now what you said about helping people find their voice and expressing themselves in the clearest possible terms.
And that doesn't matter whether you agree with them or not.
And you love that.
And that's, you see, yes, yes.
Well, that is the opposite of power.
It's not just that it isn't that power manifests itself in these institutions.
It's that when they're running properly, it's the very opposite of power.
It's the opening up of the possibility of creative expression for others.
And we take tremendous pleasure in that.
I don't think there's a more fundamental human pleasure than that.
a deeper more fundamental pleasure yeah and then you think you think so odd so odd because you you focused on this anecdote and How can you do that even for people that you disagree with?
Well, it turns out that the pleasure of opening up the possibility of expressing the ideas, the thoughts, the pleasure in that is so intense that you'll even take the hit to your own beliefs in order to engage in it.
And it also, there's a selfish aspect of it too, which is that it sharpens your own beliefs.
Right.
It sharpens them to encounter and actually to help someone with the opposite beliefs, articulate them in the most powerful way possible forces you to confront your own.
And I think that I take a lot of pleasure in that.
I mean, it's the kind of pleasure of like going for a run.
You know, it's maybe not like an immediate it's it's it's different than than licking an ice cream cone, but it's a deeper kind of pleasure in a way.
Well, I think that would be allied with the same motivation.
Because imagine that if part of what's giving you pleasure is the ability to foster the capacity of other people to communicate, to formulate their ideas and communicate, while you're doing that, you're also fostering that within yourself by putting yourself to the test constantly.
Well, it's a repetition of the same fundamental motivation.
And so it seems to me that when our social institutions are functioning properly, then the basis of the relationship between individuals within it at different levels of the hierarchy is actually one of broadened.
It's more like parenthood than it is like the expression of power.
Well, what I'm expressing, though, is so old fashioned.
It's largely a generational divide.
It doesn't always break down along those lines.
But I would say for the younger generation of people who don't believe, let's say, in journalism as Embodying the values I just described, exploratory and hearing the other perspective and trying, in fact, to make it as strong as it possibly can be, hearing the other person in good faith, all of those things that are fundamental to the liberal worldview, they don't believe that.
They believe in journalism as a tool.
And why do they believe that?
Now, is that a consequence of their education?
Yeah, it's completely connected to the ideas that I was describing, encountering when I was a student at Columbia or that Yonmi Park described to you.
You know, it turns out that there was an idea until extremely recently that was shared by conservatives and liberals in your generation, I would say, that What happened on, largely, what happens on campus stays on campus.
The Oberlin Gender Studies major will make her way into the universe and she'll get her job at McKinsey and she's going to leave those silly ideas behind.
No, no, that is not what's happened.
It turns out ideas really, really matter.
Ideas are extremely serious.
And if you're marinating at the most important formative years of your life in basically an echo chamber of this ideology, And then all of a sudden you're going into these institutions, incredibly important institutions, that our newspapers, our publishing houses, our Hollywood, go down the line.
It's not like you're checking those ideas at the door, you're bringing them with you.
And what we've seen is that you don't actually need a majority of people inside an institution to agree with these ideas for these ideas to gain moral, for these ideas to gain force.
No, you need a tiny minority.
A tiny minority and you need cowardice at the top.
Cowardice at the top.
That is the key ingredient.
You need people at the top who are willing to sell out the authority of the institution and the values of the institution that have taken decades, sometimes centuries, to accrue.
Basically for the short-term benefit of not being called a bad name.
Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit.
Okay, because that's actually pretty bloody awful, as it turns out.
You know, I mean, we don't want to...
Look, here's what I've learned in the last five years.
One thing I've learned is that most people will shut up very rapidly and apologize when attacked.
And a very small minority won't.
Why is that?
Well, because it's so horrible to be attacked.
And not only that, because it's so horrible to be attacked, but also because if you're a sensible person and you get attacked, the right thing to think to begin with is maybe you're stupid and wrong.
Yes, exactly.
Of course.
Exactly.
It's natural.
Well, it's not only natural, it's beneficial, right?
I mean, because you want to be reactive to your social surround.
And so then the question becomes, well, the first question is, why stick your neck out at all when the cost of sticking your neck out is extraordinarily high, psychologically and practically?
Even if you stick your neck out accidentally, which...
Because there are things that are, and I don't know how to say this without sounding cheesy, but there are virtues that are so much more important than getting ratioed on Twitter.
There just are.
Again, without sounding too high-minded, if you can get in touch with things that you're willing to Risk your life for, or let's say risk your reputation for, it's only then will you be able to withstand the pain of the lies and the slander.
Okay, so what are you going to...
You gave up your job at the New York Times.
I'm going to return to this point you just made.
I want to run through the biography again.
Now, you're working at the New York Times.
You're not the world's most popular person there.
No.
So you're paying up right now.
You can obviously tolerate that.
You're constitutionally built so that you can tolerate that.
I think that I'm not an expert in this subject, but I think that I would qualify as highly disagreeable, according to your definition.
Although, it's hard for me to say that because I really care what other people think about me.
You might be high.
And it hurts me.
You should take my personality test and find out.
Okay, I'll take it.
I suspect you're low in politeness and high in compassion.
That splits agreeableness, eh?
Because then you would care for other people, but you'd still be willing to say what you have to say.
I suspect that's...
And I also suspect you're probably pretty high in conscientiousness and openness.
And that makes you a weird political animal, because openness tilts you in a liberal direction, but conscientiousness tilts you in a...
Conservative.
