Ben Burgess critiques the modern left's shift from structural economic critique to moralistic policing, arguing that corporate co-optation via symbolic gestures distracts from mass incarceration and inequality. He highlights how a "limited budget of outrage" wastes moral capital on trivial etiquette while ignoring crises like the Iraq War, alienating working-class allies through intolerance for dissent. Burgess further condemns the authoritarian tendencies of cancel culture, noting how figures like Jank Uger face eternal punishment for past tweets despite historical shifts, while investigative journalists are blacklisted for tribal loyalty rather than genuine commitment to challenging entrenched power. Ultimately, this behavior risks transforming progressive movements into overgrown hall monitors that fail to address material realities or attract non-elite demographics. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Critique of the Contemporary Left00:14:51
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gas Digital Network.
Hey guys, today's show is brought to you by the SOHO Forum, the wonderful debate series run by the great Gene Epstein.
And of course, Gene will be debating our guest for today's show, Ben Burgess.
The resolution: Socialism is preferable to capitalism as an economic system that promotes freedom, equality, and prosperity.
This debate will be live in the Villages, Florida.
If you're in the area, go check it out.
It's going to be a great time.
Of course, they did a debate similar to this on the podcast a couple years ago, and I can't wait to watch this one.
So go to thesohoforum.org for all of the information.
Make sure you go support Gene Epstein in the Soho Forum, and he'll be debating our guest today.
Ben Burgess should be a good one.
All right, let's start the show.
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host.
James Tom.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm very happy to be joined today by a returning guest to the show, Ben Burgess.
If you're not familiar with Ben, he's been on the podcast a couple times before.
He's a professor of philosophy.
He's an author and the host of the show, Give Them an Argument.
That was the title of his first book.
But we're here to discuss his second book, which he just sent me and I was able to read.
It's called Canceling Comedians While the World Burns.
It's a critique of the contemporary left from the left.
And I'm really excited to talk to you about this book.
I just want to say, I loved it.
I didn't like it.
I loved it.
I thought it was incredible.
And you really, you know, it's funny because obviously we have different perspectives on this issue.
I'm a free market libertarian.
You're a democratic socialist.
But so many of your critiques of the left really resonated with me.
So thank you for taking the time to come talk with us.
I'm excited to get into it.
Yeah, thanks for having me, man.
Oh, I should also mention, just to give a plug out, that you will be debating Gene Epstein at the Soho Forum coming up soon.
Go to thesohoforum.org for all of that information.
Of course, you guys did a debate that I moderated on the podcast.
This will be a more formal Oxford-style debate with probably a much more competent moderator, if I had to guess.
You know, you did fine.
You know, you did a good job of suppressing your secret social sympathies during the debate.
I've been practicing for years, you know, so it was easy for me.
This is what I've been working on.
So the book is a critique of the left from the left, which I think is just one of the hardest things to do.
It's one of the things that takes a lot more courage, if you ask me, because it's easy to go out there and critique the right if you're a lefty, and it's easy to critique the left if you're a right-wing person.
You're not going to piss off your own base.
You're not going to get the same type of heat.
You are the champion of your little tribe.
But it's also in many ways a lot more useful and a lot more important to critique your own side because this is where the most powerful adjustments can come from.
And I've said for a long time, even from the libertarian perspective, we want to have a better left wing in this country.
I mean, if you really care about ending wars and ending mass incarceration, ending corporate bailouts and corporate welfare, like a lot of libertarians do, well, we're probably never going to accomplish any of those things without the left.
Like we're going to need a left wing on board with us.
So I actually think it's in everybody's interest for the right wing to be better, for the left wing to be better, for libertarians to be better.
So I really appreciate you writing this book.
Let me just, if you could just tell people who haven't read it, maybe just give them a quick kind of breakdown of what the book is about and why you were inspired to write it.
Yeah, sure.
So the book is about basically all of the ways that I think that the left is screwing up right now, that it's doing things and presenting itself in a way that make it harder to appeal to the great mass of people that we need to appeal to in order to actually achieve any of our goals, either the ones that you just rattled off or the ones you disagree with, either of them.
And I think in particular, it's about the ways that a lot of the contemporary left has really substituted for what it's supposed to be about, what it says it's about, right?
Which is this critique of structures and institutions, what's in practice, a kind of moralistic focus on individuals and going after people for their failure to exhibit sufficient levels of commitment to those goals.
And I try to both go into a bunch of the ways that that plays out and then also to think a little bit about why that is, how we got to be this way.
Right.
Yeah.
So it's really that I've been talking about this a lot on my show and how you see this dynamic where for lack of better term, what's called wokeism, the woke stuff, which leads in a lot of different directions where it's, you can kind of conveniently hit who you want to when you want to.
And I've just been trying to point out to the left that you see like these huge corporations jumping on board with the woke stuff.
And then it does very conveniently seem to be like, you know, Bernie Sanders gets criticized for being sexist and his supporters are sexist or Glenn Greenwald is criticized for being sexist or like all of these other,
you know, and you just look at it, you're like, whether or not this is a plot, which I'm kind of convinced it is, but whether or not it is, in practice, the way it's working is that now you have these giant corporate interests almost getting off the hook as they are now able to attack any good leftist who's standing up for a left-wing cause for violating one of the woke rules or, you know, whatever it may be.
Even like in the examples of Bernie Sanders, where it was unclear that he even did anything, even if he said what Elizabeth Warren had claimed he said, it wasn't clear that the spirit of it was anything sexist.
But so it just seems like, you know, I see these things like J.P. Morgan Chase sending their execs to diversity training and they have a float in the gay pride parade and all of these things.
And I wonder if, like, how is it not more obvious to the average left-winger, however you feel about diversity training or gay pride or any of these issues, you could agree with them on all of it, but don't you see that they're fooling you?
Like they're buying you off to say, oh, yeah, we don't have to, you know, you don't have to focus on what a good left winger really should be focused on about JP Morgan Chase, which isn't whether their execs go to diversity training.
It's the power imbalance, which is what you would think like a guy like you would want to focus on about them.
Yeah, no, for sure.
So I think that there are like, there are a couple of things, you know, going on there.
I mean, when you, when you talk about diversity trainings, like, you know, oftentimes the ways that like a good criticism of that is going to get caricatured is, oh, you're saying that like, you know, racism isn't a big deal, that we should just like ignore racism and, you know, and focus on other things.
But what I point out about that is that the effect of the Robin DiAngelo stuff is to change the subject from, you know, any sort of issue about the distribution of wealth or power, you know, between white people and black people in the United States and to make it entirely about white people having sort of these weird corporate vision quests about their own, you know, internal attitudes,
you know, which don't actually benefit anybody, really, right?
You know, like they might, I mean, I guess in theory, they might make that one person less of an asshole, though I think that the empirical evidence for that is really lacking.
But, you know, that's like that's, but it's certainly not going to change any of the problems that lead to you having these massive divergences in, you know, incarceration rates and poverty and healthcare and education and all these things, you know, between white people and black people in the United States.
And I think that when you talk about like, you know, Bernie, you know, supporters or Bernie himself, you know, in the Elizabeth Warren case where, you know, I do tend to think that that, you know, that he didn't say that, but, you know, who knows?
