Peter: I've got the new mic set up. It'll be a little louder, I think. 

Michael: You got your loudener installed? 

Peter: By the way, remember how I couldn't get it working last time? I was like, hey-- I told everyone, I sent to the thing to the [unintelligible 0:00:11] I was like, “Hey, I got the thing you told me, but I can't get the mic working now.” And basically, there's literally just a button you press on the scarlet. 

Michael: It's like a loudener button. 

Peter: Everyone's like, “You didn't press the button, idiot.” [Michael laughs] They were sending memes about it.

Michael: Maybe instead of a beverage center, you should have gotten an audio center, punk.

Peter: [laughs] I will be writing off the beverage center. I think it's business. 

Michael: Now that we've mentioned it. [laughs]

Peter: Every new thing I purchase for my home I'm just going to mention on the podcast, and that way I can frame it as a business expense.

Michael: So, I've watched numerous YouTube videos where I'm like you're only talking about this for the taxes, aren't you? 

Peter: All right, let's go in. Let's go in. 

Michael: I'm stealing this from someone in our discord, but let's do it. 

Peter: Michael. 

Michael: Peter. 

Peter: What do you know about Summer of Our Discontent by Thomas Chatterton Williams? 

Michael: All I know is there's a reason people don't call him Thomas Thinkerton Williams. 

[If Books Could Kill theme]

Peter: Summer of Our Discontent by Thomas Chatterton Williams. This just came out a few weeks back. We wanted to cover this book for a couple of reasons. One is that he's disproportionately influential to his talent, and the other is that I think that there is a lingering reactionary narrative about 2020 that he's articulating here that needs to be addressed in some form.

Michael: It's very similar. It is very similar to the Covid revisionism stuff where people are just trying to make you ignore what you remember from relatively recent history.

Peter: This is the work of a man who, for some reason, has been relatively influential among like a certain set of reactionary centrists and journalists. He has one black parent, one white parent, and so he is a person of color who doesn't think we should be talking about race so much. That's always of interest to the yapping classes.

Michael: But also, talking about it makes you sound hell of problematic [laughs] because you're basically calling him like an affirmative action hire in the worst possible sense of the term. But I think that is part of his popularity, that's a black guy saying this shit that coddles white people. 

Peter: One thing we won't really talk about, but does pop up pretty consistently throughout this book is that, he does not like Ta-Nehisi Coates. 

Michael: Oh yeah. 

Peter: And views himself as sort of like a counterweight. And I wonder whether that's true of the people who publish him too, where they were like “We need someone to balance this out.” 

Michael: Yeah, yeah. And they both emerge at the same time. 

Peter: Chatterton. I'm going to be calling him Chatterton because that's the funniest of his three names. 

Michael: Let's do it. 

Peter: He's written two memoirs to this point. In 2010, he published Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture-

Michael: Hip-hop culture. 

Peter: -which resulted in him like physically attacking his girlfriend at the time when he was 15. And he sorts of like of blames hip hop for that. I don't know. 

Michael: Are we going to talk about his column where he said that Puffy was the coolest rapper? [laughs]

Peter: Yeah. He recently after the Diddy trial, wrote a thing that was like “I looked up to Diddy and he was so cool.” 

Michael: We lost Diddy. [laughs] 

Peter: Mo Money Mo Problems is one of my favorite songs of all time, but that Puffy verse, My God. 

Michael: No, oof. I know. 

Peter: Then in 2019, he published Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race. This one is about how becoming a father impacted his view of race, particularly when he had what I think is a very white presenting child. And the premise is like again built on his belief that race is neither biologically nor socially real. Although, he believes prejudice exists, he doesn't really believe structural racism exists. And also, he thinks that race can be transcended and at the personal level. 

Michael: Yeah. I have not read his memoirs, but I have read a million of his columns in The Atlantic over the years. And it always feels like his work is based on this fundamental misunderstanding not only of like how race works, but how adjectives work. 

Peter: Right. 

Michael: He's obsessed with this idea that like by talking about racism or how race might have affected somebody's outcome, you're like putting people into categories, but this is just not true, you can call somebody left-handed or Canadian or tall or anything else- 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: -and it doesn't mean that's the only thing about them. 

Peter: Summer of Our Discontent. It's sort of in that same tradition, in that his analysis of the cultural upheaval of 2020, which is what this is about. The Summer of Our Discontent is summer 2020. It gets filtered through this lens where he believes that society should be much less focused on race and moreover, that the left is embracing illiberalism and alienating regular people. The sort of classic reactionary centrist argument. 

Michael: There're only seven magazines dedicated entirely to this argument. Finally getting it in book form, finally writing--

Peter: To give you a little more of a sense of him. Back in 2020, he interviewed the model Emily Ratajkowski for some French magazine. Do you remember this? 

Michael: Dude. There're so many little controversies surrounding him [crosstalk] that I keep forgetting them all. Yeah. 

