Malice, or the Establishment? | Michael Malice | EP 176

[Music] Hello everyone. I'm pleased to have as a guest today Mr. Michael Melis, an author, columnist, and media personality. He was the subject of the graphic novel "Ego and Hubris" by the late Harvey Picard of "American Splendor" fame. He is the author of "Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong-il" (2014), as well as "The New Right" (2019), a book that I've been reading deeply this week that was reminiscent to me of the new journalism anthropology of Tom Wolfe. He's the co-author of seven additional books, including "Made in America," the New York Times Best-Selling autobiography of UFC Hall of Famer Matt Hughes; "Concierge Confidential" with Michael Fazio (2011), which was one of NPR's top five celebrity books of the year; and most recently, "Black Man, White House: Comedian D. L. Hughley's satirical look at the Obama years," also an NYT bestseller. He served as a cultural and political commentator on podcasts with Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Tim Poole, my daughter Michaela Peterson twice, and has his own YouTube channel and podcast. You're welcome. My producer put a note at the bottom of this aisle—uh—autobiography. Michael is a comedian with a harsh and fast sense of humor. He's a big fan of yours, but be prepared for a little bit of crazy. I got that impression reading your book, but in the best possible way, I would say. So let's talk about "The New Right." If you don't mind, I'd like to dive right into that.

So, I said in the intro that it was reminiscent to me of the new journalism of the 1960s when I first read "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," which I would recommend to everyone as a brilliant journalistic anthropological investigation into what became the psychedelic culture in the early 1960s. It's a brilliant book, and I got the sense in that "The New Right" you were doing much of the same thing for whatever it was that was happening from the time of maybe 2013 to 2016, something like that. Something that actually seems like history already, interestingly enough. And you talk about it from an insider's perspective in some sense because you were an insider and an outsider at the same time in these groups. But you talk a lot about 4chan and memes and all these subcultures that exist online that are major forces and social domains in their own right, but that are, if not ignored completely by the mainstream media so to speak, consistently misunderstood. And so I'd like to ask you about that. We could start with 4chan maybe, and maybe you could walk us through first what it is and then what it was and then what it is now, if it's anything, because I did get the sense as well that this happened already. Something else is happening now, and I don't know what it is, but whatever it was you were writing about, that’s five years ago, which is a long time in internet terms.

Sure. I think right now, first of all, discussing 4chan publicly in a context like this, in some kind of studious or serious context, violates the ethos of 4chan. One of the big rules about 4chan is, you know, normies get out. So by talking about it, I’m kind of positing myself as someone who's an outsider. I'm not on 4chan all the time. But 4chan is kind of emblematic of a broader section of the internet which was driven—wasn't literally only 4chan—but was driven by irreverency, was driven by this idea that which is presented to us with earnestness should not be taken at face value. That this earnestness is often used as a cudgel and as a mechanism of affecting social control. Certainly, you've been the subject of many memes, I'm sure you're familiar with, yes?

But the point that they figured out: there's an expression that they say, "meme magic is real," the premise being, you know, before the New Right, the idea was you'd have these organizations putting forth some kind of claim or idea, often absurd on its face, and the argument would be like, "Well, that's not accurate, that's not fair." And the new approach was: "Why are we taking this agitprop at face value instead of mocking it, clowning it, and basically rendering the tool impotent?" So that was kind of 4chan's pull. You had the Donald subreddit on Reddit, so there is this—but you say that it's misunderstood by the mainstream press. I always use the term corporate press because I don't really regard it as mainstream, but I don't know that it's misunderstood so much as misrepresented.

Well, I think it's probably both because it's not easy. First of all, there's an immense divide between people who don't use the internet as a social mechanism or as their primary source of information and people who do. There's an unbelievable divide, and maybe if you're older than 50 you're in the world of 1970 and if you're younger than 40, you're in the world of 2010 and those are really different worlds. I mean, you talk about the corporate press and I've been thinking a lot about the technological impact of YouTube and podcasts so—and this is why I'd like to dig into the misunderstood part first before we go to the misrepresented part. What I see, what I saw popping up in your book continually, was two things happening in 4chan—there's troublemaking that in some sense is there for its own sake and I'd like to talk to you about that. There's political—there's political movement—but then there's also this exploration of what is actually a technological revolution. So if you think about legacy media, so I've noticed that when I've gone to TV stations and been interviewed by a journalist, I'll have a discussion with the journalist in the green room, and I'm talking to a person then, but as soon as the cameras go on, I'm not talking to a person anymore. I'm talking to someone who's an adept mouthpiece for a massive corporate organization. But that was actually a necessity because the bandwidth for television was so expensive that it wasn't possible to grant any individual untrammeled access to it. And so it was inevitable that a corporation was never going to allow, except in exceptional cases, any journalist to have what would truly be an individual opinion and certainly wasn't going to let them explore ideas in real time—too expensive, too risky.

But then now we're in this weird situation—and I think the 4chan guys were playing with this to some degree—where it isn't obvious that the corporate media platforms have any advantage whatsoever over anyone who's technologically able. I mean, the fact that we can have this discussion, for example. So there we have one.

Go ahead.

I would say they have one very big advantage which you've seen yourself, which is the concept of legitimacy. So your previous book, "The New York Times" refused to basically acknowledge it as being printed in America so you can't say it's a New York Times bestseller, even though the number it's sold is just—a huge amount—is hugely successful, right? So the "Dear Reader," the book I did about North Korea, which we'll talk about later, I did that with Kickstarter. As a result of that, on Amazon it looks the same, it's going to have a page listing like another page listing. But the New York Times, you know, all these other elements, they're in a position—I got an hour on C-SPAN's Book TV, so that is changing in that regard, but it gives them an opportunity to pretend that this book doesn't exist. So unless a book is being published by certain outlets that have legitimacy, basically, it's just like—I don't know if you watched wrestling growing up, I certainly did—the WWF when I was a kid, there were rival organizations and they literally acted as if these rival organizations didn't exist. And if a wrestler came over from the NWA to the WWF, they acted like he was this new discovery, that he had no history to him. It was very odd because all you had to do was change the channel and they're acting in certain other mechanisms.

So that is a big advantage because if you go to Talk to Mom and you say, "Where'd you hear this?" I heard this on CBS. Where did you hear this? I heard this on 4chan. It's very clear which one Mom is going to choose.

No, I agree. But part of what the 4chan guys were doing, by your own account to some degree, was testing these new technological platforms to see how much power they actually had. So these trolling games that you described. So you describe trolling as something that's actually quite specific; it's in its intent when it isn't just being, say, adolescent foolishness. It's something like: can we create a narrative and string along legacy media types? And some of that's a joke, but some of it’s also a test. It's like does this new technological platform have enough power to bend and twist what has been the standard means of delivering the cultural narrative for decades? And the answer to that frequently was yes, and increasingly the legacy media outlets are suffering from delegitimization. They lose money, they lose their ability to fact-check, and because they don't have this technological advantage anymore, they have the remnants of their brand. It's something like that.