We'll never know.
That like that those that those accusations of sexism, you know, to the extent that those are things that just come from like centrist liberals, you know, supporters of other candidates, that I think, okay, well, obviously it bothers me.
It's cynical, you know, it's annoying.
But, you know, that's in a sense sort of to be expected.
What really bothered me during the election were cases where people who were on what I'd see as the right side were playing along with some of that stuff.
So just as one obvious example that I talk about a little bit in the book, when Joe Rogan kind of sort of endorsed Bernie Sanders, you know, in a very, you know, Joe Roganish way, it's like, yeah, I think I'll probably vote for Bernie Sanders.
He seems like a good guy.
And the Sanders campaign like clipped like a, you know, 90 second, you know, video of him saying nice things about Bernie and tweeted it out.
And there was all of this outrage about that, you know, that, you know, because he accepted the endorsement of this terrible person, Joe Rogan.
And of course, lots of that was ginned up, you know, by bad faith actors, supporters of other candidates.
But what bothered me is that I also saw lots of people with that, you know, Democratic socialist Rose emoji and their Twitter handles going along with this.
Oh, no, that's really bad.
Bernie should not have accepted the support of Joe Rogan.
And it's not my purpose here to start any shit with specific people.
So I'll leave names out.
But I certainly saw people in left media saying the same thing at the time.
And that really bothered me on a really basic level because it seems like, what do you think you're even doing?
What's the purpose of, what do you think that politics is?
What do you think an election is?
Because Quite apart from, you know, from what you think about, you know, Joe Rogan, who I think is actually like tons of Americans are and that like he has, you know, some kind of right-wing takes on some issues.
He has some very left-wing takes on some issues.
You know, he's not, he probably spends more time thinking about, you know, psychedelics and MMA and half a dozen other subjects than about this stuff.
So it hasn't really, you know, doesn't necessarily all gel together.
Probably very similar to a lot of Americans, his probably most central position on politics is that the whole thing's corrupt.
Right.
Like this whole thing is just stinks.
And I can tell that it's basically these politicians are bought and paid for.
And this isn't actually a system that works for regular people.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
And so when you have somebody like that, you know, who could go in any number of different directions politically supporting you, and it's not like this is after some process of negotiation where you had to like give up your positions on some issues to get his support.
You know, you're just getting this for free.
You'd think that you'd say, oh, thank God, this is great.
Right.
You know, like this, because not only do we have like the most popular podcaster in the world who has a massive audience of, you know, people who aren't necessarily super political, you know, who's saying, you know, who's supporting the campaign.
So, so great, more people vote for us, which is, you know, the point of an election to get more people to vote for you than the other guy.
If you're not saying that, instead, you're saying, no, this is really bad because, you know, Joe Rogan said the following list of bad things and had the following list of bad guests.
So therefore, you're like corrupted somehow by that support.
That tells me that at that point, you're not really seeing left politics as a project to change the material world.
You're seeing it as some kind of individual performance of moral commitment that, you know, you want to, you're just trying to prove to yourself or to other people that you're committed to all the right things and you're not really interested in actually achieving your alleged political goals.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's like it's twofold.
It's that point that you just made.
And then it's also just what you alluded to earlier that it's like, but don't, and don't you also see that you're becoming a useful idiot now?
Like, don't you see that obviously if there's some Biden surrogate or these networks or these papers that are way behind Biden who are pushing this narrative, and if you're going along with it, then you're, you're just working for them.
Like, and this was my point to with the issue of the big banks when you see Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase and all these guys jumping on the woke train.
And you realize it's like zoom back a little bit, okay?
10 years ago, which is not that long.
In our contemporary world, it feels like forever, but it's not that long ago.
At 10 years ago, the left were standing outside the big banks screaming, we are the 99%.
And really, they might as well have been saying, we are the 99.9% because they weren't talking about some guy making 300K a year.
The Symbolic Nature of Outrage00:10:49
They were talking about the people who own hedge funds versus the rest of us.
Like a very clear contrast that a lot of Americans could get on board with.
And this scared the bejesus, and rightfully so, out of all of these, these institutions.
And if you go see that they are jumping on board after you scream, we are the 99%.
And they're jumping on board with like, well, instead of 99%, let's focus on the 13% or the 2% or the 1% and pit all of you guys against each other.
Obviously, this is, you know, this is some type of whether conscious or not, this is working in their favor to not focus on the very central issue that you guys were focused on just a decade ago.
And to me, it seems like it's almost, you know, like when you said with Rogan, you're not even asking for a bargain.
He's not even saying, oh, I want you to change this view.
He's just saying, I think I'm going to support your guy.
But I could understand in some theory, making a bargain.
Like, I think probably all of us would be willing to at some point make some bargain short of what our ideal society would be.
You know, me and you might both think that Raytheon CEOs should have all of their wealth seized for they've they've made it through building bombs and buying off congressmen and killing innocent children and the Middle East, you know, but we'd probably make a deal.
You know, you guys could keep that money if we just stopped dropping bombs on kids.
You know, like we'd probably be willing to make a deal.
I could understand making a deal with J.P. Morgan Chase, but the deal isn't even anything.
It's like their deal is they'll send their exec to diversity training.
It'd be one thing, right, if J.P. Morgan Chase was like, hey, look, you know, we're J.P. Morgan Chase.
We have a little bit more influence than your average left winger over this government.
So we are going to lobby really hard for criminal justice reform.
Yeah, right.
If you leave us alone about this other stuff, we'll do that.
But they're not even offering you that.
They're just offering you like, how about we make a poster and we say we put BLM outside one of our banks and then we send our rich white executives who are going to keep all of their money to go some training and they'll stand up and say, yes, yes, I'm racist because of the color of my skin and blah, blah, blah.
And then move on raping the entire country as they have been.
How is that deal acceptable to the average left-winger?
Yeah.
So I mean, I guess to be fair, you know, for lots of, you know, for lots and lots of them, it's, it's not, but it is, I think, you know, but I think that the thing that I do want some people to think more about, because I'm sure like lots of people who are doing things that I criticize in the book, you know, would nod along to what you just said, right?
You know, it's like, sure, you know, that's, that's, you know, that's obviously not good enough.
You know, we, we, we, you know, we still hate these people.
But, but I think that the thing that I would hone in on about that is that it is, uh, that it is just symbolic, right?
So like it's, it's, it's not even like, okay, you know, they're going to put the float, you know, in the gay pride parade, but, you know, they're not like, you know, I'm sure that it would not come up with, you know, would not take a lot of creativity to come up with something they could do with all of their money that, you know, that would actually like, you know, materially help, you know, like, I don't know, you know, gay teenagers who, you know, were kicked out of the house or something like that, right?
You know, that like that there's some, that there's something in the real world that they could do without money that would actually, that would actually help people.
But, you know, but it's, it's just, it's, it's, it's purely, it's purely symbolic.
And, you know, I think that sometimes people will say, you know, who, you know, who disagree with some of the things I say in the book, well, okay, but, you know, sure, fair enough.
I mean, obviously we're not going to be bought off with that, you know, but why not both, right?
You know, we can have, like, we could fight the like stupid little symbolic battles and also the more the more significant ones.
And I'm not sure that you can actually do both.
