Oct. 14, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:07:26
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unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| Let's go all the way back to one of my favorite years, 1985, and talk about Russia today. | ||
| 1985 and talk about Russia today. | ||
| There's so much happening in the news lately with this giant country, but since we're all in election mode here in the United States pretty much all the time, most of the news about Russia is getting completely lost and there's a bunch going on. | ||
| First, there's the ongoing war with Russia and Syria, which has become the deadliest conflict since World War II. | ||
| It's estimated that over 400,000 people have died so far, and sadly it seems that there's no light at the end of the tunnel. | ||
| Then there's the rumors that Wikileaks is somehow working with the Russian government to influence our election right here. | ||
| This has become a big talking point in democratic circles as Wikileaks continues to drop information about Hillary Clinton emails and Clinton Foundation donors. | ||
| Even Julian Assange, Wikileaks editor in chief, is promising more October surprises and clearly They're not going to be aimed at helping Hillary or the Democrats. | ||
| On top of those issues, there's a lot of other reasons to believe that Vladimir Putin sees America in retreat around the world, and he's looking to fill that void. | ||
| Russia has occupied Ukraine for two years now, and it's clear that Russia is making moves throughout Syria without US approval, sometimes in direct conflict with American goals, although it's completely unclear to me what exactly those American goals are. | ||
| Only four years ago, in America's last presidential election, Mitt Romney was widely mocked for calling Russia, without question, our number one geopolitical foe. | ||
| And yet now it seems that it's the Democrats who are leaning more hawkish on Russia. | ||
| Just listen to Hillary or Tim Kaine in the debate so far. | ||
| The Democratic nominees are much more anti-Russia than either Trump or Pence. | ||
| Is Trump too close to Putin? | ||
| Or does he have other Russian business interests in mind? | ||
| I guess that's possible too. | ||
| There could be a new Cold War brewing, but this time there may not be a Rocky Balboa vs Ivan Drago boxing match on Christmas Day in Moscow to help us work things out. | ||
| While I don't think there's any legitimate reason that a direct conflict with Russia is on the way, I do think it's important that we start talking about our deeply complex relationship with Russia in an open and honest way. | ||
| Not just by demonizing and making fun of Putin, which don't get me wrong, he makes it very easy to do, but by really understanding what's going on within Russia and the geopolitical circumstances which have led us to where we are now. | ||
| If we don't do a little homework now, then we'll all be easily manipulated by both politicians as well as by the media that has their own goals in mind. | ||
| Boogeymen are a lot less scary when you know a little bit about them. | ||
| My guest this week is author and columnist Cathy Young. | ||
| Cathy grew up in Russia until the age of 16 when she moved to the United States. | ||
| She's written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, as well as my hometown newspaper Newsday. | ||
| She focuses on some of my favorite topics including political correctness and free speech and from what I've seen she equally calls out the bad elements of both the regressive left and the alt-right. | ||
| She's also been an outspoken critic of modern feminism and a defender of the men's rights movement, though she sees some issues with that movement as well. | ||
| I view Cathy as one of the few people really trying to take both sides to task and give both sides a chance before forming her own opinions All the while not being too attached to a specific ideology. | ||
| Not being locked into a specific ideology and being intellectually flexible is one of the most important attributes you can have and one that I consistently strive to have for myself. | ||
| The last few months have been interesting as we've seen many never Trump Republicans slowly fall in line. | ||
| To a lesser degree we've seen it with the Bernie bros who seem far less inclined to go all in for Hillary. | ||
| The wider point here, though, is that everyone is making their own calculations and decisions based on the information around them. | ||
| The key, no matter what you believe, is to have access to new ideas and concepts and | ||
| to have conversations that will either enforce your beliefs or change them for the better. | ||
| My guest this week is an author and columnist who's written for the New York Times and | ||
| Wall Street Journal and is a regular contributor to Reason and my hometown newspaper Newsday | ||
| Kathy Young, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| It's great to be here. | ||
| I am very excited. | ||
| I didn't know that that was your hometown. | ||
| That is, I am a Long Islander. | ||
| Born in Brooklyn, grew up in Long Island, lived in New York City my whole life, now here I am in L.A. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You're a Jersey girl though, right? | ||
| I am, well I'm originally from Russia. | ||
| Yeah, we're gonna get into that. | ||
| But I have been a Jersey girl since 1981, so it has actually been a while. | ||
| That sounds like a book right there, from Jersey, From Russia to Jersey. | ||
| Well, I did write a book called Growing Up in Moscow, which was my first book. | ||
| It came out in 1989 when I was fresh out of college. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's exactly where I wanna start, so well done. | ||
| Okay, so in my direct message, I talked a bit about Russia, and I have a sense that in the next month or so, we're gonna be hearing a lot more about Russia, between what's going on in Syria, people talking about the WikiLeaks stuff, and is there somehow a connection that they wanna take down Hillary? | ||
| Does Trump have business ties to Russia? | ||
| All of this stuff. | ||
| So let's go back to your first 16 years. | ||
| What was it like growing up In Russia, and if you don't want to give me your exact age, give me a rough estimate of the years. | ||
| I was born in 1965. | ||
| Ah, okay, you never know what you know. | ||
| Yeah, I'm fine with that. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so let's talk about growing up in Russia. | ||
| So yeah, I was growing up in the Brezhnev years, and it was interesting because at the time, it really seemed like the regime that existed at the time was really forever. | ||
| And it was funny because there was a book by a Russian dissident named Andrei Amalrek called, Will the Soviet Union Exist Until 1984? | ||
| And he picked that date because of Orwell, of course. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's so bizarre because at the time I heard about this book, you know, my father was a kind of, well, both my parents were really kind of closet dissidents and we had banned literature in the house. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What was banned? | ||
| What type of literature was actually banned? | ||
| Oh, anything that was critical of the Soviet system. | ||
| Solzhenitsyn, of course, the works of dissidents. | ||
| There were authors who were not even really formally banned, but kind of really frowned upon from the early years of the Soviet regime, like people who were executed for being sort of in opposition. | ||
| Orwell, of course, was banned. | ||
| I didn't actually get to read Orwell until I had left the Soviet Union. | ||
| It's interesting because a number of people who read Orwell in, it was called Samizdat, | ||
| these typewritten leaflets that were passed around from person to person underground. | ||
| People who read Orwell and smuggled in foreign editions, a lot of people in the Soviet Union | ||
| really were shocked to learn that Orwell had never actually been to the Soviet Union. | ||
| Some of them were sure that George Orwell must have been the pen name for a Russian | ||
| emigre because who else could have understood the system so well? | ||
