In Bed With The Right - Episode 50： The Second Annual Cursties, Part II

00:00:00.000 We have no choice but to play video games.

00:00:02.580 You know what?

00:00:03.220 You were mean to me, and now I just sit at home and play video games. 1.00

00:00:06.420 Wow, why would the feminists do this to me? 1.00

00:00:14.140 Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb. 1.00

00:00:15.940 And I'm Weber Donigan.

00:00:17.100 And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

00:00:21.860 So, Adrienne, this is the second half of our very special, only once a year, or I guess now twice a year.

00:00:30.000 curse discourse award ceremony the kirsties with our special guest michael hobbs whether you like

00:00:37.060 it or not here's another hour and a half of this look we do edit these like there's more there are

00:00:42.880 outtakes if you can believe it there's stuff that we remove yeah oh yeah but on the other hand it

00:00:48.700 was a fucking banner year for curse discourses around gender and sexuality if our friends on 0.98

00:00:53.440 the right stop supplying this bullshit we can do like a quick 15 minute thing okay that's all right 0.99

00:00:58.660 it's not great but it's all right this was not that year 2024 is not that year and you know if 0.92

00:01:02.640 i were a betting man i'd say 2025 not looking great i'm clearing the sketch for the entire 0.86

00:01:07.560 month of december to just record like a live curses like get a load of this shit me with 0.91

00:01:13.760 my head in my hands like haven't eaten in days yeah just like playing insta clips to each other

00:01:19.480 So on that note, welcome to part two of the 2024 Kirsties.

00:01:29.200 We hope you have as much, I guess the word is fun.

00:01:32.660 Yeah.

00:01:33.080 As we did.

00:01:34.240 Enjoy.

00:01:38.920 So what is your take number two?

00:01:41.000 My take number two might be bringing us into more officially serious territory, for which I apologize.

00:01:48.560 Oh, no. 1.00

00:01:48.900 My take number two is feminists are why Trump won. 1.00

00:01:55.240 Wait, where was this? 1.00

00:01:56.700 Oh, it was everywhere.

00:01:58.260 I didn't see this.

00:01:59.140 Oh, I thought you meant this was like a specific piece.

00:02:01.080 This is like a discourse.

00:02:02.380 This is a discourse.

00:02:03.240 I do have specific examples because I come with receipts, Michael.

00:02:06.340 OK, good, good, good.

00:02:07.480 But this is like an emerging consensus among like reactionary centrists, you know, your

00:02:13.920 like New York Times op-ed kind of regulars,

00:02:16.840 but then also like kind of red-brown alliance types, right?

00:02:21.300 Like people who went from being really gung-ho for Bernie in 2016

00:02:25.620 and who are now sort of like Trump-y.

00:02:28.040 I think Moira Donegan's haircut is the reason why Trump won.

00:02:31.560 I think that's actually...

00:02:32.580 I look great with this haircut.

00:02:33.680 Not that you can see me.

00:02:34.260 You do.

00:02:36.280 Looks like woke is over. 1.00

00:02:39.860 But this idea of like feminism's popular visibility 1.00

00:02:43.260 was excessive, it was wrongheaded, and then it victimized young men, leading them to embrace

00:02:50.680 Trump, right? So this is from right after the election, my take of the year, from a gentleman

00:02:56.360 named Li Fang. Do you guys know who Li Fang is? Yeah, that's one of those like post-left,

00:03:02.700 I do not support Donald Trump, even though every single thing that I say and write is in support

00:03:06.700 of improving his popularity. It is the Glenn Greenwald sector, which is getting very crowded.

00:03:13.260 I'm totally not a fascist.

00:03:15.520 It's just that everything I do and say supports that part of the political spectrum. 0.97

00:03:20.320 It's so fucked up that, like, in the way that Inuits have 19 words for snow, we need 19 words for people who say they're on the left but in fact are not. 0.95

00:03:27.600 There's so many different flavors of this. 0.99

00:03:30.280 Yeah.

00:03:30.520 There's, like, the Barry Weiss ones.

00:03:32.140 There's, like, the Intercept ones. 0.95

00:03:34.000 The Senk Uyghur guys. 0.96

00:03:35.660 Yeah.

00:03:36.200 Bernie Sanders, press secretary.

00:03:37.900 Oh, Breonna Joy Gray.

00:03:38.740 Breonna Joy Gray.

00:03:39.880 Yeah.

00:03:40.040 I kept calling her Greyjoy in my head, but that's from Game of Thrones.

00:03:43.420 That's Game of Thrones.

00:03:44.560 Yeah, yeah.

00:03:45.780 Okay, but this is Lee Fang, who I think is a former Intercept guy.

00:03:49.260 I might have that wrong.

00:03:50.060 Yeah, yeah, he's an Intercept guy.

00:03:51.120 So he tweets on November 7th, imagine being an 18-year-old young male voter.

00:03:57.360 When you were 11, the Me Too movement launched and men across the board like you were deemed oppressors.

00:04:03.900 When you were starting high school, liberal politicians closed your school and forced you to take classes online.

00:04:09.700 The women around you don't seem like victims. They are going to college at way higher rates, earning far more than men in many professional white collar jobs and are way less likely to be addicted to drugs and as lonely as most of the guys you know.

00:04:23.740 Your peer group of other young men play video games and enjoy memes, mocking the dominant, suffocating, woke culture across all the major entertainment and academic institutions.

00:04:35.360 How is voting for the establishment Democrat who already avoided any voting process or scrutiny for her nomination in any way appealing?

00:04:43.500 So this is this logic that women are doing better than men are on empirical grounds, right?

00:04:49.540 This is something you see in a lot of these discourses that is like empirically untrue that has to get laundered into making sense.

00:04:58.700 So right after the election, the New York Times ran a big piece with a bunch of charts trying to show how women are like earning more money than men are.

00:05:08.740 And their big comparison was between women with a college degree who on average earn a little bit more than men without one.

00:05:15.400 And they make it look like they're sharing apples and apples. Right. But that's apples and oranges. Right. With and without. It's like you're not actually showing the comparison between men without a college degree and women without a college degree.

00:05:29.340 Yeah. Because those women earn less than the men do. And that wouldn't prove your point. Right. You're also not showing women with a college degree versus men with a college degree because those men, once again, earn more than the women do. Right. And that wouldn't prove your point either. Right. 0.97

00:05:42.940 The point you're trying to make is that this is a disparity of gender when actually it's a disparity of class.

00:05:47.420 And that's like a very common logic.

00:05:50.640 It also tries to justify men's radicalization into like a politicized misogyny, which I do think has happened around Trump using the 2024 Trump campaign as a vehicle.

00:06:03.020 Right. But that's mostly like right wing propaganda.

00:06:04.940 It's like you're under attack from me, too.

00:06:06.780 You're under attack from the covid restrictions.

00:06:09.100 None of this had to be about, like, left-wing overreach or, like, this whole thing of, like, they came for Harvey Weinstein and you're next is just, like, amazing to me. 0.98

00:06:16.960 It's, like, if you two also raped 80 women, yes. 0.95

00:06:20.020 Yeah, if we – first we came for the, like, extremely explicit sexual predators and you, an 11-year-old boy. 0.99

00:06:26.920 Exactly, yeah. 0.76

00:06:27.680 They can come for you, too.

00:06:28.680 It's just, like, if people are drawing that link – and I think people are, honestly.

00:06:32.700 Oh, yeah. 0.98

00:06:32.840 That's mostly due to manosphere toxic garbage. 0.99

00:06:35.780 They're, like, ooh, they came for him and they'll come for you. 0.99

00:06:37.600 But it's not like there was some, like, misunderstanding, and that's why Harvey Weinstein was accused by all these women.

00:06:42.160 Like, he did all the stuff.

00:06:44.040 So it's just a really weird case to hang all of this on, even though people have done it anyway.

00:06:49.060 The idea that, like, an 11-year-old boy would look at Harvey Weinstein and say, that guy is just like me.

00:06:55.760 It imagines such a weird vision of childhood.

00:06:59.420 Yeah, completely.

00:07:00.340 I don't know.

00:07:01.040 I was not looking at the executives and being like, yeah, I share a lot of interests with these people.

00:07:05.960 Not in the seventh grade.

00:07:07.600 I was more interested in like my homework and I frankly wasn't even paying much attention to the news. 0.51

00:07:15.140 But the logic is that like men's radicalization is always a symptom of a way in which they have been victimized that is legitimate. 0.86

00:07:24.780 Right. So like men, men can never fail. They can only be failed.