Yeah, and there's also something—there's a very big asymmetry between honesty and dishonesty, right? If you and I are good friends and I tell you one major lie, well, that's one statement out of tens of thousands—that one statement is still going to do much more damage than one honest statement, because I've lost—there's an amount of trust lost. So their brand has been—and they say this explicitly—CNN had ads not that long ago saying, "This is an apple; we only report facts." If I'm coming at you and saying that I am only reporting facts, as soon as I'm caught in one misrepresentation, even if it's innocent—which I don't think it is in most cases—right away, that just kind of collapses the soufflé. Because I trusted you, I relied on you, and now you're giving misinformation. But most importantly—and this is where I differ from more mainstream conservatives who have think they think things have become corrupted—you made mistakes, I've made mistakes, everyone makes mistakes all the time. This is going to be inevitable simply from a lack of knowledge. What steps have you taken once these mistakes have been made to make amends and also put yourself in a position that you won't make the same mistake again?

And if you see with corporate media, oftentimes they'll do things that are disingenuous but let's give them the benefit of the doubt. Let's just say they were sloppy, but no one gets fired. There's no "mea culpa." Like, you know what? Like a Tylenol is a great counterexample. Back in the early '80s, I believe it was Tylenol got some—was poisoning Tylenol bottles. People, I think, were dying or at the very least were getting very sick. Tylenol had this huge ad campaign that said, "This is the steps we've taken. You know, you got the childproof cap, you got the seal, you got the cotton, whatever it was. This is how you know that we are safe; you can rely on Tylenol." You don't see that with CNN or Fox or ABC. Whenever they do these egregious things, they just pretend that they never happened all along or say that this is some kind of, you know, "You can't listen to the conspiracy theories on the internet." So this is why there's this kind of another loss of trust because there seems to be very little effort to maintain and foster that trusting relationship between the channels and the audience and make amends when things have gone wrong.

So let's—I want to go, I want to continue with 4chan for a bit. Can you walk me through exactly, like you said, that one of the mistakes that CNN did make, for example, and also Hillary Clinton's campaign, was treating 4chan like it was actually a person and as if there was someone who could represent it and speak? Can you lay out what exactly—what it is, and how it works, and then maybe we can talk about the meme culture that's associated with it?

Sure, so 4chan—and there's others, there’s 8chan, there's Reddit and other such—their message boards. So basically Fortune—I don't remember how many boards they have—some are completely innocuous. So Fitness is their fitness and health board. FA is their fashion board; guys can ask, "Do these pants look good on me? You know, what kind of hat will look good with my hair?" You know, innocuous stuff. /pol/ is their politics board. So basically it's anonymous. And it's not—I believe after there's 15 pages and after there's no updates on a thread, the threads vanish into the net—they're in the netherworld, wherever you can't see them anymore—impermanent, correct? You can identify yourself with the flag if you want when you log in, but there’s no usernames; it’s not like Facebook. So basically, you know, the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2015, 2016, were positing about these sites and like how is it that this is allowed to happen. But it’s not the kind of thing where it’s like Facebook and you call Mark Zuckerberg and he banned certain users. The users are ephemeral. You don’t know who they are; the posts are ephemeral. You know, they just vanish off the board so this claim that, you know, the comparison I had, I believe in the book, was kind of the more Al-Qaeda. It’s very decentralized. You can’t really take out one person and then the whole thing falls apart, other than you trying to take out the site which they tried to do earlier this year and in late 2020. But it’s an entirely different model, and I think people who are have that bureaucratic mindset, people have that elitist—in the sense that you have this managerial elite running things—they can’t even conceive of an organization or a location or a website which is decentralized and there’s no like, you know, big bad vampire to kill. Once you take out this vampire—

I mean, but that is part of what I thought was in some sense you’re documenting something that’s so revolutionary that even the people using it don’t know how revolutionary it is, you know? And so because we have these massive communication technologies now and they all have slightly different rules and just by tweaking the rules a tiny bit, you can create a whole new organization like TikTok, let’s say, which has videos of a certain length, and at least to begin with, almost no other—it’s all of a sudden that’s a huge social network doing all sorts of things that no one has ever done before. So the rules for 4chan are really crucially important to understanding it, so it’s anonymous, decentralized, and evanescent. And that’s something—yeah, and they have no one. The two rules are no child pornography, and if there's pornography, it has to stick to the pornography board. But so it’s pretty much the Wild West when it comes to free speech, right? And the fact that it’s not, uh, permanent also, so it’s anonymized and impermanent, which means you’d think, at least in part, that that would encourage a lot more risk-taking because one of the things that would mitigate risk is the fact that it could be attributed to you, but also that it would be permanent.

Yeah, that—I mean, that’s the comparison of 4chan and let’s say Twitter where, you know, someone’s old tweets will be there. At the very least, they’re going to be archived somewhere. You’re going to have a consistent username. So even if it’s not Jordan Peterson—if you’re just going to be like Jack Smith 37—they’ll be able to track Jack Smith 37’s posts over time. You can’t really do that on a site like 4chan or 8chan, but there are other sites like this. I mean, what they have figured out is, you know, the corporate press might decide for chance the devil. For chance the devil, 4chan is the devil. Well, they’ll just go to Discord or they’ll go to all these other sites. So technology is what allows people—it’s designed in contemporary terms for people to communicate. So if you’re going to kind of take out one location where they’re gathering and trying to communicate, it’s going to take minutes to find a new location. Now if there’s going to be a cost because you have to get the word out through other means about this is where we all are now, but it’s very, very hard when people are basically effectively teleporting. For me to go from one location to another physically, I have to get a plane, a car, a train, whatever, but if you go to one website to another, I have to type in a web address. So if you just ban one address, the amount of effort it takes to shift to another one could not be more minimal.

So, okay, so you documented, so no one’s in charge of this, but something happens and it’s a communication network, and it attracts people who—what it attracts people who are communicating in a like-minded way across time. Why did it become a place that was dominated, at least by your observations, by the thought that was associated with the new right? Why did it converge on that?

Because 4chan historically has been a site for great irreverence, so they had had campaigns to, um, troll. And by trolling, let me say specifically what I mean. Trolling is—it’s not just—you know, you have a Twitter account, and I say, “@Jordan Peterson, you’re a jerk, f-off.” That’s not trolling; that’s just being obnoxious. Trolling, I regard the first troll as Andy Kaufman, the comedian, where what, by your performance, you’re turning a third party by exploiting their weaknesses into an unwitting performer on their own. For example, there was a great wrestler, to bring it back to wrestling, called the honky-tonk man from the '80s, and his shtick was he was an Elvis impersonator, right? And when they interviewed him, he would say, “Oh, no, Elvis stole my act.” Now, Elvis had been dead for 15 years at that time. It makes no sense whatsoever, but this would get the audience really enraged and they’d flip out. So when you are calmly causing someone else to have an extreme reaction—and in this case, good trolling, he’s exploiting their innocence and they better—I mean, they’re taking what he’s saying at face value even though it’s complete absurdity—and what follows suit, you know, in some case, can be put in their lap.