| Because he really understood the surveillance. | ||
| Yeah, he did. | ||
| And the pressure to conform to the dominant ideology. | ||
| So anyway, yeah, so Andrei Amalric picked that date because of the book 1984, of course, and at the time when I first heard about it, I mean, no one could really imagine that this would sort of come true because it actually didn't exist that long past 1984. | ||
| He was off by seven years. | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty good. | ||
| When I was growing up, no one really could have imagined that. | ||
| And I think that's kind of a useful thing to keep in mind when we think of today's events in the sense that, you know, we really have no idea whatsoever what the world is going to look like in five, six, seven years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Things are really unpredictable. | ||
| They really are, and that's why I did the direct message the way I did, because I want people to have some knowledge about some of this stuff, so that the second we start hearing about this all more, we're not all caught off guard and have no context. | ||
| In terms of what it was like to grow up in the Soviet Union, it's really difficult to answer on one word. | ||
| You know, it was, in many ways, it was a complex society. | ||
| It was not the same as it was in the Stalin era where, you know, it really was kind of back then the height of totalitarianism when You know, very little information or content, as we would say today, was allowed to kind of seep in that was not thoroughly filtered through the official ideology. | ||
| Like at the time, for instance, back in the 30s and even the 50s, Dostoevsky was banned. | ||
| Maybe, again, not officially banned, but very difficult to get, and certainly wasn't studied in schools and colleges. | ||
| By the time that I was in high school in Russia, we actually had a prime and punishment on the curriculum. | ||
| Things that mentioned religion were kind of allowed. | ||
| Again, anything that really was not very overtly critical of the Soviet Union was okay. | ||
| Well, Dr. Zhivago, for instance, was bad. | ||
| But I did have the experience of growing up in a situation where When I was maybe seven or eight years old, but I started going to school and I started coming home and saying, oh, well, we live in the best country in the world because we have communism. | ||
| That was when my parents decided that they kind of had to explain to me that, you know, not, not really. | ||
| That is not really quite the case. | ||
| Did they hand you some of those leaflets that were going around? | ||
| Not at the age of seven, but they just kind of talked to me and kind of gave me a little bit of an explanation of what was what. | ||
| And, uh, Um, and I remember very well my mother telling me, you know, you really, you cannot tell anyone at school what we talk about at home because otherwise, you know, we'll go to jail. | ||
| And I'm not even sure that they would have because again at the time, things were a little more flexible and open | ||
| than they used to be. | ||
| I actually know of a situation, friends of my parents, their son, | ||
| started talking in kindergarten about how his dad was saying that Lenin was really not the greatest person | ||
| who ever lived. | ||
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unidentified
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Oh God, what happened to this five year old? | |
| Nothing happened actually. | ||
| He has one of the teachers, One of the kindergarten teachers called on his mom and basically said, you know what, I don't really care what you talk about at home, but please don't do it in front of the kid because you don't know who else is going to tell. | ||
| So that was a pretty enlightened thing for the teacher to do. | ||
| Oh yeah, yeah. | ||
| So in the society, there was a lot of Kind of flexibility under the radar, so to speak. | ||
| But officially, it was all very conformist. | ||
| We had to, at school, we had to attend these mandatory meetings where everyone had to kind of repeat the slogans. | ||
| Sing the praises of the Soviet Union. | ||
| And this is actually one reason that a lot of the stuff that is going on today in American universities really resonates with me because, you know, I've been saying to my mom, my dad passed away a few years ago, unfortunately, but I've been saying to my mom, you know, this really feels like the Soviet Union where they heard you into these, you know, meetings where you have to sit there and say all the right things. | ||
| And it's not just that you're not allowed to say, you know, things you're not allowed to say. | ||
| What I'm trying to say is that you have to say the things you're supposed to say. | ||
| Yeah, well, as I'm listening to you, I mean, I absolutely see that through line. | ||
| I'm not saying we're in 1972 Russia. | ||
| Yeah, and of course not, because, you know, we're not, no one gets hurt into the gulag, you know, there isn't, because, I mean, again, when I was growing up, I did know that you could, you know, it wasn't very likely maybe, but you could Go to prison for, you know, saying heretical things. | ||
| But, you know, we are kind of getting to the point in many areas of society where you can lose your job, you know, for saying the wrong thing ideologically, which, you know, in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, that actually losing your job was a much more likely outcome than going to prison, like unless you were actually politically active as a dissident. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| It's interesting because I find that I used to give anonymous people online more crap for being anonymous. | ||
| A lot of people would respond and say, you know, I don't want to lose my job or anything like that. | ||
| I don't know that there's a lot of instances of that in the United States, but it's more about that chilling effect, which is sort of what you're talking about existed all the time. | ||
| So your parents never went to jail, but don't really talk about this at school or all that. | ||
| So 16 years old, you move here. | ||
| Was it because you realized that there was this great opportunity for freedom? | ||
| Yeah, well that was the point when they started releasing Soviet Jews in the 70s. | ||
| And my dad had actually talked for several years about leaving. | ||
| My mom was a little more uncertain about it. | ||
| She had a job that she really loved. | ||
| She's a music teacher, and she actually still teaches, but she was teaching at one of the top music schools. | ||
| in Moscow and she had students that she was very attached to. | ||
| And she just really felt, and it was funny because she felt that she would never find | ||
| that kind of work in the US and she actually ended up doing pretty well, I think. | ||
| So yeah, but she was a little hesitant and it was also just sort of the general uncertainty, | ||
| And it was also just sort of the general uncertainty, moving to a whole new country, learning a new language. | ||
| moving to a whole new country, learning a new language. | ||
| I went to a school that specialized in English, by the way. | ||
| I went to a school that specialized in English, by the way. | ||
| So I started learning English when I was about seven. | ||
| And it wasn't really at the time with a view to going to America eventually. | ||
| It was just because-- | ||
| I mean, it was a better school the most. | ||
| And it was, I think, because of English, there was also more exposure to materials | ||
| that you wouldn't normally see on a curriculum and so on. | ||
| So, you know, for me it was really, at least in terms of language, it wasn't quite as intimidating. | ||
| My parents really did have to kind of start all over again. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So yeah, finally I think my parents both felt that things were getting worse toward the end of the 70s. | ||
| At the time, again, no one knew what was going to happen. | ||
| A lot of people thought that there was going to be a kind of resurgence of Stalinist-type, really harsh, brutal dictatorship, where you could go to prison very easily for saying the wrong thing. | ||