But it'd be worth taking the test to find out.
I'll take it.
I've never taken it.
In general, I never take personality tests.
I don't know what my Myers-Briggs is either, but I will take it.
I guess it's a longer conversation, but the question of how to incentivize Like, I'm obsessed with the idea of courage and what makes people courageous or what makes people willing to be Natan Sharansky or be Andrei Sakharov.
Like, what is it?
I think it's fear of God.
You know, they say that's the beginning of wisdom.
Well, I mean that genuinely, but also metaphorically.
A lot of courage, I think, is being afraid of the right thing.
I don't think it was courage that drove me to do what I did five years ago in Canada.
I think it was fear of what was coming as an alternative.
I could see it.
It was like, well, there's a little beast here that I could tackle, or there's a great huge beast that's lumbering forward in the distance.
But why are so many people deluding themselves into thinking that if they just keep quiet about any number of the issues we're talking about, that it will somehow get easier to speak out?
Later.
Like, this is going to be the easiest time right now.
Yeah, well, that's the thing.
I don't know what the conditions are for learning that.
You see, that's one thing.
I think I've sort of known that for a long, long time, that the time to have the fight is now.
For me, I think being deeply connected To Jewish history and feeling like it's not just history, but it's like a compass in my life and that I am deeply obligated to its lessons and deeply obligated to all of the people who suffered and sacrificed so that I can live in the freedom
and the privilege that I have.
Like, that's my anchoring thing.
And I'm interested in how do we incentivize more people to see what this is and to sort of come out of the closet?
Because the thing that is so fascinating to me about this strange phenomenon is, by any measure, we're living in the freest societies that human beings have ever known.
And they're rapidly improving.
Yes, and that people are acting as if, and for very understandable reasons, like we're living in a totalitarian society to some degree, meaning they are double thinking.
They are living lives in which they have a private persona, and they will tell me in private at dinner, totally agree with you, but I could never say it out loud.
That phenomenon, to me, is so unbelievably widespread.
Yeah, well, that is the indication of the dawning of the totalitarian state, because the totalitarian state depends entirely on the dissociation between the public persona and the private viewpoint.
And to the degree that each person is willing to swallow that lie...
That's their contribution to the totalitarian state.
And so it is a requirement.
It's interesting that you pose your moral obligation in terms of your responsibility to, at least in part, to Jewish history.
And the fact that so many times people didn't say what they needed to say and the consequences were absolutely catastrophic.
That's certainly the case in Nazi Germany, to say the least.
But it also characterized the Stalinists and the Maoists and all of those totalitarian states.
I mean, people need to realize that if they're in a position where they can't say what they think, that that's the evidence that we're sliding in a direction that's not good.
There's the evidence.
It's right there.
And what do you do about that?
Well, you say what you think carefully.
And the reason for that is the alternative is worse.
I also think that it was really hard for me to...
Give up the prestige of working at the New York Times.
God, I bet.
I want to hear about that.
It was really hard for me.
like putting myself, like the fact that I had already put myself on the hook so publicly for standing up for certain values made it impossible for me not to follow through with doing the right thing.
It's a little bit like when I wanted to run the marathon, like I insanely, because I can't run a half a mile right now, but years ago I ran the New York City Marathon, having never been a runner in my life.
And the way that I did that was I told everyone in my life, I'm running the marathon before I'd even run a step.
And the pressure to sort of follow through with what I had publicly stated was very good because it forced me to do it.
And I guess what I would say to Nietzsche said, every great man is the actor of his own ideal.
Well, yeah, I guess what I would say to people listening to this is, like, put yourself on the hook now in front of people that you respect and admire.
And maybe even do it in a public way, because then when the testing time comes, it's very embarrassing not to follow through with living by your ideals.
Well, and let's say, well, the testing time isn't going to come and we're just overstating the danger.
Because that's the rationale, right?
Do you think that?
Do you think we're overstating it?
We could talk about France.
I don't know.
I don't know, right?
Because who knows, right?
I don't know which way history is going to turn.
It doesn't look very...
I'm certainly not happy with what's happening in the universities.
I'm not happy with what's happening in the scientific journals.
It doesn't seem to me a great thing that diversity, inclusivity, and equity is popping up absolutely everywhere, that human resources departments have a stranglehold on corporations, right?
All I'm saying is that if we're living in a world in which people cannot say their commonsensical views out loud, okay?
I'm not talking about political views.
I'm talking about, are there differences between men and women?
Is America fundamentally a good place?
Is Lincoln a hero?
These are basic things that have become taboo.
If we cannot say those basic things out loud and if those ideas about the fundamental goodness, let's say, of the American project, but really of the Western project, Really, I would say more than that.
I would say of humanity itself, because this is a fundamental critique.
The idea that our social institutions are predicated on exploitative power, that's a critique of the human spirit.
Sure.
It goes past even the West.
Yeah, if you can't say that looting is bad, okay, to think about this summer, if you can't say that segregation is evil and wrong, If you can't say that, I mean, we all know what the things are, the things that have become unsayable.
And I'm suggesting that that is enough for me to sound the alarm.
And if it turns out that I was a little paranoid or hysterical, but I made these things more sayable in sounding the alarm, I'm okay with that.
I'd rather be wrong now.
So tell me, what happened when you decided to leave the Times?
Well...
I mean, how did you come to...
I'd like the story.
How did you come to that decision?
Well, there was a kind of...
Forced ideological conformity that was happening.
And it became like a battle to get any piece through that didn't conform to the narrative.
