00:00:00.000You can't just retreat into yourself and be like, I don't want to deal with this.
00:00:04.160Like we all don't want to deal with this, Pamela.
00:00:05.640But you have to actually, especially as a journalist, you have to have the capacity to look at the conditions in the country and think about what is necessary and look at like previous historical periods.
00:00:21.660I mean, you even see this among like elected Democrats, right?
00:00:24.360You had Chuck Schumer this week saying like, well, you know, once you get on the treadmill next to these Republicans, it turns out they're not so bad.
00:00:29.580And we can come to an agreement. It's like you want that to be true. I get why people want that to be true. It's not true anymore, though. And at a certain point, you just have to grow up and accept that we don't have a country where you can do this like kumbaya. We're all going to come together and Republicans are going to be normal. It's just not going to happen.
00:01:53.860I'm really grateful to you guys for being here.
00:01:56.060I feel kind of reclumped and starstruck, so I'm really glad that we got a little bit of Peter and Michael's time here to discuss the most annoying figurehead of the New York Times opinion section, Ms. Pamela Paul.
00:02:08.260I'm very confused by this interaction.
00:02:10.180When somebody asks, are you familiar with Pamela Paul, the other person is supposed to say, all I know is, and then make a joke, and the music kicks in.
00:05:39.420It was like, it was very brief. She was there for under three years. And I think you're right, Michael, that it was like a kind of transition period, right?
00:05:47.540So you guys alluded to this, but Pamela Paul really had like a specific beat. Many, many of her columns, of which there were over 200.
00:05:56.360And I read so many of them. You guys, I literally fell asleep at the dining room table. I was like, I'm just going to like lower my head down onto my elbow. And then I was like, I'm just going to rest my eyes because these things are so repetitive.
00:06:10.780And she dealt a lot with excesses of the left, particularly on social issues, right? Or like the embarrassing earnestness and like moral self-seriousness of the left, right?
00:06:25.700So she wrote a ton about campus politics. She wrote a ton about like the kind of broad wokeness or cancel culture beat, which we have discussed a lot, in which Adrienne is an expert, literally wrote the book on it, The Cancel Culture Panic. We buy it where books are sold.
00:06:43.100And then she also wrote a ton about like language and like the words that were being used.
00:06:52.440And so largely, I think what we're seeing from Paul is a fixation on the Internet, right?
00:06:59.320It is like the way that social media has made us all dumber by confusing these algorithmically generated like discourse machines for a public, more like substantively defined.
00:07:11.760extrapolated to like the largest opinion soapbox in our country, right?0.66
00:07:17.980Like Twitter brain rot scaled up to the actual New York Times.
00:07:22.520A huge number of her columns are just about like,
00:07:24.800people are saying this thing online that I don't like.
00:07:40.340Because if you're smart and funny and interesting on Twitter, you can find a following and you can start a podcast and you can become somewhat of an intellectual elite through kind of more democratic means.
00:07:51.240And a lot of the people who had these kind of gatekept roles as intellectual elites lost – like they basically lost their minds because they're getting yelled at all the time.
00:08:01.600There are people who are experts in the academic fields that they're summarizing who are saying, hey, you're misrepresenting my work.
00:08:06.480All of a sudden, they were subjected to a little bit of meritocracy in a way that they had not before.
00:08:12.040And a huge number of them just like completely melted down and made this their entire careers is essentially complaining about their lessors trying to do better than them in the marketplace of ideas.0.93
00:08:24.340Pamela Ball is like – I feel like she represents several pundit tendencies.0.94
00:08:29.060One is just the idea that you like need to generate a new thought every week, but you have no actual expertise, right?1.00
00:08:36.000Right. You're not like on a beat of any real sort. Right. Like I think of the people who are good op-ed columnists. You can use like Jamel at The Times. Right. Like, why is he good? Well, probably because he's like a nerd about history to the point where you can probably call him a historian in certain regards. Right.
00:08:53.220And so he likes to write about that in the intersection of history and politics.
00:08:56.840But if you're just sort of like a free-floating brain in space like Pamela Paul, being asked to generate a thought a week is actually kind of crazy.
00:09:07.000And in fact, I think for most people it's kind of crazy.
00:09:09.120And this is why I think that, like, in general, the op-ed project is sort of a weird relic of times past, and we don't really need it anymore.
00:09:20.640And that's why if you do what you did, Maura, which is like just read these in succession, you're like, what's going on here?
00:09:28.440Half of them are about leftists on campus.