| But at that point, you were allowed to just pick up and leave? | ||
| Your parents were allowed to just say, okay, we're leaving now? | ||
| Well, no, no, no. | ||
| It certainly wasn't that simple. | ||
| I mean, you had to apply for permission to leave. | ||
| It was not for anyone. | ||
| It was basically limited to Soviet Jews who were officially being allowed to leave for Repatriation to Israel and or family reunification. | ||
| They didn't really like the Jews, but they weren't letting the Jews leave. | ||
| Is that pretty much fair to say? | ||
| The anti-semitism, that was another thing, the anti-semitism was growing much more noticeable. | ||
| It was getting to be very difficult for young Jewish people to get into college. | ||
| Um, you know, we, my parents personally knew situations where, you know, kids who were extremely good students, uh, were basically blackballed during the admission exams and, and it was this completely closed system where they didn't have to tell you, like, where you had failed on the exams, you know. | ||
| It was really, really easy to kind of kill you if they wanted to. | ||
| Especially since part of the entrance exam, by the way, was Marxism-Leninism, and they could quiz you. | ||
| You had to read all these texts of, you know, the plenary session of the Communist Party in 1956. | ||
| So they were really testing you. | ||
| And then they could quiz you on the stuff. | ||
| And it was really, again, if they wanted to fail you, it was just really easy to do that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, you know, and I think that was that was another reason that prompted my parents to finally decide to leave. | ||
| But yeah, officially, we were emigrating to reunite with my father's aunt in Israel. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was the whole thing kind of existed under Jackson-Vanik. | ||
| It was kind of an arrangement with the United States where Russia, where the Soviet Union at the time, was getting kind of benefits and trade with the U.S. | ||
| in exchange for allowing Soviet Jews to leave. | ||
| And I think there were a few other groups, like Pentecostal Christians, who were kind of a very persecuted sect, who were also a part of that, but mainly it was Soviet Jews. | ||
| So yeah, once you actually left the Soviet Union, then you got to Vienna as a way station, and then you got a choice of did you want to go to Israel or did you want to go to the United States. | ||
| So you told them, or they were under the impression you were going to Israel, but then you went to the United States. | ||
| I think they kind of knew that. | ||
| Yeah, I think they knew what was going on, because I think at the time, like by the time that we were leaving, I think about 80% of the Soviet Jews who were emigrating We're actually going to the United States, so they didn't really care. | ||
| So what was it like? | ||
| You sort of had the benefit of, as you said, speaking English at an early age and going to an English school. | ||
| What was it like, though, to move to Jersey, 16, and live through that? | ||
| Yeah, Jersey actually was on my very first stop in the United States. | ||
| It was Jackson Heights, Queens. | ||
| Okay, all right, close enough. | ||
| It was Jackson Heights, Queens, yeah. | ||
| And this is funny. | ||
| I actually worked for about six months before my parents eventually found work in Jersey and that was why we ended up moving. | ||
| But for a while I was the main breadwinner because I was the person with English. | ||
| And I had a job as a secretary with the Boy Scouts of America, the New York chapter. | ||
| I knew how to type, and I knew how to type in Russian, but I rented a typewriter, an English keyboard typewriter. | ||
| Took me about a week to, you know, relearn how to type in English. | ||
| What was that like? | ||
| I mean, you go from Russia, now you're the breadwinner for your parents in this new country, learning a new job and all that. | ||
| I mean, how did that feel? | ||
| Oh, it actually felt really exciting! | ||
| Yeah, that whole period of my life was actually quite exciting because, you know, just the mere Experience of going abroad, you know and my father actually had traveled a bit because he was a musician He had traveled with the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. | ||
| He was actually mainly he was a sound producer for for the radio, but he was also a violinist and and He did occasionally get to travel. | ||
| He had some interesting experiences too. | ||
| He was actually in England in 1968 when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. | ||
| And he would have defected for sure if he didn't have a family back home. | ||
| And my mom actually wasn't even sure that he was coming back because when she heard about the invasion she was like, oh my god, he's going to defect. | ||
| I mean, he showed up at the door and everything. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| But he, I think he was very, very tempted. | ||
| And I mean, I don't think he was tempted to actually do it because he knew that he had a family back home. | ||
| But he did say, you know, that if it wasn't for that, he probably would have made that decision because it was just, and you know, they had the experience of, You know, being sort of booed by the audience in London. | ||
| It was just, it was really, really trying. | ||
| So let's flash forward. | ||
| There's so much that we could do about just the history and being an immigrant coming here and all that. | ||
| But for me, it was really exciting because first of all, it was this whole world of information that had opened up to me. | ||
| You know, reading Orwell and newspapers. | ||
| And I remember just the experience and I actually still remember this. | ||
| I remember when we came here, you know, I opened, I think it was the New York Post, And this was shortly before Reagan was elected. | ||
| So, you know, I opened the New York Post and I see this really mean cartoon of Jimmy Carter and I was like, you know, this is just amazing! | ||
| This is like the president! | ||
| And here is this cartoon that, you know, basically depicts him as a complete idiot. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, I love that. | ||
| I love that because it so obviously frames so much of what you write about. | ||
| Yeah, and that was just an amazing...and that just... | ||
| Suddenly, I mean, I still remember that because it was this moment that really crystallized, you know, the fact of being in a free country, that you can actually do this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I want to talk about some of the issues of being in a free country, but let's do one other thing on Russia first, because I mentioned some stuff about Russia up top. | ||
| What do you make of just generally what's happening with Russia now? | ||
| Just let's spend a couple minutes on, do you sense that Putin is really trying to fill this void that America seems to be leaving in the world? | ||
| What is going on in Syria? | ||
| Have they officially taken Ukraine? | ||
| Give me, we'll do five minutes on the state of Russia. | ||
| All right, five minutes on the state of Russia. | ||
| Well, I think that Putin definitely, ever since he came to power, it's been increasingly clear that he wants to rebuild Russia as a superpower. | ||
| It can't really return to what the Soviet Union was, although I'm not really sure he understands that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I mean, that might be why he took Ukraine, right? | |
| Yeah, well, he took Crimea. | ||
| There is this view that Putin is sort of superhumanly clever, right? | ||
| You know, he's this great strategist. | ||
| I'm not really sure that's the case because, you know, actually, Arguably, he could have gotten further with Ukraine if he had just maintained a, you know, tried to maintain a friendly relationship with them and, you know, trade and so on, you know, without actually trying to force, you know, his person, I don't want to say his puppet because I'm not even really sure that the president who was | ||
| Who was removed was completely a puppet of the Kremlin, but he was definitely sort of Putin's man. | ||