So they used to, what 4chan would go, would be known for, is, you know, for example, you had a Mountain Dew, right? And they had name the next flavor of Mountain Dew. It’s just a corporate mechanism; I talked about this in the book. It’s a corporate mechanism to sell, you know, your sugary soft drink. “What name should we call it?” And they basically got enough people together, and this is kind of like rent-seeking, right? If you have an organized goal-seeking minority as opposed to a different majority, that organized goal-seeking minority is going to be able to punch very much above its weight in terms of getting the achievements at once. How many people are caring about this Mountain Dew poll? Very very few other than the trolls. So they got the number one result to be “Hitler Did Nothing Wrong.” Right? Now, they’re not Nazis, they’re not think the Holocaust is something that didn’t happen or is bad; they’re putting now this Mountain Dew, who’s trying to use this fun to sell you this poisonous sugary garbage. Now, the corporation is in a position: are they going to follow through with this poll or are they going to pull it? Whatever they choose, they have been forced into making a choice that they themselves would not have wanted because you have someone in a meeting trying to, “Hey, this is gonna be fun for the kids,” and they ended up pulling the poll because they’re like, “Okay, the internet won.”

So to go from that and this kind of extreme distrust, if not contempt, for corporate irreverence and corporate humor and corporate fun to have basically can I curse on this?

You can do whatever you want.

Okay, well, not everything. So to have, uh, someone who was basically a [expletive] poster on Twitter running for president who was just there in these debates insulting these politicians to their face—in often very below-the-belt terms—that was that ethos brought to life because no one could have imagined in decades that you would have a presidential contender who’s looking at a sitting senator in the face, who’s doing well in the polls, and telling that senator, “I’ve never made fun of your looks, and there’s plenty of material there, believe me, that much I can tell you.” You know, this is something that was completely unprecedented and new, and we’ve been taught for decades that, you know, politics should be about respect. These are tough choices. These are people’s lives. That’s all very true, but there’s this very new left from the late '60s perspective idea that these kind of powerful entities use respect and decorum and decency as a mechanism to stifle dissent and to basically make their victory a fait accompli. And if you kind of mess that up and force them to show their hand that these are not kind, caring people who care about your grandma and your neighborhood; these are power-hungry sociopaths who will smile at your face and do whatever they need to when the lights are off, that I think was something is very useful in terms of exposing our politics for what they are.

So it struck me over the last decade or so that the alignment of comedic satire with right-wing philosophy or political philosophy or views was something that was completely, also completely unprecedented. I thought, well, all of a sudden the right-wing are the jesters—or at least among the right-wing are these jesters—and I really didn't know what to make of that. I mean, you seem to regard it in your book, "The New Right," you seem to regard it as a kind of right-wing anarchic rebellion against—but it's a strange, it’s strange what they’re against, because on the one hand there’s the corporate voice, let's say that characterizes the media, and on the other hand, there’s the left-wing progressives, and you can't really put them in the same camp all that easily.

Well, hopefully we will be putting them in the same camp. But they are in the same camp because one of my quotes is, conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit. So much of conservatism—Buckley got his start, William F. Buckley, who’s the, I think, the big villain of the book, God has started complaining how terrible things are and how mistreated he was at Yale. The new right perspective isn’t complaining about how things are at Yale; it’s, let’s say tanks. Let’s send tanks to Harvard Yard and raise it to the ground. So these are two different approaches, and much of conservatism for decades, besides being inherently humorless—which is a personality thing, which is perfectly fine if that's your thing—it has been about a reaction. So the left would have some idea of the moment—“We need to do this and that”—the right would just dig in their heels, get dragged along, and it’s a ratchet effect constantly moving us toward a more, more progressive society. The National Review’s slogan was “Standing at Thwart History Yelling Stop,” and then at a certain point, people realized, “How about instead of yelling, we actually stop it? How about we actually try to put a wrench into these gears? How about we try to, you know, metaphorically tar and feather some of these people instead of just complaining that it’s not fair? Let’s be aggressive and let’s take the fight to them.”

Okay. And you see—now you clearly see an analog between the tricks that Trump used, let’s say, the humorous tricks that he used, and the manner in which he appealed to the public and whatever was going on in places like 4chan and on Reddit and with memes as well. And you spend a lot of time in your book talking about Pepe, for example. So what is it that you see as the connection? I mean, look, I saw this t-shirt in Florida last year that I thought was really apropos. It said, “Trump 2020: Because [expletive] You Twice.” Yeah, and I thought, yes, there’s something about that that’s really interesting. And I’ve talked to my progressive friends about this a lot because I’m trying to figure out exactly what’s going on and being appalled, at least to some degree, at the shenanigans of the Democrats, among others, especially the identity politics types. Because, yes, look, I’ll tell you what I see in relationship to my books, for example. So hypothetically, this is the standard legacy media critique of my books, I would say, is that I’m peddling nonsense that, if not trite, is outright dangerous, which is kind of a strange combination. Two nerdwells who are so far beneath contempt that any attempt to help them is to be met with suspicion. And that’s something that really puzzles me because when I meet the people that I’m communicating with, you know, when I walk around or when I go to my lectures, you know, I see individuals because I look at individuals. I see individuals who are trying to get their houses in order who are oftentimes in desperate straits, and they come up to me and tell me, you know, some step they’ve taken towards improvement, sort of shamefacedly but also happy about it, and you know, I’m very happy that that’s happening and tell them that. And that’s my experience. But then I see in the response to my hypothetical audience—which is a misrepresentation to begin with—nothing, a contempt that’s so deep that the contempt is even there for the attempt to help. And then I think, well, you progressive types, at least in principle, you’re all for the downtrodden, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe if they stay in their place and act like they’re supposed to, there’s this contempt among the helping class, let’s say, for those they’re hypothetically helping that’s so deep that I think it destroyed Hillary Clinton’s campaign, that contempt. Her comments about the basket of deplorables and the Democrat abandonment of the working class and Trump tapped into that somehow. And you draw connections, and so I’d like you to elaborate on that a little bit, if you would.

Sure. And whenever I try to talk about people, I always try to steel man their arguments and present them in the most strong position possible. When the left is at its best, it’s as you mentioned, it is about concerning about marginalized people, people who are forgotten. The far left, you know, historically would care about prisoners' rights and how bad it is that this prisoner is treated. For most people it’s kind of like lock ‘em up, throw away the key, and that’s kind of a left-wing idea—that, like, this guy has been forgotten. Let’s make sure he has food; he’s not being assaulted on a daily basis, things like that. So they understand also in other contexts that when you have young males who have nothing to lose, who are completely marginalized, who are spat on and called every name in the book in other contexts—whether the Middle East in the inner city—they realized, you keep pushing someone at the bottom and keep telling him, “You’re nothing. You’re—you deserve to have nothing.” That young male is going to, at the very least, trying to get some kind of modicum of respect, trying to get some modicum of status. And this often has literally very violent consequences because if I have nothing to lose but I can make a name for myself or I could, for five minutes, have a sense of power, some people are going to do that arithmetic, and it’s a very, very bad thing. And this is broadly speaking—everyone will do that arithmetic—virtually, as unfair equality multiplies, unfair inequality multiplies. That just becomes more and more likely, that response.