And anything that didn't...
And how would that battle manifest itself?
So you would commission a story...
In all kinds of ways.
In all kinds of ways, yeah.
I mean, it would be...
I'd like to do a column on this.
And...
Me being tremendously, like having to jump through hoops and get 10 more sources, whereas other pieces from other writers would just sail through with like obvious embarrassing errors.
Not that I haven't had my own share of errors.
I have, and they're horrifically embarrassing and anyone can find them online.
But I'm saying if you didn't Comport with the orthodoxy, then you, your character, and your work were just unbelievably scrutinized in a way that another person's weren't.
When it came to commissioning things like...
I remember Ayaan Hirsi Ali called me the smuggler because early on when I was there, again, in this very brief, good period of self-reflection, I was able to get an op-ed that she wrote into the New York Times.
And she was like, I can't believe you were able to do that.
So there was this brief period in the beginning where the humiliation of getting Trump wrong, I think, led to an opening of the Overton window.
But then, for reasons I can't really figure out, it really, really, really just closed again, and it narrowed much more so, like, to a sliver, in a way.
It was much narrower than, I would say, pre the election.
And, of course, Trump had a tremendous amount to do with it.
If you believed that, you know, and I think a lot of my colleagues genuinely believed this, that Trump was a fundamental threat to America, to the Republic, to minorities, we can go on and on and on, we know the argument, we could read it anywhere else, then you were morally obligated to Defeat that threat.
And that meant that anything that flirted with any number of topics where he was on a particular side of it, then the right, the correct position, was always to be on the opposite side of it.
And so you saw this really, really clearly, let's say, in the lab leak theory.
Right, which was completely of the Wuhan, of coronavirus, which increasingly it seems like the coronavirus was, you know, unintentionally, let's say, leaked from this lab in Wuhan.
Well, that became unsayable.
And it became unsayable because people in the Trump administration were saying that that was the case.
And so everything was seen through the prism of this incredibly singular figure of Trump.
So that Sped it all up.
And then you had the summer, and you had the killing of George Floyd.
And that just brought everything that was sort of at a low boil just absolutely bubbling over.
And the way that it bubbled over Most acutely was in the choice in June to run an op-ed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton that said not that the National Guard should be brought in to quell peaceful protests, but that the National Guard should be brought in to quell violent rioting.
It was a controversial piece by any stretch in that really sensitive moment.
But it was a view, frankly, that was shared by the majority of Americans, if you go back and look at polls at that time.
But inside the context, the rarefied context of the New York Times, not only was this op-ed seen as controversial, it was seen as literal violence.
More than 800 of my colleagues signed a letter saying that this op-ed literally put the lives of Black New York Times staffers in danger.
What kind of argument was made in favor of that position?
The argument was, first of all, it was a misreading of his op-ed.
It was based on a fundamental misreading that insisted that his op-ed was about bringing in the military to put down justified, understandable riots in reaction to George Floyd.
So they never made the distinction.
They collapsed the distinction between bringing in the National Guard to put down violent rioting and bringing in the National Guard to put down peaceful protests.
And then they said that because police and the military are systemically racist, I'm being crude and just sort of giving you the overview, that this move would necessarily result in inordinate amount of Black death, the death of Black Americans.
So that was the argument.
And what happened was not, from the top, a defense of the op-ed and a defense of all of the various players.
Was this an op-ed you had commissioned?
No, I had nothing to do with the op-ed.
Oh, okay, okay.
So you're just watching this.
Yeah, I ended up being sort of...
Brought in as a kind of punching bag because I ended up tweeting out some tweets that I think hold up extremely well about that this was a very, very useful litmus test to understand the generational divide inside the New York Times.
But I had nothing to do with the op-ed, but the people that did have something to do with the op-ed, my 25 year...
I want to ask you something about that generational divide, sorry.
Well, I'm still trying to think through this.
The education of young people to adopt the viewpoint that our social institutions are fundamentally corrupt and driven by power.
So then I think, well, how much of that, this calls for speculation, how much of that is a consequence of the breakdown of family structure?
I mean, so I see the positive element of our social institutions as something like the positive aspect of the paternal spirit.
So it's a father, it's the positive father who encourages in exactly the way that you encourage the writers that were under your care to express themselves and develop.
Am I the father in that situation?
Well, you're female, but you're working in the patriarchy.
So yes, I would say, symbolically speaking, that that's a manifestation of...
Well, the spirit of your Jewish ancestors, let's put it that way.
Well, I mean that.
I mean that.
And you're the one who said that that tradition has shaped you to such a degree.
It's like, well, you feel you have an obligation to embody that.
Well, is it not a paternal spirit?
That's the tradition.
But what if you've never experienced that?
I don't know if I would call it paternal or not.
That's not the way I think about things.
But I do think...
If your family's broken, if you've never had a positive relationship with someone who's...
I think it's different than that.
I think it's about should corporations, which is what the New York Times is in the end of the day, should they be moral actors?
That's the big difference.
Like, there's a sense among the younger generation that...
A newspaper or a tech company or whatever, the place that you work should somehow also not just be about pursuing the bottom line, but should also be a manifestation of what you consider to be good politics and good morals.
And that's why you see, I don't know if you followed this entire story at Coinbase that I think is really, really interesting, where basically the heads of Coinbase said, because they felt like rather than pursuing excellence for the company, so much of employees' energy and attention and time was being devoted to using Slack to discuss the politics of the day.
And they basically said, look, No more politics at work.
Work is not a place for politics.
