If Books Could Kill - Thomas Chatterton Williams' ＂Summer of Our Discontent＂

00:00:00.000 I've got the new mic set up.

00:00:01.320 It'll be a little louder, I think.

00:00:02.480 You got your Loudener installed?

00:00:04.720 By the way, remember how I couldn't get it working last time?

00:00:07.760 It's just like, I was like, hey, I told everyone I'd like sent a thing to the 5-4-Chat.

00:00:12.320 I was like, hey, I got the thing you told me, but I can't get the mic working now.

00:00:15.640 And basically, there's literally just like a button you press on the Scarlet.

00:00:19.100 It's like the Loudener button. 1.00

00:00:20.520 Everyone's like, you didn't press the button, idiot. 1.00

00:00:22.360 And they were sending memes about it. 1.00

00:00:24.700 Maybe instead of a beverage center, you should have gotten an audio center.

00:00:27.740 Punk.

00:00:28.020 i will be writing off the beverage center i think it's a business now that we've mentioned it

00:00:34.100 every new thing i purchased for my home i'm just going to mention on the podcast and that way i can

00:00:38.780 frame it as a business expense so i've watched numerous youtube videos where i'm like you're

00:00:42.980 only talking about this for the taxes aren't you all right let's go in all right go in i'm stealing

00:00:48.120 this from someone in our discord but let's do it michael peter what do you know about summer of our

00:00:52.560 discontent by thomas chatterton williams all i know is there's a reason people don't call him

00:00:57.620 thomas thinkerton williams summer of our discontent by thomas chatterton williams

00:01:15.200 this just came out a few weeks back we wanted to cover this book for a couple of reasons one is

00:01:19.520 that he's like disproportionately influential to his talent and the other is that like i think that

00:01:25.640 there is like a lingering reactionary narrative about 2020 that he's articulating here that needs

00:01:33.920 to be addressed in some form. It's very similar. It is very similar to the COVID revisionism stuff

00:01:37.980 where people are just trying to make you ignore what you remember, like from relatively recent

00:01:42.400 history. This is the work of a man who, for some reason, has been relatively influential

00:01:50.480 among like a certain set of reactionary centrists and journalists yeah and he has one black parent

00:01:57.200 one white parent and so he is like a person of color who doesn't think we should be talking 0.64

00:02:03.740 about race so much yeah right that's always sort of of interest to the yapping classes but also

00:02:10.120 talking about it makes you sound hella problematic because you're basically calling him like an

00:02:14.320 affirmative action hire in like the worst possible sense of the term but i think that is like part of 0.99

00:02:19.200 his popularity that's a black guy saying this shit that coddles white people one thing we won't 0.98

00:02:22.720 really talk about but does pop up pretty consistently throughout this book is that like 0.99

00:02:26.520 he does not like ta-nehisi coats and views himself as sort of like a counterweight and i sort of

00:02:34.160 wonder whether that's true of the people who publish him too where they were like we need

00:02:38.000 someone to balance this out yeah and so they sort of both emerge at the same time chatterton i'm

00:02:43.440 gonna be calling him chatterton because that's the funniest of his three names let's do it he's

00:02:47.140 written two memoirs to this point in 2010 he published losing my cool how a father's love

00:02:53.580 and 15 000 books beat hip-hop culture hip-hop culture resulted in him like physically attacking

00:02:59.480 his girlfriend at the time when he was like 15 and he sort of like blames hip-hop for that i don't

00:03:05.060 know are we going to talk about his column where he said that like puffy was like the coolest rapper

00:03:08.660 yeah he recently after like the diddy trial wrote a thing that was like i looked up to diddy yeah he

00:03:14.140 was so cool we've lost diddy mo money mo problems is one of my favorite songs of all time but that

00:03:19.540 that puffy verse no i know then in 2019 he published self-portrait in black and white

00:03:26.040 unlearning race uh this one is about how becoming a father impacted his view of race particularly

00:03:31.740 when he had uh what i think is a very white presenting child and the premise is like again

00:03:36.720 built on his belief that race is neither biologically nor socially real right although

00:03:42.580 he believes prejudice exists, he doesn't really believe structural racism exists. And also he

00:03:47.520 thinks that race can be sort of transcended at the personal level. Yeah, I have not read his

00:03:53.000 memoirs, but I have read a million of his columns in The Atlantic over the years. And it always feels

00:03:57.680 like his work is based on this fundamental misunderstanding, not only like how race works,

00:04:02.680 but how adjectives work. He's obsessed with this idea that like by talking about racism or how race

00:04:08.500 might have affected somebody's outcome, you're like putting people into categories. But like,

00:04:13.580 this is just not true. Like you can call somebody left-handed or Canadian or tall or anything else.

00:04:20.440 Yeah. And it doesn't mean that's the only thing about them.

00:04:23.060 Summer of our discontent, it's sort of in that same tradition in that his analysis of the cultural

00:04:28.860 upheaval of 2020, which is what this is about, the summer of our discontent is summer 2020.

00:04:34.000 It gets filtered through this lens where he believes that society should be much less focused on race.

00:04:40.520 And moreover, that the left is embracing illiberalism and alienating regular people, right?

00:04:47.840 The sort of classic reactionary centrist argument.

00:04:50.840 There's only like seven magazines dedicated entirely to this argument.

00:04:54.500 I'm finally getting it in book form.

00:04:55.660 To give you a little more of a sense of him, back in 2020, he interviewed the model Emily Ratajkowski for some French magazine.

00:05:03.260 Do you remember this?

00:05:04.000 Dude, the thing is there's so many, like, little controversies surrounding it.

00:05:07.300 I keep forgetting them all.

00:05:09.880 Well, this one is the funniest.

00:05:11.440 So I chose that.

00:05:13.520 Emily Ratajkowski, for people who don't know, model, actress.

00:05:17.440 And she sort of, like, made herself be known because she, like, supported Bernie.

00:05:22.280 Usually when someone who's really hot starts doing politics, people pay attention.

00:05:26.840 And so Chatterton does an interview and, like, the whole premise is like that.

00:05:30.420 It's like, whoa, she's hot, but also she's kind of smart.

00:05:33.420 Ooh, has thoughts and feelings? 0.80

00:05:34.840 Here's one bit.

00:05:35.540 I will say this is translated from French.

00:05:37.480 Chatterton splits his time between New York and like the French countryside or something.

00:05:44.200 Chateau in Paris, something.

00:05:45.800 And then like prepare to have this man talk down to you about what normal people want to hear.

00:05:51.480 All right, here you go.

00:05:52.640 Okay.

00:05:52.860 He says, oh, Jesus, look at this brick.

00:05:55.120 Peter.

00:05:55.680 Also, it's very funny that he writes like this in French too.

00:05:58.500 Okay.

00:05:58.740 he says in New York or Paris you often come across models huge creatures who whatever their ethnic

00:06:06.160 origin seem to all look much more alike to each other than to anyone else like if they belonged

00:06:10.900 to a divergent subspecies of homo sapiens but Emily Ratajkowski is different the sexiest version 0.99

00:06:16.780 of a creature right on our side of humanity she was admittedly blessed with the most perfect 1.00

00:06:21.540 breasts of her generation but what sets her apart and I've heard it in several cultural contexts

00:06:26.440 from my friends in Brooklyn to the 57-year-old writer I play chess with in Paris and even my

00:06:32.480 81-year-old father who lives in New Jersey, that is indeed her personality. It might sound silly

00:06:37.720 to say it about someone whose life is largely a choreographed performance for some 18 million

00:06:42.400 devotees, but she does feel truly genuine. She doesn't seem to take herself seriously. She's

00:06:47.820 not cold and elaborate like Beyonce or tricked out like Kim Kardashian. Some of these word choices

00:06:53.480 are weird but i'm willing to give him some grace on the translation stuff like yeah yeah tricked

00:06:58.320 out like kim kardashian's a little weird but i'm assuming that's like a translation thing it's very

00:07:01.760 interesting how even in like this french context you can see m dashes how painful his writing is

00:07:09.140 he has these digressions language aside the content of this is so fucking weird and bizarre 0.98

00:07:13.260 it's like she has perfect tits but also she seems like a nice person in his defense he is putting 0.99

00:07:18.860 this in a french publication okay it's a it's a pervert nation that's true you know what i mean 0.99

00:07:23.300 And it's almost unfair that we're reading it at all. 0.85

00:07:26.240 Here's another bit from this interview.

00:07:28.720 He says, we then move on to her youth.

00:07:30.860 I wanted to know when she realized that she was special.

00:07:33.560 When did people start paying special attention to you?

00:07:36.000 I must add here that while articulating a completely intelligent thought,

00:07:39.100 she is wearing an extraordinarily low-cut neckline without a bra while seemingly knowing deep down

00:07:44.940 that her outfit is at once absurd or confusing or even outright in contradiction with her words.

00:07:50.980 One sentence.

00:07:51.440 she smiles and asks what kind of attention wait i said that sexy she smiles and asks what kind of 0.78

00:07:57.440 attention to your appearance i say impressed by her degree of tolerance for cognitive dissonance

00:08:02.580 oh he's like trying to like flirt with her or something just wondering emily are you attracted 0.99

00:08:07.460 to the worst writing in the world oh my god he's like while i'm talking her tits are there like 0.99

00:08:14.660 That's what he's writing. 0.99

00:08:16.520 That's what he's writing. 1.00

00:08:18.800 I'm asking her a question and she's sitting there with boobs. 0.99

00:08:22.960 Imagine me interviewing Henry Cavill or something and just like doing this the whole time. 0.99

00:08:26.820 Like, oh, I'm staring at his clavicles. 0.99

00:08:28.560 Just like talking about his dick outline. 1.00

00:08:30.380 Yeah, his rippling pecs as he spoke. 1.00

00:08:33.260 Like it's so uncomfortable.

00:08:35.660 It's also so funny because this whole thing is basically like his whole ideology is essentially structural discrimination doesn't exist.

00:08:41.600 But this is such an example of how women are treated in the media versus how men are treated in the media.

00:08:45.960 Men are not scrutinized like this.

00:08:48.020 Emily went on to Twitter to be like, yeah, by the way, this was a really uncomfortable experience.

00:08:52.300 And like I told my husband about it afterwards because it was so weird.

00:08:55.820 He's like, when did you start getting exactly the kind of attention that I'm giving you right now?

00:09:01.060 Like when did men start leering at you?

00:09:03.320 Like look at your low cut neckline. 0.55

00:09:05.020 This is like median French publication.

00:09:07.260 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:09:07.760 All right, so this book, Summer of Our Discontent, comes out to scathing reviews, brutal reviews 1.00

00:09:14.260 from The Times, Washington Post, Vulture, everyone's sick of this shit. 1.00

00:09:18.640 Yeah. 0.99

00:09:19.180 And so before we dive in, there is one element that we need to discuss in advance, and we've

00:09:24.400 touched on it already. 0.99

00:09:25.640 This is the worst written piece of shit I've ever read in my life. 0.99

00:09:28.600 You texted me numerous times, like, I can't do this. 1.00

00:09:31.460 He is a cumbersome writer.

00:09:34.240 His sentences are, like, long and winding.

00:09:37.860 They are packed with unnecessary adjectives and metaphors.

00:09:41.900 He uses em dashes to a crazy degree.

00:09:45.100 The most scathing thing in the New York Times review was, like, a third of the review was just a huge block quote from the book.

00:09:51.140 I'm going to have you read that, actually. 0.94

00:09:52.960 And then it just says, huh, afterwards, which I feel like is so fucking cold.

00:09:58.060 But also, like, no one looking at that excerpt would be like, ah, yes, this is a clear explication of an idea.

00:10:04.600 OK, so I am going to send you the passage that was quoted in full in The New York Times.

00:10:09.780 I do think, like, I do think it might be the worst in the book, although there's competition.

00:10:14.320 If you don't mind, I'd ask that you announce the punctuation as you read.

00:10:18.160 Here we go.

00:10:19.120 This is bad podcasting.

00:10:20.700 We talked about this before we recorded it.

00:10:22.100 Well, it was a genuine concern for me how to do this episode because a big part of our format is that one person will send an excerpt and the other person will react and there will be discussion.

00:10:33.520 But his writing is so bad and clunky that it creates a massive distraction every time.

00:10:41.320 So you can't actually respond to the substance because the writing is so cumbersome.

00:10:46.380 It's so tedious.

00:10:47.760 First, you can't figure out what he's trying to say exactly.

00:10:51.420 And then second, what you want to talk about is how bad the writing is.

00:10:54.860 It's distracting.

00:10:55.960 All right, here we go.

00:10:56.680 All right, deep breath. 1.00

00:10:58.760 Even though the mixed race population has become the fastest growing segment of the

00:11:02.680 American demos and in real terms, a disproportionate but statistically small and decreasing number

00:11:08.300 of unarmed black civilians were killed by police annually, parentheses, typically between

00:11:12.600 15 and 25 per year from a population exceeding 40 million, according to the Washington Post's

00:11:17.100 fatal force database, end parentheses, begin MDASH, and indeed, other quality of life markers have

00:11:23.360 been equalizing for significant numbers of black people since the civil rights movement,

00:11:26.980 end MDASH. The death of Trayvon Martin, followed by Michael Brown, parentheses, regardless of the

00:11:32.280 specific contingencies of that case, end parentheses, and a high-profile slate of

00:11:37.300 videotaped police and vigilante killings that converge with the proliferation of camera-equipped

00:11:41.940 smartphones and the pervasiveness of social media thwarted any self-congratulatory sense

00:11:47.040 of inevitability of social progress still alive in the first half of Obama's second

00:11:51.420 administration.