00:07:28.220 Right. But also it's taking the feminist grievance and casting that as illegitimate and overblown at the same time. 1.00

00:07:36.340 Right. Right. So women can never respond in kind to men's misogynist radicalization. If men are incels, if they're MRAs, if they're Trump voters, you as a woman are a at fault and be now obligated to like abandon your own pursuit of rights and dignity in the public sphere in order to like heal their hurt feelings over your success. 1.00

00:07:59.540 we have no choice but to play video games right you know what you mean to me and now i just sit 1.00

00:08:05.040 at home and play video games wow why would the feminists do this to me like i saw a 19 year old 1.00

00:08:10.800 on tiktok say men are trash once and now i am a loser it's skyrim in mom's basement until i get 0.97

00:08:20.100 to vote for trump yeah yeah i also love the fact that all of these guys who are like anti-woke 0.99

00:08:24.880 everything become the fucking cartoon version of a diversity consultant the minute it's like 0.99

00:08:30.820 whites or men who they think are oppressed right so it's like okay lower average incomes for black 0.99

00:08:35.700 people black people have lower iqs and they're inferior right lower average incomes for men 0.96

00:08:40.600 we really need to help men get a leg up we really need to have some affirmative action in the 0.99

00:08:43.960 colleges doesn't this indicate some structural discrimination on the part of men it's like 0.99

00:08:47.460 they believe in microaggressions they believe in all the shit that they complain about they 1.00

00:08:52.360 believe in fucking trigger warnings they believe in everything as soon as they perceive white 0.99

00:08:56.700 people or men to be the victims they don't actually have an argument about any of this stuff i mean 1.00

00:09:00.980 their argument is for male supremacy right their argument is that men are valid political subjects

00:09:06.520 and that women are not right yeah you took this from us and we want it back yeah anything that

00:09:10.940 makes men sad is a national emergency demanding collective action and anything that makes women

00:09:15.740 sad is something that they need to put up with for the common good it's also weird the way that

00:09:20.380 But like, I mean, he's making a point about a type of voter.

00:09:23.340 So I get that.

00:09:24.020 But on the other hand, like it does sort of fold COVID into a gendered thing.

00:09:28.020 Yeah, it's weird. 0.91

00:09:28.780 You were over cradled kind of by these liberal politicians.

00:09:31.720 First of the first lockdowns, sure, were done locally.

00:09:34.980 But like in the end, like that was under a Republican administration.

00:09:37.600 Like it's funny.

00:09:39.300 There has been a kind of ex post facto feminization of COVID policies that I think is probably due to the fact that a lot of the truly deranged anti-vax

00:09:49.940 and anti kind of COVID measure activism

00:09:53.220 did merge with the manosphere, right?

00:09:55.540 So it's people who had happened to hold

00:09:56.940 both of those beliefs, it seems to me.

00:09:58.820 But it is striking that that's in the list here.

00:10:01.480 Because it wasn't a, like COVID restrictions

00:10:03.060 weren't particularly like on feminist grounds.

00:10:05.200 It wasn't like a gender equality argument. 0.98

00:10:07.740 That's just kind of tangential.

00:10:09.220 No.

00:10:09.960 He's just like throwing a bunch of random grievances in there. 1.00

00:10:12.040 If anything, post-COVID feminists have been paying attention 1.00

00:10:14.880 to the way there's the lockdown, like overburden, 1.00

00:10:16.980 particularly working mothers, right? 0.65

00:10:18.500 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:10:19.060 A lot of agitation to reopen the schools was from mothers, right?

00:10:24.700 But I think what might have happened is that the guy Li Feng is imagining, and for all

00:10:29.180 I know, maybe Li Feng is himself, they live with their moms.

00:10:32.380 They live with their moms.

00:10:33.700 And being in lockdown meant they had to spend a lot of time at home with mom.

00:10:38.640 And it was mom telling them, you know, don't forget to take a mask, you know, like, don't

00:10:43.000 forget to wash your hands.

00:10:44.360 Like, we're going to get you tested. 1.00

00:10:45.840 like that kind of public health like atomization down into the family home became women's

00:10:52.160 responsibility right right and that sort of day-to-day encounter with covid precautions 0.65

00:10:58.080 was probably something that they experienced uh like being pushed on them by women because

00:11:02.580 they're not responsible enough to test themselves or to wear a mask at the height of those lockdowns

00:11:08.400 you know that's a good point wait this is kind of similar to my next one yay this was the year of

00:11:13.840 like everything being cast as like activists are doing it wrong like there's no social issue that

00:11:18.840 you can just talk about like climate change is really bad you guys it has to be like here's how 0.76

00:11:22.520 climate activists are fucking up right yeah don't use these words don't use this tactic there's no

00:11:27.840 way to talk about an issue without somehow blaming the left for it so mine is like kind of went under 0.99

00:11:32.780 the radar but it was in the new york times uh it was november 10th a sex strike is a losing strategy 1.00

00:11:39.640 for American women. 1.00

00:11:40.880 Oh, yeah.

00:11:41.920 The opening paragraphs are,

00:11:44.000 No dating men, no sex with men,

00:11:45.720 no heterosexual marriage, 0.86

00:11:46.840 and no childbirth. 1.00

00:11:47.980 These are the four principles 0.99

00:11:49.140 of South Korea's 4B movement, 0.56

00:11:50.960 a radical feminist movement

00:11:52.060 that gained popularity in 2019

00:11:53.640 in response to sexism,

00:11:55.380 hidden camera pornography,

00:11:56.520 and intimate partner violence. 0.61

00:11:58.360 After Donald Trump's victory, 0.98

00:11:59.780 some American women

00:12:00.660 have sought out the movement, 1.00

00:12:02.040 but it would be a mistake 1.00

00:12:03.220 for women in the United States 1.00

00:12:04.680 to adopt its principles, 0.96

00:12:06.140 which risk alienating those

00:12:07.520 who would be our allies

00:12:08.700 while ensuring little actually changes about our reality.

00:12:12.580 So don't do this.

00:12:13.900 But then what drives me nuts 0.98

00:12:15.140 and what drives me nuts about all these fucking takes 0.98

00:12:16.720 is there's no evidence that this was catching on 0.99

00:12:18.880 in America in any way.

00:12:21.300 This is the only evidence in this article

00:12:22.920 just links to other New York Times articles 0.53

00:12:25.240 about like women are doing this thing.

00:12:27.420 Wait, whose article is this, may I ask? 1.00

00:12:29.640 Oh, uh, Cammie Reek.

00:12:31.460 I've never heard of her. 0.60

00:12:32.020 She's an editor.

00:12:33.080 So this piece links to a New York Times article

00:12:35.980 from a couple of days previously

00:12:36.980 called after the election a call for women to swear off men.

00:12:41.640 You have to get through, like, some anecdotes and some discourse and stuff.

00:12:45.000 You finally have, like, the evidence that this is catching on.

00:12:48.120 It says, searches for the 4B movement in the United States spiked the day after the election,

00:12:53.040 according to Google Trends.

00:12:54.760 Dozens of videos on the topic have popped up on TikTok in the last 48 hours,

00:12:59.480 with users sharing why they are for or against the movement's gaining steam in the United States.

00:13:04.700 and then the only like one of the links in here like things are popping up on tiktok the only

00:13:09.160 actual link to a specific tiktok has 7 000 likes and that's after this is like i checked it the

00:13:15.140 other day this is after being linked in the new york times right so this would have had significantly 0.79

00:13:19.380 fewer likes when this appeared in this article yeah so i could find other than some fucking 1.00

00:13:24.420 like articles about it i could find no evidence whatsoever other than like 10 tiktoks that women 0.74

00:13:30.400 on mass were joining a sex strike or doing this so it's like we're we're scolding activists that

00:13:35.220 we literally just made up yeah and being totally indifferent to whether or not like sorry are

00:13:39.920 people doing this is this something that's actually resonating with people just like

00:13:42.840 whatever yada yada let's skip past that anyway this is a bad idea yeah like it seems like most

00:13:48.500 people in the country think it's a bad idea and didn't do it yes i saw one take from actually 0.59

00:13:53.460 like a sex radical feminist who was like if you think 4b is a good idea and you're an american

00:14:00.380 it's because you are in favor of eugenics against the asian population and you don't want them to

00:14:08.180 be breeding and i'm like okay i mean i feel like this this relates a little to like my last one

00:14:14.280 and that the idea that women have a obligation to use sexuality for purposes of like positive

00:14:23.500 social engineering or like pro-social as like you have to fix men you have to fix our broken 1.00

00:14:32.140 american society yeah fuck a republican in order to restore the republic and you have to do it 1.00

00:14:36.700 with your vagina ladies like it has to be this way right sexual access cannot uh legitimately 1.00

00:14:43.320 be revoked right and and even the mere idea like prompts this massive panic and backlash even 0.99

00:14:50.640 though i think you're right michael i don't think this was really very much of a thing yeah and i

00:14:55.300 read other pieces that link they're like people are posting about this on tiktok and they click

00:14:58.440 on the tiktoks and the tiktoks were obvious jokes so one person was like let's all go out and get a

00:15:03.220 hysterectomy to like stick it to the men which was like obviously facetious so it's like okay you're

00:15:07.740 you're conflating people promoting this movement and people mocking this movement because you can't

00:15:11.740 find any actual evidence that this is going anywhere and of course like you can't imagine

00:15:17.160 a New York Times op-ed piece being like,

00:15:19.120 hey, men shouldn't vote for Donald Trump.