Work is a place for making Coinbase excellent.
And if you're uncomfortable with that, we're going to give you a really, really nice severance package.
You've seen Basecamp follow suit.
When did this happen?
This happened, I would say Coinbase in the past two months, and then Basecamp, another company, much more recently.
And I'm really watching that trend because if you're running a company and rather than, let's take the case of the New York Times, you're not spending your time reporting and editing and commissioning, but you're spending your time basically being like an offense archaeologist looking through things that other people have published to decide whether or not an adjective was orientalist or not.
That's a bad use of your time if you're Supposed to be producing the best newspaper in the world.
And so that's one thing I'm watching for.
I'm curious if what Coinbase did is going to take off, because I thought that was just really, really, really smart strategy to say, no, that's not going to be what we do at this company.
But suffice it to say, the New York Times has not followed Coinbase's suit.
The fallout from the Tom Cotton episode was that within 48 hours, my immediate boss was reassigned.
The boss who had hired me, James Bennett, was pushed out of the paper after he was struggle sessioned in front of thousands of employees at the company.
Tell us about that.
I will.
Well, in Slack channels with thousands of people, guillotines and ax emojis were put next to his name and my name.
And no one said a word about that.
Remember, this is an ideology that tells us silence is violence.
But guillotine emojis aren't.
Exactly.
Basically, what happened was that it's the same script that's happened everywhere else.
Like a normal human being who looked out and saw that 800 of his colleagues felt that he decided to run an op-ed that literally put their lives in danger.
Well, the normal human response to that, as you explained before, is, I'm so sorry.
But unfortunately, in the rubric of this ideology, I'm so sorry is evidence of your guilt.
It's blood in the water.
And that's exactly what happened.
I mean, it was, I'm so sorry is a confession.
Yes.
Yes, which means don't apologize if you haven't done anything wrong.
Yes.
Because that's exactly right.
So he was pushed out of the paper, and perhaps most disgustingly, my colleague is a very dear friend of mine, Adam Rubenstein, who was one of the editors, one of seven editors who worked on the piece.
His name was leaked by others of our colleagues to the new side of the paper.
And a 25-year-old editor, at the very beginning of his career, Was sort of the guy that was thrown under the bus and he ultimately ended up leaving the paper too.
And I found that to be the most disgusting part of the entire episode because as everyone who works in any organization knows, and he didn't make a, there was no mistake that was in that op-ed.
But generally what happens in a collegial environment is if someone makes a mistake.
So for example, Months prior to the Tom Cotton episode, the New York Times ran a flagrantly anti-Semitic cartoon in which Bibi Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, is shown as a dachshund, a long wiener dog, wearing a collar with a Jewish star, and he's shown leading a blind Trump who's wearing a yarmulke on his head.
People can look it up.
Now everyone in the editorial staff knew who chose that op-ed.
Sorry, that cartoon.
And no one in the public knows his name.
And that's exactly as it should be.
It's exactly as it should be.
And yet in this case, a 25-year-old editor was hung out to dry.
And so essentially what I gathered from this entire episode was risk-taking can get you fired.
Running an op-ed that other people inside the paper considered controversial could get you struggle session in front of the entire company.
And knowing that that was literally what my job was, well, that job became impossible.
And the thing that happened that is really unbelievable.
If you're thinking about running a large organization, this will sound as insane as it is.
The new rule became kind of editing by consensus.
So every single op-ed editor had to say that they were comfortable with every single op-ed.
Well, you can imagine that if 9.9 out of 10 people agree with this view of the world, that my job became impossible.
By the time the last few weeks of the paper, I was told explicitly don't commission op-eds anymore because none of them were able to get through this new gauntlet.
And I said to myself, you know, why did I go into journalism?
I did not go into journalism to be rich.
I went into journalism because it's a job that allows you to pursue your curiosity, which is incredible.
And if I can't do that anymore, and if I need to sort of like become a half version of myself, And sit on my hands about an increasing number of topics that I think are incredibly urgent.
What's the point of doing this?
And so I felt like, you know, I could kind of like become a husk or I could leave of my own volition before something similar happened to me.
And so I decided to leave and left in a very public way and having no idea sort of what I would do next.
And I will be honest, it took me a long time to sort of like get my bearing after I did that.
Have you got your bearings?
In retrospect, I would say to anyone considering leaving an institution, have a good plan in place for what you plan to do next.
That's no easy thing to manage.
You had a dream job, fundamentally.
That's the pinnacle to be an op-ed editor at the New York Times.
That's a star position.
Have I gotten my bearings?
I would say very much so.
Oh, good for you.
I feel so much more optimistic now than I did, you know, if I left in July, it was in August and September.
I mean, it was very disorienting at first to feel like, wow, I've been in institutions for my entire life.
I've never been an entrepreneur.
I've never had to figure out all these things for myself.
You know, I've always sort of Been in these fancy institutions and what would it look like to try and build one myself?
And how would I, and this is something I'm struggling with a lot right now, or not struggling in a good way, how do I resist the same forces that I so criticize the New York Times for?
And let me give you a specific example.
So I'm writing on Substack now.
And it's incredible.
Tell us about Substack, too.
So Substack, for people that don't know, is this new platform for, well, it's for any writers, but that allows people to subscribe directly to you.
And so I publish about two things a week, often a column that I've written and a column I've commissioned.
But ultimately, I want to build this into a much bigger But this is the start of it.
And it's going extremely, extremely well.
And I'm in the top 10 of, you know, politics.