00:11:52.200 That was one sentence.

00:11:53.220 Generally speaking, try to avoid being too critical of people's writing because like

00:11:56.840 a lot of people do it a lot better than me.

00:11:59.000 Don't lie, Peter.

00:11:59.740 But that is a parenthetical straight into an em dash. 0.78

00:12:04.000 Also, the first two thirds of this, all he's saying is that the number of like non-white

00:12:09.040 people in the population is growing and police killings of minorities are relatively rare.

00:12:13.600 Right.

00:12:13.780 That's all he's saying.

00:12:14.820 I started just collecting the worst bits of his writing that I could find.

00:12:19.160 And then I had to stop because it just it was becoming a distraction for me as I was

00:12:22.380 doing the episode.

00:12:23.100 And I was like, it was like every other page I was I was just like copying and pasting

00:12:27.220 into a separate document.

00:12:28.080 That document reached like 12 pages before I was like, well, I have to stop this. 0.98

00:12:31.920 We have to do like an extra as like a bonus episode where we just read all this shit. 0.73

00:12:35.180 If there's time at the end, I'm just going to rattle off five of them. 0.88

00:12:38.140 It's like blooper outtakes at the end of like a romantic comedy.

00:12:40.940 It's like we just have like, all right, another one.

00:12:42.720 i will send you some of his clunky metaphors uh they're a little bit shorter but they are funny

00:12:47.640 uh here's one the digital highway we must all traverse has only made the road to peril

00:12:53.160 exponentially more accessible with uncountable on ramps into which we do not always realize we

00:13:00.200 are merging up with which i will put uncountable on ramps into which we do not always realize we

00:13:09.760 are emerging here is how he describes the moments after we all learned about george floyd's murder

00:13:15.180 as america began to wake up and i left my desk and returned to it and the saddening speck wait

00:13:20.380 as america began to wake up i'm leaving all this in as america began to wake up and i left my desk

00:13:25.560 and returned to it and the saddening spectacle in minneapolis as the nation's grief and fury

00:13:30.480 began to concentrate around a midwestern golgotha the christ-like dimensions of that horizontal

00:13:36.700 crucifixion started to take root in the subconscious oh my god dude it's it is unreal

00:13:45.040 so i want to die peter you got tripped up by the first problem with this which is that he says

00:13:49.540 as america began to wake up and i left my desk and returned to it what is it is it a desk or

00:13:55.200 is it america i still don't know and what is he saying here so he's talking about floyd himself

00:13:59.560 midwestern golgotha the christ-like dimensions of that horizontal crucifixion oh because he was

00:14:06.120 lying down because george floyd was lying down golgotha is like the hill that christ was

00:14:10.940 crucified on and then he says the christ-like dimensions of that horizontal crucifixion

00:14:16.340 how many times are you gonna say that's sort of like jesus also golgotha that's not the hill

00:14:21.620 that's a cheese they put on pizza so this is the this is the opening sentence of the prologue so

00:14:27.580 like the beginning of the book all right keep that in mind there's no doubt that the initial

00:14:31.500 animating spirit of black lives matter me too and the thousands of social justice protests

00:14:35.960 since 2020, forced a necessary national reconsideration of long overdue demands for

00:14:41.640 police reform in particular, as well as broader calls for greater equality and inclusion,

00:14:47.060 and perhaps above all, the wholehearted extension of dignity and recognition,

00:14:51.680 which sit higher atop Maslow's pyramid of needs than strict physical safety.

00:14:56.900 Dude.

00:14:57.300 Peter.

00:14:58.140 Why are you referencing Maslow's hierarchy of needs in your opening sentence?

00:15:01.920 Oh my God.

00:15:02.440 What are you doing?

00:15:03.120 He also says like a necessary national reconsideration of demands for police reform.

00:15:08.060 So here he is again admitting that American police are completely out of control and that

00:15:13.460 like the activist demands were roughly reasonable.

00:15:15.700 This is a very interesting thing that Chatterton does almost a little more acutely than a lot

00:15:20.580 of other reactionary centrists where he will be like, yes, this is a problem.

00:15:25.320 You have correctly identified a problem and then move on to why the left's reaction to

00:15:31.740 that problem is, like, inappropriate, right?

00:15:33.720 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:15:34.160 He does not dispute that George Floyd's killing was a straightforward murder, you know?

00:15:39.220 There's no, like, there's no second-guessing at all.

00:15:41.400 He doesn't even talk about it as if there's a question about it, but he will very quickly

00:15:45.700 move on to, here's the problem with the left's reaction, and he does that over and over again.

00:15:51.420 Yeah.

00:15:51.700 I will be toning it down on the passages I share for a little bit just to give you a

00:15:55.200 break, and I'm going to try to summarize what I think he's saying.

00:15:57.720 Thank you.

00:15:58.400 Jesus Christ.

00:15:59.200 So he starts off this book talking about the political climate leading into 2020, and then he talks about how some of the elements of COVID were racialized because they were disproportionately impacting black communities.

00:16:13.700 And then he says that after George Floyd, this gave way to a, quote, full-blown moral panic about race that, quote, touched on every facet of our collective mediated existence and spawned a vicious counterreaction from the authoritarian right that further erodes our liberal democracy.

00:16:30.920 But you can't call police violence a moral panic if you're also saying that it is real.

00:16:34.780 That's not what a moral panic is.

00:16:36.280 He thinks that the racialization of these things is overblown.

00:16:41.260 Like he says that the most distinctive element of George Floyd's life was not his race, but

00:16:46.700 his poverty and addiction issues.

00:16:49.240 But this is such a narrow point.

00:16:50.780 I agree. 0.85

00:16:51.120 It's like, oh, police didn't kill him because he's black. 0.97

00:16:52.820 They killed him because he's poor.

00:16:53.840 But like, what is your actual evidence for that?

00:16:55.980 We don't see that in the statistics.

00:16:57.160 He says that the point of the book is, quote, a broader analysis of the evolving manners,

00:17:02.780 more as taboos and consequences of the recent American social justice orthodoxy, anti-racism

00:17:08.480 or wokeness more broadly that came in from the discursive margins and went global.

00:17:14.180 I forgot the beginning of the sentence by the time you finish it.

00:17:16.280 Also, it's mores, Peter.

00:17:18.060 Oh, yes.

00:17:19.240 I always read mores.

00:17:20.620 I always read mores.

00:17:21.780 He starts off talking about the Obama era.

00:17:24.500 And the initial framing of this book is that like there was this moment where we were potentially

00:17:29.740 going to get post-racial for a minute, but everything unwound, right?

00:17:34.840 Everything fell apart.

00:17:35.660 His thesis throughout the book is very wandering when it comes to race, but I think the most

00:17:40.880 coherent version of it is that things have objectively significantly improved for black

00:17:46.020 people across a bunch of metrics, and yet at the same time, we've seen increased pessimism about

00:17:52.980 race. Poverty rates for black and Hispanic Americans are at historic lows. Median income

00:17:58.240 has risen dramatically for both groups since 2008. High school dropout rates have declined

00:18:03.260 significantly to the point where we are nearing racial parity. And all that is true. The only 1.00

00:18:08.360 caveat I'd provide is that median income for whites has increased during the same period. So

00:18:12.680 there's a substantial gap still. And on top of that, to use a quote that I had you read earlier,

00:18:19.220 a disproportionate but statistically small and decreasing number of unarmed black civilians

00:18:24.160 were killed by police annually, typically between 15 and 25 per year, maybe slightly cherry picked

00:18:30.460 because the raw numbers of people killed by police have gone up pretty substantially over the course

00:18:36.760 of the last decade. But true. The basic premise of the opening sections of this book seem to be

00:18:43.160 that the amount of political energy being put into racial equity stuff is either irrational

00:18:48.980 or disproportionate to the need. He tries to trace the origins of this race pessimism,

00:18:55.000 as he calls it. And he sort of blames it on Barack Obama, as well as a handful of activists

00:19:02.180 and public intellectuals, namely Coates. But so Obama went out of his way to discount the role

00:19:07.660 of race. Oh, did he? We're going to talk. He focuses on a couple of Obama era incidents,

00:19:12.640 the first being Henry Louis Gates, the black professor who was arrested after breaking into

00:19:19.320 his own home. Right. I'm going to read Obama's statement to you, the substantive part of his 0.83

00:19:23.620 statement. Keep in mind, this sparked a massive controversy. Okay. He said, I don't know, not

00:19:28.500 having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's

00:19:32.740 fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry. Number two, that the Cambridge police acted

00:19:37.740 stupidly in arresting someone when there was already proof that they were in their own home. 0.63

00:19:42.140 And number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a 0.99

00:19:46.260 long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement

00:19:50.280 disproportionately. These are all basic claims. And also he had this like beer summit thing

00:19:54.600 where he sat down with the cop and Gates to be like, oh, let's all kind of come together like

00:19:59.560 a kumbaya moment. He wasn't like, oh, tear down the pillars of policing in America. It's like

00:20:03.980 what the story actually demonstrates is how fucking fragile and sensitive the right is 0.99

00:20:08.920 about this stuff. Right. Where they will read like racial radicalism into the most 0.98

00:20:13.740 non-divisive, reasonable shit that a black person says. Everybody lost their minds about this. 1.00

00:20:18.780 Here is Chatterton's analysis.

00:20:22.400 Many whites, conservatives in many instances, but not exclusively or even mainly so.

00:20:27.200 We did not need that. 0.78

00:20:28.340 We're appalled.

00:20:29.440 How could the president adopt a stance on a case whose details were largely unknown to him?

00:20:33.940 Why indeed was he even commenting on a case that involved local law enforcement?

00:20:38.960 It was in no way a federal matter, and therefore the president rightly should have made no comment. 0.58

00:20:43.820 To these white Americans, Obama's response seemed as crazy as if Bill Clinton had commented

00:20:48.900 on O.J. Simpson's arrest in 1995 for the murder of his wife. 0.68

00:20:52.960 But surely Obama was asked about this.

00:20:55.080 He didn't just like randomly issue a press release.

00:20:57.280 This was like a major story that people were really fixated on and he would have been asked

00:21:01.960 about it at a press conference and he needed to say something.

00:21:03.760 I mean, look, Obama's statement was full of qualifications and was extremely inoffensive

00:21:08.260 in general. 0.99

00:21:08.700 I also want to flag a couple things from this paragraph because this is sort of our introduction to something that consistently happens where Chatterton will say some shit that is just sort of not true or not supported or he hasn't supported it enough and sort of indicates that maybe he's talking out of his ass a lot. 0.96

00:21:25.360 He says, many whites, conservatives in many instances, but not exclusively or even mainly so, were appalled. 0.96

00:21:32.180 What?

00:21:32.400 So, I'm sorry, do you know that the people who were appalled by this were predominantly, what, moderate or liberal?

00:21:38.280 Right. Where's that from? Yeah. I'm also annoyed by the Bill Clinton would have never commented on OJ's arrest thing because that's such a cherry picked fucking example. There were two big instances of racialized police misconduct during or near Bill Clinton's presidency. Right. Right. Because Rodney King was happening to Rodney King and Diallo, Amadou Diallo. Right. Both of which Clinton did comment on. Yeah. Clinton said that Diallo might not have been killed if he was white. Straight up.

00:22:06.720 He also said that the officers in the King case used excessive force.

00:22:10.720 And when the verdict came down, saying that some of the officers were not guilty, he said

00:22:15.120 he disagreed with it.

00:22:16.060 The president at the time for Rodney King was George Bush Sr.

00:22:19.700 And he said that the beating was sickening and outrageous.

00:22:23.380 So what is this premised on?

00:22:25.120 Like the idea that presidents don't comment on such things, but they do.

00:22:29.580 And this is such a Chatterton thing.

00:22:31.680 He is always talking in these abstractions.

00:22:33.840 and then he dips into material reality for a second and it's just very clear that he's not

00:22:39.060 very well informed also is it even true that bill clinton didn't talk about the oj simpson trial

00:22:42.760 that went on for like a year surely he was asked about it and said some things i don't think that

00:22:46.260 he had like some substantive comment on his arrest oh like i he's distinguishing between like the

00:22:50.680 arrest and the verdict i didn't find any instances of him talking about the arrest so like he did

00:22:55.020 comment on he just didn't comment on the arrest i don't think it's a good comparator but when you

00:22:59.080 find those better comparators, Rodney King, Diallo. I mean, again, saying Diallo wouldn't

00:23:04.660 have been shot if he was white. That's 10 times as like incendiary as what Obama said.