So to your point, so in other contexts, they understand this, but now we’re talking about your audience. Right? These are young men who aren’t doing so hot, and now they're being told, “You’re a loser for not having a girlfriend.” It’s like, well, I’m trying to get out of that situation. I’m not trying to be some kind of date rapist; I’m not trying to be some sexual predator. I just want to be normal. I just want to have Maslow's hierarchy of needs met. But because they have been assigned to be, "You’re supposed to be here at the bottom; you’ve had your turn," you’re the whipping boy of the moment. On an individual level, this is going to have very deleterious consequences. And because you are telling them, “Listen, you don’t have to be—even if you’re going to be at the bottom, you could still be a better person tomorrow than you are today.” Well now you’re kind of going into their house and rearranging their furniture and messing up their schemes. So of course they’re going to react in very aggressive ways toward your teachings.

I think, well, it’s funny too because that notion of my audience is a caricature to begin with, you know? But I don’t care about that in some sense. I’m interested that the caricaturing is occurring. It’s like there’s a reason for it. Why they’re all male, they’re all angry, they’re all white. It’s like, no, that’s not right. And even if they do skew male, that’s at least in part a legacy hangover from the fact that most of the people who watch YouTube are male. But in any case, nonetheless, that’s the categorization. But then there’s the emergence of that contempt, and I think, well, that is driving, just as you pointed out, there, that insistence upon the despicableness of that status is driving—I could see that in the 4chan right and the writing about 4chan that you were doing. There’s a testing and a pushing back that’s going on there, and some of it is clowning. Some of it is like pointless troublemaking, as far as I’m concerned. But there’s more going on in there than that, and that’s for sure. So, and then it coalesces around these more right-wing ideas, which I also find somewhat surprising. And so what do you make of that exactly? Is it because those ideas are the ones that are most specifically forbidden, and the satirical comic rebellious types just glom onto them for that? Or what do you think it is?

I think you hit the nail on the head. It’s that if you tell someone who's got nothing going on, and you say, “You know, if you push this button right here, it’s going to have some really hilarious consequences for some people who think they’re better than you and have no problem telling you to your face they’re better than you,” a lot of people are going to push that button, especially when the results are often hilarious. So it is going to give them that sense of power, and I don’t know that they’re making the wrong choice. I don’t think it’s very useful to tell someone who’s not really being particularly aggressive that, you know, you suck and you’re terrible and that, you know what it is like? I don’t make fun of people for being overweight. Like, I go after people for a lot of things. I don’t go after people who are overweight. I had a friend who passed away because he had morbid obesity. Another friend had a gastric bypass. Because when you make fun of someone who’s overweight, you’re making fun of all your friends who are overweight. You know, they’re seeing it as well. And here’s the thing: that person knows they’re overweight. They know they’re going to be treated differently. They know they’re going to be, you know, looked down on and all these other things. They’re painfully aware. And it’s the same thing here: if someone is marginalized and you’re calling him a loser, he knows he’s a loser. At that point, it just becomes a bit of cruelty and bullying. And also anytime you try to tell someone, especially in America or in the West at least, to sit down and shut up, it’s like, why? Who are you to tell me to sit down and shut up? Because now you don’t have the power to tell me to sit down and shut up. You had that power in school, you had that power in the office, maybe you had that power when there were three networks. Now that there’s infinite networks, if you look at the internet, you can’t silence me, so I am going to talk. And if I see that it’s upsetting you and you hate me, even though you don’t know me, yeah, it’s going to be a value for me to upset you because I do think you’re a bad actor, I think is the mindset. And I don’t think that mindset is at all irrational.

So let’s dig into that a little bit. I mean, I got memed like mad when I first rose to whatever prominence I’ve risen to or notoriety or whatever. There were memes, and I think that’s probably still the case. There are memes being generated in the hundreds, like weekly. It was crazy, and I was watching them. And I thought, if I behave myself properly, those won’t get unbearably cruel. Okay? I thought, if I can take a joke, then they’re going to tilt in a manner that’s more positive rather than more negative because I could see that there was a testing going on there, you know? That these jokes were being pushed at me. And I suppose to some degree pushed out, whoever was listening to me, that—and had I responded negatively to that in any—I remember when I worked on working-class working crews, you know, that one of the things that almost always happened was that when someone new joined a crew, there’d be a test period where various forms of insults would be hurled at them, and it was an attempt to see how they responded. And if they responded with good humor and accepted their stupid nickname with some good grace and could laugh about it, maybe could say something funny in return, then, you know, after a week or two, if they did their job, then everybody accepted them. And the way they went. But if they got all uptight about it, then it just got meaner and meaner until they were driven off. And I could see that happening with the memes. And, you know, I was compared to Kermit the Frog, for example, and that sort of morphed into a Pepe thing. And I was watching that, and hopefully was able to take a joke when one emerged. And at least one of the consequences of that seemed to be that it never got truly toxic. And so I’m struggling with the morality of the 4chan approach, you know, because there’s a part of me that thinks, “Jesus Christ, don’t you have anything better to do?” But there’s also a part of me that thinks, “Well, wait a second. There’s something really complicated going on here that has to do with the redistribution of power and also the acquisition of a voice by people who are individuals and not part of a corporate group, let’s say, but who have access to tremendous technological power.” And they’re serving the function of gestures, and they’re serving the function of comedians. And I think comedians, in particular, are the canaries in the coal mine for a free culture. As soon as the comedians are threatened, you know something’s up. Because you should be allowed to make fun. The biggest meme of yours that I use this meme of yours constantly on Twitter is the Kathy Newman meme. And one of those examples is, you know that famous interview you had where you were saying things that were pretty straightforward or maybe people disagreed with you, and she would just ask you a question that seemed to be a complete non-sequitur to what you had just said? And this kept going on for the whole time. The one that comes to mind is a picture of you saying, “I had bacon and eggs for breakfast,” and her reply is, “So you’re saying kill all vegans?” So oftentimes if someone—if you have something on Twitter and someone responds with a non-sequitur reproach, you just reply with a picture of her, and people right away know, “Oh, so what you’re saying is…” It has nothing to do with what it is you’re actually saying.

I think what you are saying, to be the opposite of Cathy Newman, in this context is accurate in that a lot of powerful people are there through inertia, they’re there through nepotism, they’re there through corporate means because they play the game. If I’m not part of the game, why should I be playing the game? And here’s the other thing where I think these people are heroes: the thing that they’re best at is, when it comes to the thing that is the worst, which is war. We are constantly proselytized in corporate media that war is great. We need to have people overseas, we need to have more troops, more whatever. If you have a president who is regarded as contemptible, if you look at Trump versus Barack Obama, it’s a lot harder for that president who isn’t venerated to send young men and women to die. Because if there’s a skepticism about his pedestal that he’s on, right away, you really have to make sure you’re selling this war, or otherwise, there’s going to be this—it’s just easy to clown you because the arguments used for these wars are often so ridiculous on their face.