| And I think he in a way kind of overplayed his hand in Ukraine. | ||
| I mean right now he's in a situation where he's much better at kind of messing things up for other countries than he is at You know, actually doing something good for Russia. | ||
| Because right now, for instance, the situation with Ukraine is that, yeah, I mean the new government in Ukraine is not really able to push through, you know, the reforms that at once partly because it's bogged down in this endless kind of undeclared war that's going on in the Eastern regions. | ||
| And, you know, they've got Putin breathing down their neck, basically. | ||
| But at the same time, Russia is also bogged down in this undeclared war. | ||
| And it can really, a lot of the stuff can kind of come back and bite Russia because they're creating this kind of quasi-mercenary army of armed people who have the experience now of fighting in this guerrilla war. | ||
| And who knows what will happen when these people are told, well, we don't need you anymore because we're kind of done with this. | ||
| So I think this could create a lot of destabilization in Russia itself. | ||
| And I could go on and on about this, because he's also got, he's kind of got a tiger by the tail in Chechnya, because basically he made a deal with this guy, Ramzan Kadyrov, of, well, he basically, like, you make sure Chechnya stays a Russian province, and, you know, you make sure that Putin gets, you know, 100% of the votes in Chechnya in the elections, which I think he does. | ||
| And, you know, you make sure that we get a cut of the oil profits. | ||
| In exchange, you can really do anything you want. | ||
| And this is actually kind of interesting because I know that there are people on the right in the West who see Putin as this kind of bulwark of defense against Sharia law. | ||
| Under Putin's leadership, there is a part of the Russian Federation that is basically a Sharia state. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Which is Chechnya, yeah, and not many people know about this. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| Yeah, well, it actually is. | ||
| that women are forced to wear veils. | ||
| This is a guy who's actually spoken out in favor of polygamy, which is technically | ||
| illegal under Russian law. | ||
| And there are people who have said, wait a minute, this guy is the president of a republic that is part | ||
| of the Russian Federation. | ||
| What is he doing, really, advocating things that are contrary to the Russian Constitution? | ||
| And of course, who really cares? | ||
| Because the law currently is whatever-- | ||
| He just wants the votes to keep it part of the Federation, but then lets them-- | ||
| He wants the votes. | ||
| And also, this guy, Kadyrov, is a very, very strong Putin supporter. | ||
| If necessary, he will bring out his troops that are loyal to him to fight. | ||
| I mean, it's pretty well known that he's sent people to eastern Ukraine to fight in the guerrilla | ||
| war there. | ||
| But at the same time, it is kind of a tiger by the tail situation, because if suddenly it becomes advantageous for Kadyrov to turn on Putin, Who knows what's going to happen? | ||
| He's a pretty dangerous guy. | ||
| He's kind of the classic warlord who's got his people who are extremely loyal to him. | ||
| I don't think Putin is quite as smart as he's often given credit for. | ||
| I think a lot of the time when he's succeeded, it's mainly because of the failures of the West. | ||
| Because, you know, as you said, he's good at stepping into the vacuum that arises when, for instance, American leadership kind of pulls back. | ||
| Yeah, so that's the perfect segue, of course, to everything that's going on in Syria. | ||
| What is he trying to accomplish in Syria? | ||
| Is he really trying to keep Assad in power? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| And I think part of that is really just to signal that he stands behind his allies. | ||
| And yeah, he's ostensibly making noises about creating the preconditions for Assad to talk to the opposition, but given the way that Putin treats the opposition in Russia, I mean, okay, he doesn't carpet bomb them. | ||
| But that's really, other than that-- | ||
| Right, he's doing the rest of it. | ||
| He's really not a talking to the opposition guy. | ||
| He's more of a kill the opposition quietly or put them in jail or basically leave them | ||
| with no institutional support whatsoever guy. | ||
| And I think it's really fairly clear that the murder of Boris Nemtsov, | ||
| who was at one point a really popular governor, who later became part of the opposition, | ||
| and who I think who had the charisma really to appeal to people. | ||
| I don't know that he actually was directly a threat to Putin but you know but even so it's fairly clear that there was some kind of official hand in his murder. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I mean I think that kind of tells you a lot about you know How Putin feels about dealing with the opposition. | ||
| So basically the idea is, for him it's like, I'm backing my guy, it's probably good for the economy at some level, right? | ||
| Yeah, exactly, and I think it's good for kind of maintaining his strongman image, both inside and outside Russia. | ||
| Putin Very clearly kind of has an affinity with dictators. | ||
| He gets pretty upset at regime change anywhere. | ||
| I've heard stories, and again, these are sort of rumors from people who have been on the inside, but I've heard that he was extremely upset by what happened to Gaddafi and that he really took that personally. | ||
| He took it personally in a, well, that could be me someday way. | ||
| And I think part of his issues with the United States, and I think it goes back to Iraq and a few other things, but he really does see the United States as, you know, promoting regime change around the world. | ||
| And I think that's part of the beef with the US. | ||
| Yeah, so is that the irony of where we're at at the moment? | ||
| That it seems to me that the Democrats and Hillary are more anti-Russia than the Republicans at the moment. | ||
| Now maybe Trump has business ties there, it's very unclear. | ||
| Yeah, we don't know what's going on. | ||
| But Hillary was for going in and toppling Gaddafi and apparently now it came out That a lot of the leaders of the army were saying, don't do it. | ||
| So there is some legitimacy to Putin's fears, I suppose. | ||
| If you're Putin, you can understand the fears. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think that when we look, and I don't really want to get into the whole Middle East situation. | ||
| Yeah, we're going to move to America in just a second. | ||
| Because otherwise we're going to spend the next half hour talking about the Middle East. | ||
| But, you know, I think that I understand the kind of anti-interventionist argument. | ||
| I think we've definitely overextended ourselves and, you know, doing things around the world that get us into really messy situations. | ||
| At the same time, I'm a little skeptical of this whole kind of line of argument that, oh, well, we've made such a mess. | ||
| There is this assumption that if only it weren't for our intervention, everything would be peaceful and quiet. | ||
| I don't think that that's necessarily the case. | ||
| And I think that in a way, it's funny because it kind of parallels a lot of the left-wing arguments about foreign policy. | ||
| The other day I saw somebody on Twitter, and I'm not even sure why this came up, but for some reason they were talking about how, oh, well, it was really Nixon who was responsible for the genocide in Cambodia. | ||
|
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What? | |
| I mean, I'm sorry, but, you know, Paul Pott was actually responsible for that. | ||
| The guy who did it, actually, yeah. | ||
| So it's this mindset that somehow the West is behind everything bad that happens in non-Western countries. | ||
| And I think it's, again, kind of ironic that we're seeing the same kind of mindset on the anti-interventionist right today. | ||
| And again, this is not to say that, you know, mistakes haven't been made, so to speak. | ||