00:23:11.960 Right. But it's coming from a white person. So conservatives don't freak out in the same kind 0.81

00:23:14.880 of way. They don't clock it. Also, isn't he constantly saying that Democratic politicians

00:23:19.200 should like denounce these kind of little nothing burgers? Like Kamala Harris should issue a 0.68

00:23:23.540 statement on like the Cracker Barrel logo. Yeah. Like the Dr. Seuss people no longer 1.00

00:23:28.260 publishing a racist book he like wants them to weigh in on this stuff constantly green eggs and

00:23:32.980 ham i thought eggs were white all right and now we get to uh trayvon martin controversy number two

00:23:39.700 for obama my god trayvon martin was a 17 year old black kid who was walking home and was basically 0.93

00:23:49.100 identified and stalked by george zimmerman who was doing neighborhood watch shit just a random guy

00:23:55.140 not like a police officer or anything just a random guy walking around Zimmerman follows him

00:23:59.100 around for a bit the facts as they were sort of understood by the jury in that case were that

00:24:05.660 Zimmerman was following Martin Martin got scared jumped Zimmerman started beating him up because

00:24:11.160 he thought that this guy was stalking him Zimmerman pulled his gun and shot yeah ends up being

00:24:15.460 categorized as self-defense we'll talk a little bit about Rittenhouse later but very similar in

00:24:20.380 a sense that like the immediate circumstances of pulling the gun and shooting it are like

00:24:27.460 self-defense-y in the classic sense.

00:24:29.720 Yeah.

00:24:29.920 But everything leading up to it is the fault of the shooter, right?

00:24:34.620 Right, right, right.

00:24:35.260 The stakes were escalated to that point by the shooter.

00:24:38.920 And also the role of race is sort of inchoate and difficult to define.

00:24:42.120 Like it's fairly likely that like he wouldn't have followed a white kid around, but also

00:24:46.340 you can't really prove that in any real sense.

00:24:48.560 So conservatives can always be like, well, you don't know that it was racially motivated.

00:24:52.400 But like this happens to black people far more than it happens to white people on a

00:24:55.340 population level. 0.98

00:24:56.220 I'm going to send you some chatterton.

00:24:58.600 He says, what was striking, however, even then was the flatness of the emerging narrative

00:25:02.940 and the presentism and hyperbole of its historical connections.

00:25:06.780 For example, the hashtag Emmett Till was also appended in conjunction with tweets about

00:25:11.360 Trayvon Martin, thus raising the stakes of the Martin tragedy from the specific to the

00:25:15.500 eternal, placing it on the level of one of the most gruesome and reprehensible lynchings in

00:25:20.020 American history. Activists were keen to, quote, argue that the fate that befell Martin,

00:25:25.060 Till, and those in between reflects the glaring continuation of anti-black violence and white

00:25:30.260 supremacy. This is a theme that he hits on repeatedly throughout the book. He thinks that

00:25:34.380 treating these incidents as part of a single historical pattern flattens the issue and strips

00:25:40.720 them of their individual nuances.

00:25:43.560 The retort to this is relatively obvious, right?

00:25:46.260 If you are putting things into their historical context, that adds nuance.

00:25:50.820 It doesn't subtract nuance, right?

00:25:52.880 Imagining that every incident is isolated from historical context doesn't give you a

00:25:57.500 better understanding of it.

00:25:58.700 And using that analysis, someone could have said at the time that we shouldn't view Emmett

00:26:03.340 Till's murder in the context of white supremacy.

00:26:06.220 Yeah, which many people did, yeah.

00:26:07.240 You know, he seems to think that at some like indeterminate point between Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin, race and racism lost its descriptive value and it became counterproductive to talk about it.

00:26:19.860 He also has this weird obsession with like Twitter, like a Twitter hashtag was going around.

00:26:24.200 OK, so random people were making a comparison that I guess you disagree with.

00:26:27.660 Twitter appears 26 times in this book.

00:26:31.020 Tweeted appears 20 times.

00:26:32.920 Tweet eight times.

00:26:34.680 Instagram seven times.

00:26:35.920 A huge amount of this book is presenting social media discourse as if it is like the discourse, right?

00:26:45.440 As if like this is what everyone's talking about.

00:26:47.440 And also if you were doing like a one-to-one comparison, it's like, okay, there was some hyperbole on the left.

00:26:51.580 If you believe that that's hyperbole, fine.

00:26:53.240 Was there hyperbole about that case on the right?

00:26:55.340 How prevalent was the hyperbole? 0.97

00:26:56.540 Were they saying, oh, Trayvon Martin was a thug who deserved to die? 1.00

00:26:58.980 People were also fucking saying that. 0.98

00:27:00.220 I'm leaving a little bit of this out, but he often will talk about the right's reaction. 0.99

00:27:04.100 And he talks about the racist reaction from the right to Trayvon Martin.

00:27:06.960 So again, he's admitting like the basic reality of like, oh, yeah, a lot of people on the

00:27:09.660 right are like straightforwardly racist.

00:27:11.500 But I've dedicated my book to the problems on the left.

00:27:14.060 Right.

00:27:14.360 I'm so worked up, Peter. 1.00

00:27:15.400 I don't know how you got through this whole fucking book. 0.99

00:27:16.900 So there's a statement that Barack Obama made in reaction to Trayvon's murder. 0.99

00:27:21.700 Obama called for a thorough investigation.

00:27:24.020 And then he also said that, quote, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.

00:27:28.420 This caused a crazy flare-up of racist anti-Obama sentiment on the right.

00:27:34.480 It never really died down on some level.

00:27:36.280 Right.

00:27:36.700 Yeah.

00:27:37.060 And here is Shatterton.

00:27:40.320 With the benefit of hindsight, I'm convinced a genuine opportunity was squandered.

00:27:44.180 We make our nation collectively daily.

00:27:46.180 We change our values, norms, customs, and linguistic habits and significations together.

00:27:51.100 It is not the racists alone who get to determine our state of transcendence.

00:27:55.140 It certainly should not have been a deal-breaker.

00:27:57.320 And too many Americans were too eager to receive Obama's comments with zero generosity.

00:28:01.620 But it was a mistake for the president to personalize the killing and hypothesize about

00:28:06.300 what his son might look like. 1.00

00:28:08.000 This is his whole fucking thing. 1.00

00:28:10.460 Right. 1.00

00:28:10.720 It's like, oh, well, yeah, they were being racist and completely deranged.

00:28:13.220 But Obama could have chosen a slightly different wording and that would have made a meaningful

00:28:18.600 difference.

00:28:19.400 He's saying that Obama squandered an opportunity to like repair race relations just by saying

00:28:26.480 this and like if american race relations were hinging on obama not saying that his son might 0.98

00:28:32.520 have looked like trayvon martin like safe to say we were fucked right yeah yeah all of these 0.97

00:28:36.920 reactionary centrists seem to believe that like it's the left's job to do like emotional babysitting 0.96

00:28:43.260 for the right yeah anytime the right gets angry it's because we weren't babysitting yeah attentively

00:28:48.860 enough right oh shouldn't have said that you made the little baby upset and now race relations are

00:28:53.520 ruined right that can't be how politics is done he's also making the same mistake that he accuses

00:28:58.380 the far left of doing where he's he's using like vocabulary as such a powerful signifier yeah it's

00:29:04.660 like oh well they had to be racist because his word choice was slightly off i think his word

00:29:08.620 choice was fine but also like politicians are gonna say things that are not perfect when they're

00:29:12.740 speaking off the cuff you can't just blame somebody for like oh you you slightly misspoke

00:29:17.600 and now you ruined race relations in america how do you feel this just isn't how language works

00:29:22.780 Like they would have found some excuse.

00:29:24.520 It's really obvious. 0.97

00:29:25.860 Obama's comments weren't even fucking bad. 0.94

00:29:27.620 He's having an emotional reaction to this. 0.91

00:29:29.540 And he's calling for an investigation.

00:29:31.080 Like he always gives the caveats that they claim that they're interested in.

00:29:35.440 Chatterton does not provide any polling data or anything.

00:29:38.160 This is all vibes.

00:29:39.280 Like if you look at Obama's polling data, there's no noticeable change in his approval

00:29:42.900 or disapproval ratings at this time.

00:29:45.180 As much as he wants to view himself as like a guy who tells hard truths to the left.

00:29:50.960 This book is very detached from reality.

00:29:52.780 His conclusions are almost never grounded in actual facts.

00:29:56.140 Right.

00:29:56.360 If this was some really singular moment that disabled the hope for like good race relations in this country, better race relations, surely you'd be able to identify some data that you could cite in your book that you were working on for three years.

00:30:08.620 By the way, he announced this book in like 2021.

00:30:11.080 So like he literally was writing this for three years.

00:30:14.740 Never Google.

00:30:15.580 Never Google approval rating Obama.

00:30:17.200 also i think what happened with these scenarios is that at the time people sort of looked at

00:30:24.380 obama's comments and were like yeah that's fairly reasonable whatever but then after a while your

00:30:28.420 your direct memory fades and then like fox news gets its hooks into you yeah and they start saying

00:30:33.700 like don't you remember obama's radical comments about trayvon martin and in your brain kind of

00:30:38.020 edits it this is what happened january 6th right everyone was so like freaked out about it at the

00:30:42.620 time but then a couple months go by and it's like oh it was basically just like a picnic yeah i i

00:30:47.000 can see these things not being a huge deal at the time because on the merits they're kind of normal

00:30:50.620 but then after you get all this right-wing propaganda about how obama was such like race

00:30:54.620 separatist you kind of forget what really happened and and chatterton is repeating the exact same

00:30:59.900 error it lets the emotional right-wing babies dictate the terms of the historical record like

00:31:06.080 oh this is when he lost us is it right you know to keep the babysitting analogy alive this is

00:31:11.480 a little kid throwing a tantrum in a supermarket asking for chocolate and chatterton's like well

00:31:16.540 why didn't you give it to him yeah completely yeah yeah yeah all right here is his concluding

00:31:21.060 thought in this chapter and i'll warn you this is gonna be one sentence this is not substantive i

00:31:26.220 just think that this is a one of the most ungodly sentences i've ever read he says nearly a decade

00:31:33.760 after obama's vacating office and coates's having largely abandoned the discursive arena after

00:31:39.680 having thrust open the doors for a new less tortured less equivocal less modest less literarily

00:31:46.520 inclined, less powerful class of racial gurus.

00:31:49.700 No, it's actually a more powerful class of racial gurus. 0.99

00:31:51.760 Oh, you made me fucking start over. 0.99

00:31:54.240 From the top. 0.98

00:31:56.260 I'm going so slow because I know I'm going to have to repeat these things.

00:31:59.400 After having thrust open the doors for a new, less tortured, less equivocal, less modest, 0.87

00:32:05.560 less literarily inclined, more powerful class of racial gurus, experts, thought leaders, 0.76

00:32:11.040 indulgent sellers and doomsayers identity has become the single most potent prism through which

00:32:17.540 all matters of discussion and dispute certainly political and cultural but even scientific are 0.98

00:32:22.320 now unceasingly filtered for fuck's sake god is he paid by the noun this is a crazy sentence like 0.88

00:32:31.040 what are you doing you've got the doors of a discursive arena being thrust open but then also 0.96

00:32:35.920 a prism in the same sentence it's wild i feel like i'm learning the rules of a board game

00:32:41.480 chapter two titled trump and the state of exception it's about trump's first term

00:32:49.020 but it's focused of course on how uh social justice narratives made people on the left

00:32:54.440 act irrationally on he starts off talking about election day 2016 he goes to see an art exhibit

00:33:00.620 And then he leaves himself a voice note about the art exhibit that he publishes in full in the book.

00:33:09.280 Really?

00:33:09.680 Yeah.

00:33:10.020 In that voice note, he misattributes the origin of the term all black everything to 2011's Jay-Z Kanye collaboration, Watch the Throne, when actually it was 2009's The Blueprint 3.

00:33:24.860 First appeared in Run This Town.

00:33:26.540 You just got fact-checked by the king.

00:33:28.380 Was that off the dome, Peter?

00:33:30.120 What, you think that the New York Times caught that?

00:33:31.820 No, I did.

00:33:33.500 40-year-old white man fact-checking a black guy about rap.

00:33:36.660 Maybe race isn't real. 0.93

00:33:38.180 Maybe he's right.

00:33:39.820 He starts off talking about Trump derangement syndrome.

00:33:43.940 I imagine you can define Trump derangement syndrome for us.

00:33:47.140 Yeah, it's like you hate Trump so much that it makes you lose all of your critical faculties.

00:33:50.800 And no matter what, even when Trump does something good, like sort of ending the state and local tax deduction, you're like, man, I hate this because that's Trump.

00:33:57.920 Right.

00:33:58.000 What is it called? Negative polarization?

00:34:00.260 He has two primary examples. One is the Covington Catholic kids in Washington, D.C., if you remember that.

00:34:05.200 Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:34:05.520 And the other is Jussie Smollett.

00:34:07.760 Oh, yeah. Really? What? Okay.

00:34:09.700 So Covington Catholic, if you don't remember, a bunch of Catholic kids, high schoolers in like MAGA hats were filmed in a situation where it seemed like they were mocking a Native American guy.

00:34:20.960 The initial video clip made it seem like these kids are just being racist.

00:34:24.200 The narrative got a lot more complex as more footage was released.

00:34:27.220 It turned out that they were sort of being antagonized by black Hebrew Israelites and

00:34:31.960 the initial video clips, whatever you thought of them, lacked some context.

00:34:36.060 And the protagonists were like 16 years old, which always makes me like a little uncomfortable

00:34:39.500 going after like literal minors. 0.88

00:34:41.200 Yeah, for sure.

00:34:41.580 And so, yeah, I actually think that is like an example of like the left getting over its

00:34:45.280 skis on Twitter.

00:34:46.040 I think that was like an embarrassing episode.

00:34:48.260 His whole complaint in both these cases is about like the initial reaction was too strong.

00:34:53.620 Right. 1.00

00:34:54.080 And I think it's correct.