Peter: Well, this one is the funniest-

Michael: Okay. [laughs] 

Peter: -so I chose that. Emily Ratajkowski for people who don't know, model, actress. And she like of made herself beknown because she supported Bernie. Usually when someone who's really hot starts doing politics, people pay attention. And so, Chatterton does an interview and the whole premise is like “Whoa, she's hot, but also she's kind of smart.” 

Michael: Who has thoughts and feelings. Wow.

Peter: Here's one bit I will say. This is translated from French. Chatterton splits his time between New York and the French countryside or some--

Michael: chateau in Paris, something.  

Peter: And then like prepared to have this man talk down to you about what normal people want to hear. [Michael laughs] 

Peter: All right, here you go. 

Michael: Okay? He says, oh, Jesus, look at this brick. Peter. 

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

Michael: Okay. [laughs] He says, “In New York or Paris, you often come across models, huge creatures who, whatever their ethnic origin, seem to all look much more alike to each other than to anyone else like if they belonged to a divergent subspecies of Homo sapiens. But Emily Ratajkowski is different, the sexiest version of a creature right on our side of humanity. She was admittedly blessed with the most perfect breasts of her generation, but what sets her apart, and I've heard it in several cultural contexts, from my friends in Brooklyn to the 57-year-old writer I play chess with in Paris, and even my 81-year-old father who lives in New Jersey, that is indeed her personality. 

It might sound silly to say it about someone whose life is largely a choreographed performance for some 18 million devotees, but she does feel truly genuine. She doesn't seem to take herself seriously. She's not cold and elaborate like Beyonce or tricked out like Kim Kardashian.” Some of these word choices are weird, but I'm willing to give him some grace on the translation stuff. Saying tricked out like Kim Kardashian's a little weird, but I'm assuming that's a translation thing. 

Peter: It's very interesting how even in like this French context, you can see- 

Michael: Fucking em dashes. 

Peter: -how painful his writing is. He has these digressions. 

Michael: Language aside, the content of this is so fucking weird and bizarre. It’s like she has perfect tits, but also, she seems like a nice person. 

Peter: In his defense, he is putting this in a French publication. 

Michael: Okay. [laughs] 

Peter: It's a pervert nation. 

Michael: That's true. 

Peter: And it's almost unfair that we're reading it at all. Here's another bit from this interview. 

Michael: He says, “We then move on to her youth. I wanted to know when she realized that she was special. When did people start paying special attention to you? I must add here that while articulating a completely intelligent thought, she is wearing an extraordinarily low-cut neckline without a bra, while seemingly knowing deep down that her outfit is at once absurd or confusing or even outright in contradiction with her words.” One sentence. “She smiles and asks, what kind of attention? Wait, I said that, sexy. She smiles and asks, what kind of attention? To your appearance, I say, impressed by her degree of tolerance for cognitive dissonance.” Oh, he's trying to like flirt with her or something. 

Peter: Just wondering, Emily, are you attracted to the worst writing in the world? 

Michael: Oh, my God. 

Peter: He's like while I'm talking, her tits are there, like that's what he's writing.

Michael: [laughs] That lowcut neckline. 

Peter: That’s what he’s writing. I'm asking her a question and she's sitting there with boobs. 

Michael: Imagine me interviewing Henry Cavill or something and just like doing this the whole time, like oh, I'm staring at his clavicles. 

Peter: Just like talking about his dick outline. 

Michael: Yeah. His rippling pecs as he spoke. It's so uncomfortable. It's also so funny because this whole thing is basically, like his whole ideology is essentially structural discrimination doesn't exist, but this is such an example of how women are treated in the media versus how men are treated in the media. Men are not scrutinized like this. 

Peter: Emily went on to Twitter to be like, “Yeah, by the way, this was a really uncomfortable experience. And I told my husband about it afterwards because it was so weird.” 

Michael: He's like when did you start getting exactly the kind of attention that I'm giving you right now? When did men start leering at you? Look at your lowcut neckline. 

Peter: This is like median French publication. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: All right, so this book, Summer of Our Discontent, comes out to scathing reviews, brutal reviews from the Times, Washington Post, Vulture. Everyone's sick of this shit. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: So, before we dive in, there is one element that we need to discuss in advance, and we've touched on it already. This is the worst written piece of shit I've ever read in my life. 

Michael: You texted me numerous times of like “I can't do this.”

Peter: He is a cumbersome writer. His sentences are long and winding. They are packed with unnecessary adjectives and metaphors. He uses em dashes to a crazy degree. 

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

Peter: I'm going to have you read that, actually.

Michael: And then it just says, huh afterwards, [laughter] which I feel is so fucking cold. But also no one looking at that excerpt would be like, ah yes, this is a clear explication of an idea. 

Peter: Okay, so I am going to send you the passage that was quoted in full in The New York Times. I do think it might be the worst in the book, although there's competition. If you don't mind, I'd ask that you announce the punctuation as you read. Here we go. 