| But it really doesn't mean that, you know, if we hadn't blundered in Libya and Iraq and so on, that that region today would be just, you know, a model of peace and quiet. | ||
| I don't think that's the case. | ||
| We have no idea, by the way, what would have happened. | ||
| We don't, but we do know that actually Iraq was better, and they were having basically free elections, and then we left. | ||
| George W. Bush had signed the thing to leave, but Obama is the one who decided. | ||
| Yeah, and I think there's collective responsibility for this. | ||
| I think, you know, leaving aside the merits of the invasion itself, I think it's pretty clear that the administration in Iraq post-invasion was very badly mismanaged, and I think That was part of why I think they weren't able to get a deal that would have allowed us to keep some troops there. | ||
| But I think what you're saying is that not everything all the time is always America's fault. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| And that, it's really whether you're blaming George W. Bush or whether you're blaming Hillary and Obama, you know, it's really much, much more complicated than that. | ||
| There are forces, and it's kind of ironic because in a way, in a way, it's demeaning, really, to the people in those countries to say that, oh, well, everything they do is really only because of instigation and so forth by the United States. | ||
| Right, that they only react. | ||
| They have their own extremely complicated history and, you know, they do things for their own reasons. | ||
| I mean, obviously, we contribute for better or for worse, but it's really an oversimplification to say that, oh, well, and a lot of conservatives are saying that now. | ||
| Oh, well, Hillary started this mess in the Middle East. | ||
|
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Really? | |
| You really wanna go there? | ||
| And it also, of course, it always depends on where you wanna start history from, because there was something called the Ottoman Empire that ran the whole thing, and then there was the British Empire, and then the United States, and all that, okay. | ||
| So all right, let's move from some geopolitical stuff, and let's talk about the issues of the day, and let's come back to America for a moment, because that's where you do most of your writing about now. | ||
| At the moment, yeah, although I do actually write quite a bit about Russia, because I do have You know, the experience that I think, you know, is really helpful in assessing what's happening there today. | ||
| So, all right, let's start with, we're going to talk about the regressive left and the alt-right. | ||
| Which one would you prefer to start with? | ||
| What feels like a better transition there? | ||
| You mean like what I'd like to start with, the regressive left or the alt-right? | ||
| Yeah, you wanna go regressive left or alt-right first? | ||
| Oh, let's do the alt-right. | ||
| Yeah, let's do the alt-right. | ||
| So let's do the alt-right. | ||
| Because actually Russia is a good kind of segue to the alt-right, because I think that a lot of people on the alt-right have this, you know, Putin cult. | ||
| Of course, a lot of them are, I think, are just Kremlin trolls, really. | ||
| Oh, that's actually true, yeah. | ||
| So there's a lot of trolls on the alt-right, we know that, but what is your definition of the alt-right? | ||
| What is the alt-right to you? | ||
| 'Cause I think nobody's defining it properly. | ||
| Oh, that's actually true, yeah. | ||
| So everyone uses it for their own purpose. | ||
| Right, well, it's difficult to define, actually, because there probably isn't a single alt-right. | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| It started maybe five or six years ago with a bunch of people on really obscure websites. | ||
| And there are these different kind of factions of the alt-right, some of which, like there's the, and I haven't really written about the whole neo-reactionary so-called phenomenon, which is really about kind of going back to pre-democracy political institutions, you know, a lot of them are very pro-monarchy, which is Kind of a non-starter in the United States. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Let's not tear up the whole system at once. | ||
| But I think today, what people usually refer to when they talk about the alt-right is it's more kind of white nationalist segment. | ||
| And I think that has primarily come to be associated, especially with the Trump campaign, which So correct me if I'm wrong, but my take on it has been that when people refer to the alt-right, yeah, they're referring to this white nationalist group of people and these neo-Nazis and that thing. | ||
| My feeling about it, from what I've seen just being online and talking to people and seeing what people send me and things, is that a huge percentage of the alt-right is just really disaffected people who love memes and they love shitposting and sending Nazi imagery to people and all this stuff, not because they're Nazis, but they're so frustrated with the system that they're just trying to get a reaction. | ||
| Now, I'm not apologizing for them, and I don't like getting those things. | ||
| I wouldn't stop them from doing it as long as they're not trying to physically harm anybody. | ||
| But to me, the white nationalist subset of it obviously exists, but it actually strikes me as a small portion of a movement that really is just pissed at conservatives, that are pissed at the people on the right who didn't do the things they said they were gonna do. | ||
| They're pissed at the system. | ||
| They're pissed at the media. | ||
| I mean, a lot of the things that I actually do care about, yet there is absolutely a truly xenophobic component to it that doesn't like black people, | ||
| that doesn't like Muslims, gays, Jews, et cetera. | ||
| Do you think that's fair to say that there's some-- | ||
| Well, it's really difficult to estimate the percentages because it's not a movement where you can do a poll | ||
| and find out what percentage of people who are affiliated with the alt-right online | ||
| are actually just sort of disaffected conservative Zolobitarians who like memes | ||
| and, you know, like, shut those things up. | ||
| Or former liberals, by the way, too. | ||
| Yeah, as opposed to, you know, actual white nationalists or, you know, even neo-Nazis. | ||
| We don't even know how many people are actually involved because a lot of them could be like one person with 30 handles. | ||
| It could be like, what was that guy's name? | ||
| Joshua Goldberg, remember? | ||
| This was the Jewish guy who had all these different identities, including a Nazi. | ||
| Oh, I don't even know about this one, yeah. | ||
| Oh yeah, this is an amazing story, and I actually, he eventually got arrested for- Sounds like currencies in a South Park, I don't know if you're watching, but- I know, I know, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, but he eventually got arrested, I think, for trying to stage some kind of terrorist act, like he was talking to some radical Muslims online also, and I think he was trying to persuade them that he was a radical Muslim too. | ||
| This guy was just trolling everybody. | ||
| Yeah, so he was trolling everyone, but he had some personas that really were, you know, that were alright. | ||
| And so, yeah, we could be, you know, dealing with, you don't know, you know, you never really know who you're dealing with. | ||
| You know, you could be dealing with a teenager who's, you know, sitting in his parents' proverbial basement and, you know, and pretending to be like 10 or 15 different people on Twitter. | ||
| So then what do you make of the supposed strength of it then? | ||
| Like when Hillary calls out the alt-right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are we talking about an actual political movement here, or? | ||
| I think there is something of a political movement. | ||
| I mean, we know that there are people, websites like VDare, you know, those are real people. | ||
| Those are not, you know, teenagers pretending to be somebody, you know, while posting from their parents' basement. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, how much following do they actually have? | ||