00:34:55.240 The initial reactions to this were too dramatic.

00:34:57.220 We should be better about reacting to contextless video clips, right?

00:35:01.560 Yeah.

00:35:01.680 I also think that this is basically something that applies across the spectrum, that there's

00:35:05.260 no real political valence to this.

00:35:06.820 Right.

00:35:07.000 This happens on the right all the time. 0.99

00:35:08.900 All the fucking time. 0.99

00:35:09.700 It's an artifact of social media. 0.99

00:35:11.180 Clips of TikTok is like an entire account dedicated to taking things out of context

00:35:14.740 and melting down about it.

00:35:15.980 He says that these like overwrought left-wing social media reactions empower the right.

00:35:21.700 No.

00:35:21.780 But, like, I don't understand why right-wing social media doesn't get the same analysis, right?

00:35:27.160 So, like, yeah, libs of TikTok, extremely popular right-wing account.

00:35:31.360 The entire purpose is to strip away context, right?

00:35:34.100 They lead to insane things like bomb threats to children's hospitals.

00:35:37.380 But no one ever says they empower the left.

00:35:40.100 Right, right.

00:35:40.860 Why aren't they responsible for our radicalization, but we are responsible for theirs?

00:35:45.300 I've always said with this whole cancel culture panic thing that it's silly to deny that people do not, like, get into these Twitter mobs.

00:35:51.780 Like this has always been a real phenomenon.

00:35:53.760 However, you need to look at it in context.

00:35:55.880 This is something that is less severe, less prevalent on the left, and there is a corrective

00:36:00.740 mechanism.

00:36:01.720 Because the way that I learned the more context thing about the Covington Catholic thing was

00:36:04.720 from, I forget what, but it was like a liberal podcast that I listened to that was like,

00:36:08.680 hey, we should probably talk about this when we got over our skis on this one.

00:36:12.040 There are liberal podcasts that do this and will actually question groupthink on the left.

00:36:15.040 There's nothing like that on the right.

00:36:16.440 It's all just radicalization all the time.

00:36:18.580 He basically makes the same point about the Jussie Smollett situation.

00:36:21.560 Jussie Smollett, of course, the former Empire actor who appears to have faked a hate crime

00:36:29.460 that was like very dramatic.

00:36:31.260 Like, yeah, he said that he like was attacked by two guys wearing MAGA hats who like called

00:36:36.940 him the N word and F slur and put a noose around his neck and dumped bleach on him.

00:36:41.820 And it was just like a crazy story.

00:36:43.620 Yeah.

00:36:43.820 So Chatterton points out that like all of these various politicians and celebrities put out

00:36:47.580 these statements and then of course it's revealed that they were this is they were all duped it was

00:36:51.340 a hoax yeah i do think again that this sort of like involves a lot of people jumping the gun

00:36:55.440 a little bit i'm mostly concerned about journalists right yeah there was some criticism that some

00:37:00.340 early coverage of this dropped the term alleged and okay that's that's terrible journalism right

00:37:06.260 yeah but this is i think in my mind a slightly weird example because like yeah he lied and a

00:37:10.300 lot of people believed it i don't think that's that weird right he's like there was no counter

00:37:15.420 narrative but it's like okay were you about to publish a story that's like i don't know about

00:37:19.620 this yeah exactly black people lie about being attacked for their race like is that what you

00:37:23.340 wanted in in a context of incomplete information right you basically have two choices you can like 0.94

00:37:28.800 as a default believe the victim or as a default not believe the victim and so i think in general

00:37:35.180 for me personally when i see somebody making a claim of like rape or a hate crime or something

00:37:38.900 in general i believe the person unless they're like totally not credible right if his point is

00:37:42.720 like wait then sure but like he's like there was no counter narrative it's like okay what what

00:37:48.560 would that look like exactly because the actual argument would be like institutions are too quick

00:37:53.900 to believe these people like maybe locking up somebody who was accused of this crime with no

00:37:57.440 actual evidence they did that that would be a real problem right but if what you're really talking

00:38:00.900 about like is people on social media being like wow this is like really horrific i don't know that

00:38:05.500 that's like that big of an issue it's like he can't actually point to any bad outcome here other

00:38:10.140 than there was like 72 hours of people siding with this person if what he's saying is like people

00:38:15.780 just jump too hard on this stuff without context then i do agree i just don't think that again this

00:38:20.840 is just not something that has a real political tilt to it right he says none of the celebrities

00:38:27.480 and politicians who had voluntarily hyped the well-connected performers stunt which the new

00:38:31.960 york post accurately described as a social justice inflected 21st century version of a 1980s abducted

00:38:38.300 by alien story issued public apologies or corrections i honestly don't remember seeing

00:38:43.760 all that many to be honest i do remember the story like getting debunked i don't know that i

00:38:47.440 saw apologies exactly because like a lot of them probably just viewed themselves as being duped

00:38:53.480 right like sorry i got had i but like corrections yeah like yeah kamala harris said she was

00:38:59.880 disappointed in smollett and that fake allegations make things harder for real victims the biden

00:39:06.000 White House said it was shameful after the verdict came down against Smollett.

00:39:09.960 What Smollett did, SAG-AFTRA put out a statement saying it could lead to people disbelieving

00:39:14.660 hate crime reports.

00:39:16.340 The ladies on The View criticized him publicly, like he was mocked on like The Daily Show.

00:39:21.380 And also he's been completely abandoned as like a cause celeb by like social justice

00:39:25.600 people.

00:39:26.060 Nobody says like, oh, he was like wrongfully accused of faking it. 1.00

00:39:29.000 Like everyone's like, oh, fuck this guy. 0.99

00:39:30.500 Outside of a few total, like total nutjob radicals, no one supports him anymore. 0.99

00:39:34.880 and his career is over so like what else yeah what do you need here because you're like ultimately

00:39:39.480 what is what chatterton's argument boils down to it's like i would like people to wait slightly

00:39:44.620 longer on social media before amplifying bias claims yeah okay is that really a problem in

00:39:50.960 the nation that we need a whole book to address it's sort of like his actual argument here is so

00:39:55.840 it's such a narrow point yeah and if the broad criticism in this chapter is that people latch

00:40:01.900 onto anecdotes that confirm their priors. I agree. But also that is what Chatterton is doing right

00:40:08.740 now. He's just he's just locating anecdotes that confirm his belief about liberal ideology and

00:40:13.820 putting them forward as the seminal examples of how social justice works. Right. Because there

00:40:18.560 are also hate crimes that did, in fact, happen. Right. And by the way, as we move on to the next

00:40:22.800 chapter, I want to be clear that what we just discussed was his entire chapter on Trump's first

00:40:27.760 term. Wait, really? We have now passed Trump's first term. What do you remember about 2016 to

00:40:34.400 2020? Eh, Jussie Smollett. He's like, let me fucking tell you, Jussie Smollett. All right.

00:40:38.860 Chapter three, the plague. And it's about COVID. It's about COVID. Good. The initial theme of this

00:40:44.020 chapter is that he sort of like enjoyed the early stages of lockdown. There was like a sense of

00:40:49.220 solidarity. He was in the fucking French countryside. So like, I bet you did. And then 1.00

00:40:54.340 images of American right-wingers acting like babies, sort of like break the spell and things

00:40:59.900 start to spiral. But then he very quickly starts to focus on the hypocrisy of Black Lives Matter 0.93

00:41:06.460 protests happening during lockdowns. Because you were against the anti-mask,

00:41:11.080 anti-vax protests, but you were for the anti-racism protests. You change your mind.

00:41:16.040 I remember this. He says, in the space of two weeks and without really thinking it through,

00:41:20.580 we went from shaming people for being in the street to shaming them for not being in the

00:41:24.940 street. This is another one of those arguments where he's operating from vibes when he could

00:41:29.260 be arguing from data. Like, this is a very common right wing talking point. Like, why was it okay

00:41:34.660 to attend these crowded protests when we're otherwise locked down? But whether or not

00:41:39.460 protests worsened to the spread of COVID is a measurable fact. There is research. So first,

00:41:46.620 there was no spike in overall COVID cases around the time of the protests.

00:41:50.200 There was a paper that was first published as a working paper in 2020 that found no impact from

00:41:54.740 protests, which is likely because one, protests were outside and participants were like actively

00:42:00.300 mitigating. And then two, protests actually decreased riskier activities like bar and

00:42:06.620 restaurant attendance. So even if protests themselves were riskier than staying home,

00:42:11.580 which they almost certainly were, they reduced even riskier behavior.

00:42:16.440 I also think like it's totally fine to accept that people were willing to expose themselves

00:42:19.900 to some risk and maybe even irrationally so following a few months of lockdown.

00:42:24.880 But the risk that they were exposing themselves to does not appear to have been very high

00:42:29.860 based on what we know.

00:42:30.900 Yeah, this is also the weird thing of like people pretending that they have no outcome

00:42:34.480 preferences.

00:42:35.080 It's all process preferences.

00:42:36.460 Like, yeah, it was a calculated risk to go be in a crowd in summer of 2020. 0.98

00:42:40.520 People decided it was not worth the risk to go to a fucking anti-vax AR-15 rally at the 0.99

00:42:46.000 Michigan Statehouse. 1.00

00:42:46.680 It was worth the risk to protest a real phenomenon, black people being killed by police. 0.80

00:42:51.720 I don't really think that's like hypocrisy to be like one kind of protest is good because

00:42:56.340 it's based on reality and another kind of protest is bad because it's based on a lie.

00:42:59.500 Well, I think his concern is just like lockdowns overall.

00:43:03.460 So like he's like, why can't I go to a restaurant then?

00:43:05.760 Also, you could go to a restaurant in summer of 2020.

00:43:08.320 God.

00:43:08.720 But here's his sort of big picture take on this.

00:43:11.360 He says,

00:43:11.680 It is a statement of basic fact that as the direct consequence of lockdown and quarantines,

00:43:17.240 many millions of people around the world lost their income, depleted their savings,

00:43:21.420 missed farewells and funerals of their loved ones, postponed cancer screenings,

00:43:25.160 never experienced graduations and proms, at times went without human touch entirely,

00:43:29.300 and generally put their lives on pause for the indefinite future.

00:43:32.020 Again, so many examples.

00:43:33.680 They accepted these sacrifices as awful but necessary when confronted by an otherwise

00:43:37.960 unstoppable virus and then from one day to the next they were told with a straight face that

00:43:43.380 this had all been done in vain people were not told this in vain in vain it's very important 0.99

00:43:49.980 sometimes when reading this book to like pause and process that he is actually very stupid yeah in 0.97

00:43:55.880 that he is actually just not good at coming to accurate or defensible conclusions based on the 0.98

00:44:00.880 information he has like even if you think people were absorbing too much risk here that doesn't

00:44:06.060 mean that prior mitigation was done in vain right every time he tries to like describe material

00:44:10.960 reality he just butchers it it's wild he also says that experts lost their credibility with

00:44:17.500 the public and that as part of that he says that they were attempting to push a quote unproven

00:44:23.200 vaccine oh wait really yeah oh he's really in it deep to be flirting with anti-vax stuff is wild

00:44:30.340 you see this all the time from like the right end like the center right the sort of covid skeptics

00:44:35.140 right unproven vaccine like what do you mean by proof because many scientists worked to determine

00:44:41.140 the efficacy and safety of the vaccine and obviously this was a different type of vaccine

00:44:46.640 than usual vaccines which was necessary if we wanted to have it quickly if you don't want didn't 0.98

00:44:50.680 want to still be in lockdowns for fucking years on end right but it cracks me up to see some fucking 0.96

00:44:54.700 half-employed debutante right all a vaccine unproven what was the proof you had of the 1.00

00:45:01.920 MMR vaccine before you took it, right? The only proof that someone like Thomas Chatterton Williams

00:45:06.740 has ever had for any vaccine that he's ever taken is that a scientist told them it would work,

00:45:11.360 right? That's it. The details are irrelevant because he couldn't parse them with a gun to

00:45:16.620 his head. So what do you mean by unproven vaccine? Also, yeah, they came up with the vaccine like

00:45:20.680 in like April of 2020, very early. And then they tested it. The reason it took so long was testing

00:45:25.620 it for safety and efficacy. It wasn't actually developing the vaccine. That was like a weekend.

00:45:29.320 And the reason why trust fell in experts was because of like both the right and reactionary 0.97

00:45:35.040 centrist constantly fucking saying things like they're pushing an unproven vaccine on us. 0.98

00:45:39.540 Right. 1.00

00:45:39.740 That's why people don't trust experts. 0.99

00:45:40.960 It's not the experts fucking up. 0.94

00:45:42.320 He says even obvious and commonsensical speculations and responses such as the likelihood of a lab 0.92

00:45:47.080 leak or the very serious need to prohibit travel from China were dismissed as incorrect and

00:45:52.180 even xenophobic as the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, put it when articulated by the

00:45:56.280 president. 1.00

00:45:56.560 I was just going to be like, read me the fucking lab leak shit. 1.00

00:45:58.820 You know he's going to go there. 0.99

00:46:00.220 By the way, I actually couldn't find a source indicating that Pelosi ever said the term

00:46:04.480 xenophobic in this context.

00:46:06.120 It's hard to be exhaustive, but I actually think he got this, got her mixed up with Biden

00:46:10.240 who said it about the China travel ban.

00:46:12.260 OK.