So what was you—what was the conclusion that you’ve drawn? Now, it’s been a couple of years since you wrote "The New Right," so what are your later thoughts on boards such as 4chan, and what’s happening in 4chan now? It doesn’t seem like—I think 4chan has, to some extent, fallen away as a cultural force. I mean, they were trying to meme Trump into the presidency, and that happened successfully in 2016. The Donald, which was the board on Reddit, was banned during the election. I think they responded as the Donald Duck win. And these other, you know—and again with these decentralized things, if you try to figure out where everyone’s going, you know, then you’re going to have subgroups. People define themselves by opposition, not by unity. So anyone who has any kind of ideology will tell you the people they argue with the most are the ones who are basically one degree of separation away from them within that ideology. So I think right now there is kind of a—of what happens next now that there’s a Biden presidency, but the focus has shifted. And I think this is extremely healthy for those of us who value liberty. It has shifted from Washington, and this has always been kind of the background to corporate media and understanding that Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz will never despise you and will never have as much contempt for you as the editorial board of The New York Times or the people at The New Yorker. They’re much, or let alone many academics. So having the trolling and the memes be much more focused on what that just moldback called.

So why do you think that’s true? Do you think that's true? And why do you think that’s true? Because that’s quite a radical statement, I would say.

But I think it does speak to this t-shirt that I mentioned earlier, you know? So your sense, what you just told me was that there is this elite contempt, and to some degree, it was associated with the political class. But on further analysis, it’s not the political class; it’s the chattering literary—the chattering educated literary. And I actually happen to think that that’s the case, that that’s actually true.

So why do you believe that?

Sure, I’ll give you a couple examples first. And the arch villains, and I’m not trying to troll you, are the university professors. That’s where the poisoning really, really starts. But let me give you an example to demonstrate which is wagging the dog. Whether it’s—because the argument was about Washington. Andrew Breitbart, you know, who certainly falls into this new right kind of context, made the quote about politics being downstream of culture. And the idea was, wait a minute. If we’re fighting in Washington, by that time, it’s already, you know, fourth down and we’re down how many points. It’s a—the consequence of what led up to this. Let’s suppose I was a Democratic congresswoman or congressman and I thought President Trump was a Nazi, Klansman, horrible Hitler, every name in the book. At the same time, I did not think that there was any kind of collusion with Russia or any kind of something wrong with that phone call. Maybe he’s a jerk, but I certainly don’t think he should be impeached or removed from office.

All my constituents have been hearing for months, from the televangelists to the left—Don Lemon, Rachel Maddow—Trump, Russia, Trump, Russia, Trump, Russia. How could I, as a Democratic congressman, go back to my constituents and say, "Guys, I agree with you. This guy is the worst president in history and he’s a despicable human being, but you don’t impeach someone over this." This is ratcheting up and nonsensical, as a congressperson. I would not be in the position to make that claim, and I think that is a good demonstration of who is in charge of whom. There’s a clip online—I’m sure people can find—where Don Lemon from CNN had John Kasich on, former, I think, House budget direct budget committee chairman, governor of Ohio. He was a major presidential candidate in 2016, and he’s yelling at him, "John! John! John!" And you’re sitting there, and it’s like, it’s very clear who regards themselves as the authority and who regards them—who is regarded as the subject in that relationship.

So, okay, so what if I said, “Maybe we should just stop caring about that too,” because the technological playing field for communication has been leveled so drastically that the New York Times and the legacy media types are basically dead in the water. And that’s just going to play out, like, inevitably over the next three or four years. And I was—let me give you just a quick example: Yes, they were. If they were dead in the water, the lockdowns couldn’t have happened. I don’t think they’re dead in the water now, but I think the writing’s on the wall. I agree. That’s why I’m going to write a book called "The White Pill" because I’m so optimistic. I think they’re on borrowed time. Then we can also talk about what happens next and we can talk about the difference between podcasts and legacy media too, which I think are—I’m trying to think through right now and because I think the YouTube, podcast, long-form structure is very revolutionary in all sorts of ways that we are just starting to understand.

I was talking to Russell Brand a week ago, you know, and he talked about voiceless people and how we’re increasingly becoming voiceless, and I thought, “Well wait a second, that’s true in one sense, perhaps, but it’s very untrue in another sense that might be more important because now everyone’s a TV station if they want to be, and everyone’s a radio station if they want to be, and everyone’s a publishing house if they want to be. It’s right there at their fingertips, and there’s no—apart from impediments that get thrown up now and then—like YouTube banning people and so on—it’s if you want to have a voice, all you have to do is buy a $100 microphone and use your laptop and bang, you know, you have whatever audience you can draw in.

Yeah. And so—and that is playing itself out in our culture extraordinarily rapidly. And so maybe that’s just like the 4chan discussion that’s drawn from your book "The New Right." The culture’s moved past that; that’s already history. It might be the case that the continued dominance of the main narrative by the legacy media types, that’s already done; we’re just mopping up the ashes. That’s exactly my perspective, and this is why it’s often so frustrating with me on social media because I think it’s inevitable. I don’t see how—if my—if I’m the New York Times or if I—see, I ask myself this question fairly often. I said, “If I’m CNN, what could I do to regain the trust of this young population? Like, what steps would I take?” And they’re really in a bad—it’s like Marlboro. Like, one of my quotes is I said, “The battle is won when the average American regards a corporate journalist exactly as they regard a tobacco executive. You are never going to have the guy who runs Marlboro be someone that you trust and think is like an unwitting, unmitigated good person. You understand his job. You might say, look, these have to be legal. It’s a horrible habit of—and so on and so forth. And I get how he’s getting a paycheck, and I get how it could be used in moderation, but regardless, this is—there are better ways to improve humanity than selling tobacco.”

Well, I look at the BBC, for example, tried to formulate a channel for young people, and they did exactly what you’d expect—appeal to progressive causes, and yeah, the truth of that didn’t work at all. And why didn’t it work? It’s because for young people, broadcast TV is so dead that they don’t even notice the corpse. Yeah, right? It’s just not there. It’s just not an issue. And no wonder because the technological advantage of on-demand video, both production and consumption is so—that the advantage of that is so great that those old forms are just—they’re terminally dead. And so when I go and have an interview with a TV person, you know, it feels like I’m going back into the '70s, and I’m not doing them anymore for—and I can get into that in a little while. But what happens is, you know, the person that you’re talking to isn’t the person and whatever it is that you’re having isn’t a conversation. We’re having a conversation when we’re doing this, right? You know, I’m sure we bring our flaws to this and our arbitrary preconceptions and our biases and all that. But my sense is that when a podcast goes well, I can tell because I’m interested in the conversation, and the reason I’m interested in the conversation isn’t because I’m—I’ve got some viewpoints that I’m hammering forward that you have to attend to, but that I’ve got some ideas that I can throw at you, and then I can see what you do with the ideas and take them apart and add what you can to them, and then I can have different ideas and we can do that collaboratively over the course of the dialogue, and we can include all the people that are watching this in the process. And that’s like—it’s like this long-form allows for the truth being something like an investigation into the truth instead of the truth.