So I just have to go a little bit further to beat, you know, Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald.
So it's going really well.
But the thing that is corrupting about it, it's the same force that's corrupting at the New York Times or any media right now, which is to say, I know that if I run certain kinds of stories, that that's going to be like a heroin hit for my readers.
And I see.
You see right away.
Yes, and we all know about the temptation of providing heroin hits for our readers.
Yes.
And it's very, I mean, and at least at the New York Times, you have some insulation.
Okay, you write one column that is a viral hit, great.
You write one the next month that's only a couple hundred thousand.
But there is some level of insulation.
With Substack, there's none.
I see every single night how many people are converting to paid subscriptions.
And I see extremely clearly what kinds of stories make sense.
Make that happen.
And I don't want to give in to the same.
I don't want to radicalize my readers in a certain direction.
And so you have to be, as an editor and as a writer, disciplined.
You know, I'm going to commission this story.
You have to be pursuing something else.
That's the thing.
I mean, I've struggled with the same thing with this podcast.
I mean, what I'm trying to do, maybe this is insulation.
I don't know.
I'm trying to learn things I don't know.
And so I'm talking to people that I think are interesting, and I'm hoping they'll teach me things so that I'm not quite so stupid.
And if people are happy with that, I mean, I read the comments, I'm responsive to my audience, I respect my audience, but the respect is that I'm going to take them along for the journey.
And so I'm not tailoring it to an audience at all.
But what's so nice about that is it really seems to work.
Like, when I'm not tailoring to my audience, when I'm engaging in a genuine conversation, that's when the responses are the best.
And so that's so heartening that that's the case.
I mean, what are you seeing with regards to responses?
What's the temptation exactly?
Yeah, so I think that, you know, when I resigned from the New York Times, that letter...
I think was probably the most widely read thing that I've ever written.
And I'm really, really proud of it.
But I think in a way I became like symbolic of, let's just say, like the anti-woke position.
And on the one hand, I think it's extremely important for me to report on that.
And I'm really proud of the reporting that I've done exposing The way that this ideology, for example, is taking over K through 12 education.
And one of the reasons I think it's so important that I do it is that the mainstream media is not going to touch it, because it's the same ideological succession that they're implicated in.
So on the one hand, I think I have a particular burden to write about this topic that's being untouched.
And on the other hand, I don't want every single piece to be pounding the drumbeat on anti-wokies.
See what I mean?
Because then it's a feeling of like, oh my God, the world's melting down.
It's like, no, you also want to give people a sense of perspective.
So that's my challenge.
But I imagine for other writers on the site, it's a different challenge.
Yeah, the challenge is that you don't want to become a parody of yourself and serve your previous image.
I mean, that's a very troublesome thing, especially as your image develops.
So, as you said, you've become symbolic of something.
And so then the question is, is the power of that symbol so overwhelming that it shapes your entire character and everything that you do?
And there's...
Definite incentives in that direction.
And it's hard to resist.
And it's being demanded in some sense by your audience.
Right.
And it's really hard also because...
I picture my reader as someone who still reads the New York Times and the Washington Post, and they're coming to me for the thing they're not getting there.
But for the readers who are only reading me, let's say, and only reading a handful of writers that are sort of playing in my same playground, that can have a radicalizing effect.
And so I just want to, that's the thing I'm struggling with.
Right, and it's because you're also not embedded with a bunch of other opinions, as you would be in the newspaper.
Exactly.
That's right.
And so my dream situation and what I'm trying to build toward is creating that ecosystem.
I'm not interested in, like, the creator economy.
I think I've watched you and I've watched other public figures who have become such potent symbols.
And on the one hand, I'm like, look at the effect that they've had.
It's so powerful.
And I know just from when I was writing about the intellectual dark web and reading 12 Rules for Life, I remember sitting at a hotel and a young waiter, a man coming up to me saying, like, that book saved my life.
And that's unbelievably powerful.
And on the other hand, The burdens of it seem very scary and dangerous to me.
And so I want to place myself ideally in a kind of round table, like a kind of group where it's like a sensibility.
And I'm not the only one because...
I don't know.
Am I wrong about...
No, no, I don't think you're wrong at all.
I mean, in the new book I wrote Beyond Order, I talk about this necessity for social interaction as the prime sanity-maintaining process, is that sane people aren't sane because they're so organized internally, that their psyches are organized properly.
That's what you might expect...
psychoanalytically minded or maybe psychologically minded.
But what really is the case that what maintains our sanity is constant receptivity to the reactions of other people.
At least that's part of what maintains it.
We have a dialogue with our own conscience, which is something like that internal spirit that you described earlier, the spirit that animates history speaking within us.
We have a responsibility to that, but we have to be open to other people, especially people who don't share our opinions because we're stupid and lost.
And it's absolutely crucial.
So I think that from a psychological perspective, I think that's a great idea.
And I mean, it also keeps you alive because then other people are feeding you new ideas all the time, right?
Yeah, and I think, you know, for all of the Downsides of the New York Times, I think being around people, you know, good faith people, and there were many good faith people who just disagreed with me.
And like, you know, I had a wonderful editor there who, you know, was definitely to my left, but was such a fair reader and made everything I wrote stronger.
Like, I need that.
Everybody needs that.
And one of the things that I think is one of the It's amazing because we can connect directly to an audience.
But also, everyone needs an editor.
Everyone.
And everyone needs a community.
And if your community is only parroting back to you the things you believe, That's not a recipe for growth, and it's also a recipe, I think, for being captive to who you are in a particular moment.