00:09:30.660The other half are just about whatever appeared to be bothering her at any given time.0.93
00:09:34.680And that's because she had an editor being like, what's your complaint this week, Pamela?
00:09:39.860And I just don't – I don't think we need that.
00:09:41.920It might be interesting to turn at this point to like Pamela Paul's personal history, because I was a little curious and one of many instances where I really just wish I was a fly on the wall at a New York Times like personnel or editorial meeting being like, how did you guys make this decision?
00:09:58.440Yeah. Because she was for like 10 years the head of the New York Times book review where she was an intellectual gatekeeper at this like very important outlet. Right. And then she moved to the opinion section in a role to which, as Peter was saying, she does not seem particularly suited. Right.
00:10:17.940like she does not have a background specialty the way a lot of opinion writers tend to right
00:10:24.740she does not have a cause exactly but she had this kind of like general sense of like entitlement to
00:10:32.560authority that seems to have been grounded by this experience as a books review editor right
00:10:38.460yeah i guess i assume that she was like fun i have like nothing to say i'm like yeah i'm trying
00:13:31.380Well, I think she's sort of trying to speak for Gen X in this one.
00:13:34.580Like she does sort of describe herself as sort of a latchkey kid and all that stuff.
00:13:37.740So like it feels very like Gen X resume sort of at the end of the 20th century.
00:13:42.880But the other thing, of course, I think she's probably metabolizing is what appears to have been her own starter marriage to a fellow New York Times columnist and man who will write to your, what is it, dean or provost if you make fun of him on Twitter.
00:14:21.720When I read that, it's like things click into place in your brain, right?
00:14:25.220Right. And also it sort of makes sense of her career. Right. She was running in circles with folks like this.
00:14:31.800Yeah. Yeah. You know, we talk about like how Pamela Paul is a type, like the anti-woke pundit is a type and there's a bunch of them, but there's not so many that they don't all know each other. Right.
00:14:44.880Yeah. And like the people she's talking about on the Internet who are making fun of her, you know, the like overly woke liberal is a type. And again, there's not so many of them that they don't all know each other. Right. Like, yeah, she is attacking in her columns a very specific milieu that is actually quite small. But she also is a product of a very specific milieu that is quite small.
00:15:08.040Yeah, she says in one of her columns, like, Brett and I used to always fight about politics. And my first thought was like, what?
00:15:14.440You said I hate a campus feminist and he hates a different campus feminist? Like, what are we fighting about?0.77
00:15:21.700I think we should give her some credit here. Brett Stevens is like a fascist in a way that I think that Pamela Paul is not. You know what I mean?
00:15:31.280It makes sense to me that they would spend some time together, that they perhaps imprinted on one another in various ways.
00:16:45.000it's kind of like what Peter was saying0.73
00:16:46.040that like he is like a straight up fascist,
00:16:47.660but also he doesn't believe that climate change is real.
00:16:51.000Pamela Paul probably does believe that climate change is real and that we shouldn't do anything about it and that the people who want us to do something about it are the real problem.
00:16:58.340So ultimately, at the end of the day, they do, in fact, have the same opinion on that.
00:17:02.360It's just like they would express it differently.
00:17:03.900Right. Or at least their choice for how to approach the situation is functionally identical. Right.
00:17:10.000Right. Brett believes that you should not be protesting climate change and racism because both of them are fake.
00:17:16.400Right. And she believes that you shouldn't be protesting them because protesting is gauche and humiliating.
00:17:22.200Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You guys are pointing to like the superficiality of the supposed differences.
00:17:27.120But the supposed differences is like narcissism of small difference.
00:17:30.400We're identifying among these like anti woke pundits and their conservative bedfellows is, I think, distinct enough that it's very, very important to them.
00:17:40.600Right. Because that allows them to understand themselves as having this like virtuous tolerance.
00:17:46.400Yeah. Of conservatism in a way that's like quite myopic about like what tolerance would actually mean.
00:17:53.020I mean, in the sort of 50-year view, I do think that we're going to look back at this moment as a time when elites took on this bizarre fetishization of like balance and, you know, hearing out people who you disagree with and this weird, this completely far-right propaganda narrative that like people on the left can't hear views that they don't agree with.
00:18:13.240And this thing where like we're all supposed to be hanging out with people we disagree with constantly, but with no actual kind of basic acceptance of the fact that sometimes people are wrong about things and that like hanging out with someone who denies that climate change is real is not actually intellectually nourishing in any meaningful way.