| Again, nobody knows. | ||
| But I do think that there's a real movement there. | ||
| I think that they are gaining a lot of visibility recently. | ||
| And it's kind of, it's really difficult to even know how to deal with this because in a way, of course, by criticizing them, you know, people like me are giving them more visibility. | ||
| But at the same time, I do kind of feel that it is important to, and I really hate the word call out because it's been so thoroughly kind of You know, appropriated and misused by the social justice people. | ||
| But I do think that it's important to point to this and say, yeah, you know, this is really going on and this is not a good thing. | ||
| And I think that there are young people who do kind of tend to get drawn in by this stuff for real. | ||
| We have a lot of young people Uh, who are extremely uneducated, you know, and I think that is a problem with the educational system. | ||
| We have a problem of kind of teaching relativism in the sense that, oh, well, you know, there's really no such thing as objective truth. | ||
| There are people who have been saying for a long time, you know, this kind of mindset eventually leads to embracing Holocaust denial because, hey, who's to say what really happened? | ||
| If historical truth is really only just a matter of who gets to control the narrative, Right, this is a big problem because then it's whoever yells at us. | ||
| I mean, just yesterday, did you see this guy at the Trump rally screaming about it? | ||
| Holocaust denier. | ||
| It's like, I didn't retweet it because I don't want to amplify these crazy people. | ||
| And yet at the same point, they've suddenly found a voice through Trump. | ||
| And I don't think he's obviously, I don't think he's a Holocaust denier, but what is the connection to Trump in this? | ||
| Well, I think the connection to Trump is that because of his rhetoric on immigration and not even his specific position so much as just the kind of level of vehemence and comments like, you know, and I mean, yeah, it's true that he didn't say all Mexican illegal immigrants were rapists. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Not like the whole, oh, you know, these Mexican, you know, Mexico is sending us these rapists, | ||
| you know, kind of stuff. | ||
| I think it did send a message to a lot of people on the kind of genuinely xenophobic, | ||
| you know, parts of the alt-right that, hey, you know, this is a guy who thinks the way | ||
| we do. | ||
| we do. | ||
| And I think Ann Coulter is kind of a conduit there, too, because she's, you know, she's actually engaged for years in some extremely kind of nasty rhetoric targeting all sorts | ||
| of different people and including immigrants. | ||
|
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She has an open invitation to come on the show, by the way. | |
| Oh, okay, okay. | ||
| And she became a big cheerleader for Trump. | ||
| And I mean, the story that I've heard is that actually it's the success of her anti-immigration book, | ||
| you know, Adios America, was what kind of drove Trump suddenly to make immigration. | ||
| This is kind of the interesting thing. | ||
| In 2012, he actually criticized Mitt Romney for being too anti-immigration, which is funny. | ||
| When people talk about Trump being this and that ideologically, I think Trump ideologically, Trump is a Trumpist. | ||
| You know, he's interested in his own advancement and that's about it. | ||
| But that doesn't make him not dangerous because, you know, an egomaniac who is, you know, very close to being president of, well, I don't know how close right now. | ||
| I think if either one of them wins, we have an egomaniac in the White House. | ||
| But to the Trump point, I agree. | ||
| I think he's out for his own, we don't know what, I don't think we fully understand what his motivations are, Maybe all presidents have a degree of that. | ||
| I think Hillary is a more conventional egomaniac. | ||
| Sure, absolutely. | ||
| By political standards, absolutely. | ||
| My fear with the Trump thing is that it's not... I don't think he's a white nationalist or something like that, by any estimation, but I think he's allowed for it to suddenly become it's sort of okay. | ||
| Now look, you know, and I like you, I'm a free speech absolutist. | ||
| So as long as these people aren't calling to harm anyone, I'm for letting them be out there and I'm not for banning any of them. | ||
| Just like I'm not for banning Milo from Twitter and all that kind of stuff. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But I fear, at some level, that we're normalizing a certain degree of hate. | ||
| Well, that's, yeah, I think that is a problem, and I think, and that is really why I felt that it was important to address this. | ||
| Yeah, and you've called them out, by the way. | ||
| Yeah, and I have, and I really do have, I mean, I think Milo is a very smart guy who's, you know, done some great things, and, you know, Criticizing and mocking the social justice warriors. | ||
| I mean, I think it was a really, really big mistake for him to start essentially normalizing and legitimizing these kind of creepier segments of the alt-right. | ||
| Right, but isn't the irony, have you seen them turn on him lately? | ||
| Because I've seen these websites that are now calling to have Nazis show up and write messages. | ||
| Right, and it's hard to tell, again, how much of that is theater, you know. | ||
| I don't know how many of these people like I never actually get out of the basement. | ||
| I would imagine sometimes they tweet while walking. | ||
| Sometimes, probably, yeah. | ||
| So yeah, I think a lot of what goes on while the alt-right is theater, I mean, you know, I've gotten threatening tweets and messages from these people that I don't really take seriously. | ||
| I mean, it's... I think a lot of that is really just kind of showing off and kind of being assholes on Twitter, basically. | ||
| But at the same time, when you have a lot of this very violent rhetoric going on, you | ||
| never know when it's going to actually trickle down to the wrong person who actually decides | ||
| to do something about it and not just send tweets and so on. | ||
| So I'm not going to say that this is not dangerous, because when you have a lot of this rhetoric | ||
| that demonizes people, that calls for violence, I mean, there's a lot of rhetoric calling | ||
| for retaliation against enemies of Trump. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I've seen a lot of that. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| I mean, I see it every day. | ||
| So, you know, I think that the rhetorical atmosphere, the rhetorical climate right now is really bad, and of course, I'm not gonna blame that entirely on the alt-right. | ||
| This may be a good moment to segue to the regressive left. | ||
| Okay, so that's exactly where I wanted to go with that, because the reason I've been somewhat sympathetic to whatever the alt-right is is that I do see, and I'm not defending the white nationalists for the purpose of this, but for all of the people that are just shitposting and upsetting everybody and are sending memes all over the place and trying to be heard and all that, They're angry at the establishment, which I fully understand, and they're angry at political correctness. | ||
| And who did that to them? | ||
| It was the regressive left. | ||
| It was the people on the left that silenced everybody with these false cries of racism and bigotry. | ||
| So they're a natural reaction, and that's why I've been somewhat tolerant of them. | ||
| Well, it's also a kind of idiotic reaction, really. | ||
| Because I mean, the argument-- and I remember actually arguing | ||
| about this with Milo, like, back before he wrote those articles | ||
| that were kind of defending the alt-right in a kind of serious | ||
| way, when he was just kind of starting to kind of dabble and apologize for the alt-right. | ||
| And he was basically saying, oh, well, you see, what's really going on here is that they want to challenge these taboos. | ||