And I really want to make sure that I'm giving myself the ability to change and grow as hard as that might be able to do in public.
Well, that's the right thing to model, I think, is that I believe that when these podcasts work properly, the reason they're compelling to the degree they manage to be compelling is because what people are observing and participating in is the process by which two people mutually transform one another towards a higher good.
So we're both struggling to make things clear and to approach something that we don't have yet.
But it's in that struggle that the motivation arises.
But you know how you and I, before this podcast started, both said, like, I said to you, I'm nervous.
And you said, I've been nervous for five years, or anxious for five years.
And I said, I know exactly what you mean.
Like, that's true to some extent.
But we both know that we're having this conversation, just the two of us right now, but that it's going to be in public and that millions of people potentially could see it.
And that ultimately changes the way that we talk to each other.
It makes us more careful.
And I think that's a good thing.
But the conversation- And more nervous.
Yeah, and more nervous.
But the conversation you and I might have in private, like, That's a different conversation.
And that to me is the most precious kind.
Because that's like the high trust.
I mean, obviously I have a high level of trust enough to be able to come on this and trust that the conversation is going to be fair and good faith.
And of course I have that.
But like, it's still in public.
Yeah, my dream is that these conversations are as close to a private conversation as it can possibly be managed.
Of course, of course.
But you see what I mean.
Well, yeah, it's interesting because we've struggled with this a fair bit because often at the end of the interview or the discussion, We'll close it, and then we'll keep talking, me and whoever I'm talking to, and then we'll talk about some things that are interesting, and then we have the decision, because we're still recording often, is like, well, do we include that?
And generally, the answer has been yes, although not always.
I mean, it's hard to...
It's interesting, though, too, because if you make a private conversation public, see, that is the truth to do that.
And then that really shows that you have trust in your audience, is that, look, I'm going to tell you what I actually think.
But then, see, Barry, too, that's that adventure that we were talking about earlier, that is being offered by these radical movements.
There's something unbelievably adventurous about telling the truth in public.
Because you don't know...
You see, you have to stake your faith on the truth in that situation because you make the presumption that that's the best possible approach for it, even though you don't know what's going to happen.
You hedge your bets otherwise, right?
And you're more conservative and you're more cautious because...
Well, because you want to direct what's going to happen, even though you really can't.
But to the degree that you can throw that off and say, well, to hell with it, so to speak.
I'm going to say what I think.
And...
But that's also when these things really take off, when the discussions really take off.
I agree.
And I just, for me, you know, now that I'm doing well on Substack and I'm building my company, it's like, I can tell the truth.
Telling the truth is good for business for me.
But what about the young person who hasn't even started their career?
I guess what I'm trying to say is the price of telling the truth Well, I've thought about that a lot, you know, and in my first book, I learned a fair bit of this from reading Nietzsche, I would say, but there is an emphasis in Nietzsche's thinking on the necessity for an apprenticeship.
Let's say you're a young person, well, and you don't really know how to express yourself and you don't really know anything yet.
And so what you have to do to some degree is subjugate yourself to a disciplinary process.
And that means that your particular voice is temporarily, it's not suppressed exactly, it's subordinated.
But it's subordinated to authority, not to power.
And then you go through that apprenticeship process, which for you would have happened to some degree in college and then to some degree at the Wall Street Journal.
You go through that subordination process and discipline yourself, and then you can start integrating who you are with the discipline and then speaking.
Well, this is the thing that I think...
Some people in our, in like, let's say the independent, like the Wild West universe, do not appreciate about what the institutions at their best can do, which is exactly what you're describing.
It's the training and the raising up and the elevation of the younger generation and of other voices.
And that's not their exploitation.
No.
And I want to figure out how can I do that?
How can I build a version of an institution that somehow is immunized or inoculated from the ideological takeover That adheres to the kind of old school liberal values that we've talked about on this podcast,
and that allow me to do the thing that I told you I love doing, which yes, I love writing and something about my personality allows me to be in the arena, much more so than a lot of other people.
Extraversion and openness.
Sure.
You'll find out when you take the test.
Yes, but also, I will not be satisfied if that's the only thing that I do.
I just know that the reasons that I'm able to do what I do are...
Be able to put together a column or know how to report or speak in public is because so much effort on the part of other people went into training me to be able to do that.
Yes, yes.
Well, this is something else we can talk about.
You talked about editing.
But for people that are coming up, let's say, as Instagram influencers or clubhouse personalities or whatever, that's not a substitute for the kind of process that I'm describing.
It's just really not.
So you talked about...
You can get the substitute to some degree, I suppose, by being carefully responsive to your audience because they will train you to some degree, but then you run into the problem of the echo chamber, the potential echo chamber developing the positive feedback loop.
Now, there's something here about judgment.
Like, in our society, the idea that you should be non-judgmental has become a truism, and it's one of those truisms that you violate at your own peril.
But I don't like that at all, because if you're going to be a good apprentice master, let's say...
Judgment's my entire business.
Judgment's discernment, saying that some things are worthy and some things aren't.
Some ideas are worthy of being heard by the world and some writers and some voices and some style and Certain, like, you want to tell me that, like, you know, everyone's as good as Joan Didion and we should have no judgment?
Like, give me a break.
That's insane.
Well, that's it.
Well, right.
Well, it's certainly the pathway to insanity because everything becomes...
But when people say that, it's like, no judgment.
It's like good vibes.
No.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It doesn't mean it.
I don't think people understand the depth of what it means.