00:18:29.940But there's just this fetishization of like the aesthetics of like, oh, you're supposed to hear people out. But that that view only favors like right wingers, climate deniers, anti-vaxxers, people who just do not have the facts on their side.
00:18:41.560And this total refusal of intellectual elites to, like, just draw a line under things and be like, no, we're not going to hear from people who say that climate change is fake anymore.
00:18:50.080That's not like me being afraid of intellectual challenge.
00:18:52.960That's actually just like we've closed this debate.
00:18:54.780It's a huge waste of my time to keep debating this with people who do not have the facts on their side.
00:18:58.760But there's this weird – she seems to really embody this thing, this construction of a moral panic that people like us are unwilling to hear views different from ours.
00:19:07.420And I actually think being unwilling to hear views that are not backed by science is good and fine.
00:19:12.280And there's been basically nobody defending it in places like the op-ed page of The New York Times because everyone thinks we're all supposed to be hearing from people who don't agree with us all the time.
00:19:23.560And that like willingness to submit to being berated by a fascist is itself a kind of like intellectual virtue, right, as opposed to just kind of like a symptom of not having a lot of principles.
00:19:35.060I mean, another thing that came out, you know, one of you guys' research assistants came up with an Excel spreadsheet of all of her columns, which was very edifying.
00:19:42.800Thank you, Olivia, for your valiant work going through every Pamela Paul column.
00:19:47.620It is fascinating how much she talks about, like, free speech as an issue.0.90
00:19:50.940And this – I've noticed other, like, friends of mine have their parents kind of radicalizing toward the right and becoming, like, sort of drifting into QAnon territory.0.75
00:19:57.960And free speech is oftentimes the entry point for that.
00:20:00.960It's like, well, I don't agree with what they say, but I think everybody should be able to say it.
00:20:04.140And that is a completely right-wing propagandistic narrative that has been peddled by all kinds of far-right news sources, this idea that there's a problem with left-wing censorship in this country, which of course we're seeing now is like not remotely the problem.
00:20:16.480But I think this is an entry point for a lot of otherwise well-meaning people to kind of open their minds and open their lives to people who do not have a good faith objection to things and are just like peddling garbage all the time.
00:20:27.020But in this weird four-year interregnum period between Trump administrations, everyone just got obsessed with this idea that, like, free speech is under attack from, like, college leftists.
00:20:35.620And I think Pamela Paul is such a perfect example of that.
00:20:37.660It's like, why are you just talking about this all the time?
00:20:40.600Yeah, I mean, this was always sort of a useful tactic for the right in a couple of ways.
00:20:45.660I mean, one is that it just sort of, you know, creates an intellectual framework through which you need to listen to them, right?
00:20:52.040It's actually important that you listen to my opinions.
00:20:55.320And then the other thing is that they never actually have to discuss those opinions.
00:20:59.420They just get to have this discussion about speech.
00:21:02.900And the opinions themselves become almost a secondary concern.
00:21:06.800They're subjugated to the idea that the left is suppressing speech.
00:21:09.800And so the discussion becomes about the excesses of the left rather than any given topic of conversation.
00:21:16.180And the debates never actually have to be had for the right to win them.
00:21:20.440So you get this sort of idea that, like, A, the left is generally censorious, and then B, that maybe they have something to hide on each of these issues, right?
00:21:30.220That the reason they are censorious is because if we talked about race and IQ for long enough, we would reveal that, in fact, we're wrong, right?
00:21:38.520And we cover up for that by censoring opposing views.
00:21:42.040That sort of thing has been very beneficial to the right in ways that just sort of end run around the actual substantive debate.
00:21:48.860You know, it's almost like quaint at this point to talk about how the free speech concerns were not real, right?
00:21:56.500Like, you know, the Trump administration is laying it bare to some degree.
00:21:59.560But even last year, I mean, Pamela Paul was writing about how like students not getting jobs because they were protesting Israel was just sort of good.
00:22:08.700And like the natural course of events that like wealthy business people don't want to hear you yapping at a protest, right?
00:22:15.560Right. That's not compatible with someone who writes 20 columns a year about the suppression of free speech.
00:22:23.200But it doesn't even clock to her because at no point are they actually having a genuine discussion.
00:22:29.400Right. This is all just sort of frame shifting.
00:22:32.180Right. I think what you guys are articulating is that Pamela Paul and like sort of the anti-woke pundit genre have sort of opened the door for the entrance into political discourse.