You know, I think that, so I think I remember Freddie DeBoer had a good post about this in the sub stack.
I think it was just called Perhaps You Can Actually Do Both.
And in that, you know, he makes the point that there is like a limited budget of attention and resources and all of that stuff comes in somewhat limited quantities.
And of course, if we're talking about stuff that actually, you know, matters, I mean, of course, you're right, you know, that there are anytime you're actually engaged in real politics, you know, there are going to be trade-offs, you know, but you can, but at least like we can say, you know, whatever we might disagree, agree or disagree about about which trade-offs would be willing to make under what circumstances, that if we're talking about like, you know, anti-discrimination laws or something, all right, that matters.
Again, you know, but like if you're talking about pure symbolism, that that really doesn't matter.
And it's, and it's also worth thinking about what kinds of symbolism even like even have, are even sending a message that's useful when it comes to winning over, you know, all the people that you'd have to win over to actually accomplish any of this stuff.
Because what worries me is that oftentimes the symbol, you know, I mean, forget J.P. Morgan Chase for a minute, you know, like the symbolic message that, you know, even people that I like are sending is we look at, you know, look at us being overgrown hall monitors who are very concerned with monitoring every aspect of each other's behavior all the time.
And that's, that's a message that's, that's going to appeal to almost no one.
Yeah.
Okay.
I wanted to actually, I was going to read that quote from the book, but I want to ask you this first because to the point you just made, and I've, I've been saying this for a long time on the show, and this is, this is a critique of the left and the right.
It's a critique of our entire society.
And I'll use free market libertarian language for this, but I think you would agree with what I'm saying.
And what the way I've always said it is that, look, outrage is a finite resource.
Right.
That we only have so many hours in the day.
We only have so much breath in our lungs.
There is only so much you can be outraged about.
And therefore, you need a hierarchy of values of what deserves the most outrage.
And that's not to say that there aren't lots of things, but you know, if someone gets murdered on the street and then you stub your toe later, you really got to be more concerned about the person getting murdered because otherwise you're, you're, first off, you're wasting your time.
And besides that, you're, you know, you're almost being a useful idiot for helping the guy get away with murder because you're focusing on all the wrong things.
And to me, you know, like the this manifests itself all over the place.
And one of my criticisms of the left was that during the Trump years, I go, look, Donald Trump could drop a bomb on a third world country and kill 100 people, which he did plenty of.
And then that same day, he could say something like, you know, I don't think trans should be in the military or something like that.
And it's not like two to one, the outrage goes to the transgender comment.
It's like a hundred thousand to one, if there's even a one.
Like no one's even thinking about it.
And that is now, again, it's like people get trapped in this kind of binary thinking and they'll be like, so you don't care about the transgender comment.
It's like, no, I'm not saying you don't have to care about that.
I'm saying that the proportion of outrage to 100 real human beings, some of which might have been trans, were murdered that day.
And by the way, they're all poor and not white and in third world countries, if that helps, not that it would be okay if you were to do it to rich white people in a, but so the point is just that the outrage priorities seem all off.
And there was this passage in the book that I literally wanted to stand up and applaud that you wrote it.
I want to read this.
And you were talking about this in the first chapter of the book and you were talking about Louis C.K.
And I guess Louis C.K., who his politics were always pretty moderate Democrat, like pretty much was going to support whoever the establishment Democrat candidate was.
And he had sent some money to Joe Biden and the Joe Biden team had returned the money and kind of been like, yeah, we don't want Louis C.K.'s money.
And you wrote this, which I loved.
You said, still, whatever you may think of this tangle of ethical issues, the bottom line is that Louis C.K.'s sins involved masturbation.
Joe Biden was one of the loudest voices on the Democratic side of the aisle calling for the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and 2003.
Well over a million human beings died in that conflict.
In a sane world, Louis C.K. would have been the one who would have worried about people associating him with Joe Biden.
I mean, that to me sums it all up perfectly.
Where are our priorities of moral outrage when we find the sins of Louis C.K., whatever those may be, to be a more grave sin than getting a million people killed, well over a million at this point, in a war that everyone acknowledges never needed to be fought.
Yeah, right.
And I mean, this is like, this is a big, and of course, you know, that's a big problem.
And in that case, you know, that's, that's a problem that's about, you know, liberals, you know, who, who are, you know, who are the ones who, you know, who are immediately, you know, being criticized in that passage.
And if, and if I thought that like all of the ridiculous things that, you know, that liberals were doing, that there was like a, there was a sharp, like bright, unambiguous line between, you know, between that and the way that people who actually agree with me politically are and the things that they're doing and how they're acting, then, then fair enough.
I mean, I might have made that point in a Jackman article somewhere, but, you know, like that, that would be, I wouldn't have to write the book, maybe.
But I think in practice, in practice, there really isn't, you know, like, because in practice, you have a left where there is like a lot of the sort of bad things about the way that contemporary liberalism is have, you know, kind of infiltrated in and colored the way that, you know, that people, that people do things there too.
Disconnect from Real Working Class00:13:46
Because I think that what you're talking about, about that kind of like limited budget of outrage and the absurdities of this, like, I don't know.
I mean, like, like when I see those clips from the DSA convention in 2019 where people, you know, like you're told not to not to clap because it's possible that out of 600 people there, there might be three with some incredibly rare condition that makes them, you know, especially sensitive to loud noises.
And then people are talking about that and somebody gets up and says, no crosstalk, you know, hey, guys, no crosstalk.
And a third person says, hey, guys, is gendered language.
You know, I think, and, you know, and I know that like those clips were famously put together by Tucker Carlson, who, who's a person I deeply hate, right?
You know, like, like, I, you know, but, and you could say, oh, he's cherry-picking the worst moments, and he is.
But also, those moments are there for him to cherry pick.
And it's not like some, you know, Breitbart thing with, you know, Planned Parenthood or whatever, where, you know, somebody's like coming in with a pin camera.
This is stuff that they are streaming to the world.
And it seems like nobody there is thinking about, or at least nobody there who wants to say anything.
I'm sure lots of people are thinking it in their heads, right?
You know, nobody there seems to be thinking about whether this is the image that you want to put out to the entire world that, like we've got enough left over in our outrage budget.
You know to like get upset about clapping and the phrase hey guys uh, like that, like that, that just doesn't seem helpful, okay.
So I I will first off disclaim that I played that clip and made fun of it on the show as well, because it's just, it was just so hilarious and just ridiculous.
But I really here's where I can really relate to you right like, okay.
So I don't know if you've ever seen, but I get sent this clip all the time.
I was just recently talking about it on my last podcast of the Libertarian Uh Convention in 2016, and the question is asked to the candidates, um, do you think there should be government driver's licenses?
And they go down the list and every one of them like, drive what's next?
A license to make toast in my own damn toaster?
And he's, of course, we should never have driver's licenses.
And then Gary Johnson goes, I, I mean, I don't know.
I guess maybe like, before you start driving a car, you should have to get a license, and everyone's like boo, boo.
And you sit there and you're like, look man, and I think the same thing is happening in in this Democratic Socialist conference that you're talking about.
You get so into your little own world and so absorbed by the minutia and detail of what we think about and splitting hairs down to like one 16th of the hair that you first had, and it's almost like zoom out and just understand.