00:15:20.960 Don't do that.

00:15:21.800 It doesn't, you know, 1.00

00:15:22.400 you should care about the women in your life. 0.99

00:15:23.520 It's really bad for them.

00:15:24.240 It's also, he's not really going to protect

00:15:25.400 men's interests anyway.

00:15:26.980 But it's like somehow we can just issue these calls

00:15:29.700 to activists, like activists, don't do this.

00:15:32.420 Can you imagine a piece that's like men have to like

00:15:34.880 be nicer to their wives?

00:15:37.700 They have to like do more of the housework at home. 1.00

00:15:39.760 They have to like take her to a nice dinner.

00:15:41.620 You know, like any of these calls

00:15:43.240 for like emotional investment

00:15:44.780 and like romantic and sexual attention 1.00

00:15:46.400 to fluff up the egos of women,

00:15:48.720 it's never going to happen, 0.99

00:15:50.220 in part because that would make you gay. 1.00

00:15:54.080 Nice. 0.99

00:15:54.980 But it's also this kind of way,

00:15:56.680 I mean, this is where the New York Times

00:15:57.880 sort of starts seeding the discourse

00:16:01.360 for like future constructions of reactivity, right?

00:16:05.200 Like, wasn't it the left-wing excesses

00:16:07.780 after the 2024 election

00:16:09.840 that really brought about the, you know,

00:16:12.640 the calamitous policies

00:16:14.560 of the Trump administrations

00:16:15.900 about reproductive rights.

00:16:17.240 This is going to show up

00:16:18.120 in articles for years 1.00

00:16:19.100 of like if women hadn't joined

00:16:20.520 the 4B movement 1.00

00:16:21.480 after the election,

00:16:22.600 blah, blah, blah.

00:16:23.160 Like these things

00:16:23.880 just become canonical

00:16:24.820 without anybody.

00:16:25.700 On our college campuses.

00:16:26.940 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:16:28.080 Also, I think

00:16:28.780 if people don't want

00:16:30.140 to date Trump voters,

00:16:31.640 that's not really an issue

00:16:32.500 of public importance.

00:16:33.280 And if they don't want 1.00

00:16:33.660 to fuck people. 1.00

00:16:34.460 Yeah, if you want to date 1.00

00:16:35.460 or not date anyone

00:16:36.340 for any reason, 0.99

00:16:37.100 have a fucking blast. 0.98

00:16:38.120 I mean, I think the idea, 0.99

00:16:40.100 again, it's like

00:16:40.920 they're casting the people,

00:16:42.840 like the echo chambers thing.

00:16:44.140 It's like the people

00:16:44.960 leaving the platform 0.99

00:16:45.820 are the problem the people not wanting to fuck trump voters are the problem it's like well maybe 0.98

00:16:50.000 an entire movement based on like very open misogyny that's not a thing you want to write 0.97

00:16:54.840 an article about the article is about people who are like hey i just don't want to date this

00:16:57.800 category of people due to their behavior not due to their like demographic or variables that they

00:17:03.060 can't control it's like yeah you chose to take an action and i don't want to date people that

00:17:06.780 have taken this action i don't know why and honestly and then of an entire gender is like

00:17:10.640 Like, go within yourself, my brother.

00:17:15.480 Reflect on why that might be, right? 0.97

00:17:17.580 Like, I've met some real shitty men over the years who had girlfriends. 0.96

00:17:22.240 Like, they managed. 0.98

00:17:23.140 But, like, I think the principle being upheld is that men have, like, a foundational entitlement to sexual access to women, right? 0.98

00:17:29.460 And that it's unfair and excessive of women to be like, actually, I am an adult with freedom of association and I don't have to, you know, like provide pussy to anybody by virtue of the fact that he is a man, you know? 0.93

00:17:43.820 I mean, I don't want to go super dark here at the end. Like, I do wonder, like, because I, you know, Michael and I have both been spending a lot of time in the moral panic minds and like moral panics can be about totally non-real things and then spawn perfectly real sort of legislative consequences. 0.78

00:18:00.700 And it is hard to sort of think like, oh, shit, would a 4B panic possibly get us even closer to kind of a handmaid's tale kind of thing where entitlement to women's bodies is codified into law? 0.99

00:18:13.700 And like that is that's fucking grim, man. 0.99

00:18:16.400 Yeah, there's there's been some flirting with this over the years. 0.97

00:18:18.560 Some of the like fixes for incels or whatever.

00:18:21.380 Yes. 1.00

00:18:21.660 They need a socialist distribution of girlfriends. 1.00

00:18:24.400 Yeah.

00:18:24.620 It's just weird discourse around it. 0.99

00:18:26.160 I mean, if you look at, like, rape law, it's really not a litigation of, like, when do men have a presumptive right to, like, fuck women? 0.76

00:18:32.320 It's, like, when do women have a presumptive right to say no?

00:18:35.200 And that is actually a very narrowly defined set of legal circumstances. 0.99

00:18:39.560 Like, you actually do not get to, like, refuse access to your pussy in as many situations as you would think if you have one. 0.99

00:18:46.760 I think the presumption of male sexual entitlement is already codified into a lot of our law. 0.99

00:18:52.240 Not to, like, go, like, full Kitty McKinnon with a skunk streak in my hair, like, on you guys, like, so early in the morning.

00:18:59.640 But, like, it's already kind of there. 1.00

00:19:01.800 I just think the most important thing to stress is that women deciding not to fuck Trump voters is exactly like white flight. 0.99

00:19:07.280 Isn't it the same as people who left cities due to demographics they don't like? 0.99

00:19:11.860 I think it's the same thing.

00:19:12.680 Judging people on their beliefs and actions.

00:19:14.580 Isn't that the same as judging people on their demographic traits?

00:19:17.020 It's not the new racism.

00:19:18.020 Yeah.

00:19:18.540 Yeah.

00:19:19.500 So should I go for my number three?

00:19:21.020 Yeah, do it. 0.51

00:19:21.640 Yeah, do it.

00:19:21.960 All right.

00:19:22.240 So I've decided to go nuclear on this one.

00:19:25.380 It's specific, but I think it says a lot about what went wrong this year, to my mind, in the discourse.

00:19:32.720 So I'll take you to Berlin, a place that Michael, I know, has spent much time in, at the new National Gallery.

00:19:38.100 Can you picture that, Michael?

00:19:38.980 It's the sort of the modern building.

00:19:40.780 Yeah, with the hat.

00:19:41.080 Looks like a baseball hat.

00:19:42.020 Yeah, yeah.

00:19:42.600 And late November 2024, and the photographer Nan Golden gave a speech to inaugurate a new exhibition of her work.

00:19:48.940 And she used that speech to call out, you know, Israel's actions in Gaza and the German government's complicity in them, and especially the German government's sort of actions in silencing voices that had called for boycott and divestment.

00:20:05.160 Here's an article about this.

00:20:06.680 I'm going to translate from the German.

00:20:08.620 So this is a person who's there and seems horrified by Nan Golden's speech and says,

00:20:14.460 these people, among them many who think of themselves as queer and arty, are a kind of

00:20:19.560 sect who wants to talk to no one and whose members no longer want to engage in any kind 0.71

00:20:24.500 of discourse. And the thing I want to drill down on here is the queer part. What the fuck 0.99

00:20:31.520 is the word queer doing there? 1.00

00:20:32.540 Yeah, there's been a lot of garbage with like, oh, you'd rather be gay in Gaza or something. 1.00

00:20:36.660 And it's like, even if people are homophobic, I don't want to kill them in the tens of thousands. 1.00

00:20:41.120 It's just like a completely irrelevant fucking argument. 0.99

00:20:43.520 So my number three, and this is what I'm leading up to, right? People very vividly imagining death for queer people in order to make a point about Gaza is my most cursed discourse of 2024. 0.98

00:20:54.200 It's been so fucking annoying. 0.99

00:20:55.420 And this is, you know, you get this from Israeli politicians. You get this from European politicians. This person who wrote this article, I know this guy. I'm not going to name him on the pod, but I know this guy. 0.98

00:21:05.240 Like, you know, these are supposed left-wingers casually sort of being like, oh, isn't it weird that queer people are like pro-Palestinian?