00:46:12.540 I think there probably were people in democratic circles and critical of the initial China

00:46:17.960 travel ban, which, by the way, wasn't aggressive enough.

00:46:20.320 Yeah, this definitely was bouncing around the left, even if Pelosi didn't say it.

00:46:23.020 This was an argument that you heard at the time.

00:46:24.700 But it's so weird to me that this had become such an article of faith among reactionary

00:46:28.060 centrist and on the right that it was leftist overreach in march of 2020 to constantly be

00:46:33.160 hurling around these accusations of xenophobia but like at the time trump was calling it the

00:46:37.520 wuhan flu yeah peter navarro who was on trump's covid task force wrote a book called death by

00:46:42.880 china yeah people were talking about like a chinese bioweapon at the time this kind of polite

00:46:48.360 version of the lab leak did not exist for another year right so the lab leak theory at the time was

00:46:54.120 pretty openly driven by xenophobia yeah it's just so striking that they like they never even bother

00:46:59.300 to show that like the left is wrong or that it's an incorrect claim they just think that any

00:47:04.000 accusation of racism is kind of on its face ridiculous chapter four it's about the reaction

00:47:09.840 to george floyd again not a george floyd revisionist or anything horrific like that

00:47:16.420 his focus here is how the incident leads to the popularization of certain social justice

00:47:22.380 principles that he does not like like don't kill people look some of this i kind of agree with like

00:47:28.780 he he starts off with white fragility oh right it's a book that we've considered covering on

00:47:33.460 this show uh and whose author robin d'angelo i consider to be grifter adjacent oh does he go

00:47:39.960 into kendi as well he talks about kendi who wrote how to be an anti-racist uh which i know less

00:47:45.760 about but i've seen sort of similar critiques i think chatterton's criticisms are overwrought

00:47:51.080 here but there's like a coherent argument in here that people with sort of weird ideas about race

00:47:57.000 were elevated and praised and probably got way too much money for programs that don't verifiably

00:48:02.580 work we've talked about this the dei sector is like doesn't have great empirics behind it but

00:48:07.140 also the moral panic around dei is very obviously like a racist moral panic and an excuse to 0.91

00:48:12.960 dismantle all of this shit and like push minorities out of prominent positions dei now is just a 0.99

00:48:18.680 catchphrase for conservatives when they see a black person on TV that they don't like. 1.00

00:48:23.320 They're like DEI. 1.00

00:48:24.360 Yes.

00:48:24.900 He also includes an anecdote that I'd forgotten about, but I actually think is pretty good.

00:48:28.960 In September 2020, Princeton University's president put out a letter about addressing

00:48:34.280 systemic racism, where he said things like,

00:48:37.120 racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton as

00:48:42.180 in our society, sometimes by conscious intention, but more often through unexamined assumptions

00:48:47.100 and stereotypes, ignorance or insensitivity, and the systemic legacy of past decisions

00:48:52.400 and policies.

00:48:53.520 He also said racist assumptions from the past also remain embedded in the structures of

00:48:57.840 the university itself.

00:48:59.240 This prompted the Department of Education to open an investigation into potential violations

00:49:03.800 of Title VI, the law requiring that schools don't engage in discrimination.

00:49:08.140 And then, of course, Princeton denies doing so.

00:49:10.900 Now, this is under the Trump administration, right?

00:49:12.960 This is a very cynical ploy by the Trump administration.

00:49:16.180 Yeah. But I do think that it's sort of prodded at elements of this like performative anti-racism at these big liberal institutions. Right. And a lot of these critiques about performativity are frequently made by the left. But Chatterton doesn't really seem to engage with that. Right. Like there are very large segments of the left that hate this shit.

00:49:37.140 It is. I mean, man, if these like factors in American life and these threads are so prevalent, 0.99

00:49:42.980 it's like, why does every one of these guys talk about the same two fucking people? 0.96

00:49:48.000 It's like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi. Okay, well, surely if everyone is like entranced by 0.98

00:49:53.120 this ideology, you have more than two books and like the same anecdotes. My God. I feel like he's

00:49:58.100 going to have a whole chapter on the breakup of the Bon Appetit test kitchen. We're going to

00:50:01.900 relitigate that for two hours. Chapter five, Reply All.

00:50:05.200 Jesus Christ.

00:50:06.020 And then he gets to defund the police.

00:50:09.500 And here we go.

00:50:10.480 All right.

00:50:10.720 All right.

00:50:10.920 He says, back in Minneapolis, for one eye-catching example, less than two weeks after the death

00:50:15.880 of George Floyd, a veto-proof nine-member majority of the city council stood before

00:50:20.600 a crowd of hundreds gathered in sunny Powderhorn Park and pledged to dismantle their police

00:50:26.320 department and create a new system of public safety for the community.

00:50:29.980 What happened then, Thomas?

00:50:31.220 What happened after that?

00:50:32.180 He then says that the murder rate spiked in 2020, which it did very substantially.

00:50:37.020 The only city where that happened because they defunded their police.

00:50:38.880 And then people lost their appetite for reform.

00:50:43.940 Here's what he says about the murder rate spike.

00:50:46.100 He says, the majority of that violence occurred after the killing of Floyd and the subsequent push to end policing as we know it,

00:50:52.980 A rhetorical gambit that led, according to the city's Latino chief of police, Medaria

00:50:57.940 Arundondo, to more than 100 officers vacating the force, a figure more than twice the annual

00:51:03.460 rate.

00:51:04.180 Okay, so people quit.

00:51:05.220 Yeah.

00:51:05.420 And he seems to be implying that the 2020 murder spike was maybe caused by anti-police

00:51:11.380 rhetoric, right?

00:51:12.640 Which is like just another thing where it's like, I think you're going to need evidence

00:51:15.760 actually.

00:51:16.340 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:51:16.740 I don't want to get into wonky details here, but I just think it's worth noting that like

00:51:20.240 he doesn't talk about the policy of defund at all. Like he has no interest in it. He has very

00:51:25.580 little interest in policy in general. And he also sort of hand waves away the contradictions. Like

00:51:31.460 he wants you to believe that this cultural vibe shift was so significant that it permeated our

00:51:36.720 politics. But then he doesn't have a coherent explanation for why it didn't actually lead to

00:51:41.600 any major policy changes in any major city. And he's like, well, you know, the murder rights

00:51:46.140 spiked and then people realized that they shouldn't defund. Yeah, maybe. But you just

00:51:51.120 described the city council as a veto-proof majority. Right. And he keeps saying that

00:51:56.740 leftist ideology is overriding basic realities. Right. But then why are the basic realities

00:52:02.340 changing people's ideology in this case? Right. You're talking about this ideology that dominates

00:52:08.120 on the left so substantially that you needed to write a book. Democrats are in charge of every

00:52:12.900 single major city in the country basically and you can't find one that defunded why why as usually

00:52:20.000 he also totally misreads the power dynamics here that like yes we have police who basically did a 0.88

00:52:24.900 work stoppage starting in that summer like a little tantrum that they've never fucking started

00:52:28.860 doing their jobs again we still have police that refuse to enforce the law that's a huge problem 0.97

00:52:34.420 they're also super right-wing fucking radical pill a lot of them are covid deniers it's like 0.61

00:52:38.400 this is actually a huge problem it is clearance rates have gone down i was just talking about 0.96

00:52:41.720 us on five to four, but like police and like their accoutrement, like police unions, the

00:52:46.860 fraternal orders, they're just like this giant right wing political operation that gets public

00:52:52.320 funding. I think that's like an important thing you're calling out because he does not have a

00:52:58.300 framework for understanding right wing political power. He mostly understands the right as a

00:53:03.380 political force that reacts to the excesses of the left. So he cannot see police unions and

00:53:09.860 lobbying groups and police pr departments and how they've been learning to respond to protest

00:53:15.140 movements since like the beginning of black lives matter over a decade ago we've talked about this

00:53:19.000 before but like police budgets for pr shot up after 2014 and 2015 and he he just has no vision

00:53:27.120 into that no knowledge of it that i can see and so everything that happens happens based on

00:53:33.720 whatever is going on on the progressive left right also i know this antedates the book but

00:53:38.280 like they did just dismantle the department of education it's not like it's not like the

00:53:42.560 radicalism is like exclusively on the left on this stuff that's what is going to radicalize

00:53:46.360 chatterton that he uh no longer gets uh federal funding to teach some 21 year old about camu or

00:53:53.000 yeah fly him out to oberlin or some shit yeah i was on his social media feed he's being flown all 0.99

00:53:58.080 over the world for stupid bullshit i know he's one of the luckiest people in america it's crazy 1.00

00:54:02.640 no wonder he doesn't believe in race he's like he's like why am i gonna get all this money then 1.00

00:54:05.940 If racism is real, then why am I getting flown from university to university?

00:54:11.280 Then why am I on Peter Thiel's jet right now?

00:54:13.500 Explain that, SJWs.

00:54:15.600 All right.

00:54:16.000 Chapter five, media in the age of moral clarity.

00:54:20.180 Oh, my God.

00:54:20.840 And we were just talking about the phrase moral clarity in our Brett Stevens bonus episode,

00:54:26.340 right?

00:54:26.620 But there's like this argument that comes from reactionary centrists a lot where they

00:54:30.380 say the problem with people on the left is like their sense of moral clarity.

00:54:34.000 They're too certain of their own moral correctness.

00:54:37.820 Which, again, is just a long way of saying they're annoying to me on social media.

00:54:41.240 Yeah.

00:54:41.640 I don't agree with you.

00:54:43.560 But rather than argue with you, I'm going to say that your problem is that you're too confident in your own correctness.

00:54:49.680 If your tone wasn't so bad, we wouldn't have Trump again.

00:54:52.040 So this chapter centers around the New York Times' Tom Cotton op-ed in the summer 2020.

00:54:58.340 Oh, God. Do we have to talk about this again? Jesus Christ.

00:55:00.000 christ tom cotton publishes an op-ed in the times called send in the troops about the need to deploy

00:55:07.300 federal troops to quell the riots across the country so tedious he's just re-litigating a 0.98

00:55:12.700 bunch of like twitter controversies it's unbelievable to dedicate a whole fucking 0.96

00:55:15.740 how dare you describe this book as the re-litigation of a bunch of twitter controversies 0.95

00:55:20.600 twitter is only mentioned 50 times in 200 pages and you think that this is all about twitter god 0.96

00:55:28.480 It's just like, find some other fucking anecdotes, do some work. 0.88

00:55:31.420 It's like, these are all so well-trodden. 0.99

00:55:33.700 I've read 300 articles about this fucking Tom Cotton thing. 0.97

00:55:36.820 Also, the paragraph that I sent you is literally just about a Twitter post. 0.99

00:55:40.800 Oh my God.

00:55:42.760 He says, what happened next was highly unusual.

00:55:45.960 On Twitter, beginning on June 3rd, 2020, the day the op-ed ran, a number of high-profile

00:55:50.880 Times journalists and staffers began to share a short, eyebrow-raising declarative sentence

00:55:55.560 above a screenshot of the op-ed's headline.

00:55:58.180 Running this puts Black people,

00:55:59.580 including Black New York Times staff, 0.94

00:56:01.280 in danger, the tweet alleged.

00:56:02.980 The reasoning was as logically unpersuasive

00:56:05.520 as the phrasing was prefabricated

00:56:07.980 and strategically coordinated

00:56:09.700 to initiate a specific response

00:56:11.820 from the company's management.

00:56:12.920 Ooh, they were coordinating.

00:56:14.320 The realm of intellectual, political,

00:56:16.700 and journalistic disagreement had been forsaken.

00:56:19.160 This was now, however implausibly,

00:56:21.280 a matter of physical safety,

00:56:23.080 and therefore, it was non-negotiable.

00:56:25.560 But it was negotiable.

00:56:26.480 It was negotiated.

00:56:27.300 Also, he started off the book by saying that dignity and recognition are higher in Maslow's hierarchy of needs than physical safety.

00:56:37.120 Interesting. 0.99

00:56:38.080 So it's very clear that he thinks that the idea that this op-ed endangered time staffers is like a total fiction, total bullshit. 0.94

00:56:46.040 Worth noting, journalists would be covering the protests and riots, right? 0.82

00:56:49.560 So like the presence of the United States military there is a pretty direct concern.

00:56:53.280 And also, if the military is deployed, yes, there are going to be concerns about people

00:56:58.500 getting hurt. 0.97

00:56:59.620 Like, he might not think that's enough to warrant an objection, but like have the balls 0.99

00:57:03.500 to say that. 0.93

00:57:04.020 Like, someone's talking about deploying the military to United States cities, and he's

00:57:08.060 like, oh, they're making it a matter of physical safety.

00:57:10.760 Right.

00:57:10.940 It's like, well, yeah. 0.94

00:57:11.860 Also, he's doing this thing where, that they always fucking do, where he's implying that 0.87

00:57:15.600 certain acts of speech are suppression of speech. 0.98

00:57:18.460 So for a black person to say, hey, this makes me unsafe, that's suppressing speech. 0.54

00:57:21.620 However, a sitting senator writing an op-ed calling for widespread violence, that's not suppressing speech?

00:57:28.120 One thing that James Bennett, the Times, the editor of the opinion section at the Times, always hangs his hat on is like, well, Cotton wasn't calling for the deployment of troops against protests.

00:57:38.580 He was calling for it against the riots only.

00:57:41.960 And it's like, right.