00:22:45.080of some like really like odious ideologies that are just like incompatible with the shared dignity
00:22:50.620of human beings in civic life and democratic governance, right? Like if you are constantly
00:22:57.360being berated and having to have the debate about whether or not you should hear out the race science
00:23:02.640guy, it distracts people from actually shutting down the race science guy, right? And I think
00:23:11.220what we are seeing at this historical moment is like Paul and her ilk, this like anti-woke
00:23:16.800pundit genre, really could have only existed at this like very specific historical moment
00:23:22.700when conservatives were being made uncomfortable by what seemed like these ascendant social
00:23:28.820movements of the 2010s and were using their credibility, their authority, their places
00:23:35.520of great visibility and like quote unquote platforms to discredit those social movements
00:23:42.220in a way that made the reaction seem more plausible and gave it this implicit imprimatur
00:23:48.020of elite approval. Right. And that's why I think Pamela Paul as an anti-woke pundit and maybe the
00:23:54.980anti-woke pundit more broadly in its like various other manifestations is kind of done. I think
00:24:01.500they've like sort of like matured and burst like a pimple right because now moira oh sweet moira
00:24:08.460you think these people are gonna be gone these people are all blaming the left for what is
00:24:13.140happening now they're like if the left didn't scold people for not saying pregnant people we
00:24:16.500wouldn't have trump too like this has become the entire narrative is like oh this this vindicates
00:24:20.920the anti-woke pundits it's possible that that is simply their last defense before they wither away
00:24:26.360and die. I hope so. I honestly don't know. I have no optimism left. I'm somewhere between you
00:24:31.420because I don't, I really don't know what happens to the people who have been just decrying like
00:24:39.740wokeism or whatever for the last four or five years, but also sort of like nominally consider
00:24:45.740themselves liberal. You know, many of these people have just sort of drifted right and have started
00:24:50.180presenting as right wing. But for the Thomas Chatterton Williams's of the world, I don't know
00:27:14.720I mean, I'm very intrigued by what happens next with these folks. But I do believe that, like you're saying, Moira, that they had a moment where they could pretend to be kind of brave and they could pretend to be heroic.
00:27:27.240And now we're entering a moment where, like, standing up to the regime would require actual bravery, actually putting your career and perhaps your person in some danger.
00:27:38.400And all I can really guarantee is that none of them will be courageous in that context, that none of them will show any actual courage.
00:27:47.920On our episode, Peter, you kept talking about how you kept finding Pamela Paul columns and being like, this is the quintessential Pamela Paul column.
00:27:53.940When we were going through the Excel spreadsheet, I noticed she has one where she says the whole point of the column is cats are better than dogs.
00:28:23.940So that's actually a question that Pamela Paul is more open about than some of these other people.
00:28:29.780Like, I feel like especially Atlantic contributors, named and unnamed, tend to kind of work themselves into the sort of moral high dungeon and like tend to sort of write like these pieces are like 4,000, 5,000 words long.
00:28:43.100But there is this kind of anti-awoke punditry that also is sort of kidding, sort of not.
00:28:47.640They're like, oh, like if you push them out and you're like, that didn't happen or no one says that.
00:28:52.160They're like, well, I'm just trying to get the overall vibe and like, why can't you take a joke, right?
00:28:56.400Like there's the infamous, still one of my favorite articles of all time, Sasha Eisenberg fact-checking David Brooks on the stake pricing in, I forget where it is.
00:29:18.180this was a i thought an excellent insight in the andrea long true piece on pamela paul which is
00:29:24.440the kind of thing every now and then a takedown piece and it's usually by andrea true will emerge
00:29:29.760that like then gives me nightmares about being the subject of such a like withering dissection
00:29:34.840of all of my flaws spare andrea true if you're listening please do not write this piece about me
00:29:39.800because it's like it's very precise and it's the kind of cruelty where like a certain writer can
00:29:46.940just see into somebody's soul and like understand everything that they fear about themselves and
00:29:51.540then just confirm it as true in public um and one of the things chu says about paul is that she
00:29:59.560clearly wants to be given the credit of being a little unserious a little cheeky and kidding yeah
00:30:05.660yeah and you can see that in a lot of these pieces there's a posture of like like jocular
00:30:12.600knowingness yeah and i think part of the disconnect between paul's sense of herself and how she
00:30:18.420appears to the outside world is that she thinks she has a set of claims to credibility of like
00:30:26.700being an insider and being on the right side that she actually has not earned from her audience
00:30:31.660right completely yeah yeah yeah she's like of course me as a good liberal i would never endorse
00:30:36.760Right. The worldview that these annoying campus protesters are protesting against. I am objecting on matters of priorities or of style. And it's like, well, actually, it's not obvious to those of us merely consuming your public output and not living with you in your head that you do object to the substantive facts of injustice. Right. Like it's not really made clear.