00:21:12.600 And it's like, is it really?

00:21:14.260 And then you very quickly get to a kind of punitive discourse, right?

00:21:18.100 Like you're delusional, right?

00:21:19.960 Like, do you know what would happen to you in Gaza?

00:21:22.120 And as you say, Michael, the logic of it just isn't clear to me. 0.99

00:21:25.880 I am sure that Sudan would be a bad place for me to be a gay man. 0.96

00:21:30.280 I do not think that we should fire rockets into Sudan tomorrow, right? 0.95

00:21:33.740 I think large portions of Alabama would be very homophobic to me. 0.92

00:21:36.680 I also think it's wrong to kill tens of thousands of people and starved children in Alabama. 0.80

00:21:40.680 I mean, I don't even accept the premise that everyone in Gaza is homophobic.

00:21:43.680 But even if we did accept the premise, it's so wrong to kill tens of thousands of people, many of them children.

00:21:48.620 So what are we even doing here?

00:21:50.600 There are so many people who don't like me personally that if I was going to advocate for bombing them all, you know, like it would just be – it would be a lot.

00:22:00.360 It would take out a lot of the population, I think. 0.98

00:22:03.740 Also, Moira were such fucking normies for only bringing articles in one language. 0.96

00:22:07.980 It's such a flex to be like, oh, I'm translating this from the German. 0.98

00:22:11.820 Actually, this is from my Esperanto friends who speak the nine languages that I speak.

00:22:16.480 But it did really kind of transcend borders.

00:22:19.380 This was really kind of this international thing.

00:22:21.100 It flitted around, right?

00:22:23.000 Like every time someone had to sign Queers for Palestine at any of the campus encampments or any of the marches or whatever, like you'd get these kinds of comments.

00:22:31.360 It shows up in the Atlantic immediately.

00:22:33.260 Yeah, exactly. And then it also sort of went kind of viral on social media.

00:22:37.480 And we're going to stay kind of in Berlin with a man that Michael and I have thought a little bit about this year.

00:22:44.280 Because I know I texted you about him. What is the fucking deal with Daniel Ryan Spaulding? 0.97

00:22:48.140 Oh, this. 1.00

00:22:49.420 Wait, is this one of these creatures? Because every now and then, Adrian, you bring me a little tidbit from the gay internet. 1.00

00:22:56.560 And it's like you're handing me a pearl and I've just like never encountered it before. 0.94

00:23:00.280 So my impression is that Daniel Ryan Spaulding is not part of the gay internet. 1.00

00:23:03.700 I hope not. 0.94

00:23:04.640 I think he performs gay for a straight audience. 1.00

00:23:08.720 I get so sad watching any of his videos.

00:23:11.380 I get so sad.

00:23:12.040 So maybe we'll walk you through him real quickly, Moira, because I think he's mostly an Instagram phenomenon.

00:23:17.880 And he was known for these kind of little skits about being a power gay, which I never understood what that was.

00:23:24.680 Yeah, what is a power gay?

00:23:26.320 He's an American or a Canadian living in Berlin. 0.93

00:23:28.600 Yeah. 0.52

00:23:28.800 And he would do these skits of like, I'm a power gay, so I'm at the rooftop pool of this hotel or something, but in a sort of like, power gays do it like this and other people do it like that. 0.56

00:23:38.740 I moved to the USA to pursue my American dream of being a power gay in New York City and I made it happen. 0.99

00:23:46.560 I lost over 200 pounds and now I'm a skinny bitch who doesn't take shit from anybody. 0.99

00:23:51.900 Power gays lift weights together, but I just run because muscles are for boyfriends. 0.99

00:23:57.540 We escaped to Fire Island because we don't like being around straight people. 1.00

00:24:02.700 I don't think they were ever very good or funny.

00:24:05.040 Well, and it always simmered in a certain kind of resentment.

00:24:08.320 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:24:09.300 You kind of were supposed to find it cute, and at times you were supposed to make fun of it.

00:24:13.840 Yeah.

00:24:14.200 Anyway, and then October 7th happens, and Daniel Ryan Spaulding, who had had, as our friend Bernstein documented,

00:24:21.240 a very interesting kind of fixation

00:24:25.180 on hot Israelis throughout.

00:24:28.700 I forgot that's how it started, yeah.

00:24:30.440 Well, not so much pro-Israel content, I should say,

00:24:33.320 but anti-critics of Israel content, right?

00:24:36.460 It's really about the left

00:24:37.740 and about how they're anti-Semites, et cetera, et cetera.

00:24:40.180 So that becomes sort of his new bailiwick

00:24:42.260 to the point that he introduces a new character 1.00

00:24:44.420 who is somehow even less funny than the power gay, 1.00

00:24:47.140 I gotta tell you. 1.00

00:24:47.820 I mean, it's so hard to watch.

00:24:49.780 The purple haired girl, I guess is her name. 1.00

00:24:52.800 He got like a cheap wig somewhere and he does like a literal purple haired feminist with this awful voice. 0.96

00:24:57.840 And it's not funny. 0.84

00:24:59.460 I just watched a very disturbing clip from Eye on Palestine.

00:25:04.400 Annie Lennox and Rosie O'Donnell have both shared it. 1.00

00:25:08.200 So it must be true.

00:25:10.240 Hi, I'm Mr. Daniel and this is my friend, the purple haired girl. 0.64

00:25:13.880 She's not a bad person, but she's been radicalized to become a raging Jew hater.

00:25:18.800 and we want to help her what's happening in the video purple hair girl human rights abuses by the

00:25:25.640 idf interesting i can only last like 15 seconds into the videos because they're just so cringe

00:25:31.760 it's so cringe and it's also just so like kind of ugly it's the same thing that we were talking

00:25:37.800 about earlier of like all he can do is criticize activists like look how dumb the activists are 0.94

00:25:41.920 look how annoying the activists are while never addressing anything on the merits like is it okay 0.94

00:25:45.360 to kill tens of thousands of people?

00:25:47.520 Let's put that aside. 0.95

00:25:48.880 Yeah.

00:25:49.120 Some of the protesters are really annoying.

00:25:50.620 It's like, that's what we should be focusing on.

00:25:52.200 Do you remember that fall semester 2023

00:25:54.620 when we spent every weekend 0.82

00:25:56.560 calling for the annihilation of the Jewish state? 1.00

00:25:59.460 Good times from the river to the sea. 1.00

00:26:03.020 And remember all the Jews were like, 1.00

00:26:04.800 hey, that's calling for our genocide. 1.00

00:26:06.620 And we were like, fuck off. 1.00

00:26:08.520 Rashida said it was fine. 1.00

00:26:10.440 If I'm not mistaken, I do not follow him.

00:26:12.440 But my impression is that he ended up

00:26:13.700 in a pretty Trumpy position

00:26:15.000 in the end. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And also, he's not Jewish. Yeah, that's important. He's sort of

00:26:19.660 like semi-implying that he's Jewish at various times. He goes to Israel at one point. It's a

00:26:24.080 sort of like he's like sticking up for Jewish people, but he's not Jewish. He's just like this 0.99

00:26:28.600 random guy who says like fucked up things about feminists. And then I'm also stealing this point 0.99

00:26:32.820 from Matt, but it's like by the end, he's kind of he's repeating like right wing talking points

00:26:37.300 about gay people. He's basically recreating all of the deranged shit that MAGA people say about 0.99

00:26:43.000 gays but he's saying it about like feminists so he's like he's joining this like virulently 1.00

00:26:47.180 anti-gay movement on behalf of jews which he's not a jewish the whole thing is just so fucking 0.98

00:26:52.880 weird so you're like he was so opposed to this supposed palestinian homophobia that he like 0.80

00:27:00.720 owned them into adopting his own position of homophobia right yeah i mean it's also what

00:27:06.220 like barry weiss is doing like barry weiss allegedly dedicated her career to fighting

00:27:10.200 anti-Semitism and she's joined the right, which is openly anti-Semitic. Like owning the left is

00:27:17.020 more important to any of these people than like their actual values or even looking at the conflict

00:27:21.480 holistically and being like, which side of this do I want to be on? Yeah. So, and I realize it's

00:27:26.160 not really the point here, but I did then get kind of interested because he keeps going on and on

00:27:30.600 and people like that keep going on and on about what happens to gay people in Gaza. And I was like,

00:27:34.300 this is something that must be documented, right? And, you know, obviously Gaza is probably not a