Guys, we look like assholes right now to the rest of the world.
This is insane.
Like, if you can't see this, you are completely removed from what real, regular people see when they look at this, which is that what you're talking about has nothing to do with any of their problems.
It is not in any way.
And and you would think, right from the libertarian perspective you're like hey guys, we're we're in the longest wars in American history.
There is a crisis facing the nation right now.
The government is locking.
I mean, this is 2016, so other things, but all of the issues.
I mean, if you're like a democratic socialist, you'd be like, guys, look at the amount of money, that's the amount of billionaires on welfare right now, like Americans that the American government hasn't rejected welfare, they're just giving it to billionaires.
You know what I mean.
Like there's so many real important points that actually speak to the working class that you're trying to reach that.
What like it's like?
What do you think the average you know you're, you're the democratic socialist, you're here to stand for the working class what do you think the average working Joe thinks when he looks at you and hears this um, excuse me, point of personal privilege he, him and the audible noise do you think you are relating to the average trucker right now in America and it and it seems to me that and this is true in the libertarian world too you you wrote this is another quote from the book that I really loved you said I certainly don't claim to have all the answers,
but i'm pretty certain that making ourselves look like overgrown hall monitors is unhelpful, and I just thought this is because i'll tell you there's a lot of the.
The woke stuff has come into the libertarian world as well, and you just go for uh, you're like guys, this appeals to a very narrow slice of the American population.
Forget even, not even arguing over the absurdity of it because frankly, I find the idea absurd.
That you shouldn't clap because some of you might have ptsd, like this is just ridiculous.
I also you know that maybe i'll get in trouble for this.
I find the idea of using your gender pronouns a little bit ridiculous too, for the people who that applies to.
Maybe it makes sense that you don't have to agree with me on this.
I don't want to get you in trouble, but I just don't think like your regular man or regular woman needs to waste their time letting everyone know that I am what you already know I am.
But regardless of that, just on the practical level, you look like assholes now to the vast majority of the population, who you're trying to win over to your side, and so, if you want to, this is always my message to libertarians, and I think it's a good message for democratic socialists as well, focus on the real crises that are affecting real people's lives right now.
That's a message that could really resonate with people.
And, in fact, look whatever you have to say with him.
This is why Bernie Sanders rose up to prominence.
This is why this old Cremogeny guy who wasn't doing it off sex appeal or naked charisma he rose up to prominence because he was like hey, I want to give Americans health care.
Like hey, you know, like that's what actually that your average working person, you know, right now, is like yeah, my premiums are like way too high and I got this huge deductible and a copay.
You know like this is this sucks.
That actually speaks to me, you know, anyway.
Yeah, so i'd i'd say uh, like that actually.
You know I, I think it's, it's interesting on uh, the uh, on the pronoun thing.
So there's uh.
Natalie Wynn is uh, is a very prominent left-wing youtuber uh, contra points this channel and uh, and one of and the things, and you know she's a trans woman and she uh, she got uh.
One of the things she got in trouble for on twitter a couple of years ago is saying that she always feels ridiculous.
You know, like there seems like something very strange about the fact that she can sit at a sports bar in North Carolina and be miss and ma'am all night, you know, with no problem, and then, and then she goes to like a lefty meeting and everybody's going around saying their pronouns and she can sort of feel everybody pivoting and staring.
You know, like when it's, when it's her turn uh, and you know I, I understand like different, you know uh, different people have like different feelings about that for different reasons.
I mean I, I think honestly, I think a practical solution is just, like you know, give people name tags.
If they want to write their pronouns down on it, they can, but you know you don't have to make a big thing about it but uh, but I think that on um, you know, on the other, you know the other issue uh, that you're uh, that you're talking about uh, that's like I know, because I, you know, spend way too much time, like at this point, like i've internalized, like all the shit that people who you know, who are gonna like, have their hackles up about this,
are gonna say in response to what you just said.
So I can hear that little voice in my head saying oh uh, you know, so you're just like talking about some stereotypical, you know, leave it to be.
you know like white male you know worker and you know in a hard hat you know like that's the guy you're talking about not appealing to but i think that no like i mean sure that guy too right you know but like not just him uh i think that any normal human being whereby normal human being that's not like a dog whistle for you know white male cis whatever right like i just mean like anybody who's not marinating in the particular political subculture of the left uh
you know.
So, whether we're talking about like um, you know, black trans Wiccans anybody right, you know like, like who who is doesn't just swim in this world uh, you know, when they see that uh, that no clapping clip, they say, oh wow, those seem like some like really unpleasant weirdos.
I don't want to have anything to do with that and and that they in no way represent the working class.
And yeah no, i'm not talking about the white working class, i'm talking about the black working class, the Latino working class, i'm talking about regular working class people in America.
None, and this is something that I think is um.
Again, I think this is true for libertarians as well um, because oftentimes libertarians are both of us, from our own conception of what freedom is, are fighting for regular people's freedom um, but but you know, you have this almost like this disconnect between the kind of academic um world that has all of these ideas in their head and then the real world, the people who are actually out there in the working class, and the cultures are quite different,
and when you're coming off with this thing like it's just a cultural difference where it's like yeah, most people you know.
I remember um, when Andrea Mitchell god, i'm trying to remember what she said oh uh, she was talking about the Kamala Harris Mike Pence, vp debate and she said, every man who i've talked to has said that he was mansplaining to her and that this is just something that's really not going to appeal to men.
And it's like, no, this is a comment, Andrea Mitchell, on the men you hang out with.
This isn't a comment on men or women, for that matter, or for working class women who have never used the word mansplain a day in their life.
Like this is what you and Alan Greenspan, at cocktail parties, run into and it's.
There's something really ironic about the fact that democratic socialists who who, at their core, are supposed to be challenging that class and fighting for the working class right, but yet they've absorbed a lot of these values which listen, you just, i'm sorry, you just don't go into.
Well, if you go into a working class environment, you don't see concern for microaggressions.
That is something that you find at universities, that that is an elitist value, because there are so many more real concerns in the working class's mind that no one's going.
Hey, he said, where are you from?
And you know i'm actually not from here and that's offensive to me because, but like they're just not concerned with this stuff and you're never, you know, you're never going to relate to that class, let alone be their champions, when you have these, these values that are, uh like, completely counter to everything they are.
Yeah, no, I think that's, I think that's right.
So you, you can't, I think a big part of the problem is that in practice, you know, most people on the left come out like of are like part of the reason why,
you know, leftism appeals to them is because they're, you know, they're downwardly mobile because, you know, they like, you know, because increasingly a lot of people who are, you know, even are like educated professionals, you know, like have, you know, more precarious, you know, financial, you know, financial circumstances.
You know, like the, an obvious example would be like how many people who, you know, teach at colleges compared to 10 years ago or are adjuncts, you know, who might not even necessarily have health insurance now.
And, you know, my point in saying this is not to say like, oh, you know, screw those guys, right?
You know, like, you know, I don't, you know, I don't want them, right?