| So, you know, because the racist label is constantly being used to silence conservatives, they're actually trying to kind of make that stigma meaningless by actually, you know, saying all this racist crap. | ||
| Saying absurd stuff, right. | ||
| Well, it doesn't really work that way. | ||
| I mean, first of all, by doing this, because I do think that the vast majority of people who are not social justice warriors, who are not the regressive left, nonetheless quite rightly loathe and detest genuine racism and bigotry, what you're doing by saying this crap Yeah. | ||
| is alienating people who could be your allies. | ||
| Because then they're gonna look at you and say, "Oh, well, these people really are racist creeps." | ||
| Say, "No, thank you. | ||
| "We don't really want anything to do with them." | ||
| So, I mean, it's really a little bit like, if you're a black person who wants to challenge | ||
| nugget of stereotypes of blacks, you're not gonna do that by trying to embody those. | ||
| I mean, it's a little bit like. | ||
| I suppose you have some people in the rap community who kind of do that, and that's stupid. | ||
| It's stupid when anti-PC people do it. | ||
| But I totally agree that the left bears a lot of responsibility for the climate of the really, really bad and counterproductive rhetorical climate that we have in many ways. | ||
| So how do we uncouple some of that from left? | ||
| Because that's, you know, that's why I've spent so much time talking about this on the show is that I want liberalism Right. | ||
| Well, I don't think it's too late. | ||
| I mean, I don't think we're at the point yet, you know, we're not in the Soviet Union. | ||
| And is it almost too late because we now see the other side gaining power and it's only gonna make them | ||
| that much more scared of the people that are stuck in that way of thinking? | ||
| Right, well, I don't think it's too late. | ||
| I mean, I don't think we're at the point yet, you know, we're not in the Soviet Union, | ||
| we're not at the point where you can, you know, go to prison for, you know, wrong thing. | ||
| Right, but you do see the underpinnings of that, right? | ||
| But we do see the underpinnings of that. | ||
| I think it's really important for, you know, genuine liberals. | ||
| What I would love to see, by the way, is a kind of liberal conservative alliance | ||
| of, you know, reasonable people. | ||
| And I think right now that is feasible. | ||
| I think we're seeing. | ||
| A lot of that. | ||
| We're seeing people like, you know, Jonathan Chait on the liberal side, for instance, speaking out against political correctness and, you know, getting attacked by the regressive left. | ||
| And, you know, the attacks are really always the same. | ||
| You know, it's kind of, oh, like, you're just another white male who doesn't like women and minorities criticizing you. | ||
|
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Is there anything worse than a white male who doesn't think the way he's supposed to think? | |
| It's ridiculous because actually if you look at the article that Jonathan Shade got attacked for, he was not even talking about criticism directed at himself. | ||
| He was actually talking mainly about women and minorities who were getting attacked in really nasty ways for being politically incorrect. | ||
| He was talking about people like this Muslim student at the University of Michigan who got really badly harassed for, you know, writing something that mocked political correctness. | ||
| I mean, I think he had like a bunch of really nasty leaflets dropped in front of the door of his apartment and stuff like that. | ||
| So, I mean, it wasn't even just people tweeting nasty things and so on. | ||
| It was really, in a way, kind of quasi-physical harassment. | ||
| So yeah, I think that there is a movement of both conservatives and liberals who are very, very ready to reject this and to kind of try to restore rationality. | ||
| What I would love to see, by the way, and this is kind of my own personal dream, right now there isn't a single publication, like I read a lot of publications online, I don't think there is a single publication that kind of consistently stands up for a non-social justice, and I put the word social justice in quotation marks because it really is a kind of, what passes for social justice today, is a kind of neo-totalitarian cult right. | ||
| It's obsessed with controlling words and thoughts. | ||
| It's obsessed with identity politics. | ||
| And it's obsessed with politicizing every single aspect of life. | ||
| It's like when you look at, for instance, the discussions of culture, like movies, whether it's movies, video games, books, everything in the, you know, progressive media. | ||
| like Vice, Verge, to some extent even The Daily Beast, which I've written for and which I think does, | ||
| I mean, The Daily Beast is one of the few that isn't kind of completely co-opted by this | ||
| and still publishes good stuff. | ||
| Or stuff that doesn't fit that identity politics mode. | ||
| But a lot of that, all of the discussion of television, everything, it's completely in terms of, | ||
| oh, well, does this really reflect the true diversity of the population? | ||
| Do we have enough trans people in this? | ||
| Is this cultural appropriation? | ||
| Does this writer really have the right to talk about this ethnic group the way that he or she does? | ||
| And it's all in terms of this ideology and identity and it's ridiculous. | ||
| And I think what I would love to see, so there's that and there's the conservative media on the other hand, but there isn't a single publication that kind of consistently embraces a, you know, kind of true liberal point of view. | ||
| I mean, there are still some publications like The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, that have that point of view represented, but it coexists with a lot of the really hardcore kind of ideological And I think that coexistence very often tends to lead to the liberal viewpoint being pushed out. | ||
| Because the social justice people, they're really not interested in dialogue. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| They think that the opposing viewpoint is evil. | ||
| They're fighting racists. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, it's a little bit like, you know, you can't really have a dialogue between Voltaire and Turquemont. | ||
| It's going to end with Voltaire being burned at the stake. | ||
|
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Of course. | |
| Right. | ||
| And so I think what we really need, and I would love to see this, you know, something like the old New Republic, for instance. | ||
| I mean, the new New Republic is this, you know, lamentable, you know, shadow of its former self, where I don't know if you saw the other day, they had this really bizarre essay called "What are white writers for?" | ||
| or something. | ||
| I didn't, but I can remember it. | ||
| And it contained this line which I actually screenshot it and tweeted that said something like, | ||
| "Well, for the most part, white people have always been able to do everything they want to do." | ||
| Yeah, really? | ||
| Are you detached from reality? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These people don't even realize how profoundly elitist that is because it's like they think, and the guy who wrote this is a Yale grad, so you think that your experience as a writer who went to Yale Because you're white is identical to the experience of some white guy who lives in Kentucky and is out of a job and who's gonna vote for Trump, by the way, because you people keep telling him that, you know, he's a racist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because he is not happy with where he is in life. | ||
| I think we really, really need more voices for this kind of liberalism that doesn't, both moderate conservatism, which I think has been largely edged out these days by the Rush Limbaugh's and that crap. | ||
|
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There is very little of a traditional conservative movement. | |
| The National Review, I think, still has some really good kind of, National Review commentary. | ||