00:27:39.100 great place to be lgbt but it's also not a great place to be anything right around now but it's

00:27:43.600 very noticeable how much fake news there is around this stuff which is not to say again like it's not

00:27:48.860 to say that there isn't brutal repression right i'm not going to say hamas is like somehow great

00:27:53.320 on lgbt issues or any other issues to be very very clear but right so there was a famous image that

00:27:58.500 people kept circulating of a gay man being thrown from a roof which sort of came up as like well

00:28:02.280 in gaza you'd be thrown out from a roof and that turns out as fact checkers keep telling us that's

00:28:06.840 from Syria. It's from Homs. And it was an atrocity perpetrated by IS, by the Islamic State, not by

00:28:12.100 Hamas, right? There was this story of a Hamas commander that kept coming up who was executed

00:28:18.760 by the group itself in 2016. He was accused of homosexuality, among other things, but it appears

00:28:24.540 that the main offense was stealing money, allegedly, to have gay affairs, right? And then I looked at 0.96

00:28:30.820 the report from the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and there are tons of executions in

00:28:36.680 Gaza, you know, after the Hamas takeover in 2006, I guess it is. But I couldn't find a single one

00:28:43.640 that's about homosexuality. The main thing, and I mean, like, again, that's not to say that these 0.99

00:28:47.820 guys aren't complete fucking assholes, but like the number one thing is like either murder or 1.00

00:28:52.640 spying for Israel. They accuse you of collaboration and then you get killed, right? And I think that's 1.00

00:28:58.000 significant in that like, it begs the question about where this imagination of like, what would 0.92

00:29:02.900 happened to you in gaza comes from it's not to say that again like it wouldn't be bad to be gay

00:29:07.980 in gaza it's to say that like there's something odd about the specificity uh with which the thing

00:29:13.180 that would happen to you queers for palestine yeah is imagined i have another tweet unfortunately

00:29:18.020 that is also in german flex bro flex this is about a icelandic group at the eurovision song 0.62

00:29:25.200 contest who are holding up a palestine banner and then this german politician i believe a social

00:29:30.980 democrat tweets i wish best of luck to these humanists when they play their song next in gaza 0.92

00:29:37.640 these three hamas puppets will be hanging from their balls from a construction crane faster than 1.00

00:29:44.140 they can shout lgbtq that's just like a hella homophobic tweet what the fuck somebody is having 1.00

00:29:50.120 a fantasy about committing like inventive forms of violence against gay people and it's not the 1.00

00:29:55.680 pro-Palestinian side yeah yeah it's it's it's so vivid and it and there's this glee in it right

00:30:02.280 like it's not just saying these people are wrong or these people are inconsistent and these people

00:30:05.760 are right it's just like i hope that something violent and awful happens to them and i'm like

00:30:10.580 i don't know man that seems like a very much a you problem yeah yeah and also the the current

00:30:15.640 ruling regime in israel is not particularly pro-gay so it's not as if like israel is just

00:30:21.000 like haven for gay people and Palestine is bad it's like everything kind of contains everything 0.89

00:30:26.240 and also so much I mean it's kind of the perfect example because so much of the discourse on this 0.98

00:30:29.860 all year has followed this thing of like oh you think it's wrong to murder a bunch of innocent 0.96

00:30:33.760 civilians but did you know how bad Hamas is Hamas did this and then they'll list some fucked up 0.95

00:30:38.420 things that Hamas did or some fucked up things that happened on October 7th and then it's like 0.99

00:30:41.960 but they're not killing Hamas they're killing a bunch of innocent people including children 0.96

00:30:46.060 so it's even if every single thing that they're saying about Hamas is true you're killing tens

00:30:50.220 of thousands of people who aren't Hamas in any

00:30:52.120 meaningful way. So it's all just irrelevant

00:30:54.020 to even talk about any of this shit. Only 0.99

00:30:56.020 one thing can be bad at a time,

00:30:58.420 guys. That's, I think, what we've learned.

00:31:00.600 If you think one thing

00:31:02.380 is bad, that means you think

00:31:04.020 everything else is good. Yeah.

00:31:06.460 Yeah. And they're trying

00:31:07.800 to do this, like, weird hypocrisy argument, but I don't even

00:31:10.020 get it because it's, like, it's actually a stronger

00:31:12.360 moral case to say

00:31:13.960 regardless of someone's political beliefs, including

00:31:16.320 anti-gay beliefs, I don't think

00:31:18.120 they should be murdered. Yeah. That's not 0.99

00:31:19.880 that's not a hypocrisy of mine no it's like you say you say lgbt rights are important and yet you

00:31:24.800 don't want to kill people who are anti-lgbt well yeah killing people is bad don't do it

00:31:29.420 you heard it here first folks michael hobbs bravely coming out as anti-murder it's a 0.99

00:31:35.860 cancelable take this whole fucking thing all year has been so fucking annoying the other 0.96

00:31:41.360 outcrop of this has also been like it's not technically a genocide oh yeah maybe it is 0.97

00:31:46.720 maybe it isn't it's a technical legal term some people use it some people don't i genuinely don't

00:31:49.920 really care if people want to call it a genocide but it's like oh it's just the mass murder of a

00:31:53.980 bunch of innocent people yeah okay well either way it seems like you should just be joining with

00:31:58.420 the people who are trying to stop it rather than complaining about the word yeah do you want to be

00:32:03.100 in a position of arguing about the semantic definition of what it is it is not a genocide

00:32:09.020 to try and justify the actions of your own side call it what you want to call it man technically

00:32:13.660 it's not a genocide okay well i guess it's fine then like even if that holds water like i don't

00:32:18.500 know it's just probable war crimes like yeah yeah everything just feels like a distraction and it

00:32:23.040 just feels like no one wanted to address what's fucking going on on the merits at all i mean i 0.94

00:32:26.500 just also don't think that like i think just the weird moral standards that palestinians are being 0.97

00:32:31.800 held to it's like they have to be morally perfect in order to us justify not bombing them that's 0.89

00:32:37.600 actually kind of asymmetrical like israel can do anything and still be righteous yeah but the 0.98

00:32:43.800 palestinians can't do anything and not be deserving of slaughter you know yeah that's an asymmetry 1.00

00:32:49.340 i've noticed over the past year yeah well sorry to drag us all way down this was i was like i'm 0.97

00:32:55.180 just gonna go for it this is my darkest i'm glad someone i'm glad someone did it i had a third take

00:33:00.080 i was gonna take you guys on a long trek through the rise of pronatalism over the past year but

00:33:06.900 But instead of doing that, I'm just going to read some of the things that are prominent pro natalists who are really concerned about the supposedly falling American birth rate and about the poor eugenic quality of American babies that are being born and the and the wasted eggs of educated white women who are, you know, going to law school on instead of settling down with some dipshit and having like 50 babies.

00:33:30.100 I'm just going to read some of the names.

00:33:32.040 OK.

00:33:32.660 OK.

00:33:32.960 So these people are supposedly pro babies, right?

00:33:36.360 Supposedly they are pro-children.

00:33:38.220 They think that it is pro-social and morally edifying to have children.

00:33:43.000 But this is what Malcolm and Simone Collins are bespectacled avatars of pro-natalism. 0.82

00:33:50.440 We're having a million white babies.

00:33:52.420 People that have been the subject of like 300 feature articles at this point.

00:33:55.840 Yes.

00:33:56.620 Here's what these people have named the children they supposedly love.

00:34:00.240 Okay.

00:34:01.500 This is such a mean dig, Moira.

00:34:03.860 octavian george collins okay that is a boy torsten savage collins

00:34:14.900 also a savage is my middle name he can say that his whole life think about how cool what that

00:34:19.880 would be nice titan invictus collins every one of these children's names sounds like a white 0.98

00:34:26.720 supremacist avatar on twitter or like a gay porn star yeah and then finally that that's a girl 0.94

00:34:33.100 titan and vixis is a little girl what titan's a girl's name titan's a girl and then uh the last 0.98

00:34:39.160 so far although i think they've promised us about 74 more of these children the last so far is named 0.88

00:34:44.940 industry americus collins fuck off you made that one up no i did not i think if you love your 0.90

00:34:54.120 children you would not burden them with these names i don't even want to talk about what elon 0.99

00:34:58.180 musk names his children because i can't say it i know my like scorching hot take that i get yelled

00:35:03.360 at about in bars constantly is when i lived in denmark denmark famously has a thing where you

00:35:08.200 have to name your kid one of the approved names on a list of i think it's like around 5 000 names

00:35:13.880 oh wow like you have to name your kid one of these things and if you don't want to name your

00:35:17.700 kid one of these things there's a whole like court approval process that has to go on for you to say

00:35:21.780 like this is actually really meaningful to our family or whatever you have to justify it and i

00:35:25.080 like this policy because parents are naming their kids things to like flex on other parents yeah 0.97

00:35:31.620 like i named my kid ugly dumbass as like a social experiment that poor kid has to go through life 0.98

00:35:36.160 yeah which is like there's this famous case of a guy who named his kids winner and loser 0.99

00:35:39.560 and like loser kind of ended up being like more of a quote-unquote winner whatever it shows up 0.95

00:35:44.000 in fucking freakonomics it's like i don't think you should be able to name your kid loser that's 0.99

00:35:47.440 like a fucked up thing i mean there's the famous case of a man who went ahead and named his boy sue 0.99

00:35:52.320 Oh, see? 0.96

00:35:53.400 Oh.