You know, like, like, I mean, for one thing, obviously, you know, like, you know, obviously I also, you know, come out of that, you know, but the problem is when so many, so many leftists, so many Democratic socialists are either sort of downwardly mobile members of, you know, the professional classes or are at the very least, the downwardly mobile sons and daughters, you know, of professional classes,
that means that they're acculturated to all of this stuff that is, you know, might sometimes, you know, be good in certain ways or, you know, or to a, or to a certain extent, you know, like that that's, I think that, you know, that there are things that, there are things that maybe some of the stuff prevents that, you know, that should be prevented.
But you do have to chill out on all of it at a certain point if you're going to reach out to or be appealing to, you know, like anybody who comes from outside of that, you know, because at the end of the day,
if you if you sound if you sound less like someone that the people you're trying to appeal to would want to hang out with, then you sound like somebody who the people you're trying to appeal to might have to deal with because, you know, they're sent from the HR department, you know, then like they're just not going to want to have anything to do with you.
Why All Lives Matter Matters Less00:09:35
Yeah, which is just kind of a basic life lesson in some ways, not even just applicable to politics.
But if you're trying to persuade someone of anything in life, step one is usually being someone who they'd want to be persuaded by.
Like, you know, if, and if you're not, that's usually going to make your job that much harder.
So that's, that's just a good life lesson in general.
So one of the things that you talk about in the book, you have a chapter on the genealogy of left-wing moralism.
And I find all of this stuff really interesting.
And I think that right at the heart of kind of one of your critiques is the idea that there's a lot of this moral outrage and condemnation of regular people seems to be at odds with what the spirit of leftism was supposed to be all about.
And particularly to the point that we were making before, especially when it's, you know, the target is at regular people.
And again, I know we keep using this term regular people, but all I mean by that is the Occupy Wall Street, you know, sense, the 99%, like not the guy who owns a hedge fund.
The guy.
I mean, there was this, there was this one case that got a lot of attention where this woman was fired for posting on her Facebook, All Lives Matter.
And like, you can feel however you do about saying all lives matter.
And certainly there's more than just the statement, all lives matter, to that statement.
It's a counter to Black Lives Matter.
And you can feel however you feel about it.
But you're like, this was just some lady.
You know what I mean?
Like, I don't know.
Maybe she was a jerk or maybe she just meant it.
Like, like all lives matter could be meant in not the way that you're offended by.
I mean, I think it probably it probably was, you know, I mean, in practice, realistically, right?
You know, somebody says all lives matter.
They're making a statement of opposition to BLM.
I do think, I mean, you know, I think as somebody who very much supports, you know, the goals of BLM, I think that having like a, I think people have never had like a good, like the way that that plays out, right?
You know, when people will say like, oh, all lives matter.
And then like the response is to get infuriated about that, you know, right?
Like, like, I think it's just like kind of rhetorically tone deaf that, you know, you could say, like, like, like, I don't think it should be that hard to just say, yes, all, of course, all lives matter.
That's why Black Lives Matter, right?
You know, like, like, that, that, that should be an easy play.
But, uh, but then, uh, but then, but the, I think the more basic question there is, should we want people to be fired from their jobs for just saying, like, kind of, uh, you know, like bog standard, you know, right-wing things, you know, that like, surely at least, you know, at the very least, like, you know, 70 million people, you know, voted for Donald Trump in the last election.
And that's like stuff that like anybody, you know, that like any of them, you know, would say.
And I think no, right?
You know, both because both because I want everybody to have like a, be able to make a good living.
And, you know, and even that includes people that I disagree with politically.
But also, also, it's like a terrible strategy because like, what's like, how do you imagine this playing out?
You know, is somebody going to say, it's like, oh yeah, those people who ruined my life, you know, who got me, you know, got me fired from my job, you know, because they won, they defeated me in this way, you know, like, I guess now I agree with them.
You know, like that, that just seems like the most unlikely way that could possibly play out.
And it, but, and it just seems, at least in, in my lifetime, and I feel like there's been like a real shift in how militant this stuff has gotten.
And again, this isn't everybody on the left.
Obviously, you just wrote a book about this.
And there's lots of people, I think, I think a lot more who agree, who don't want to speak up because there is such militancy against them.
They're like, oh, I don't want to be the next one who's getting crucified here.
But to me, at least as a kid, I always felt like the spirit of the left was kind of like, okay, there might be somebody who like stabbed someone when they were 18, but they had a really bad life and a really bad childhood and they went to jail for 10 years.
And they've paid their debt to society.
And look at all the good things they did while they were in jail.
And we are ready to try to bring that person back into the fold.
And yet now you have this thing where it's like, wouldn't your impulse be if someone says all lives matter to be like, hey, let me explain to you why that kind of bugs us when you say all lives matter?
Cause it's kind of like we're trying to talk about that.
You know what I mean?
And there's, it's just like, you just want some regular lady publicly humiliated and then fired and that, oh, that's pretty creepy.
Yeah, no, exactly.
And yeah, that is like an obvious, like bizarre contradiction, you know, like when I like even, So this is not like a, you know, this is not a regular person, you know, in that sense that we've been talking about, you know, so it's like, but the, I don't know if you're following what happened a few weeks ago, whenever this was at Teen Vogue, where the, which is like as funny as this sentence sounds, like, you know,
like Teen Vogue has been publishing all of this like super duper lefty stuff in the last little while, like to the point where there'll be like there'll be articles and, you know, in Teen Vogue, like, you know, like, you know, 10 things you probably didn't know about Karl Marx.
Okay.
And but they hired somebody to be the new editor of Teen Vogue who had who had done, who had tweeted apparently 10 years before as a teenager.
She had she had tweeted some sort of edgelordy, kind of mildly racist things.
And again, this happened a decade ago when she was a teenager.
And I just, all I could think is like, how many people who are like, who want this person to be fired?
And I think she eventually just resigned under pressure are like prison abolitionists, right?
You know, like, and certainly, because like, you know, this, this, the spectrum on, on the far left on that issue goes from just outright abolitionism about police and prisons to like, okay, maybe we can't quite do that, but like, let's at least have like, you know, vastly more humane and rehabilitative, you know, prisons.
And certainly everybody, you know, on the left supports like, you know, ban the box.
So you can't be denied, you know, employment, you know, after you, after you get out of prison, you know, because of your prison record.
So at a certain point, it's like, so, so the, so somebody who is in prison for rape, who gets out, right, should be forgiven and allowed to get a new job.
And somebody who had bad tweets 10 years ago, like this can just be, be held against them for all eternity, you know, like, or, or like the, I think one of the worst examples, you know, that I think about a lot is, you know, Jenk Uger, who is, you know, whatever people, you know, people think about, about Jank or his politics or, you know, any of the controversies about him.
And, you know, his politics are not exactly my politics, but he he has, this came up again this last year because he was briefly running for Congress and it was used against him there.
And it came up like a year or two ago because the Justice Democrats, which is an organization like that helped elect AOC, et cetera, that he helped found, you know, as one of the main leaders of, that he was forced out of that because of this.
And the this is that like literally 15 years ago, 20 years ago, something like that, when he was a young Republican, he had written some blog posts.
It was long enough ago that we still have blogs.
And in the blog posts, he, you know, as, look, in my, you know, in my view, you know, conservatives tend to believe lots of stupid shit.
And, you know, and he said lots of stupid shit in these blog posts and, you know, some things I would find pretty objectionable.