00:31:03.180This is why I asked you guys to put together a list of all of her columns is because I wanted to figure out like to what extent is she actually dedicating her intellectual output to like the messages of liberalism.
00:31:16.140She doesn't think I'm a liberal but – and then everything is just conservative boilerplate.
00:31:19.660So in the Excel spreadsheet that Olivia produced, there are 164 entries of like her actual columns.
00:31:27.440There's other things that she's written but her actual columns.
00:31:29.500She wrote 164 of them during her tenure.
00:31:31.200I counted six that were just, like, straight up, like, liberal stuff.
00:31:37.220Like, she has one about, like, the rise of Christofascism.
00:31:39.840She has one about, like, how John Roberts should retire.
00:31:42.580She has one after overturning Roe v. Wade that's like the Supreme Court is bad.
00:31:46.360So six columns out of 164 are just, like, liberal stuff.0.73
00:31:51.340She has eight about how trans rights have gone too far.
00:31:56.160She has 13 about like campus controversies, like various things like this college president messed up.
00:32:04.100And she has countless – I mean I like stopped counting at a certain point.
00:32:07.760But she has countless that are just like these like anti-progressive screeds.0.99
00:32:19.420This 1991 book was stunningly prescient about affirmative action.
00:32:22.860The most profound loss on campus isn't free speech.
00:32:25.080It's listening, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And in this interregnum period, when there was a real opportunity to turn the country around into a better direction, she spent the vast majority of her time warning about the excesses of the left and ignoring the excesses of the right, which were becoming more and more obvious and is now the regime that we live under.
00:32:45.180Right. I always think about my own career of like, well, what do I want to tell people I did? Like, what do I want to talk to my grandkids about? What did you do during the four years when Trumpism was ascendant? Oh, I complained about campuses. I complained about words being different. Are you are you proud of that? Are you happy with that? Like, I just have bottomless contempt.
00:33:06.940It's like at least I feel like at least I hope like we've given people a realistic picture of like the threats in the country.
00:33:14.160And like everyone's well, you know, we'll complain about campus stuff.
00:33:16.400We'll complain about leftist excesses fine.
00:33:18.460But it's like if you look at the corpus of work, you would not get a sense from Pamela Paul that like, oh, yeah, there's this like increasingly openly fascist movement on the right that is seeking and gaining power all over the country.
00:33:32.380Yeah, I was thinking about, like, imagine if a historian 50 years from now or 100 years from now tells the story of 2020 to 2024 using only one columnist.
00:33:42.120And imagine they tried to reconstruct it using Jamal Bui's columns and get a pretty accurate picture of what happened.
00:33:49.000They probably get a bunch of events right and there'd be some things missing.
00:33:52.340There's some things he doesn't write about because that's someone else's beat.
00:33:55.380But with Pamela Paul, you'd have a absolutely absurd picture of what actually was going on in the country.
00:34:00.800yeah you think campus protesters like 19 year olds were like taking over the entire government
00:34:05.300apparatus of the country and like throwing conservatives in prison or whatever and like
00:34:08.500well funnily enough 19 year olds are now taking over the government but it's a very different
00:34:12.860kind of 19 year old correct about that yeah it was not the blue haired like non-intuitive pronoun
00:34:18.72019 year olds it was the like i have spent thousands of hours on youtube watching like0.93
00:34:25.480only a nazi video game streamer it was like broccoli haired it was big balls yeah that's
00:34:30.900who we have running the country now i i think i disagree adrian i feel like reading the pamela
00:34:35.880paul columns would be a little more useful because if you read the jamel columns you'd be like how
00:34:41.540did trump get re-elected you read pamela paul and you're like oh i see these people were a bunch
00:34:48.700I mean, the, you know, the whole like I'm a liberal, but has just become a throat clearing exercise for people who are shifting. Right. It's a way for them to sort of like just solve the like internal wound created by the fact that they recognize that to some degree they are conservative now that they have become reactionary and yet want to communicate that they are, you know, egalitarian, that they embrace those values that they feel like they should.