00:35:54.400 It's a Johnny Cash song.

00:35:55.480 I'm super old.

00:35:56.440 That was the original pronouns in bio.

00:35:58.280 That's right.

00:35:58.880 Like, my first boyfriend's name was Ashley, which is, like, a pretty common boy's name in Ireland.

00:36:03.020 But, like, he had to put his pronouns in his bio in, like, 2001 because, like, otherwise people just called him she all the time.

00:36:08.260 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:36:08.840 So this is the real equality that we want.

00:36:11.220 We just want it for everybody.

00:36:12.500 Anyway, sorry, Mara.

00:36:13.440 Sorry, I just knew a guy in college whose legal first name was Hummingbird.

00:36:16.400 Okay, that's not that bad.

00:36:17.840 He was not happy about it.

00:36:19.360 That's just under California hate, dude. 0.99

00:36:21.120 like don't he's from massachusetts i do think the right of a kid to have a fucking normal ass name 0.98

00:36:29.300 they don't have to spell their entire life should supersede the right of parents to like self 0.96

00:36:34.020 expression through naming their kids i if i had a kid i'd name them like matt or david or like

00:36:38.800 jessica or something normal and easy to spell because this stuff just sentencing your kid to 0.99

00:36:43.200 have to spell out their fucking name and hear the same goddamn joke their entire life i do think is 0.98

00:36:47.580 like kind of mean i don't know the reason i'm being so quiet is that river is due from school 1.00

00:36:52.080 any minute now but that's a normal name that's within that's like one standard deviation or

00:36:58.800 half a standard deviation away it's an object in the world but phoenix i feel like river phoenix

00:37:03.540 opened doors for you guys yeah i hope so i hope so it's fine also river is easy to spell people

00:37:08.760 know what a river is yeah there's no like it doesn't have a number in it like elon musk's

00:37:14.940 Well, okay, but that's a very low bar.

00:37:16.780 I'm a better dad than Elon Musk.

00:37:18.900 Write that on my tombstone.

00:37:22.980 All right, guys, that might be it for the Kirsties. 0.51

00:37:25.460 Are we done?

00:37:25.920 I have one more.

00:37:26.640 I have one more.

00:37:27.040 Oh, you have one more?

00:37:27.740 Okay.

00:37:28.220 Well, mine is not about sex and gender, so we can just do it really quickly. 0.71

00:37:31.500 Okay, this is like an overall just gripe of mine about like the general bedomining of America,

00:37:37.420 how like every elite institution just seems to have like no real interest in like addressing things on the merits

00:37:43.100 or like presenting facts to its readers.

00:37:45.520 So this is, there's always recency bias in these things,

00:37:48.140 but this was something that came out,

00:37:49.440 I believe last week in The Atlantic

00:37:51.260 called The Allure of Smoking Rises Again.

00:37:54.700 The cool factor of cigarettes has proved hard to shake.

00:37:58.480 And it's by Nicholas Florco.

00:38:00.860 And I'll read you guys the first paragraph.

00:38:03.920 The allure of smoking has proved hard to stamp out.

00:38:07.140 Listen closely.

00:38:07.980 Despite the fact that cigarette use

00:38:09.980 is at an 80 year low in America,

00:38:12.060 comma. Smoking has unfortunately become cool again. At the New York Fashion Week show in

00:38:17.280 February, some models accessorized their runway outfits with a cigarette. A clip of the TikTok

00:38:22.320 influencer Addison Rae smoking two cigarettes is cut into her latest music video, which has more

00:38:27.580 than 4 million views. That's not that many views. The pop star Charlie XCX, who was recently gifted

00:38:32.760 a bouquet of cigarettes for her birthday, sparked one during her performance in Manchester last month

00:38:37.620 and has said that her brat starter pack

00:38:39.940 would include a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter,

00:38:42.500 and a strappy white top with no bra. 0.59

00:38:44.640 So people are not smoking in America.

00:38:47.020 Smoking is at the lowest rate it's been for 80 years,

00:38:49.520 but I found three random things online

00:38:52.480 where people were smoking. 0.99

00:38:54.780 And then I wrote a whole fucking article about it. 0.99

00:38:57.100 A person in Manchester was smoking. 1.00

00:38:59.460 Like, hold the fucking presses. 0.99

00:39:01.580 What really bugs me about this is like, 0.99

00:39:03.460 you know, that it was written,

00:39:04.420 that it was punched, that it was published, everything.

00:39:06.100 And also this guy, Nicholas Florco,

00:39:07.180 is the newest staff writer for The Atlantic.

00:39:09.960 So this isn't some random freelancer with like a pitch.

00:39:12.440 This is a guy whose previous work, 0.98

00:39:14.220 which is fucking abysmal. 0.98

00:39:15.680 He used to work at Stat News. 0.99

00:39:16.880 Most of his articles are terrible.

00:39:18.340 Like The Atlantic saw this guy and was like,

00:39:19.840 yeah, let's hire that guy. 0.99

00:39:20.960 And then everything he's written has just been garbage. 0.85

00:39:23.580 He also wrote an article called RFK Jr. 0.95

00:39:26.160 is in the wrong agency.

00:39:27.540 He could be a great agriculture secretary.

00:39:30.260 Oh God. 1.00

00:39:30.680 Which again, just the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard. 1.00

00:39:32.780 Like that's not, the guy lies constantly. 1.00

00:39:34.760 Like he's not qualified to be the secretary of anything.

00:39:38.000 Yeah.

00:39:38.180 It's like not only are these takes getting published, but it's like the people writing them are being accepted into intellectual institutions.

00:39:44.800 And these institutions themselves are showing this just sector wide indifference to whether or not something is true.

00:39:51.300 And I find this so much more corrosive than like some people online being like, I don't want to have sex with men because Donald Trump, like all of the activist stuff that they complain about, some of which is genuinely pretty bad or pretty.

00:40:04.760 you know, inconsiderate or whatever,

00:40:06.340 this thing where like elite institutions 0.98

00:40:08.640 just don't fucking care 0.95

00:40:09.820 whether something is true anymore 0.98

00:40:11.040 is so much worse.

00:40:13.480 Well, and the fact that like,

00:40:14.620 I mean, you said it's not about gender,

00:40:16.260 but isn't it?

00:40:16.820 Like it feels like these examples, right?

00:40:19.320 Fashion models and female starlets,

00:40:22.000 like there's something about the centrist brain 0.99

00:40:25.560 that demands infinite examples of something

00:40:29.080 if they have to say it about men.

00:40:31.160 Yeah. 0.98

00:40:31.560 And where three fucking tiny anecdotes 0.98

00:40:33.880 will do if it's queer people or ladies right like i definitely think there's an element of like 0.98

00:40:38.840 like it's not an accident like if this were like you know this country singer lit up on stage like

00:40:44.040 i think they wouldn't publish that like marginality is sort of short-circuited in the reactionary

00:40:49.660 centrist mind they've taught themselves that anything that anyone who's vaguely left-coded

00:40:54.660 ever does is relevant to their take and like sometimes they get away with it and sometimes

00:41:01.200 they end up with like smoking is making a comeback because charlie xcx lit up in manchester

00:41:05.820 it's i just think you should not write a take if the first thing in your article is just like oh

00:41:12.280 yeah this isn't true like smoking rates are really low right now then just write something else is

00:41:18.260 there nothing else that the u.s public needs to be informed about rather than this well it's kind

00:41:24.860 of worse than that isn't it like because it's in some way you're right like the atlantic and like

00:41:28.700 frankly New York Times opinion like it almost feels like they are more interested in a problem

00:41:34.880 if it doesn't really exist right like didn't the New York Times just do like there are no more men

00:41:40.140 in literature did you see that take and then like in the first paragraph they're like well it's not 0.70

00:41:45.740 true numerically but right right right that should be the fucking end of it man like that is weird 0.69

00:41:50.900 write about it yeah like it basically it almost seems better for it not to be the case for you 0.91

00:41:56.440 to like write about it being the case like yeah that's bad you set agendas for people you shape

00:42:03.120 how people perceive this world and what they think matters for their own identities for their politics

00:42:08.980 for their voting decisions etc etc yeah it feels real bad if your main way of grabbing their

00:42:14.880 attention is by reporting shit that did not happen yeah yeah yeah yeah it's i mean in some ways it's

00:42:20.140 kind of full circle too because the whole thing with the you know anti-echo chamber argument is 0.94

00:42:24.400 like we need to be exposed to challenging views.