Right. Well, we don’t want to underestimate how much of that is purely a consequence of the technological revolution because now there’s time. Right? We can make mistakes, and it doesn’t matter because the bandwidth is unlimited. Yeah. If I’m a roulette player, I mention this in the book as well, all my money is on technology being what saves us. I do not—I think politics literally only causes problems, and it’s not a place for any kind of solution. You cannot look to Washington for solutions. What’s funny is, when you listen to corporate media, a lot of times they will acknowledge something’s a problem, but then when that problem is solved exterior to it, they start to panic. We have heard—you and I are both old enough to remember that there was a lot of hand-wringing, correctly, that we live in a sound bite culture—that it’s not reasonable that a politician who might have a new innovative way to save, solve for poverty, to solve for the environment, to solve for, you know, out-of-wedlock births, they have some program but they have to wrap it up in 10 seconds. It’s very hard to make that point, and as a result, this rewards glib people or people who have good one-liners, but someone who’s inarticulate who has great ideas— that person is going to be dead in the water, and that’s going to create results that we necessarily like. So then people are like, “You know what? This is true.” You know, you have people talking past each other, the Republican versus Democrat. You know, broadly, what you’re—they’re going to say it’s fun when they get a zinger in, but I’m not going to have the needle moved; I’m rooting for my team, and it’s kind of a sports phenomenon. Podcasts come along; we’re going to have a long conversation where both of us are listening to each other. I might disagree with you, I don’t have a political party behind me.

Neither do I. Hopefully, you’ll disagree with me, hopefully—

Okay, that you’ll do—hold on! Not only will you disagree, but more importantly, that you’ll do it in an interesting way that’s interesting also to me because, yeah, if you disagree with me, there’s some possibility that you know something I don’t, and if you disagree, I could learn something from you. Yeah. The smartest person—the smartest person is ignorant of 99.99% of knowledge. We—this is the mistake that these kind of overeducated people think. They think just because I’m smart, I know everything. You’re still going to be profoundly ignorant; you’re just going to be knowledgeable about certain things very specifically. But getting back to the point I was saying earlier, now that we have these long conversations and people can really delve into ideas, and if people listening to us might think we’re both full of crap, but now they’re at least challenging their own views and being like, “Why do I disagree with both of them?” You don’t have that space on CNN by nature of its organization. And now what CNN and other outlets had correctly posited as a problem has been resolved, but it’s been resolved at their expense. So now the human cry is, “There’s misinformation! People are being told dangerous ideas!” Yeah, it’s dangerous to your edge enemy. It’s dangerous to your prominence. CNN, Brian Stelter had a whole segment, I don’t think he named Tim Pool by name but saying, “How is it that these YouTube shows—news shows have orders of magnitude bigger than us? What do we do about this?” It’s like, this is literally every market. Like, I’m a publisher or I make apples. Someone comes along; their apples are people like those apples better. You know, you don’t call in the state; you don’t regard some kind of an abomination against the natural order of things. You’re like, “Okay, crap, what nerve that is Tim striking that I can learn from?” But they’re never interested in that because they’re not interested in learning. They’re interested in teaching, or more specifically training their audiences what to think and believe. And you see this in social media. I made this joke over the weekend: in the same way that Christians regard the Trinity as one God and three persons, you have these entire populations which is one mind in many, many persons. Because the people will watch Jon Oliver or they’ll watch, you know, some other show on the right, and the next day, not only will they be repeating these views, but they’re repeating them verbatim. And that is when you realize, “Oh, there’s no mind there.” This—we’re trained since we’re kids correctly that it’s important for us to be informed on current events. So what these shows do very perniciously is they will bring up an issue that the person hadn’t heard about before, which is important for us to understand, sure, but immediately we’ll train them on how to look at this issue and what the correct emotional response is. And people are hungry for that because they want to present themselves as informed, but they don’t have the time or the capacity to undertake the critical or independent thought to do that, so it comes prepackaged for them. So it’s kind of the TV dinner of the mind.

Well, that’s a good metaphor, but the network format, all of it, the whole technological apparatus including the corporate funding as a consequence of the expense of bandwidth absolutely demands that, you know, like I never feel more like content than when I go to a TV station and everyone in there is in some sense held hostage to the limitations and advantages of that particular technology. And you know what? Well, as Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.” You know? And a lot of what looks like even corporate think or corporate malfeasance is merely a consequence of that strange technological limitation. The networks have to assume that everybody watching has no memory and no education and no attention span because the bandwidth requirements demand that. And now that’s all gone. So let me ask you about this: So now, all of a sudden, the network—everyone’s a TV station, okay? So one thing that the dominance, let’s say, of the three major TV stations from say 1950 or thereabouts till 1995, maybe something like that, there was the imposition of something like a coherent national narrative. And now you can object to that, and you should because, in some sense, it’s imposed. But it’s a collaborative imposition between these technologically powerful companies and the government. The journalists couldn’t go to—couldn’t be too corrupt if they chased after the politicians because then they wouldn’t get access and the politicians couldn’t be too corrupt because the media would disrobe them, but there was this sense of unity. And now you get this immense multiplicity. And so, I mean, you’re more anarchically oriented, I would say, temperamentally than I am, but I am an anarchist. Yes, right? Right? But you know, there is a danger in fragmentation. That’s the—I mean, that’s diversity. It’s fragmentation. But, you know, enough fragmentation you get nothing but endless conflict as people try to work out how they’re going to cooperate. So I don’t think that’s necessarily true because I don’t think you’re taking it as a given that cooperation is desirable or that this unity of some kind is desirable. I think what’s coming up in certain circles—which I was the first one to posit this in 2015—is in America, at least, the idea of a national divorce, recognizing that we’ve had at least two cultures since the very beginning. They’re being held together through, you know, often nefarious means. And if one group regards Donald Trump as literally Hitler and an authoritarian strongman, which you can very easily make the case for that, and the other group regards Joe Biden as basically someone sitting in his own urine behind the Resolute Desk, there’s no reason, other than some kind of sense of inertia, for these two or more groups to be under the same polity. Both—there’s no reason for you to have the president you don’t want. And increasingly, as conversation becomes—and discourse collapses, because I think social media does tend to drive our ideologies to their logical conclusions, which leads to extremism—which could be both a good thing or a bad thing—it is going to be harder and harder to the point where it’s impossible to, you know, have this sort of conversation, and we’re seeing it also in Europe.

Okay, but there are reasons for the necessity of the unity. I mean, so you talk about Jonathan Haidt in "The New Rite," and there’s a lot of psychological investigators, myself included when I was doing research, who were looking into the temperamental basis of political affiliation, right? And so, you know, roughly speaking, on the left end of things, you get the high-open people who are creative in their thinking and who are temperamentally in favor of the free flow of information and tend to be lower in conscientiousness, particularly orderliness. And then you have people who lie on the other side of that who are higher in orderliness and lower in openness. And I tried to figure out why that was the fundamental political axis because there’s five temperaments, yes. So why only those two as the major determinants of political affiliation? And what it boiled down to me for me is that it’s probably that because borders are the fundamental political issue. And I don’t just mean borders between countries; I mean borders between concepts. I mean borders between categories—countries, states, towns, people. The conservative types think you have to hold things together because if they dissolve, they die. And the liberal types think, “Well, wait a second, you bloody well need to maximize information flow.” And the truth of the matter is sometimes one of those perspectives is right for that situation and sometimes the other. And it’s cont—I mean, look at the advantages of free trade and then the disadvantage of, you know, a worldwide epidemic. That’s a great example. It’s like, well, are open borders good? Well, they do facilitate the transmission of disease. And it turns out that the probability that infectious disease will be transmitted in a given political locale is actually a very good determinant of political belief within that locale. So wherever there’s more infectious disease, people are much more conservative. And it’s a huge effect. So something very fundamental is going on at the bottom of our political thinking. But having said all that, it’s that also means, you know, that both of those types are necessary because sometimes one has the right solution and sometimes the other. But even more importantly is that there’s no way of getting rid of that dichotomy. If you have groups of human beings—and so if we can’t imp—if we can’t have a unity emerge that allows both those types of people to coexist, then what we’re going to have as a consequence is conflict, like—and who knows how severe that can become. So we have—we don’t have a—we have a choice. It’s like unity, however fragile that might be, or the degeneration into something like conflict, and that’s not preferable to cooperation, all things considered.