00:57:43.260 Do you understand how this would have gone down?

00:57:44.780 Right, completely. 1.00

00:57:45.600 Absolute schmuck. 1.00

00:57:46.880 Also, they were classifying peaceful protesters as fucking rioters. 1.00

00:57:50.080 it was really obvious what was going on all right here's some uh here's some chatterton 0.93

00:57:54.140 also there was also the thing of james bennett didn't even read it before it was published and

00:57:57.640 he had a number let's not get ahead of ourselves let's not get ahead of ourselves okay fine

00:58:01.940 why do we do this to ourselves i'm dying at how mad i've spent two weeks just wanting to

00:58:10.900 absolutely just like run my head into a buzzsaw and you and you finally get to just experience

00:58:16.840 a little bit of it. It's great. He says 48 hours later, he lost his nerve entirely. And James

00:58:22.040 Bennett, the editor of the opinion section, resigned under immense pressure. By June 7th,

00:58:26.740 the Times had issued a bizarre apology stating obliquely and for reasons that contradict its

00:58:31.620 own stated values that the piece did not meet our standards. Yeah, he didn't read it before

00:58:36.320 it was published. This is what Chatterton doesn't really address at all. Bennett admitted that he

00:58:41.220 did not read the op-ed before publication which is his fucking job yeah and he also says this 0.96

00:58:47.480 in what has always been an extremely hierarchical institution the paper's history does not include 0.98

00:58:52.860 an equivalent episode of staffers a significant number of whom were not even journalists but

00:58:57.580 rather digital media technicians and producers my god muting their bosses at times in openly

00:59:03.780 ad hominem and patently insulting terms in order to exact punishment on a top figure for doing what

00:59:10.080 had been fully within the purview of his job publishing a widely held perspective articulated

00:59:14.860 by an important political actor. No, we talked about this in our Barry Weiss bonus episode.

00:59:19.100 This was not a widely held view. The only way you get to that is by misrepresenting polling data

00:59:24.000 where it was asking people like, are you okay with the National Guard supporting local law

00:59:29.520 enforcement? It was not the view of the population that the military should be sent in to crack down

00:59:34.960 on protests. Yeah. Polls are not exactly super reliable, nor do I believe the fact that an

00:59:40.020 opinion is held by a senator means that the New York Times has to publish it. Go fucking tell the 0.99

00:59:43.960 president, right? Whatever. I think that this reveals like the fundamental frustration of the 1.00

00:59:47.940 anti-woke set about 2020 in that like it reflected a sort of bottom up accountability that they felt

00:59:53.900 powerless to discipline and that really just pissed them off. Yeah. That's also the obsession

00:59:57.580 with social media. It's just like normal ass people can go into Brett Stevens mentions and 0.96

01:00:01.760 be like, you fucking bed bug. That's like, that's the anxiety that's driving all of that stuff. 1.00

01:00:05.760 Yeah. It's also worth diving into the background here, which Chatterton leaves out. Bennett had

01:00:10.100 joined the paper a couple of years prior, and he explicitly said that part of his MO was to

01:00:15.400 challenge his readership by publishing views that readers find objectionable,

01:00:19.860 quote, provided they meet the same tests of intellectual honesty, respect for others and

01:00:24.060 openness. Well, well, I mean, if there's if there's anything that characterizes the Thomas

01:00:29.040 op-ed. It's respect for others and intellectual honesty. So in other words, he wanted to publish

01:00:36.340 more conservative views, right? And that aggravated a lot of people at the Times,

01:00:39.840 and they felt like he was willing to publish low-quality pieces just because they felt

01:00:44.140 contrarian. Let me send you this final bit. And I'm sorry, it continues to be distracting how bad

01:00:51.920 of a writer he is, but there's nothing I can do about this. He says, on another more enduring

01:00:55.880 level, the Bennett firing was much more than a pressure-releasing communal sacrifice. It was

01:01:00.740 illustrative of a power struggle between competing versions of what most fundamentally journalism

01:01:05.620 itself is supposed to be. What this controversy so potently entailed was the literal embodiment

01:01:11.420 of legacy media capitulating in the face of coordinated mobs of junior staffers who,

01:01:17.440 though they psychologically and cathartically might have benefited from the social killing

01:01:21.380 of one high-level competitor were even more decisively vying to fundamentally reshape

01:01:26.680 journalism's marquee institution according to their newfangled conception of the trade

01:01:31.940 and inevitably biased narrative vision.

01:01:34.540 But this is all just like about their motivation.

01:01:36.900 This is this thing of like, oh, they were doing it performatively.

01:01:39.400 They were doing it as a power play.

01:01:40.540 I think people believe what they say.

01:01:42.560 I think when people say that they're offended by police killings, they're offended by police

01:01:45.980 killings.

01:01:46.360 We don't need to see that as like a power play.

01:01:48.580 Is it really crazy to believe that people found it objectionable to publish a senator

01:01:53.920 saying that we should send troops to major American cities?

01:01:56.040 Right.

01:01:56.360 I know that it's happening now, so maybe it seems normal, but there was actually a time

01:02:01.440 a few years ago when it wouldn't have been normal.

01:02:04.880 And I do think that people were trying to shape the institution, but also that's normal

01:02:08.920 in an institution?

01:02:09.760 That's not weird.

01:02:10.240 It's not weird.

01:02:10.820 Most, like every NGO I worked at has like a five-year strategy and a 10-year strategy,

01:02:14.660 and you try to influence those things.

01:02:16.840 Very normal.

01:02:17.420 He can't really debate this up on the merits.

01:02:19.000 So he has to say that like their motivation was bad, but she has no proof for.

01:02:22.580 The way that he frames it is that he thinks that time should remain neutral on debatable

01:02:26.640 issues.

01:02:27.060 That's a quote.

01:02:27.640 And he says that the social justice types wanted the times to abandon neutrality.

01:02:33.400 Not remotely true.

01:02:35.140 That like fundamentally misunderstands what's happening here.

01:02:38.560 Bennett himself did not aspire to neutrality.

01:02:42.040 He openly wanted to challenge his liberal readership, right?

01:02:45.300 Right. Which means he was making an effort to publish conservative opinions. Right. It was

01:02:49.540 also revealed in the course of this that the Times actually reached out to Cotton about this op-ed.

01:02:55.260 He didn't pitch them. Right. They reached out to him. That's even worse. How can you claim

01:02:59.200 you're institutionally neutral when you're literally soliciting certain opinions? And

01:03:04.180 why is publishing an opinion neutral while not publishing it is biased? Like they have to remain

01:03:09.240 neutral. What are you talking about? How many pitches per day do you think the New York Times

01:03:14.020 gets. They can only publish a subset of them. How do you remain neutral? What does that even mean?

01:03:19.260 Yeah.

01:03:19.800 You have to make choices.

01:03:21.360 He's like, James Bennett has fallen. Like a single deer rolling down his cheek.

01:03:26.180 It's like they replace him with someone else exactly the same.

01:03:29.020 Exactly the same. And also James Bennett is now just like editor in chief at like The Economist

01:03:33.340 or something.

01:03:33.760 Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no actual stakes to any of this.

01:03:37.500 It's not even landing on his feet. It's just like there's a perfect cartwheel into The Economist.

01:03:41.140 Yeah.

01:03:41.380 It's like, it's, whatever.

01:03:43.840 Now, chapter six, titled Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests.

01:03:48.560 Okay.

01:03:49.040 He admits they're mostly peaceful.

01:03:50.260 Again, classic Chatterton, because he does acknowledge very briefly the people who were

01:03:56.020 responsible for most of the violence were not meaningfully related to the protests,

01:03:59.800 which were largely peaceful.

01:04:00.880 But then he also just like pivots into extended descriptions of the violence, businesses burned,

01:04:06.620 and stuff like that.

01:04:08.260 He says, quote,

01:04:09.400 What is he talking about? 0.99

01:04:24.500 That sounds like some Clarence Thomas shit, like the most lurid description. 0.99

01:04:27.360 That whole, like, bodies twisted up thing is referring to an incident in Dallas where a man rushed a group of people wielding a machete before the crowd got the upper hand and severely beat him. 0.99

01:04:41.340 He refers to this guy as the proprietor of a business who was safeguarding his livelihood, which is not true.

01:04:48.020 Police confirmed a few days later that this guy showed up with a machete to protect his neighborhood but did not have a business there.

01:04:55.380 The idea that he was a business owner is just something that came out of right-wing Twitter posts from the time.

01:05:01.020 Yeah, just like laundering him into someone like noble and good, yeah.

01:05:03.780 Right.

01:05:04.280 So Chatterton took that image.

01:05:06.440 What happened to one man who rushed a crowd with a machete lies about the circumstances of it and straightforwardly says that it's happening to business owners around the country.

01:05:17.560 Right.

01:05:18.000 This thing that happened once and not to a business owner.

01:05:21.960 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:05:22.520 It's so dishonest.

01:05:23.680 He gets mad about reactions to social media where he's like, you're overreacting to this

01:05:28.360 one thing you saw context free. 0.96

01:05:30.800 Meanwhile, he's had fucking five years to figure out that that is not true. 0.93

01:05:35.740 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.97

01:05:36.340 He also complains that NPR published what he calls a wildly credulous interview with

01:05:41.860 the author of a book called In Defense of Looting.

01:05:45.260 Oh, God.

01:05:46.280 He describes the author as a young white trans author.

01:05:50.200 No reason to mention that she's trans, by the way.

01:05:52.480 He just doesn't. 0.93

01:05:53.040 In her book, she basically argues that property rights are a tool of white supremacy and therefore looting as a tool for dismantling white supremacy.

01:06:01.040 So basically, I found a book I don't like by someone I don't like.

01:06:03.540 Yeah. 0.99

01:06:03.820 Well, so if Thomas just said, hey, that's stupid, I would be like, no doubt, bro. 0.99

01:06:07.580 Yeah. 1.00

01:06:08.160 Whatever.

01:06:08.860 Yeah.

01:06:09.020 Someone published a book I don't like.

01:06:10.240 Fine.

01:06:10.680 He says, quote, this is the discourse being promoted even in our most vanilla of mainstream media outlets.

01:06:17.120 So you're complaining about essentially an op-ed. 0.99

01:06:19.040 You just wrote a chapter about how people shouldn't complain about a fucking op-ed. 0.98

01:06:21.380 Dude, we're fresh off the Tom Cotton op-ed chapter. 0.98

01:06:24.640 So do you want debate or not, dude?

01:06:26.620 He was just talking about the perils of letting your journalism be dictated by ideology and

01:06:31.800 like the need for neutrality.

01:06:32.940 But now NPR is covering an idea he does not like.

01:06:36.660 Yeah.

01:06:37.080 And he like within a matter of pages, it's just like this is the discourse being promoted.

01:06:43.100 And now he understands that platforming an author is a form of promotion, right?

01:06:49.440 Like now he seems to understand that.

01:06:51.220 That it's not inherently neutral.

01:06:53.380 We shouldn't air these ideas that are fundamentally making people unsafe.

01:06:56.360 Oh, really, Thomas?

01:06:57.180 Wow.

01:06:57.400 And now we get to Rittenhouse, Kyle Rittenhouse.

01:07:00.520 I almost skipped this because I don't think he has a ton of interesting stuff to say.

01:07:05.280 But it does include one of the funniest sentences in the book.

01:07:10.980 So I'm going to – God, it's so funny.

01:07:13.860 Oh, God.

01:07:14.660 I think about this sentence all the time.

01:07:16.000 He says,

01:07:16.340 when a doughy 17-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse, too young to purchase the AR-15 assault rifle he'd

01:07:22.280 armed himself with, ventured from his home 20 miles away in Antioch, Illinois, into the flaming

01:07:27.140 streets of Kenosha, he was doing many things simultaneously. It's so funny. What is doughy

01:07:33.260 doing there? It's so funny to call him fat right off the bat. What the fuck? And like he was doing

01:07:38.080 many things simultaneously. Like, yeah, aren't we all, dude? What are you talking about? That's

01:07:42.820 like like yeah when i went to the grocery store i was doing many things simultaneously kyle

01:07:47.220 rittenhouse is a land of contrasts his basic position on rittenhouse who you know for people

01:07:51.740 who don't remember this kid goes to do like community defense armed with uh an illegal

01:07:58.040 assault rifle he drives from his home like many miles away to go like 20 miles away from his home

01:08:04.320 in antioch illinois he was doing many things simultaneously and that's what i always say

01:08:08.660 about kyle rittenhouse he specifically like got a gun and sought out this like city he doesn't

01:08:13.640 live in to like quote unquote defend it and then he ended up shooting somebody and yeah very similar

01:08:17.920 to zimmerman trayvon where he gets off the hook there's a not guilty verdict eventually mostly

01:08:25.400 because the immediate circumstances of the shooting look like self-defense chanderton doesn't take a

01:08:33.020 position on this either way he seems to think it's a reasonable minds can differ situation in fact he

01:08:37.920 says that pretty explicitly that's because he would have to read about it and learn something

01:08:41.120 about the details his actual complaint is of course how liberal institutions reacted he says

01:08:47.200 that they like did not react with the appropriate level of nuance you know he complains about

01:08:52.780 administrators at uc santa cruz putting out a statement saying that they were dismayed by the 0.82

01:08:56.700 verdict who fucking cares what uc santa cruz did jesus christ he also says such statements and

01:09:02.160 interventions were boosted by journalists and thought leaders across the social and traditional 0.95

01:09:06.420 media as though conveying uncontested truths that were self-evident.