00:35:18.700embrace. Right. But again, it doesn't matter. Yeah. They don't embrace those values in any
00:35:23.120meaningful sense. Right. The liberal values are the ones that you keep at home, tucked away in a
00:35:28.520drawer. And the ones you bring to The New York Times are the reactionary complaints.
00:35:33.500Yeah. You should be judging me on what's in my heart, not what I choose to put out into the
00:35:37.300world. Not what I write in The New York Times, guys. Not what I say and do. Just what I think
00:35:42.140privately yes so now that we've like diagnosed paul as a conservative who believes that she's
00:35:51.820a liberal who has been sort of backed in by the excesses of liberals to publicly proselytize
00:35:58.980conservative viewpoints right do we want to like list some of these symptoms in the form of just
00:36:04.700like her columns and her subheads because we thought one way of approaching this phenomenon
00:36:09.340might just be in, like, revealing its repetition.
00:36:12.960So here's, like, a few of Pamela Paul's subheads.1.00
00:36:17.840Too many bus and subway passengers don't pay.1.00
00:42:42.860But like, I don't think 1933 is an example of the dangers of tribalism.
00:42:49.000It's not like people believed strongly on both sides.
00:42:53.080Like, you cannot look at that as a historical event and think that it's about polarization and people believing things.
00:43:00.020If German Jews had gone out and just, like, made friends with more Nazis, maybe that wouldn't have happened.
00:43:04.740I mean, like, that is a monstrous proposition.
00:43:07.420I'm like, I'm not familiar with this book, but I'm familiar enough with the historical period to say, like, I don't think tribalism was the problem in 1933 Germany.
00:50:48.660Like I'm so mad about it and like can't everything just go back to normal so I can just live my life and not have to think about this stuff?0.99
00:50:56.440But the problem is she then doesn't take the next step of being like, well, that's not an option anymore.
00:51:01.860You just have to engage with the way that things are and you have to do your best in the situation that you're given.
00:51:07.240You can't just retreat into yourself and be like, I don't want to deal with this.
00:51:11.460Like we all don't want to deal with this, Pamela.
00:51:13.040But you have to actually, especially as a journalist, you have to have the capacity to look at the conditions in the country and think about what is necessary and look at like previous historical periods.
00:53:29.760So, I mean, that's another, like, wonderful line in the Andrea Long two-piece, right?
00:53:34.080She says, many of our columns are primers in aging gracelessly, full of half-hearted
00:53:38.500gripes about young people and a reflexive longing for the poorly remembered past.0.98
00:53:42.460And I think this is why I'm a little surprised she got shit-canned, to be honest, because0.98
00:53:46.000in some way, there is this sort of like multiplicative narcissism there, right? Like,0.99
00:53:51.540as you say, Michael, she could confront these really gnarly, scary questions that are
00:53:56.240occupying us all today. Like, what is happening in this country? What can we still do to stop it?
00:54:01.100What's happening next? Or you could be mad at the thing that's happening right in front of you,
00:54:06.440the barista with the blue hair, or your friend whose kid uses neo pronouns or whatever. You can
00:54:10.840obviously legitimately have both those gripes but pamela paul shows you how to telescope from1.00
00:54:16.680one to the other yeah right how to say like oh the thing that mildly annoys you right she's1.00
00:54:21.640one of turnstile jumping right like the thing that you saw on your way to the office today
00:54:26.240is the downfall of civilization that is through this insane little cavil you basically are
00:54:35.040bringing the whole house of cards down right as opposed to um well you know it's obviously not
00:54:40.500The most important thing, but it also annoyed me, which like, right, like my back hurting also annoys me.
00:54:45.300It is not, I don't think, the cause of fascism in America.
00:54:48.500I think, unfortunately, those two things are unrelated and I will have to deal with them separately.
00:54:52.540I mean, not to be like, it's the phones, but I do think social media makes it difficult or more difficult to distinguish between what is most annoying and what is most important, right?
00:55:04.040If you're barraged constantly by shit you find really annoying, that will come to seem urgently important.
00:55:11.020And we're just not in an age where we have the luxury of taking our own annoyances as seriously as Pamela Paul wants us to take hers.0.98
00:55:19.820Wait, can we talk about the language policing columns?
00:55:59.780And then in the number, she mentions, like, they're actually using gay around three times more than they're saying queer, but they're using it less.
00:56:07.640So it's like, OK, your own numbers indicate this is not really an issue.
00:56:10.400Also, queer and gay mean different things.
00:56:28.780She has one about the term lived experience.