Oh, I disagree. I think it is comparable, and I don’t think the alternatives—excuse me. I don’t think the unity means cooperation. I think unity means oppression. Well, sometimes you look—I don’t disagree with that in some sense. I’m saying all the time, unity through politics always means oppression because the political system can only be used to silence people and force them to do what they otherwise would not want to do. For their sake, and that when you play that out, that game on a national, international scale, that is the definition of oppression. Instead of you and I having a podcast, why aren’t we in the factory making socks for poor people? That’s more utility, says the, you know, the third party who’s not involved here. And that’s the danger in my view. And the legitimacy of that kind of third party. It is.

So the development—I picked up a reasonable number of my ideas about the relationship between games and morality and higher-order social structures from the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. And he was interested in the science of ethics, essentially, and his goal was the reunification of science and religion, actually, although very few people know that about Piaget. And he pointed out quite clearly that a cooperative game would out-compete a tyrannical game over time because the tyrannical game had to waste resources in enforcement whereas a cooperative game didn’t because people were voluntarily going to go along with it. So that then you say, “Well, I think you can make a perfectly credible case that if you could choose between two games, and one of them involved force and the other didn’t and they had the same end, let’s say that the cooperative game is to be preferred, and it’s also more sophisticated.” But I would say as well, we actually don’t know how to pull that off. Some of it’s just lack of ability. Well, when you integrate so many people—like you have 330 million people in the United States, it’s really hard to organize a cooperative game. Well, that’s the role of the corporate press. The corporate press puts forth the agenda of the power class and gets everyone persuaded to do that which they had wanted to do, Mario Cuomo, whose book I got—sorry Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, whose book I got paid to read—he said explicitly in his book that if this wasn’t done through voluntary compliance, I wouldn’t be able to pull off half of this. And what is allowed to happen is you have decentralized enforcement of these rules. And we saw this during the lockdowns where every low-status person had an opportunity with certain dominance over somebody else by going up to them and yelling at them that they’re not wearing a mask even though going up to them ostensibly is going to put your life in danger. And just—you made a very cogent point about how persuasion is a lot cheaper than force. A lot of people use all these Orwellian 1984 comparisons, and I think the comparison to contemporary terms is much closer to Brave New World, and it’s through the use of pleasure and the carrot because it’s a lot cheaper to tell people, persuade people it’s in their best interest, “Go along, you’re going to give up your freedom, but I’m going to give you safety,” and they’ll be champing at the bit to do that. H.L. Mencken, the great cynic of the early 20th century, said that the average man does not want to be free; he simply wants to be safe. And for those of us who are fans of freedom, who regard liberty as a high value, the issue is how do you engage in a polity with people who don’t really find liberty of use and would rather have every minute of their life, whether through their corporate job or what they watch on TV or what they wear, pretty much decided for them?

I mean, the speech in "The Devil Wears Prada" that Miranda Priestly makes about how you’re wearing that blue sweater because the people in this room, you know, chose the cerulean jacket five years ago, then it went to the fringe designers, then it became in the mall, then you found it on clearance, and you think it has nothing to do with you, but it was because we had made these decisions and it percolated down to you. And I think that top-down approach—I mean, Ed Bernays talked about this. Walter Lippmann talked about this in the books "Propaganda" and "Public Opinion." This was something that they figured out a hundred years ago specifically during the Woodrow Wilson administration. How do you get over the complete, you know, fascist takeover of the United States, of course, under wartime premises and get everyone involved in something that would have been completely alien to American thought just five years prior? That we’re going to send all our kids over to Europe to fight a European war. This was a major revolutionary shift in how America regarded its relationship between the state and the population and between America and the rest of the world. Woodrow Wilson was the first president to leave America as president; FDR just went to Panama, but that was like American territory at the time. Sorry, Teddy Roosevelt. So this was—that’s what. So they’ve been— they’ve been at this for a hundred years, so they’re playing the long game, and now it’s starting to fall apart, thankfully.

Okay, so I got three things I want to ask you now. Sure. I want to know who they is, okay? So then I want to know in "The Devil Wears Prada" were you on Miranda Priestly’s side or on the side of the naïve ingénue who, you know, was hypothetically tyrannized by her? And now I can’t remember the third one. We’ll stick with those two for the time being.

So who’s the they exactly? Sure, so because it’s a shorthand, right? And it’s a conspiratorial shorthand, so it’s worth pa—it’s worth unpacking. Sure. A conspiracy is just an organization that you don’t approve of. The Constitutional Convention was a conspiracy. The founding fathers got together in Philadelphia to reorganize the Articles of Confederation. That was what they had been their assigned tasks that they had sported. They get in there, lock the doors, they go, “Yeah, we’re starting over,” right guys? Like, yeah, yeah. And they swore themselves to secrecy. Now we don’t say conspiracy because we don’t like that term, but this was very much a conspiracy.

Okay, conspiracies usually involve deception and secretiveness too. So they swore themselves to secrecy in Philadelphia, and there’s a conspiratorial element there for sure. But there’s lots of things that people do behind the scenes, so to speak, that aren’t necessarily conspiratorial because they do them—they're not hiding them. So back to the they, you know, so basically, so the model is you get the kids at a very young age and you put them in government schools. They are taught many things that are nefarious such as that your self-esteem should be a function of this mediocre person from the room; that everyone should have the same work hours; that you’re forced to be in a relationship with violent peers that in no other situation are you forced to be locked into a relationship with them, with, like, bullies or just people who are, you know, disruptive. But this, it starts with the universities. And this was by design. The American Economic Association, which was started, I think, in the late 1890s by Richard Eli, who was Woodrow Wilson’s mentor there, and they always use Orwellian language—country myself—but the idea is we’re training the next generation of elites. So basically you have an entire population who go to these best universities who are taught the same faith, and this was—they had something at a time which has degenerated now called the social gospel, the quote “What would Jesus do?” which contemporary Christians say all the time. This was posited by a socialist Christian because the idea was instead of an individual soul being able to be saved, which was kind of the central idea of Christianity and a big innovation in terms of historical individualism, the premise was a nation has a soul and a nation can be saved. Now once a nation has a soul and can be saved, there is nothing outside your purview just like when we’re talking about individual soul, the bedroom, the boardroom, how you are in public, these all tie into your salvation. And Eli and other in the UK, it was the Fabian Society whose logo was literally a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the premise was it’s kind of Gramsci’s march through the institutions: we’re going to train the next generation of leaders; they’re going to self-identify as leaders because they have the diplomas and degrees, and they’re going to go out there and basically be infect and take over the country, and it’s going to be this top-down idea. And you see that it’s percolated through to this day, so you have—it starts with universities, then you have all the journalists and people working media who are trained at these universities in the same ideas, and then the final consequence is the politicians. Now for decades what had happened was you had the Nancy’s Pelosi of the world go on TV and say truthfully and honestly, “Give me money, re-elect me, I’m fighting Mitch McConnell and the wicked republicans.” And Mitch McConnell went on TV and said, “Give me money; I’m fighting Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats.” Meanwhile, while these two are engaging this pantomime, The New York Times, Harvard, are lobbing grenades over their shoulders and they’re not taking any fire at all. What has happened now is people are realizing people like Biden, McConnell; these are puppets of larger actors, and that’s where the focus needs to be in terms of affecting change and liberating the West.