But like, also, this was decades ago.
And in those decades, like for most of that time, he had completely come over politically and he was an extremely progressive person.
And so the message that you're sending when you keep dredging this stuff up to use against him is, hey, if you currently disagree with us, If we persuade you, if you come over, you're on our side now, we reserve the right anytime we get mad at you to like use against you the fact that once you disagreed with us, it's like, wow, that is a hell of a recruiting pitch.
Kratom Prices and College Costs00:02:33
I mean, who wouldn't, you know, who wouldn't want to come over after that?
Well, there's a couple things, right, that come to my mind about that.
And by the way, uh, your boy Bernie uh disavowed him after that.
Probably never made it all the way up to Bernie Sanders.
It's probably a decision on his campaign team or something like that.
But I did think it was a bad decision.
And particularly because Jenk had apologized for these things like over the course of years.
And so many times this was stupid.
I was young.
You know, I shouldn't have written that.
You know, it's just, again, I just think a non-issue.
But it also, look, it reminds me of your great quote that I read earlier and applying that to this.
So that Bernie Sanders is now in the position of disavowing this guy's support because he wrote some questionable things a couple decades ago.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden's up there like, yeah, I voted for the war in Iraq and championed it, but you know, I've changed my mind since then.
It's like, oh, okay, so your apology, an apology covers a million dead people, but an ecology doesn't cover like I wrote some quasi-sexist things in a blog a couple decades ago.
So that there's just a real problem there.
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One of the other things I would say, right, if I were giving my own amateur strategic advice to Democratic socialists, not that I want you guys to succeed, but I would say that there are a lot of people, right?
Look, I can tell you just my perspective right now.
I'm a unique situation that I'm a hardcore free market anarchist type.
But like, I, I mean, my, the healthcare prices that I pay for for me and my wife and my daughter are outrageous.
I mean, just like outrageous.
And then we have deductibles and copays.
And then if you have to go to the emergency room for something, you're still stuck with a bill.
You know, it's just like, this is bonkers.
Corporate Hijacking of Cancel Culture00:15:37
And there's a lot of people, I think, out there who this is part of the reason.
More people who traditionally wouldn't have necessarily supported someone like Bernie Sanders, but they see the costs of their kids' college and the cost of their health care and the cost of all these other things.
And you're like, you know what?
I mean, at least this guy's telling me he's got a plan to deal with some of this.
But part of the reason why socialism gets demonized, right, is because of the history of the authoritarian socialist regimes.
And I know that you've talked about this a lot, not just in this book, but throughout your career.
And this is a big thing that the democratic socialists have to try to contend with and explain that, listen, we are a different strand of socialism.
We are not here to offer this authoritarian crackdown on dissident views.
We are here to talk about power imbalances, an economic system that works more for the average person.
And when they see this stuff, even when people don't really have the power in the political apparatus, but when they see the spirit of already being that we want to crush dissident thinkers, this is going to convince a lot of people.
And I think fairly that, my God, I mean, the type of people who want to go back in your tweets from 15 years ago and ruin your life over that, I pray to God they never hold political power.
You know, and I'm sure you do too.
So that's another thing to think about, not just in the fact that it makes it harder to recruit, but also the fact that all of us, you and other Democratic socialists included, you don't want to see these type of people hold power.
Lord knows what they would do with it.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I think that, of course, to a large extent, you know, people who act like this do hold power because in the society that we're, you know, that we're currently living in, I mean, some of the some of the worst offenders for these kinds of behavior are like, you know, centrist Democrats.
And in fact, there are many, you know, famous cases, or I don't know, maybe not as famous as they should be, you know, where it's been effectively used against the left.
So like an example of that would be Ben Mora, who was a Bernie staffer, and another place like the Jake case where I think the Bernie campaign folded when it shouldn't have, that who had like a private Twitter account.
And, you know, and Ben Mora is like a, you know, he's a gay guy whose sense of humor, you know, has, you know, like, you know, a lot of comments about people's appearances.
You know, you get a picture, right?
You know, that's had, and he'd say some pretty nasty stuff, right?
This is also a private follower-only Twitter account.
And somebody sent a bunch of screenshots from it to the Daily Beast.
And then this Daily Beast reporter didn't do what I would hope that any like, you know, vaguely responsible adult journalist would have done and be like, this isn't news.
What's wrong with you?
And they instead they published it and got him fired and everything.
And I think that kind of thing happens a lot.
And I should say, by the way, that I think that this sort of like this way of doing things, this kind of like, you know, Twitter pylons, all that stuff, like in the book, I'm very concerned with the way that it intersects with the specific pathologies of the left because I'm concerned with what that does to the left and how it, you know, how it makes us less effective and all that stuff.
But I do think it's a much bigger problem, you know, that infects society as a whole for a lot of reasons we could get into, you know, that there are, you know, and there are certainly examples of this, this sort of thing, you know, going on, you know, on the right.
So if you, if you read, like John Ronson has a book from 2015 called So You're Being Publicly Shamed, where he doesn't have like the phrase, I think it was like a little bit too early for the phrase, like call out culture, never mind, like cancel culture, which is what seems to have replaced it.
But that's what he's describing.
And one of the examples in his book is this girl, Lindsay Stone, who was just like not a public figure in any sense, just a normal person.
She had a job.
She worked for this organization, Life, that works with adults with learning disabilities.
By all accounts, she was very good at her job.
The clients loved her.
The parents loved her.
And while she and her friend Jamie, who also worked there, while they were on their office hours, they like to take like jokey pictures of each other and post them to Facebook.
And so like there'd be one where one of them is, you know, smoking a cigarette in front of a no smoking sign, stuff like that.
And one of them, they were on a field trip, you know, for this organization in Washington, D.C.
And on their off hours, they're at Arlington National Cemetery and there's the sign there that says silence and respect.
And so Jamie took a picture of Lindsay going, right, pretending like she's yelling something next to silence and the silence, respect sign and posted that to her.
her Facebook where, you know, it's like 20 people would see it or whatever.
And I guess like a lot of people, she wasn't great about the privacy settings, you know, so it was accidentally set to public.
And this ended up being this giant thing where there were people who were, there was like a fire Lindsay Stone Facebook group with like 10,000 people in it.
And she did end up getting fired because it just sort of randomly went viral.
And, you know, people were talking about how she's a, you know, fat feminist who should go to hell and, you know, shouldn't be allowed in the United States.
You know, so I think like all of the reasons why this stuff happens, which are that it's that we live in a society where pre people are pretty atomized and they often feel most connected to other people online, the social media platforms themselves, they're, you know, for-profit businesses that they try to make as addictive as at all possible.
And it really incentivizes a lot of bad behavior.
I would argue the fact that most people live and non-you know, work in non-unionized workplaces where, you know, the idea that somebody could whisper something in someone's ear and they could get fired, you know, like like is a real fear for a lot of people.
Like all of these things like end up impacting, you know, the whole political spectrum, you know, that like people, people act this way all over the place.
I think a lot of times it has a kind of woke flavor, you know, because that's the, you know, because that's what's going on in the culture, you know, at the time.
But I also think it's it's a much, it's a much bigger problem.