00:56:31.020She, of course, has one about how you can't even say woman anymore.
00:56:33.840She has one about liberal, the term liberal, how it's like being overused and it doesn't mean as much because now people say like classical liberal and that confuses her.
00:56:42.520But then she also has one about the term conservative because people are labeling people like her and Matt Iglesias and Jonathan Chait as conservatives simply for their stated views in the nation's newspapers.
00:56:54.820How dare you smear me for my words and actions?
00:57:15.220But there's also a weird timelessness here, right?
00:57:17.240Because, like, some of these, like, you know are wrong just off the word go, right?
00:57:22.240Like, when I first came to the United States, the word liberal meant anyone to the left of, like, I don't know, Bill Clinton.
00:57:29.380Like, the gradations between democratic socialists, leftists, right?
00:57:33.940Like, people who are, I'm not a liberal, but I'm on the left, right?
00:57:36.400Like, those have proliferated during my time in this country.
00:57:40.000I can't speak for the New York Times, but it would seem that, like, the number of people that Pamela Paul meets who say, I'm not a liberal.
00:57:46.200You know, if anything, this word has undergone a little bit of a decline, I would say.
00:57:51.020And what you can tell is that, like, these complaints are sort of, they're weirdly timeless, as are so many of her things, right?
00:57:57.000Like, the same columns could have been written in 95, 96.
00:58:00.720I mean, the word queer people were upset about in the 90s, right?0.54
00:58:03.800Like, that's why queer theory is queer theory, because they wanted to trigger Jesse Helms, basically, right?0.60
00:58:07.820Like, this was in the 80s, probably, right?
00:58:10.000She literally has a column about how the political correctness panic of the 1990s was, like, fake, and it didn't really matter.
00:58:28.320She just doesn't remember it because she wasn't a pundit at the time or whatever.0.57
00:58:31.440I mean I also think it speaks to the parochialism because as public figures – I don't know about you guys' inboxes, but my inbox is full of like complaints about vocabulary.
00:58:39.740Like if you're someone who does things in public for a living, a lot of the complaints you get are about like, oh, this term has fallen out of fashion.
00:58:47.580Some of those are like really bizarre, honestly.
00:58:49.860But it's like, yeah, it's just like a minor annoyance about my job that like a lot of the things that people give me feedback about intellectually are like the ways that I pronounce words or the words that I use.
00:58:59.320Not really like the content of what I'm saying.
00:59:01.160And you sometimes feel kind of scolded.
00:59:03.240You're like, why am I getting yelled at about this like thing that I don't think is all that important?
00:59:40.860It's like if you if you are the recipient of an insult like that, if it's sort of targeting what you might believe to be you, all of a sudden you get super nuanced about the importance of language and things like that.
00:59:52.940Yeah. If Karen were something that was like directed against any other demographic primarily, I assure you that Pamela Paul would be like, what are we doing?
01:00:03.040Yeah. Policing language like this. You know, it's language is imprecise.1.00
01:00:06.940Yeah, part of it seems to be about like the arrogance of people to dictate how she would refer to them, right? It's like, how dare you? And there's a degree of like, just frankly, just like status enforcement there. It's like, no, me as a fancy white person who works for the New York Times, I get to decide how you are talked about.
01:00:25.720And also a weird obsession with social media. I mean, so much of this stuff comes down to like, yeah, I'm sorry your inbox is annoying, Pamela. But like you write for an audience of millions of people. If 1% of your audience sends you a complaint, that's thousands of emails in a week. That's just like part of the job of being an intellectual influencer.
01:00:43.240And, you know, in the social media era, it's really easy for people to send you, you know, to at you on social media or to send you something in your inbox.0.67
01:00:49.580Like, I feel like, Adrian, we should do like a whole episode about the like linguistic complaint era that like everything became about fucking vocabulary in the last four years.
01:00:58.920And that conversation has almost exclusively been led by pundits, people who have inboxes, people who get a ton of feedback on their words.0.84
01:01:07.060And so the idea that this has been like constructed as a problem for the left, like they're going to scold you for saying meh.
01:01:13.080people scold you about things. If you're a waitress, you're not getting yelled at about
01:01:17.080your use of vocabulary, right? This is not something that is happening to normal people.
01:01:20.900It's something that is happening to pundits. And because our intellectual discourse is led by
01:01:24.800pundits, it's like these people basically complaining about a mild gripe about their
01:01:28.820own jobs. To me, I'm just like, grow up. Sometimes you get annoying emails. Who fucking cares?