00:42:26.460 And I think that is the guiding ideology

00:42:28.240 of the bunch of editors of these magazines

00:42:29.680 is like, we need to be challenged.

00:42:31.080 But there's a difference between

00:42:32.540 being challenged with someone's views

00:42:34.300 and being challenged with facts,

00:42:36.080 like information about the world

00:42:37.320 that you did not know previously.

00:42:38.980 And so it's not a challenging view to say like,

00:42:42.020 oh, it's really bad that cigarette smoking is back.

00:42:43.980 If cigarette smoking isn't back,

00:42:45.620 that's not a challenging view.

00:42:46.820 That's not adding to my ideology.

00:42:48.560 That's not something I need to hear out.

00:42:50.400 It's actually very good to be like,

00:42:51.880 I'm not really going to entertain this.

00:42:52.960 come to me when there's evidence that smoking rates are rising they're like yeah well let's

00:42:56.760 talk about it but right now they're not so i'm not being exposed to a challenging idea it's

00:43:02.280 challenging in the sense that it's false but then the fucking earth is flat is a challenging idea 0.59

00:43:07.320 like yeah these people don't seem to have a clear view of what it means to be intellectually

00:43:12.040 challenged by something but michael what if they are actually trying to challenge you

00:43:16.600 by furthering epistemic collapse.

00:43:20.380 That challenges me.

00:43:22.000 That does challenge you.

00:43:22.500 Look how weird it is challenge of all.

00:43:24.960 Look how easy it is to get my face red. 1.00

00:43:27.020 Michael, what if stupid? 1.00

00:43:30.260 But the other point, of course, 1.00

00:43:32.140 is that like we've reified

00:43:33.960 the difficultness of difficult conversations, right?

00:43:37.440 And we haven't asked like,

00:43:38.600 well, what's this really about, right?

00:43:40.660 Like, sure, smoking being back

00:43:42.640 would be something I would find troubling.

00:43:45.060 Yeah. 0.99

00:43:45.140 At the same time, like, it's selling us one of the most seductive and easy narratives any medium could ever spin, which is young people and minorities are doing something that you don't understand and you don't like. 0.67

00:43:59.820 And four are that you don't use anyway, right? 0.55

00:44:01.740 Like, the Atlantic reader to TikTok consumer, like, that Venn diagram are two separate circles, basically, right?

00:44:07.620 So you're feeding them this pabulum that just confirms their priors.

00:44:12.000 Like, sure, the content of it might be a little challenging to them, but the meta message is you are okay the way you are.

00:44:20.400 Other people are the problem.

00:44:21.780 And frankly, like, that's not particularly challenging.

00:44:24.180 That's very reassuring.

00:44:25.120 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:44:26.000 And I think the secret is that the Atlantic knows that and that that's how they want to sell their subscriptions.

00:44:30.960 They want people to feel like they're bold and engaging with different ideas. 0.98

00:44:34.060 Like, no, they're feeding you the reactionary centrist shit that you crave and can stomach and you get to feel like an adult for it. 0.94

00:44:41.280 But, like, in the end, like, the overall structure of this thing is that, like, other people than you are the problem and you get to yell about them. 0.95

00:44:48.520 There's a whole industry now of people selling you the least challenging ideas imaginable as challenging ideas.

00:44:55.140 So, like, one thing Naomi Klein talked about in her book was how Naomi Wolf will now go to these, like, Steve Bannon rallies, essentially.

00:45:02.480 And she never says, like, I'm one of you.

00:45:05.140 Vaccines are bad.

00:45:05.940 What she always says is I'm a liberal feminist, but I'm standing up against the vaccines, right?

00:45:11.360 Just that little caveat at the beginning makes people think that they're hearing challenging

00:45:15.500 ideas.

00:45:15.960 Like if you ask people that are sort of reading these websites, they'll be like, oh, I hear

00:45:19.560 from a wide range of views. 0.87

00:45:20.720 Like just yesterday I heard from a liberal feminist. 1.00

00:45:22.980 But the thing the liberal feminist was saying was something you already believe. 0.91

00:45:25.660 She's just telling you that vaccines are evil and Fauci's bad, right?

00:45:28.400 But people think that they're receiving challenging information.

00:45:31.460 I think this is why Joe Rogan is so popular as well.

00:45:33.480 It's like it feels like he's skeptical.

00:45:35.780 It has the aesthetics of something skeptical.

00:45:38.100 like, oh, you're hearing something that's going to make you really uncomfortable, but

00:45:41.220 and then he just tells you something you already believe.

00:45:43.100 I think this is kind of the same sort of thing where it's like, we need to make sure people

00:45:46.360 are exposed to these challenging ideas, but the ideas themselves on the mares are not

00:45:49.500 remotely challenging.

00:45:50.520 Young people shouldn't be smoking.

00:45:51.680 It's bad for you. 1.00

00:45:52.200 They don't know.

00:45:53.080 Well, that's something most people believe anyway.

00:45:54.700 It's not that hard.

00:45:55.520 You know, kids are doing it wrong.

00:45:57.280 Given that Moira is sort of pulling us back to the echo chamber discourse, and I think

00:46:00.620 that's exactly right.

00:46:01.560 Like, it's so interesting that so much of this is happening on and around digital platforms

00:46:05.120 because I do think this kind of brain rot took place

00:46:07.420 in Silicon Valley at the same time

00:46:09.380 as it sort of took hold in D.C.

00:46:11.540 Yeah, a lot of it was Twitter, honestly.

00:46:13.080 Yeah, so I love to hate read this essay by Paul Graham,

00:46:16.660 who's this kind of like Silicon Valley thought leader,

00:46:18.880 which is called How to Think for Yourself.

00:46:20.980 And I'll quote from that briefly.

00:46:23.040 It matters a lot who you surround yourself with.

00:46:25.720 If you're surrounded by conventional minded people,

00:46:27.860 it will constrain which ideas you can express.

00:46:29.860 And that in turn will constrain which ideas you have.

00:46:32.500 But if you surround yourself

00:46:33.580 with independent minded people,

00:46:35.120 you'll have the opposite experience.

00:46:36.880 Hearing other people say surprising things

00:46:38.580 will encourage you to, and to think more.

00:46:41.940 And then I want to skip to the very bottom of this piece

00:46:44.060 where he thanks the people who read early drafts of this.

00:46:47.340 And maybe I'll tell you who these people are

00:46:48.920 because it takes a little Silicon Valley Inside Baseball

00:46:51.280 to understand who these people are.

00:46:52.900 So he says, thanks to Trevor Blackwell.

00:46:55.000 He's a Y Combinator guy.

00:46:56.740 Paul Buchheit, that's the inventor of Gmail

00:46:59.060 and of Google AdSense, I believe.

00:47:01.440 Patrick Collison, who started Stripe, I believe.

00:47:04.520 Jessica Livingston, who's a Y Combinator partner,

00:47:08.000 Harsh Taggar, who's another Y Combinator guy,

00:47:10.620 and Peter Thiel for reading graphs of this.

00:47:12.840 So this guy has basically talked to people

00:47:16.780 who are essentially clones of himself

00:47:19.780 and then congratulated himself

00:47:22.060 on figuring out how to think for yourself.

00:47:24.640 Like, don't surround yourself by yes men.

00:47:26.700 Surround yourself with partners from Y Combinators. 1.00

00:47:30.360 Like, there's not a non-billionaire in this bunch

00:47:32.600 unless someone like also has a gambling problem right the thing about these like heterodox

00:47:38.360 thinkers calling for more intellectual diversity right or like patting themselves on the back

00:47:44.260 for exposing themselves to unfamiliar ideas actually all they do is talk to the same 15 0.96

00:47:50.200 fucking people like this is definitely a specific issue in silicon valley right but if you look at 0.86

00:47:56.340 like the intellectual dark web like anything barry weiss ever puts together it's always like 0.99

00:48:02.720 the same fucking like 15 20 people over and over and over again and they all agree with each other 1.00

00:48:10.780 on basically everything yeah you know that meme that's like it's just two dumb bitches telling 1.00

00:48:15.440 each other exactly like that there's a whole media ecosystem that's just like 500 dumb bitches 1.00

00:48:21.840 telling each other exactly because they actually have a pretty uniform worldview that they are 1.00

00:48:27.460 like reinforcing. Right. They've just recreated their own echo chamber about how we're in an

00:48:32.520 echo chamber. Yeah. It is weird. This like the fetishization of like intellectual diversity

00:48:37.220 at the same time that all these people spend their whole time denigrating actual expertise.