Judgment is essential.
Judgment is absolutely essential.
It's certainly essential if you want to be a good writer.
Well, if you want the good, judgment is inevitable because you have to differentiate between what is good and what isn't.
So how do you construe the relationship between fostering the development of someone And the imposition of that judgment, because you're going to impose high standards, right?
And so that means judgment.
And judgment means criticism.
Criticism means this and not this, right?
It doesn't mean not this.
It doesn't mean it's all bad.
It means, well, we'll keep this and we'll dispense with the rest, right?
It's the winnowing of the wheat from the chaff.
And so how do you construe that in relationship to mentoring?
And how do you do that without becoming a too imposing force, right?
It's very interesting.
It's such a delicate, good question that really comes down to the trust you develop with someone and whether or not they believe that you're trying to shape them into the best potential Not version of themselves that's saying too much, but their talent becoming...
I don't know if it is saying too much.
I don't think so.
I do think that's an extension of the parental place and that that's the proper way to construe the social institution.
I would say to steal a term, I do think a safe space is extremely important.
I have been able to hear incredibly harsh criticism from people in my life, mentors in my life.
I'm thinking now especially back to my early days at the Wall Street Journal and, you know, people like Bret Stephens and Paul Jago or Melanie Kirkpatrick when I knew it was coming from a place of genuinely wanting the best for me.
Right, so you trusted the judgment because I think you were on the right path.
Because it was connected to like, I admired what they were doing.
I saw that it was impressive and good.
I saw, even if I disagreed with the view, right?
The craft.
And I knew that I couldn't do that yet.
Right, so judgment in the service of what's admirable and good is to be devoutly hoped for.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And just...
And that's not power.
But it was just so obvious to me that I couldn't do what they could do.
And that if I wanted to learn to do what they could do and what I so desperately wanted to be good at, for whatever reasons about my history or the way I was raised or whatever, then I needed to, like, put my ego aside and listen to them.
Sometimes that meant that the things I wrote, they said, were pretty much garbage.
Yeah, well, that's the case, though, when you start to write or think, is 95% of what you write or think is garbage.
And even when you're good at it, the more you throw away, the better, in some sense, because you only keep what's great, if you can manage it.
And I also think that there's a mimicry in the beginning that I think is extremely important.
Yes.
Studying what works and literally mapping it out You know, I was just...
Yeah, that's the humanities, by the way.
Yeah, like, that's very important.
And that doesn't mean that you're a parrot.
And that doesn't mean that you don't have your own style.
But like, you know...
And why would you make that comment about style?
Just out of curiosity.
I think that a lot of people in my generation are, especially younger, obsessed with being singular and being different from everyone that came before.
And they confuse the discipline with the eradication of their style.
I think, yeah, yeah.
Well, it is a fine discernment.
It is.
And I think that, you know, you can, I also think that Style has to do with inborn talent a lot of the time, and that you can learn to be an excellent...
Like, I'm not a great writer.
I'm a very good writer.
But there are people who are, like, just, like, Cirque du Soleil writers, okay?
Yeah, yeah.
But being a very good writer and being able to communicate plainly and compellingly and convincingly, that's more than most people can hope for.
I guess I'm saying that I think a lot of young writers imagine that they can do something that no one's ever done before.
And it's like, why don't we strive for being able to communicate really clearly and plainly without jargon?
To someone with only a high school degree so that they can understand a complicated topic.
Right.
So that's the imposition of constraints to begin with, just to develop the discipline of the craft.
And then hopefully you can deviate from that in a stylistically appropriate manner as you become an expert.
Exactly.
It's just like, you're not Hunter S. Thompson.
Maybe you could be that, but let's try and just get the basics down.
Start with Hemingway.
The basics are hard enough.
The basics are hard enough.
And like...
Yeah, I just think that it sounds so basic, but being able to communicate plainly without the crutch of jargon is something that many people that are coming out of the most celebrated, elite, prestigious universities in North America cannot do.
And I will tell you that when I can find a young person that can do that, I cling to that person.
That's how rare it is.
And why cling?
Why do you say that?
Because it's special and rare.
It's special and rare to be able to find someone whose, frankly, worldview, but then that's reflected in the writing, has not been captured.
It seems so obvious to me that It's obvious in a way that is only obvious when you realize it, but that when institutions are functioning properly, they consist of people who are looking to young people to find talent in the direction of their interests and to nurture that.
I mean, you've experienced your apprenticeship in these various institutions.
Is there any relationships that you've had that you regard as intensely positive that weren't of that nature?
That weren't mentored?
Yeah.
So I like to think about it as the best in that person serving the best in you.
And when you look back at the people who've shaped your development, I mean, isn't that the nature of the relationship that you had with them, rather than the relationship of arbitrary power where they're skimming off, say, the excess profits of your labor?
It's not fundamentally exploitative.
Overwhelmingly, it's been...
Overwhelmingly, it's been the former.
Overwhelmingly, it's been positive.
Now that's not to say, listen, as you've sort of assessed me without me taking the personality test yet, I'm also someone that can piss off a boss because I'm someone who can, you know, swim upstream by my nature.
Now, oftentimes, though, that's been a quality that's appreciated because it's meant Sometimes in homogenous environments that I've been looked to as like a check on it.
So I think that they're a good manager.
Advantage of disagreeable people is exactly that.
They will actually tell you what they think.
Yeah.
And sometimes they're right.
Often we are right, I will say.
But it can piss people off that are just trying to kind of like...