01:01:33.360I get maybe, I don't know, maybe one of those a month where I'm like, eh, it's like kind of a0.99
01:01:36.560weird complaint. But it's just, it's so minor. It just doesn't matter that much.
01:01:40.920We've talked about this, Michael, like when you are sort of putting your views out there, if you get 20 emails complaining about something, it feels like you are drowning in complaints, right?
01:01:53.620You might have a podcast that gets 100,000 listens per episode or something, and 20 is, in fact, just an unbelievably small percentage of those listens.
01:02:05.460But when you're sitting there getting those emails, you're thinking, oh, my God, everyone's mad at me.
01:02:14.240So if your column is going out to actual millions of people, I would imagine that the volume of complaints they're getting is super large and probably feels even larger.
01:02:26.040But in reality, again, it's just a tiny percentage.
01:02:28.480It's just that if you want people to listen to you at that scale, you sort of have to accept that this is part of the deal, right?0.99
01:02:34.820That people get to give you feedback, and sometimes it'll be good, and sometimes it'll be stupid.1.00
01:02:39.500Most of the time it will be stupid.1.00
01:02:40.860You can't build your politics around it.0.98
01:02:42.900As somebody who has opinions in public, online, for my job, I always take a lot of comfort in knowing that I am annoying other people much more than they will ever get the opportunity to annoy me, right?
01:02:55.900Like that's just a privilege of the job.
01:03:15.220Also, like the thing is, it's not that I'm not annoyed by those things.0.54
01:03:18.480I just screen grab them and share them with my group chats and be like, can you believe this person is yelling at me about this dumb thing?
01:03:23.880I just don't talk about it publicly because who cares?
01:03:26.200Proportionality is the name of the game and it's what Paul lacks.
01:04:21.520This might be like a decent place to wrap up because I think that there's something
01:04:25.260about pamela paul that really speaks at least to me i can't speak to your guys experience but for
01:04:31.780me i'm like oh this is my id this is my pundit id made totally horrifying you know like yeah and
01:04:38.820she's just there very clearly showing all my worst impulses like no moira lash out at your critics
01:04:44.740on twitter like moira like totally talk about the thing that annoyed you that doesn't actually
01:04:48.760matter. No, my is Iglesias. Sorry. I know it's embarrassing for me too. But it's like, this is
01:04:55.320a warning, right? Because your pettiness, your own insecurity, your own excessive investment
01:05:01.260in your like narcissistic little annoyances can actually drag you to like the dark side in a
01:05:08.460moment of, you know, world historical crisis. Right. So like we all have to get our own bullshit
01:05:14.640in check if we're going to be acting in public and try to behave a little more responsibly.0.99
01:05:21.200We need more group chats, group chats for every pundit in America. Just post them in the group
01:05:25.200chat. You guys dedicate your journalism to actual journalism. I'm going to start like a pundit
01:05:29.780support group, like just for like people who are annoying online. It's like, listen, we all have
01:05:33.940to hold hands together. Yeah. Is this the right solution though? Because I do feel like some of
01:05:38.240these pundits now that I'm thinking about it are probably emerging from group chats that got a
01:05:44.620right? We're on a balance beam. Yeah. My suspicion has been that a lot of the cancer culture
01:05:50.740freak out among American punditry was a group chat thing, right? That like America's pundits
01:05:56.900discovered WhatsApp. I think that can also juke your brain, unfortunately.
01:06:00.480Well, also the right-wing media basically is a group chat for like mild linguistic complaints.
01:06:04.500It's like this trans person said this thing online. And then even though it's in like total
01:06:09.320right-wing garbage, you find it popping up in these columns in like New York Times or like0.80
01:06:13.680People like Yasha Monk will post things, even though oftentimes these things originate with somebody like Andy Ngo or somebody like a super bad faith actor or just like a deranged like Newsmax style outlet.0.96
01:06:22.780It's just like these anecdotes find their way into the New York Times op-ed section.
01:06:26.560Yeah, right. Like maybe group chat is aiming too high, you guys. I think a paper bag in which to scream might be really what America needs right now.
01:06:34.780You need an outlet of some kind, but you really just need to keep in mind that this is dumb, petty bullshit.1.00
01:06:42.160And at all times, you need to be asking yourself, am I writing about dumb, petty bullshit right now?0.99
01:06:47.880And if you're doing that, then I feel like your chances of Pamela Paulifying yourself are relatively low.0.99