Okay, okay, so I would say the emperor has some clothes because I’ve met—I worked at Harvard for quite a long time, and many of the people I met there were genuinely estimable. And I’ve worked in—that’s of course—okay, okay.

Well, it’s the differentiation here that’s of such critical importance, you know? And Pinker’s "The Blank Slate" is a book everyone should read. I’ll say that without any asterisks. It’s an amazing accomplishment, and you don’t go beyond that and say, “Well, look at the structure that gave rise to that.” And I guess it’s the tinker. It’s not a fun—that book is not a function of Harvard. That book is a function of him and his ideas and his work, and there’s no question—

No, no, it’s also a function of Harvard. One of the things that I really noticed about Harvard, this is odd, but one of the things I’ve noticed among many academics is contempt for books.

Interestingly, is that right?

Yes, it’s far, far more common than you would ever think. But that wasn’t true at Harvard. What if you were a professor there in psychology and you wrote books? That was valued—genuinely valued. The people that I associated with there, and that was the bulk of the department, like, they were by and large as genuine an article as I had come across. And so the—and the institution actually did—now look, I’m not happy with what’s happened to the universities at all. I’m not. I think it’s appalling, it’s appalling. But when I was there in the '90s, the institution was set up so that people like Pinker could exist and be rewarded, and even more importantly, the institution was set up at that point to actually benefit the undergraduates. So the hierarchy of concern was the undergraduates. Now you could be cynical and say, “Well, Harvard treated its 18-year-olds like potentially generous baby 40-year-old millionaires.” I don’t think it was just that; it wasn’t just that. And after them was the senior professors, the full tenured. So it was a—a—an institution that had its ducks in order, as far as I was concerned, and it was really quite a privilege to work there as a consequence and a tremendous amount of academic and intellectual freedom within that structure, and that was built into the whole structure—so it was a genuinely respectable and remarkable institution. And it did a great job of finding students who were of incredibly high caliber. You know, like in the typical undergraduate Harvard class, a third of the class would be made of individuals who were as smart as anybody you’d ever meet, you know? So this whole conservative idea that people who they don’t like are also dumb is really one of the stupidest concepts in contemporary discourse. It’s a lot easier to train a smart dog than it is to train a dumb one, and many of the people who are putting over some of these extremely malevolent nefarious ideas, they’re very, very bright. There’s no question about it, but my—and my respect for—they weren’t just bright; they were also—they were also ethically admirable in a deep sense. And you see that with Pinker saying—you see that with Jonathan Haidt, who’s a centrist, a moderate centrist. But you know, he’s a tough character; he stands up for what he believes in, he makes coherent and cogent arguments, and he’s no pushover. And I praise Haidt very heavily; I know you do.

I know well, that’s partly why I’m taking this apart because, I mean, our—the anarch—the anarchist critique of structure is, I suppose, evident in 4chan as well and in your writing that it seems to me to have the danger of producing a premature cynicism. And oh, I wouldn’t call it cynicism. Okay. I mean, I’m a big fan of Camus, and Camus, Albert Camus, the French novelist and philosopher, he regarded cynicism as the enemy. I completely agree. I think it’s important to just—because an enemy exists, just because malevolent actors exist, even if you don’t want to say it’s the Harvard graduating class, which I’m not saying that—in no way means that human beings are inherently evil or inherently corrupt. It just means that there’s a population, and you have to, you know, just like an infection, work your way around. Whereas, so I think cynicism is a very, very, very just—it’s—I—it cannot be overstated, the cost of cynicism on an individual level; it’s the worst. Yes, and one of the things I fought for in this book and I fight for it in when I do podcasts in social media is there are so many people who think it’s hopeless, and then they give up, and then they’re just kind of—it becomes their mindset. Whereas the point is if there’s any chance that you’re gonna come out ahead, you better stand on your feet and go out swinging, and even if you lose, you’re gonna go down at least knowing I did everything in my power, and you’re going to have happiness, pride, and self-esteem as a consequence. So I reject all forms of cynicism, and if that is what I am implying, then I’m doing something wrong.

Well, I’m—look, I’m not saying that my reading of what you wrote or what you’re doing is canonical. I mean, you’re not the only anarchist in the world after all, and so I’m not going to dump all of this on you. But, you know, the reason that I have been concentrating on people’s individual development, I think, well apart from the fact that I’m a psychologist and I think there’s also less danger in that in some sense because the revolution just occurs within, you know, and sure, people who don’t want your goddamn revolution aren’t forced into it, right? I guess by concentrating—see, you said that you implied that I’m not the corporation and that you’re not the corporation, but you see, I actually don’t believe that’s true. I believe that I am in fact the corporation, and I me—I’m even the evil corporation and I’m so tangled up in that world like we all are that we bear responsibility for that fact. And so, and so I think, well, what do you do about that? And it seems to me that you try to get your act together on a personal level, just to—to identify the enemy within, which is the right place to start, and then work outward from that. But your critique is basically a social critique as far as I can tell, that you’re starting with the institutions themselves, even though it’s not the institutions exactly; it’s the corruption of the institutions.

But I—but corruption makes it seem like this is something that could be salvaged, whereas in my view, these institutions are inherently malevolent.

I know that’s your view, but they’re no more inherently malevolent than individuals are. There are plenty of individuals who are inherently malevolent.

That’s their—they go into politics. Well, not everyone who goes into politics is inherently malevolent; you know, I’ve met with many, many politicians. I’ll give you an example because that just means they’re good at passing—no, no, it doesn’t just mean that. I had a dinner in Washington with a group of Democrats and Republicans. It was part of an attempt to, you know, they never talk to each other; they don’t have time. Like, I would not want the job of an American congressman. No, they don’t; their time is so—

Stop, stop. No, no, they’re not running an ambulance. They’re not an ER doctor; it’s just not a priority for them. They have time. Give me a break. They just have to just take stuff—don’t call back your lobbyist and call that call; they have. Are you kidding me? You’re telling people—if there’s one thing people in Washington have, it’s time.

Things go at a glacial pace.

Look, look, you’re making an attribution of corruption to complex structures and I’ll accept that, but I don’t use the word “corruption.”

But go ahead.

Well, pick a word that’s more suitable because I’d be happy to use it if it’s more suitable. Malevolent gravity. Malevolent level;