01:09:11.680 And then he cites negative reactions to the verdict by four people, Ellie Mistel, who

01:09:16.080 writes for The Nation, Nicole Hannah-Jones at The Times, Al Sharpton, and Kathleen Ballou,

01:09:21.380 who's a historian I haven't heard of before.

01:09:23.240 Whose book is really good, yeah.

01:09:23.940 But it's just like, wait, hold on.

01:09:25.640 So, okay, universities can't take a position because reasonable minds can disagree and

01:09:29.620 you don't think that this is like their role in our society.

01:09:32.920 Okay, right?

01:09:33.580 I don't know that that's right, but it's like coherent, I guess.

01:09:37.120 But then also these journalists can't-

01:09:39.240 Have an opinion.

01:09:40.280 Again, his whole spiel is like civil discourse and disagreement.

01:09:43.540 Yeah.

01:09:43.760 But then he repeatedly criticizes the media for like holding or promoting views he doesn't like.

01:09:48.860 Right.

01:09:49.480 We're skipping chapter seven. 0.99

01:09:50.580 It's bullshit even by this book standards. 0.97

01:09:52.560 What's it about? 0.99

01:09:53.660 I don't remember.

01:09:56.980 Just nodding your notes, just a blank hole.

01:09:58.880 I have a thing that's like skipping chapter seven and then I went back-

01:10:01.860 Wait, look it up, look it up, look it up.

01:10:02.920 Okay. This is, yeah, it's chapter seven is, uh, we are all Americans now. Anti-racism goes global

01:10:10.120 in the age of social media. Oh, I will not be talking about, uh, other countries during this,

01:10:15.240 uh, episode. During this entire podcast. Bad enough that I have to talk about America.

01:10:19.520 Chapter eight, cancel culture and its discontents. Oh no. He's actually saying it. We're doing this.

01:10:25.700 Fuck. Yeah. You thought this whole thing was about cancel culture, but no, there's actually 1.00

01:10:28.900 a specific chapter i'm getting visions of myself at like 90 years old like relitigating the same 0.95

01:10:34.080 like four fucking anecdotes like did the professor get fired for doing blackface or not so the whole 0.71

01:10:39.300 chapter revolves primarily around the harper's letter which chatterton co-authored and spearheaded 0.97

01:10:44.900 in uh summer 2020 he's like i was a hero i was actually a huge hero for that you know about the

01:10:49.660 harper's letter it's a letter published in harper signed by a bunch of like authors and thinkers

01:10:54.280 titled A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.

01:10:57.760 Here's a passage.

01:10:58.700 The free exchange of information and ideas,

01:11:01.440 the lifeblood of a liberal society

01:11:02.860 is daily becoming more constricted.

01:11:05.080 While we have come to expect this on the radical right,

01:11:07.460 censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture.

01:11:10.120 An intolerance of opposing views,

01:11:12.220 a vogue for public shaming and ostracism,

01:11:14.320 and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues

01:11:17.020 in a blinding moral certainty.

01:11:18.880 It's such perfect TCW.

01:11:20.320 I know.

01:11:20.640 I was like, I had not entirely clocked

01:11:22.640 that he wrote this whole thing.

01:11:23.620 Yeah.

01:11:23.820 Once he said he co-authored it, I went back and read it and was like, oh, that's why this 0.99

01:11:27.680 thing sucks. 0.98

01:11:28.340 Because he's like, well, the fascists are like super fascist, but we have some very minor 0.99

01:11:32.660 complaints about people on the left that we're going to dedicate the rest of this document

01:11:36.140 to.

01:11:36.580 So yeah, he's basically just hashing out his beefs about this.

01:11:40.160 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:11:40.840 And you can tell that he's really pissy about it because he starts strawmanning the arguments

01:11:45.700 really badly.

01:11:46.980 Yeah.

01:11:47.220 I'm going to send you a couple.

01:11:48.220 He says,

01:11:48.780 critics of the letter, a variety of whom were also leading advocates for the shift to moral

01:11:53.640 clarity in theory and anti-racism in practice. Reality itself is biased. Therefore, debate must

01:11:59.600 be restricted and we should be the arbiters of what is permissible. No one said this.

01:12:03.720 Who said that? Right. Who said that? This pisses me off so much. Find me one person who says

01:12:08.300 reality itself is biased. I guarantee you that person is like a 20-year-old who's mentally ill 1.00

01:12:13.820 on Twitter. Relax. He then says, for the critics scorning the Harper's letter, 0.99

01:12:17.880 concerns about fairness, openness, and tolerance of divergent viewpoints were not simply overblown.

01:12:23.180 The phenomenon they attempted to address, an atmosphere of censoriousness, did not even exist

01:12:27.900 in the first place. This is always the fucking thing. They're like, they won't even admit that 0.99

01:12:31.780 the left cancels people. These mobs on social media form, I've never seen anyone deny the basic

01:12:36.980 reality that sometimes left-wing mobs happen and they get over their skis. They fire that Adidas

01:12:42.240 lady for like sending a racist tweet like everyone knows the fucking examples of this no one denies 0.99

01:12:46.000 the basic reality the problem is the interpretation of it we are disputing the interpretation that this 0.99

01:12:50.560 is a left-wing phenomenon and a sign of like creeping totalitarianism on the left right which

01:12:55.180 looking back from 2025 is just not fucking true empirically it's not true one of the big criticisms

01:13:00.360 of the harper's letter and concerns about like cancel culture generally is that there's a thin 0.93

01:13:04.920 line between what some people describe as cancel culture and what might be considered like basic

01:13:09.800 accountability. So he tries to tackle that to distinguish between cancellation and mere

01:13:16.120 accountability. He uses a definition written by Ross Douthat in a Times column, essentially the

01:13:23.340 Ross definition. All right, here he goes. Cancellation, properly understood, refers to an

01:13:28.620 attack on someone's employment and reputation by a determined collective of critics based on an

01:13:34.760 opinion or an action that is alleged to be disgraceful and disqualifying where is the

01:13:40.960 clear delineation between cancellation and accountability here yeah every attempt to

01:13:45.360 define cancellation runs into the same problem that either it's too specific and it's like oh

01:13:51.380 someone gets fired for challenging social justice orthodoxy and it reveals that it's just like an

01:13:56.060 ideological project yeah or like this one it's too generic so doubt that is saying here that like

01:14:01.240 any attempt by a collective of people to get somebody fired is cancellation and therefore bad.

01:14:08.100 But there's millions of examples of groups of people trying to disqualify someone because they

01:14:14.640 did something disqualifying. Like this would include like the congregation of a church asking

01:14:20.020 to remove a pastor because he like embezzled funds. How would you distinguish between this

01:14:24.320 and like what happened to Harvey Weinstein? Obviously he was canceled under this definition,

01:14:28.520 right attack on his employment and reputation by a determined collective of critics so like

01:14:33.300 are you opposed to that yeah i think it's notable that these guys who have built careers off of 0.98

01:14:38.480 these boogeymen right wokeness cancel culture they cannot provide a fucking definition of them 0.59

01:14:44.720 is that not notable like it's wild yeah in an interview for the new yorker shortly after this 0.97

01:14:49.660 was published uh isaac chotner interviewed him he was asked for uh examples of what he considers

01:14:54.660 cancellation he gives them and then the interview included bracketed descriptions of what actually

01:15:01.620 happened in those cases and i'm gonna i'm gonna send you this um i can read you actually i'll

01:15:08.720 read i'll read chatterton and you can read the bracketed descriptions okay i'm the editor's

01:15:13.920 okay there have been many many academics who have been silenced there was a ucla professor who got

01:15:18.960 in serious trouble for just reading letter from birmingham jail william paris a lecturer in

01:15:23.520 political science, reportedly came into conflict with his students over his decision to read aloud

01:15:28.260 the N-word in King's letter and show a documentary about lynching. UCLA told a New Yorker that there

01:15:33.620 was no formal investigation, but that the situation was being reviewed. There's an academic at the

01:15:38.280 University of Chicago who questioned some aspects of the orthodoxy on Black Lives Matter. Harold

01:15:42.860 Ulig, a professor of economics, compared Black Lives Matter activists to flat earthers and

01:15:47.420 creationists. A student then claimed that Ulig had made racially discriminatory remarks in his

01:15:52.620 classroom the university conducted an investigation and found that there was no basis for further

01:15:56.620 proceedings that's it two two situations where the issue appears to be that some students got

01:16:04.400 upset and that's it so complete nothing burgers it's like basically somebody acted in class

01:16:09.020 arguably racist and faced no consequences so it's actually evidence against his view that this is

01:16:14.520 all out of control and like the institutions themselves that he believes are like a little

01:16:19.500 too caught up in all of this are in fact reviewing this stuff and being like no that's all right yeah

01:16:25.620 you can do it because you say they didn't even start a formal investigation right i mean yeah

01:16:28.900 it's just some like some students got upset and he's like shut up shut up he says there have been

01:16:33.760 many many academics who've been silenced silence no one was silenced is your point that those

01:16:38.600 people shouldn't be complaining because then who's the one being censorious thomas chatterton

01:16:43.360 williams yeah yeah he also says that the james bennett new york times thing was canceled culture

01:16:47.200 And it's like, OK, yeah, there was a large group of social media users attacking him.

01:16:51.400 But like the locus of that discussion wasn't just like, oh, he said something offensive.

01:16:55.820 It was like, was he doing his job properly?

01:16:58.460 That's the locus of that discussion, right?

01:17:00.000 You can disagree with how it turned out, but it feels pretty reasonable for there to be

01:17:04.280 like a big public discussion about how the most influential newspaper in the world is

01:17:08.280 handling its editorial section.

01:17:09.940 That feels very reasonable to me.

01:17:11.640 Yeah.

01:17:11.820 If I can try to force some good faith into this conversation, I feel like what they're

01:17:15.120 really talking about, even though they can't say it, is proportionality.

01:17:19.700 Yeah, yeah.

01:17:19.980 If you're a random professor somewhere who reads the N word aloud in the context of reading

01:17:24.940 Martin Luther King, and suddenly you're getting swarmed by like hundreds, thousands of people

01:17:29.920 online, that probably feels very overwhelming.

01:17:33.080 But the reality of social media now, like we've discussed, is that the amount of attention

01:17:37.440 that we pay to a lot of things is disproportionate.

01:17:40.420 Like one person will do something weird or bad on TikTok and there will be extended discourse about it.

01:17:46.560 Just say Kendra.

01:17:47.720 Just say Kendra who's all known as a psychiatrist. 0.98

01:17:51.000 There is a lady who is 100%, I can say it with confidence from my armchair, mentally ill, who like who is in love with her psychiatrist and believes that he was in love with her. 0.99

01:18:02.800 Yeah.

01:18:03.260 Like to say that there's been extended discourse about it.

01:18:05.340 Dude. 1.00

01:18:05.600 I mean, this is one woman having a straight up mental health crisis and people are just like, have you seen this dumb lady? 1.00

01:18:13.980 Are the subject of like national attention. 0.99

01:18:15.960 But this is what I'm saying.

01:18:17.240 Like the way in which we pay attention to anything right now is just sort of odd and it's amplified by social media.

01:18:26.520 Algorithms are pushing it.

01:18:28.120 And I will say, Chatterton knows this.

01:18:30.540 Like he talks about how this is sort of like intertwined with technology and social media.

01:18:35.200 I don't know that he understands it as like almost entirely a function of that, right?

01:18:39.800 He always talks about the political side of this, the extent to which this is like part

01:18:46.620 of the left's culture or whatever, and very rarely talks about the technology side.

01:18:51.800 And it's like you're missing what I think is 99% of the story because we see these

01:18:57.180 same exact things being replicated in completely apolitical arenas.

01:19:02.300 This is always the grand tragedy of the cancel culture narrative is that it

01:19:05.120 became about like creeping authoritarianism on the left when it's actually just a shift to social

01:19:08.680 media which has real implications beyond ideology and like right there's actually an interesting 0.71

01:19:13.160 conversation there yeah it just became this dumb thing like the left is always canceling people 0.96

01:19:17.340 which just isn't fucking true everyone's canceling everyone he says the only authentically liberal 0.96

01:19:21.620 stance then is to resist cancel culture as well as its right-wing exploitation simultaneously 0.87

01:19:27.640 post better don't and it's like bro how are you resisting the right-wing exploitation of cancel

01:19:32.800 culture when you're literally covering it obsessively for years on end. This is a book

01:19:37.680 about it. You've got to get your career to it. How are you resisting the right-wing exploitation?