You know, let's get through the day.
Let's put out the paper.
It can be annoying, frankly.
And I know that about myself.
But also, I think that it can be a superpower.
I really do.
So what's in the immediate future with regard to Substack?
And how many subscribers do you have?
Tell me about, tell me the end of the story.
So now you're on Substack.
Oh God, there's so much that's happened.
We've drawn out like a resignation over two hours, but I hope we fit other things that are of interest into it.
So now I'm on Substack.
Like, you know, like I think a lot of the, a lot of heterodox journalists who Don't fit in with a tribe are also on Substack.
And I think it's extremely interesting.
The thing that I think is a challenge- It's like an IDW of journalists.
Yeah.
I mean, the thing that I think is challenging, right, is if you're like a dentist or an accountant or a lawyer, and I meet a lot of these people and they say, I don't trust the New York Times anymore.
What do I read?
Well, it's a really dissatisfying answer because I'm like, well, you need to subscribe to these 10 sub stocks and listen to these five podcasts and follow these 30 people on Twitter.
No, that's not going to work.
So I am extremely interested in what I've been referring to.
How do I make a common address for that sensibility, that independent-minded That, you know, is not like centrist in the sense of like, just finding the middle path, but is able to see truth on, but is able to separate, let's say, identity from ideas, and is able to say, yeah, that person maybe sucks on this thing, but they're really right about that.
Like, that's what I'm interested in building.
And so the way that started off for me, and I'm proud of it, is, you know, commissioning op-eds and columns and reported pieces from Voices that, you know, don't have the platform that I think that they should and trying to elevate them to my readers.
But it's going to be, you know, my podcast, podcast network.
And ultimately, I hope like a whole ecosystem of journalism and storytelling.
That's what I'm interested in building.
And so I have tens of thousands of subscribers and That's been fantastic, and I'm incredibly grateful to it.
But for me, this is just the beginning.
In the end of the day, the reason that I left the New York Times, Jordan, is that, yes, because I was being bullied.
Yes, because I couldn't do my job.
Both true things.
But ultimately, it's because I really believe that the fight for Liberalism, and I don't mean that in the partisan sense, but I mean the kind of values we've been describing during this conversation, that is more important than any amount of popularity.
Any amount of accolades on Twitter than anything else.
And so I had to leave the institution in order to fight for liberalism.
And that I see as like the mission of my life, I guess you would say.
And the catastrophe of our times.
Especially for someone who's older, like me.
I had a dream a while back.
I wandered into the backyard of a cabin that I was staying at, and there was a dying lion by a fire pit at the boundary of this cabin's property.
Wait, an actual dying lion?
This is in a dream.
Oh, in a dream, in a dream.
Yes, sorry.
Yes, and so my aunt called to me to warn me about the presence of this lion, and I looked at it, and it was in rough shape.
It was mangy and ill-kempt and not good, but still, you know, a lion and powerful.
And then I wandered around to the left side of the house, and interestingly enough, and there was a whole...
Number of them, tigers, lions, all these predatory beasts, all in terrible shape and all hungry and willing to attack.
And I had to speak in order to keep them at bay.
And I woke up and I thought, well, Jesus, that's pretty bloody obvious.
I know what that dream means.
I mean, there's all these dying lions, the New York Times, the legacy medias, the institutions.
I'm not happy to see their demise.
No.
It's really awful.
I mean, they were stellar.
And to hear someone like Yeonmi Park talk about Columbia in that way, it's so awful.
And to see what happened with you at the New York Times.
It's like, you know, on one hand, the story is, well, you know, you pursued your creative spirit and you established yourself independently.
And isn't that wonderful?
But that loss that you described of the institution that has the capacity to apprentice and train, that's cataclysmic.
I will say that I spent months, I could kind of cry thinking about it, mourning that.
Like, it is catastrophic.
But there are things in history that have been more catastrophic.
And that's the kind of perspective that I'm trying to keep.
Because if I spent all day looking at the wreckage, And more than just looking at the wreckage, trying desperately to try and like shore up something that is so clearly rotten, I would spend my life in grief.
And I just believe so strongly that, not believe, I see that people have had to build things in way, way, way more trying and difficult circumstances than this.
And so if they could build things from true wreckage, believe me, we can rebuild new institutions.
We can.
And that's what I'm going to do.
And I think that's what everyone that comes to me, you know, complaining about what's going on in their kid's school or what's going on in their company.
Sometimes people that are running the company is coming to me complaining about what's happening in their own company that they have control over.
Like enough.
Enough.
No more complaining quietly.
No more anonymous emails.
The time is now to out yourself as someone that is opposed to this, that is alarmed about it, and then spend all of your energy and money and time banding together with people to build new things.
I wish there was another option because that sounds exhausting, I realize, but I just don't think there's another option.
Three years ago, if you had asked me, I would have suggested something different.
I really believe that a lot of these institutions can be saved.
And by the way, some of them, and to the extent to which there are ones that can be saved and shored up, they should be.
Because it's really, really, really, really, really hard to build new things.
Really hard.
It's so easy to tear things down.
That's the conclusion that I've come to.
And I think the more people that can, yes, let's grieve the 20th century institutions that are crumbling.
Let's understand that they are something that they might have the same name, but they're no longer what they used to be.
And then let's get to work building the things that we know we need to build that are necessary for upholding The civilization that we talked about earlier.
That's what I think the task is.
Thank you very much for talking with me today.
Thank you, Jordan.
It was really good to see you, Barry.
It was great to see you too.
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