00:48:42.000 Yeah. It's very anti-intellectual. Yeah. On both of the podcasts that I have,

00:48:45.880 which are both like fairly research driven, but also like we're kind of

00:48:48.480 new to this and normies and we don't want to get stuff wrong most of our episodes before we put

00:48:52.760 them out we send the rough cut to like academic experts like hey you're a medievalist we're about

00:48:57.060 to talk about medieval research can you listen to this make sure we're not saying anything bone

00:49:00.200 headed you've sent it to me you've sent me episodes of i think if books could kill be like

00:49:04.900 hey is there anything misogynist in here and i'd be like well let me look you know and i like

00:49:09.620 you're like the first third to one half but that's like a viewpoint thing to be honest like

00:49:17.860 if we're talking about a group we want to send it to members of that group but also like me and

00:49:21.040 Aubrey did an episode about like the science of sleep and like how sleep works and I sent like

00:49:24.660 four different researchers on sleep to be like am I making any technical errors in this and we

00:49:30.100 weren't really looking for like viewpoint diversity it's just like you are experts we're doing our

00:49:34.720 best to summarize a field let us know if we're getting anything wrong and then we will update

00:49:39.000 stuff if we're getting things wrong but it's not like when you're talking about facts you're really

00:49:43.460 not trying to get like a range of views in the same kind of way like the fetishization of viewpoint

00:49:49.260 diversity and the total like indifference to academic expertise and the extent to which these

00:49:55.420 people are fucking complaining about academics all the time it just reveals the nature of the

00:50:00.540 whole project right because if you were trying to go about the world in a more responsible way 0.98

00:50:04.640 you would try to engage with people who know what they're talking about and have dedicated their

00:50:08.780 lives to whatever issue you're talking about like space exploration or anything like there's real

00:50:12.600 experts on this but these people don't seem interested in them yeah there's like oh i need

00:50:15.980 to hear from basically seven people from an extremely narrow slice of like center-right

00:50:22.840 ideology like that's what they actually want under the guise of intellectual diversity

00:50:26.840 i feel like the quote-unquote trans debate is such a good example of this where like

00:50:31.760 people who study this stuff for a living are the activists right yeah yeah and then we shouldn't

00:50:37.540 we get a different viewpoint and that's a person who's just like shooting their mouth off on like

00:50:41.100 Mumsnet or whatever, right? 0.99

00:50:43.360 And actual clinicians, I mean, nobody talks to the fucking clinicians. 0.99

00:50:46.240 Yeah, right. 0.99

00:50:46.960 Like, clinicians are totally absent from this entire discourse because they're seen as, like, biased.

00:50:51.240 But it's like, well, these are people who are doing this day to day. 0.96

00:50:53.020 Shouldn't you talk to them about, like, timelines and shit? 0.97

00:50:54.720 Yeah, if we were talking about, like, cancer treatments, I think we'd ask an oncologist, you know. 0.97

00:50:59.200 Yeah.

00:50:59.580 It's also a place where, like, sort of our clique economy and academia sort of diverge in interesting ways.

00:51:04.700 Because in some way, they're interested in having the same debate over and over again.

00:51:08.360 Whereas, indeed, academic research kind of says, like, oh, I think we kind of know this and we move on to the next question now, right?

00:51:13.280 Like, I can't tell you how often I'm told, like, well, you guys talk a lot about trans people at the Klayman Institute, but you never address, like, what is a woman?

00:51:19.900 I'm like, oh, my God, like, really? 0.82

00:51:22.660 You want me to, like, do dumb gotcha, like, things? 0.83

00:51:25.740 Gotcha, Adrian. 0.92

00:51:26.900 Like, what are we doing with this?

00:51:28.340 Like, right?

00:51:28.600 It's like, you know, why are we bothering with this stuff?

00:51:32.980 Like, there is interesting work to be done.

00:51:35.480 Let's platform that interesting work.

00:51:37.340 and then eventually we'll be done with that work too

00:51:39.100 and move on to the next thing, right?

00:51:40.860 Like fields tend to evolve in these ways

00:51:43.740 and that's what expertise is, right?

00:51:45.780 You've heard from people who are clinicians and researchers, 1.00

00:51:48.160 but you haven't heard from 50 dumb bitches going exactly. 1.00

00:51:52.540 I think that's wrong. 1.00

00:51:53.800 I think you need to hear from everybody.

00:51:55.060 I think that's a good note

00:51:56.280 about like the repetitiveness of these discourses, right?

00:52:00.420 They do kind of like circle the drain for a long time.

00:52:04.300 And I think this comes back to your point

00:52:05.500 about comfort, Adrienne.

00:52:06.900 It's like this is the mac and cheese that your mom has made you 40 times this past year.

00:52:14.820 You know, it's like there is something really reassuring, I think, about returning to these discourses where you feel like you already know the answer and you can have your preconceived answer reaffirmed again as right, even in the midst of a world that is presenting to you like frightening contrary evidence, right?

00:52:33.540 Right.

00:52:33.640 This might touch on what you were talking about, Michael, about how like these discourses and including the ones that get laundered into like elite publications tend to not really have a lot of reference to facts or like empiricism, right?

00:52:46.700 I think it's a feature and not a bug, right?

00:52:48.540 I think what they're doing is like soothing readerships who are being confronted with unfamiliar, disturbing, challenging, like to them new information, right?

00:53:01.440 And just kind of like soothing that information away and restoring the status quo ante, like, no, no, no, no, no.

00:53:07.880 You don't have to think about gender differently because you've encountered a lot of, you know, accounts of trans experience and trans people.

00:53:15.440 You can just think that trans people are fake and we're just going to like soothe your hair and shush you to sleep. 0.71

00:53:20.280 Right. And no matter how many state laws get passed, you still call that like challenging wisdom. 0.93

00:53:24.920 You're like, ooh, no one wants to talk about it. It's like, well, 25 states have now banned this kind of care.

00:53:30.220 It's not really like the – this was also the year of the fucking lab leak discourse, which at this point more than 50 percent of Americans believe the origin of COVID was a lab leak. 0.84

00:53:39.400 So like you won, guys. 0.92

00:53:40.980 Congratulations.

00:53:41.840 But every time this comes up, it's still cast as like forbidden wisdom.

00:53:45.020 You're not allowed to talk about it.

00:53:46.240 Like the elites don't want you to know. 0.99

00:53:47.180 It's like, guys, at this point, you can just say it's the fucking establishment view. 0.99

00:53:50.220 It's false or at least there's no evidence for it. 0.97

00:53:52.320 But it's like you can only do this like put upon challenging view garbage for a limited amount of time. 0.95

00:54:00.600 But it doesn't seem to fucking matter to anybody. 0.96

00:54:02.060 Does the president, the speaker of the house and a five to four majority of the Supreme Court agree with you? 0.96

00:54:08.540 Not that challenging of you.

00:54:10.020 I'm sorry.

00:54:11.500 That's pretty canonical.

00:54:13.620 You guys, I need a cigarette so bad.

00:54:15.440 That might be where we have to wrap up.

00:54:17.420 It's time.

00:54:18.500 That's now four examples.

00:54:19.580 You can put that.

00:54:20.060 You can edit the Atlantic article.

00:54:20.940 Put me in there.

00:54:23.160 All right, guys.

00:54:23.980 Thank you so much for coming on this weird journey with me.

00:54:26.280 I feel like I've really recapped my year in a distressing way.

00:54:29.600 Yeah, my heart rate is up, which means I've been podcasting.

00:54:33.000 Michael Hobbs, friend of In Bed With a Right, host of every one of your favorite podcasts, and an all-around mensch.

00:54:39.720 Thank you so much for being here with us. 0.99

00:54:41.280 A gay mensch, which means I only have sex two minutes at a time. 1.00

00:54:45.640 That is gay. 1.00

00:54:46.580 That is gay, fellas. 1.00

00:54:47.660 That's true. 0.95

00:54:48.120 in bed with the right we'd like to thank the michelle r claimant institute for gender research

00:54:55.320 for generous support jennifer portillo for setting up our studio our producer is katie lyle

In Bed With The Right - December 24, 2024

Episode 50： The Second Annual Cursties, Part II

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