And that, you know, but yeah, also though, I do take your point that it's that if that if you want to give people the impression that that you're not some kind of wannabe authoritarian, then you, you know, then like, even if lots of other people act that way too, you know, you certainly shouldn't shouldn't act like you're some sort of like weird toy inquisitor.
Yeah.
So one of the things, and I make this point a lot on the show when I talk about this stuff, because it's very easy for right-wingers now to rail against cancel culture and be like, this is so authoritarian and so messed up and kind of say a lot of the things that we are saying here because the, you know, they don't like this left-wing culture.
But I make the point all the time that the last time in America that I believe we had what you could truly call a right-wing culture where the right-wingers were really in charge of the institutions and the temperature was right after 9-11.
And they were quite happy to cancel people in that time too.
And at that time, it was for more right-wing reasons.
You know, you questioned the troops or you something like that.
The Dixie Chicks.
Not for being called Dixie Chicks, but for questioning the troops.
That's true.
Actually, that's like a good indication of how much the culture is.
Yes.
Yes.
Controversial.
The Dixie Chicks.
Nobody ever once brought up.
I recall the Dixie Chicks.
Right.
But it was a different.
They made mildly anti-Bush comments.
But here's the thing.
But here's the thing that's interesting, right?
And this is what I really want people to see through is that it's all the same corporate interests that were pushing that cancel culture and are pushing this one.
The corporate press, right?
who will now be up in arms about whatever the latest woke violation is about Bernie Sanders or whatever, they were selling George W. Bush's wars.
All of the, like this whole corporate apparatus jumped from that to this.
Now, a lot of people will say, and me and you messaged about this just the other day, but I was trying to get this point across that it's like a lot of people will look at what happens on the left and the rise of this kind of woke cancel culture.
And the kind of Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, a lot of people who rose up from smacking it down, battling these college kids with their crazy woke ideology, which for a lot of us was very satisfying to see when it first came up because you felt like someone needed to kind of argue with some of these kids.
But their thing more or less, and I think Dave Rubin and other people have this take where they're like, look, the left overtook the liberals.
And there's this sense that that almost seems kind of plausible on the surface because you can look at it and you can say, well, look at all these supposed liberal values, like, you know, free speech and yada yada.
And they don't really have them.
And a lot of these ideas do have their origins in, you know, critical race theory, in postmodernists or, you know, like other strands of left-wing thought, right?
So there is a plausibility on the surface to that.
But if you kind of look at the bigger picture and realize that all of the corporate interests who were behind the liberals all these times that the leftists were fighting against have seized on this left-wing ideology and are pushing it like to 11.
And you realize that you're like, well, actually, this is really the liberals overtaking the left.
Because all of the critiques of corporate power seem to somehow go away.
Like they seem to be the ones, all these other critiques about society are put into the forefront.
And the thing that you're just supposed to forget about, and now you'll even see these liberals like on MSNBC or whatever, you know, supposed progressives who will be up there and when they describe cancel culture, they'll go, well, this is just being good corporate citizens because they're not just caring about the profit.
You know, see, they have this higher calling of really wanting to make society better.
And when you start to see this being used as a reason for why corporations are actually making society better and not just concerned about the profit, you go, is this really the left overtaking the liberals?
Because it looks a lot more to me like the liberals have weaponized a leftist term.
And I would just, and I want to get your thoughts on this, but I would just say this is the other thing that I've talked about a lot on my show is that Murray Rothbard had an analysis of the progressive era that I think was really interesting and on point.
And of course, Murray Rothbard, when he does history, there's an agenda there as well.
And there is in the same sense of like Howard Zinn or somebody like that or Noam Chomsky when he talks about history.
You know what their agenda is.
But he makes the point that during the progressive era, there were a lot of progressive intellectuals who pushed progressive policies because they wanted to rein in the robber barons and they wanted life to be, you know, life to be better for the working class and kind of bleed the rich and these kind of socialistic impulses.
But by the end of the progressive era, the robber barons had basically taken complete control of the managed economy.
And they were like, oh, okay, we'll have a Federal Reserve, but guess who's going to be running the Federal Reserve?
And guess who's going to be...
And I would say that leftists should at least be aware of the fear of a corporate hijacking of what was your cause, because that to me seems to be pretty transparently what's going on here.
However you feel about critical race theory, I'm not a fan personally.
actually find other left-wing schools of thought to be far more compelling.
But regardless, you could be completely on board with it and still recognize that like all these big corporations jumping on board with it are not doing it for the same reasons that the left-wingers were initially supporting some of these ideas for.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I think that as far as like left-wing origins of some of these ideas, I mean, I think that like a lot of times the like the version of the history of ideas that you get from your,
you know, you mentioned Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin, you know, like like I would, well, I guess let me just say I would at the very least like like have like I'd have a lot of problems with that version of the history.
I think that I think that if you look at like somebody like like Peterson will say things like, oh, you know, basically he thinks that like postmodernism is like Marxism in disguise.
And I'd say, well, like look at the actual original postmodernists, these people like Foucault and Derrida and what they actually had to say about all of that, right?
Like they were they were very like part of their big thing was being against like sort of big sweeping theories of history and overall explanations of everything and Marxism is actually exactly the kind of thing they had in mind.
Somebody who like Sartre, who actually was a Marxist, like he and Foucault hated each other.
And then also I would question how much like the on the other end of the equation, right?
Like how much sort of postmodernism really has to do with like what some college activist is like.
Oh, yeah.
No, I completely agree with you on that.
And also the, I mean, right, obviously like like Marxism kind of relied on objective truth and objective reality.
And that's completely at odds with postmodernism.
I also think that like, you know, the the to me, honestly, the Frankfurt school ideology, you can draw a closer line.
No, that one actually does come out of Marxism.
Although although I'd say that, you know, even though those are people who do are very firmly in that intellectual tradition, that they, that like a lot of like the sort of, you know, Frank, you know, Frankfurt School and Frankfurt School becoming critical theory, a lot of that story is about them sort of giving up on the sort of political goals that they had and getting more and more interested in culture.
Moralistic Anger Feeds Reactionaries00:02:26
And, you know, and so there's lots of things that you could be very, you know, very critical about from a Marxist perspective about that.
Sure.
But I do agree, I think, with your bigger point, which is that the idea and when it comes to like your Jordan Peterson types and like the kind of like particular kinds of like stuff going on on college campuses that they're reacting to,
you know, like I have, I mean, I find the whole thing, you know, like, you know, found the whole thing really frustrating on many levels.
Like I think that, you know, because I have, you know, extremely little sympathy for those guys, but I also think that there were, well, actually, the book you can see behind me against the web by Michael Brooks, you know, he has a big thing about this where, you know, like, okay, I don't really like, you know, what, you know, what Brett Weinstein has to say.
You know, like, like, I have, you know, I think a lot of it's kind of ridiculous.
But I also think that like the only reason any of us know who this guy is, the only reason he has a public career is because student activists at Evergreen College were reacting to him the way that they were.
If they just ignored him, we would never have to hear from this guy ever again, right?
And this is not like an isolated case.
it's a little bit different in its origins because like Evergreen that actually is like, you know, grass, like I think pretty misguided, like grassroots activism, whereas this one is much more of a corporate media thing.