| Those publications have some really good kind of traditional conservative voices. | ||
| But I think we really, really need more of that and we need more liberal publications | ||
| that consistently advance a liberal point of view. | ||
| Yeah, you know, I really like what you said about this new thing forming | ||
| because I've been sort of talking about it a little bit and I've had a few guests that have mentioned it. | ||
| And I've been saying for a while that it seems to me that defending my liberal values | ||
| is now becoming a conservative position. | ||
| That doesn't make me feel good to say that, but I think that shows that there's a bridge to be built here. | ||
| I want to back up to something else that you said, which is that everything's being politicized these days. | ||
| Because yesterday, I saw on Twitter, somebody tweeted that the lead actress in the show Black-ish Which has double the ratings, I suppose, I guess, of Tim Allen's newer show, not Home Improvement, but the one that's on now. | ||
| And it said that he makes something like 20 times more than him. | ||
| And what the implication was, was somehow that he as a white man is making more than this black woman. | ||
| And I think that line in general is just, it's a misguided way of attacking. | ||
| But it was really, they were trying to sow some sort of social injustice. | ||
| But really, Tim Allen is a massive star who I think, if I'm not mistaken, he's the only person ever to have a number one movie, number one book, and number one sitcom all at the same week. | ||
| All the same week. | ||
| So this is a massive star who's reaping the benefits of being the headline guy in a sitcom. | ||
| Oprah Winfrey, I'm sure, makes a lot more money than you do. | ||
| Believe it or not, people aren't exactly sure how the YouTube CPMs work out, but yes, she does. | ||
| And I'm a white guy. | ||
| Ah, what does that prove? | ||
| There you go. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| But that idea that everything is politicized, it's really dangerous, right? | ||
| As someone that comes from a place where everything was politicized. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And it's really, really discouraging to see, especially a lot of the culture criticism ...couched completely in these political terms. | ||
| It's like, you know, you can read a random review of some TV show and suddenly you see a line along the lines of, well, of course, you know, in the rape culture of, you know, modern American society, you know, women are systematically suppressed and, you know, cannot express their wishes freely. | ||
| You know, and it's like, it reminds me of how, when I was growing up in the Soviet Union, you know, going back to that experience, I had these editions of, you know, classics like Shakespeare and translation, and there was a kind of obligatory thing where virtually any publication of a classic had to have a foreword that It had to have at least some passages that put it in the proper kind of Marxist context. | ||
|
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So it was a trigger warning before a trigger warning. | |
| Well, it's not quite a trigger warning so much as kind of an ideological framework that told you what the correct way to read it was. | ||
| So for instance, Shakespeare's King Lear is really about the emergence of the bourgeoisie and its replacement of the feudal family system and so on. | ||
| And there would be a quote from either Marx or Lenin, and it was funny because apparently in the Russian publishing industry, I've heard people actually used to refer to these Marx and Lenin quotes as locomotives because they were like pulling through the publication of the book, you know, and you couldn't get the book published otherwise. | ||
| And it's not even necessarily that the person who wrote the foreword believed any of that. | ||
| It was just the obligatory nod to the reigning ideology. | ||
| And I think we're almost getting to the point where you look at a lot of TV, movie, book reviews in, you know, kind of progressive, left-of-center publications, and it's the same kind of stuff. | ||
| You know, you see these, you know, references to the race, gender, you know, sexuality, identity, politics, ideology. | ||
| We're happy. | ||
| permeates everything and it's scary. | ||
| Especially in terms of gender issues and relations between men and women. | ||
| We haven't even gotten to that. | ||
| I've been doing a lot of writing on gender issues. | ||
| No, I know so Unfortunately, we're out of time. | ||
| So you absolutely are gonna come back whether you like it or not. | ||
| All right thing you to come back Okay, so next time next time we're gonna do a full hour of gender We'll do all the gender feminism and men rights and all that But I really do love how you brought this back to where we started because the themes of being in a society that are closed We're in an open one now and someone like you that's lived through the other side can can see some of the frameworks of it happening here and So, that's why I'm glad that we brought her on. | ||
| So, I'll give you the last word. | ||
| Well, I mean, I think you made a really good point about how we have an open society that is suddenly somehow reproducing a lot of these thought patterns of closed societies. | ||
| Societies where there is a dominant ideology. | ||
| And I think that is something that we all have to be very, very leery of. | ||
| I think, you know, seeing the world exclusively through a political slash ideological lens is a really, really limited and skewed way of looking at the world. | ||
| It also really keeps you from looking at the opposing point of view because, you know, if a point of view that is different from yours is not just a different point of view but the enemy, Uh, you know, that is really not a, uh, that is really not very conducive to getting a full picture of what's going on in the world. | ||
| And I think that applies, by the way, again, to a lot of people on the right as well as people on the left. | ||
| I think that, you know, the right kind of has its own version of political correctness. | ||
| And I say, oh no, I'm not defending the right in the way they use it too. | ||
| I'm just trying to do what I can with the liberals. | ||
| So, you know, I think we, again, I'm going to repeat it again, I think we need to, you know, my own politics are kind of moderate libertarian, really. | ||
| I'm not extremely doctrinaire about, you know, minimal government. | ||
| I mean, I obviously think Less government is better, but I'm probably not quite as minimalistic about government as some of my colleagues at Reason. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, I think that there are legitimate disagreements that we can have about the size of government, about welfare programs. | ||
| These are all legitimate subjects for discussion. | ||
| As long as you understand that your point of view could be wrong, that you're not necessarily right about everything. | ||
| And, you know, unfortunately the identity politics are a whole different ballgame because unlike debates about the nature of the welfare state, for instance, identity politics does tend to put people in boxes. | ||
| Identity politics tends to demonize the opposition. | ||
| And the social justice ideology that really kind of seeks to control | ||
| how people even talk about identity related issues. | ||
| I mean, that's a whole different story. | ||
| And this is where, you know, I don't think it's really possible | ||
| to conduct a dialogue with people who espouse totalitarian ideology. | ||
| Well, I'm gonna keep trying. | ||
| And you absolutely, you're coming back Absolutely. | ||
| As I like to say, on a good interview, I don't even look at these once. | ||
| I didn't pick them up once. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| So it was a pleasure. | ||
| Thanks for coming to LA and doing this. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Great to finally meet you, and I really wanted to do this again. | ||
| We're real people in more than 140 characters. | ||
| I can't believe it. | ||
| For more on Kathy, you can check out kathyyoung.wordpress.com. |
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