01:19:42.260 Like what? That little caveat in the beginning of every chapter before you spend the rest of it

01:19:46.360 complaining about the left, that's you resisting? It doesn't count when I do it because I'm telling

01:19:49.460 you not to do it. I want to try to throw in some good faith here. There are some things he says

01:19:52.520 that I agree with. He argues that the language of social justice is often like limited to the

01:19:57.160 educated classes. I think that's right. But then he says, are we interested at all in the perspectives

01:20:02.000 of those minorities within the minority, the Muslim with a critique of Islamism, the young

01:20:06.540 white woman who is concerned about due process in the era of Me Too, the black Ivy League professor

01:20:10.960 who balks at the new anti-racist doctrine that reifies racial difference. Are these not also

01:20:16.180 authentic points of view? Oh my God, we hear from these people all the time. You're a black guy who

01:20:19.720 lives in France and you're complaining about America all the time. That's you, dude. This is 1.00

01:20:22.820 your job. You're the professor who balks at the anti-racist doctrine and you're selling a couple

01:20:28.340 thousand copies of each of your shit-ass books and yet you have an entire career you never think 0.99

01:20:32.600 about why maybe someone uh very wealthy and influential is interested in propping up your 0.99

01:20:37.020 view he knows he's lying about this because he's clearly reading a lot of right-wing media and one 0.99

01:20:40.420 thing the right-wing media loves it's like i'm a feminist but the feminists have gone too far

01:20:44.740 i'm a muslim but muslims are obsessed with violence they love this narrative he has a footnote here

01:20:50.100 about how one of the signatories of the harper's letter was an algerian journalist who was uh who 0.65

01:20:55.200 criticized Islam in some interviews and then had a fatwa put on his head by what Chatterton

01:21:01.760 describes as an obscure Salafist imam. And I'm like, I'm sorry, am I supposed to be able to do

01:21:08.940 something about this? Like, what are you talking about? It's just like religious right-wingers,

01:21:12.600 basically, like traditionalists. And he's like, the left has done this. Now on to, believe it or

01:21:17.560 not, the most substantively outrageous chapter of the book. Oh my God, really? Sorry. We've been

01:21:22.920 recording for two and a half hours, Peter. This is the longest record session we've ever had.

01:21:26.100 I told you it was going to be long. Oh my God.

01:21:27.500 Usually I'm very good at condensing a book down into episode length. You're not good at it, but

01:21:34.920 I'm like, we're doing a three part episode on the seven habits of highly effective people.

01:21:44.280 This is, this is the one thing I bring to the table here that I can, I can look at entire,

01:21:48.920 like the entire half of a book and be like, no, we're not doing that.

01:21:54.440 That is what you did with liberal fascism. We talked about like three chapters of that book.

01:21:59.000 That was a blessing, I promise you. But this one is brutal and it's brutal for one very specific

01:22:04.740 reason. So we won't take that long on it, but I'm going to give you, this is a couple of paragraphs

01:22:09.940 pieced together. It's the January 6th chapter. This is the January 6th chapter. He says,

01:22:14.180 The pathetic insurrection, whipped up by the cheapest internet conspiracy and the most outlandish lies and innuendo about a stolen election, all originating in the mouth of the entertainer president, was but a physical manifestation of the social media era's much larger and more serious and sustained assault on truth.

01:22:31.240 There were many men and women in attendance on January 6th who were neither organized nor trained,

01:22:36.240 but had been gorged on an outlandish diet of riots and looting in Ferguson, Minneapolis,

01:22:41.480 Kenosha, Portland, Seattle, and many other theaters of open lawlessness and rebellion besides,

01:22:47.120 all of which were frequently condoned.

01:22:49.620 Not, oh my god, Peter.

01:22:53.000 The January 6th insurrection, far more symbolically destructive and politically dangerous,

01:22:57.240 was nonetheless a gross apotheosis of the kind of increasingly common tendency

01:23:02.040 visible on the social justice left for years now

01:23:04.400 to make the country's politics in the street whenever feeling sufficiently unheard.

01:23:09.400 This is really egregious.

01:23:11.220 January 6th is the fault of the left.

01:23:13.700 Unbelievable.

01:23:14.340 He says that it is downright fantastical, quote unquote,

01:23:17.640 to say that the rioting in summer 2020 and the condoning of that rioting from the media

01:23:22.960 did not influence January 6th.

01:23:24.960 This is another time when, like, the machinations of the American right are invisible to him.

01:23:30.660 January 6th was the culmination of extended planning by very, very powerful people.

01:23:37.840 They had legal arguments.

01:23:39.460 They coordinated with right-wing media, right, to propagate lies about the election being stolen.

01:23:44.620 We now know that from various lawsuits.

01:23:46.400 And Chatterton is just like they were inspired by the riots of the left.

01:23:50.080 Also, the voter fraud myth has been around for decades and has been stoked by like elected

01:23:54.960 Republican leaders all over the place.

01:23:56.660 So this was fertile ground for somebody to kind of take this further than it had ever

01:24:00.500 been taken before.

01:24:01.280 That's not remotely about the left.

01:24:03.180 And I mean, it was stoked by Trump after 2016, right?

01:24:06.340 The idea that he had actually won the popular vote, if not for illegals, et cetera.

01:24:11.120 Again, like he has spent his entire adult life wringing his hands about a handful of

01:24:18.820 social justice activists on the left, and he has no ability to see the world outside of them.

01:24:25.580 There's one theme that pops up throughout the book that I want to drill down on a little bit.

01:24:28.640 We've talked about this before, but it's just a really glaring gap in his analysis.

01:24:32.200 One of the first things he says in the prologue is that the upheaval in 2020,

01:24:36.460 quote, spawned a vicious counterreaction from the authoritarian right. He makes this claim a few

01:24:41.620 times throughout the book. I listened to an interview with him by Andrew Yang, where he says

01:24:47.580 that Democrats took their eye off the ball by pandering to activists and invited a reaction

01:24:53.300 from the right to says that Trump's win was easily preventable.

01:24:57.500 With a universal basic income?

01:24:59.060 Is that what Andrew Yang said?

01:25:00.040 He actually solved this.

01:25:00.980 But the big problem with this, and we've talked about this before, is that the timeline is 0.96

01:25:04.820 fucked up. 0.88

01:25:05.600 Summer 2020 was really the height of all of this, right? 0.98

01:25:08.660 The social justice activism and Democrats won.

01:25:11.760 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:25:12.340 Right?

01:25:12.660 Right after all of this went down, Democrats won.

01:25:15.480 Yeah.

01:25:15.600 So if your theory of modern politics is that that rhetoric is what led to Trump, you need

01:25:21.940 to explain why he lost when it was at its peak, right?

01:25:25.400 Why did the protests in 2020 result in a Biden victory and then morph into a backlash that

01:25:32.340 catapulted Trump into office in 2024?

01:25:36.160 Right.

01:25:36.380 This is what he needs to explain the most, but there isn't even an attempt.

01:25:41.200 Right.

01:25:41.420 You might be able to piece together some kind of explanation that's like, well, 2020 was

01:25:45.320 an anomaly for various reasons, blah, blah, blah. But you need to try. You need to actually try to

01:25:50.420 explain that. And don't say Trump's win was easily preventable. Like you could have commandeered the

01:25:57.460 Kamala campaign to victory or whatever. Like this guy splits his time between New York and the French

01:26:03.120 countryside and just cited Camus seven times in a book about American politics. Fucking a feet 0.99

01:26:09.380 little charlatan you don't know what you're talking about i mean people memory hole it 1.00

01:26:14.900 because the backlash to this has been so severe but i mean black lives matter enjoyed extremely

01:26:20.580 high approval ratings for much of that year i'd like like i like i mentioned people a majority

01:26:25.340 of people said that the burning down of the police precinct in minneapolis was justified that is

01:26:32.620 wild there was real injustice going on and people were responding to very real injustice and that's

01:26:37.300 actually quite mobilizing for people. I mean, these were the largest protests in American

01:26:40.640 history at the time. People were really fucking upset. You'd be at work, your normal ass job in 0.98

01:26:45.800 2020, and people were like, here's someone here to talk to you about slavery. I'm not saying that 0.84

01:26:51.300 was good. But if that was the most off-putting thing, then why wasn't there a consequence? Why

01:26:58.760 were people still supportive, right? Yeah. I mean, because the fucking median American's position

01:27:04.320 in summer 2020 was fuck the police. 1.00

01:27:06.860 That's like, that's what was happening. 0.99

01:27:08.140 Yeah, totally.

01:27:08.440 Yeah, yeah.

01:27:08.940 The afterword for this book.

01:27:10.860 Oh, thank God it's over.

01:27:11.760 Is entirely about reactions to October 7th.

01:27:15.520 Oh, man.

01:27:16.340 He talks about the like cancel culture elements on the right

01:27:19.940 where you have things like Canary Mission

01:27:22.260 where like activists just get doxxed

01:27:24.500 and people are coordinating to prevent them

01:27:28.300 from being employed.

01:27:29.120 To be sure, everything I've described in my book

01:27:31.360 is worse on the right.

01:27:32.760 And yet I've written a book about this.

01:27:34.880 Great.

01:27:35.240 Right.

01:27:35.420 Cancel Culture on the right is like this coordinated money operation, you know?

01:27:39.400 It's like led by the richest people in the world.

01:27:41.480 It's like, but still.

01:27:42.500 I'm going to send you what I think is his final thesis statement in the book.

01:27:46.780 I've never wanted an episode to end so badly.

01:27:49.800 I've had two cold booze and a Celsius while we were doing this.

01:27:52.640 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:27:52.800 And I'm still sort of wiped out.

01:27:54.920 He says, a remarkable and increasing number of Americans believe themselves not only justified

01:27:59.780 but entitled to resolve political disagreements by force if they sense themselves at an impasse.

01:28:05.660 Genuine liberals, as well as their moderate and center-right partners, have no choice but to

01:28:09.980 reclaim the abandoned moral high ground. He's claiming the moral high ground by saying like

01:28:14.540 you're bad for protesting a genocide. We must identify and disown the means of extremism,

01:28:20.240 even when they manifest themselves in pursuit of ends we may agree with. That is the most basic

01:28:25.260 prerequisite for democracy. Yeah, this is what I was saying earlier. He wants a nonstop sister

01:28:30.300 soldier moment. Yes. Every democratic leader just constantly complaining about whatever people are

01:28:35.000 talking about on Twitter. Right. We must speak less about Kendra and her psychiatrist. I denounce

01:28:38.880 the left for doing this. This is what he wants. It's electoral fucking suicide. And it's also

01:28:43.380 stupid on the merits. I stand with Kendra. Yeah, I don't think there's much to it. I just wanted to, 1.00

01:28:48.580 you know, share the final statement. I think it's just the same shit over and over again. 1.00

01:28:53.520 The extent to which these people have completely failed to read the political moment in the 1.00

01:28:57.760 last five years is just so profound.

01:28:59.520 Yeah. 0.99

01:28:59.720 And the fact that they're still fucking lecturing us on the same shit when like, shouldn't you 0.99

01:29:03.120 have seen this coming? 0.99

01:29:04.380 You're a free speech person.

01:29:05.340 That's your beat.

01:29:05.940 Free speech.

01:29:06.440 Look at what is happening now.

01:29:07.520 It's so embarrassing.

01:29:09.140 I'm going to send you a couple of terrible sentences.

01:29:11.800 You can cut this, but it's just funny.

01:29:14.140 I want to reiterate that the torture that I've been put through, I'm going to give you

01:29:20.160 no context because it's irrelevant.

01:29:21.660 Here we go.

01:29:21.860 Okay.

01:29:22.020 The norms, rules, and behavioral guardrails, those informal structures that had been put to stress in the past, but in holding up, had also been mistaken for formal truths, came crashing down around us with the swiftness of a new Copernican revolution, decimating an entire political, cultural, social, and intellectual cosmos in the process.

01:29:44.680 He's so happy about his little cosmos Copernican thing.

01:29:48.640 It's like, it's a coherent metaphor, but it's not a coherent sentence.

01:29:51.020 It's not a coherent sentence.

01:29:52.300 There's, why the lists?

01:29:54.260 Why the lists in the middle of a sentence?

01:29:56.500 Also, he says the swiftness of a new Copernican revolution.

01:30:00.320 That took like 400 years.

01:30:01.800 It was like literally centuries, dude.

01:30:04.940 It was centuries.

01:30:06.180 Yeah.

01:30:06.760 And here's the last one, I promise.

01:30:08.820 Even though I have so many more, it would shock you.

01:30:12.360 We were living in a techno-dystopian fantasy.

01:30:14.540 The internet-connected portals we'd come to rely on rendered the world in all its granular

01:30:18.620 detail and absurdity.

01:30:19.840 Like Borges' Aleph, yet we scarcely knew a thing about what it was we were viewing.

01:30:25.720 You just wanted me to say Borges wrong, Borges.

01:30:28.040 I'm just like his references are so forced and painful.

01:30:33.800 But also what is he even saying here?

01:30:34.820 We were living in a techno dystopian fantasy, but we scarcely knew what we were viewing.

01:30:38.840 I guess what he's saying is like we see things out of context on social media.

01:30:42.420 That's all he's saying.

01:30:43.320 That's all he's saying.

01:30:44.320 And that's what's so crazy about these sentences.

01:30:45.840 Just cite like an actual person who's like an expert in this, not some Borges

01:30:49.680 reference he really thinks that these like digressions in every sentence and these like

01:30:55.160 overwrought forced metaphors like are useful to your understanding and it's like no no i think i

01:31:01.800 told you this i think i like texted you this at some point during the past week when i was doing

01:31:05.240 this but like when thomas chatterton williams goes to hell he's just going to be made to read

01:31:11.340 hemingway he's just like a professor an english professor standing above him for all of eternity

01:31:16.360 being like you can see how this is better right and also peter at the end of your life when you

01:31:19.800 go to hell you're gonna have to read thomas chatterton williams for the rest of it

If Books Could Kill - September 11, 2025

Thomas Chatterton Williams' ＂Summer of Our Discontent＂

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