But I mean, it's like the same thing with like that kid, you know, Nicholas Sandman, Sandman, however you say that, who like he spoke at the Republican convention.
Like, and the only reason that we, you know, that we have to hear for this kid and his stupid opinions are that are that everybody went after him basically for wearing a Trump hat and like having what kind of looked at a still image like a smug expression on his face.
Nibbling Edges Won't Fix Systems00:03:54
That's it, right?
That's the sum total of what he did.
And I think that there's like a there's like a more general like thing that you can learn from a lot of these things, which is that this kind of like, you know, moralistic anger, you know, at figures like this is like the worst.
It's like the, I mean, it's like fucking Star Wars, you know, strike me down now and, you know, I'll be more powerful than you could possibly imagine, right?
You know, like this is, this feeds into them like nothing else, you know, like nothing else possibly could.
And, you know, and I think it's, it's just, it's just stupid.
It's an own goal, right?
You know, that, like, that you're, that, you know, you're doing this, you know, to yourself if you keep on like making a big deal with these figures and, you know, having like and responding to them by, you know, by trying to de-platform them, that, like, all that does is just like make them a right-wing celebrity, which of course it would, right?
Because like part of the problem with this stuff is that like, okay, one issue is whether free speech is valuable in itself, which I think it is, and, you know, and whether it should be a big part of, you know, any socialist society that's worth wanting.
And I think it is.
But like, also, even if you disagreed with all that, in practice, in 2021, if you're any kind of leftist, like we don't hold power.
And so this idea that you can just make the bad people go away, like is just doesn't make sense because like, you know, the biggest megaphones are in the hands of various people that we don't like.
So it's just like, it's not going to work out.
It's not going to work out the way that you think it would.
So I know that was that whole rant was a little bit of a, you know, of a depression.
No, but I thought it was very good.
I thought it was good.
I guess I, and yeah, and I do agree about the point about liberalism, you know, because I think that the, because I think that, you know, I think that oftentimes in practice, right, because like what's the, what's supposed to be the big fundamental distinction between, you know, between liberalism and leftism?
You know, well, you know, the big distinction is, do you think that the system is bad?
Or do you think that it's just maybe being like administered by bad people or that like it's it's it's, you know, needs to be, you know, you need to nibble a little bit around the edges to make it work.
And if you think, oh, it's just being administered by bad people, you just need to nibble a little bit around the edges to make it work, then I can understand the sort of like fixation on individual morality that like,
you know, that like once we just get like good people, you know, in positions of prominence or, you know, maybe a sufficiently diverse cast of good people, you know, that the system, the system will be fine.
But if you think that the system itself is the problem, then all of the focus on symbolism, on individual, you know, moral character, you know, which is what a lot of this stuff gets, you know, gets down to when you're, you know, when you're obsessed with, you know, with whether somebody has, you know, bad tweets or, you know, bad takes or, you know, like when people, like earlier in the interview, you mentioned, you know,
Critique of Big Business Power00:04:38
Glenn Greenwald and, you know, like, I'll never understand how some people who think, you know, who do think that they're socialists care more about what shows he goes on or who he's feuding with.
Or even understand that like, you know, all of these guys, like, who were all, I think, really good left-wing journalists, whether it's Glenn Greenwald or Aaron Matei or, you know, whoever else it might be, Jeremy Scahill or like some of these guys, but half the reason they go on these shows is because they're basically blacklisted from the supposedly progressive networks.
I mean, I'm sure Aaron Matei or Glenn Greenwald would have been happy to go on MSNBC and explain to them how they were just spewing CIA propaganda about Donald Trump being a Russian agent for three years, but they didn't seem interested to do that.
And to your point, the distinction between the liberals and the leftists, well, you'd think that really at the heart of the left-wing ideology was always a preference for egalitarianism and a critique of big business and a critique of power imbalances and therefore a critique of imperialism.
And so the left is supposed to have an allergy, a very important allergy to big business and to imperialism.
And so if you see that, and those two things are related, of course, as me and you both know, that there are big business interests that are very, you know, in bed with the imperial forces.
And so it's just like when you see something like the CIA coming out and giving you talking points, and then, of course, all of these weapons companies getting extremely rich off of all of this stuff, it's just like, you know, that's all I would say, like my message to the left, just pay attention to where the imperialist forces and where the big corporate interests are putting their attention.
And at least your default position should be suspicion of those forces.
Whereas the liberals are, of course, going to love all of those forces because they really are, that's what they support.
Yeah.
And again, you know, when it comes to someone like Greenwald, like I think like how people react to him is a really interesting bellwether of this because, you know, none of his, like, you know, nobody has ever, like all the argument I've ever done with anybody about Glenn Greenwald, nobody has ever been able to point to like, okay, here's like a right-wing thing that he thinks, right?
Like that's like never, right?
Like they have, I mean, we're talking about like a like a gay Jewish left-wing investigative journalism who lives in Brazil with his husband, who's a socialist congressman.
Right.
And so a lot, how like a lot of people have gotten into their heads that he's like secretly a Nazi or something is beyond me.
But like also like, okay, look, let's say, you know, you think that he, you know, shouldn't go on these shows or whatever, which as you say, a lot of that's because this NBC, which he actually used to go on all the time.
Right.
You know, blackball him.
But like just if that sort of thing matters to you, you know, more that like, oh, he went on the wrong show, or I don't like some of his takes on Twitter or I don't, you know, like, like, like, I, I think, you know, I think he was in the wrong about this like interpersonal thing or whatever.
Like if that stuff like really gets you hot and bothered and you're not like, and you care more about, I mean, like, even if we're in the like, is Glenn Greenwald a good person or a bad person business, which I don't think should be the focus anyway, right?
But like, you know, even if we are in that business, like if you care more about that than you do about exposing the NSA spying about, you know, on everybody or exposing, you know, what was going on with the persecution of Lula in Brazil, then that starts to tell me that what you're doing is really something different from politics as I understand it, because you're not actually concerned with changing the world in any big picture sense and material reality.
You know, what you're really concerned with is signaling that you have all the right commitments and that, you know, and that you have the right reactions to things and you have all the right tribal loyalties, which does nothing for anybody.
It doesn't give anybody healthcare.
It doesn't stop any wars.
It doesn't unionize any workplaces.
All it does maybe is make you feel better.
Right.
Stop Signaling to Feel Better00:01:13
And in addition to that, I would just say, and we do, I got to wrap up on this because I got another show coming up.
But I would also just say that if you are ever going to really be a threat to power, if you're ever going to really be a threat to the establishment, which is what leftists want to do, right?
By their nature.
Right.
Then you're not going to be able to social signal and have everybody agree that you have the approved opinion.
So that whole mentality and the type of person who needs to do that, you're never going to be successful at actually rolling back entrenched power because, of course, the powerful have a lot of outlets and they're going to be critical of those type of people.
So I do have to wrap, but I really, I can't stress enough.
I thought the book was fantastic.
I thank you for writing it.
Canceling Comedians While the World Burns by Ben Burgess.
Also, your podcast, Give Them an Argument.
Is there anything else that you'd like to plug?
Yeah.
I mean, I think if you just go benburgess.com, that's the easiest, you know, one-stop shop to find links for everything.
So yeah, thank you so much for having me on, brother.