Michael: This is bad podcasting. We talked about this before we recorded this. [laughs] 

Peter: It was a genuine concern for me how to do this episode, because a big part of our format is that one person will send an excerpt and the other person will react and there will be discussion. But his writing is so bad and clunky that it creates a massive distraction every time, so you can't actually respond to the substance because the writing is so cumbersome, it's so tedious. First, you can't figure out what he's trying to say exactly. And then second, what you want to talk about is how bad the writing is, it's distracting. 

Michael: All right here we go. All right deep breath, “Even though the mixed-race population has become the fastest growing segment of the American demos, and in real terms, a disproportionate but statistically small and decreasing number of unarmed black civilians were killed by police annually (typically between 15 and 25 per year from a population exceeding 40 million, according to the Washington Post's Fatal Force database) –And indeed, other quality of life markers have been equalizing for significant numbers of black people since the civil rights movement – The death of Trayvon Martin, followed by Michael Brown, (regardless of the specific contingencies of that case). And a high-profile slate of videotaped police and vigilante killings that converge with the proliferation of camera equipped smartphones and the pervasiveness of social media thwarted any self-congratulatory sense of inevitability of social progress still alive in the first half of Obama's second administration.” That was one sentence. 

Peter: Generally speaking, try to avoid being too critical of people's writing because a lot of people do it a lot better than me. 

Michael: Don't lie, Peter. [laughs] 

Peter: But that is a parenthetical straight into an em dash.

Michael: Also, the first 2/3rds of this. All he's saying is that the number of non-white people in the population is growing and police killings of minorities are relatively rare. 

Peter: Right.

Michael: That's all he's saying. 

Peter: I started just collecting the worst bits of his writing that I could find and then I had to stop because it was becoming a distraction for me as I was doing the episode. And it was every other page I was just like copying and pasting into a separate document. That document reached 12 pages before I was like “Well, I have to stop this.” [Michael laughs]

Michael: We have to do an extras, like a bonus episode where we just read all this shit. 

Peter: If there's time at the end, I'm just going to rattle off like five of them. 

Michael: It's like blooper outtakes at the end of a romantic comedy. It's like we just have like all right another one. 

Peter: I will send you some of his clunky metaphors. They're a little bit shorter, but they are funny. Here's one. 

Michael: The digital highway we must all traverse has only made the road to peril exponentially more accessible with uncountable on ramps into which we do not always realize we are merging [laughs] up, with which I will put. 

Peter: Uncountable on ramps into which we do not always realize we are merging. Here is how he describes the moments after we all learned about George Floyd's murder. 

Michael: As America began to wake up and I left my desk and returned to it. And the saddening spec-- Wait. As America began to wake up-- I'm leaving all this in. As America began to wake up and I left my desk and returned to it, and the saddening spectacle in Minneapolis as the nation's grief and fury began to concentrate around a Midwestern Golgotha, the Christ-like dimensions of that horizontal crucifixion started to take root in the subconscious. Oh, my God. 

Peter: Dude. It is unreal. 

Michael: I want to die Peter.

Peter: You got tripped up by the first problem with this, which is that he says, “As America began to wake up and I left my desk and returned to it.” What is it? Is it the desk or is it America, I still don't know. 

Michael: And what is he saying here? 

Peter: So, he's talking about Floyd himself. Midwestern Golgotha, the Christ-like dimensions of that horizontal crucifixion. 

Michael: Oh. Cause he was lying down. Because George Floyd was lying down. 

Peter: Golgotha is like the hill that Christ was crucified on? And then he says the Christ-like dimensions of that horizontal crucifixion. How many times are you going to say that it's sort of like Jesus. 

Michael: Also, Golgotha's, that's not the hill. That's a cheese they put on pizza,-

Peter: So, this is- 

Michael: -the pepperoni.  

Peter: -This is the opening sentence of the prologue so like beginning of the book, all right? keep that in mind. 

Michael: There's no doubt that the initial animating spirit of Black Lives Matter, MeToo, and the thousands of social justice protests since 2020 forced a necessary national reconsideration of long overdue demands for police reform in particular, as well as broader calls for greater equality and inclusion, and perhaps above all, the wholehearted extension of dignity and recognition which sit higher atop Maslow's pyramid of needs than strict physical safety. 

Peter: Dude. 

Michael: Peter. 

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

Michael: Oh, my God. 

Peter: What are you doing? 

Michael: He also says like a necessary national reconsideration of demands for police reform. So here he is again, admitting that American police are completely out of control and that the activist demands were roughly reasonable. 

Peter: This is a very interesting thing that Chatterton does, almost a little more acutely than a lot of other reactionary centrists where he will be like “Yes, this is a problem. You have correctly identified a problem.” And then move on to why the left's reaction to that problem is inappropriate.

Michael: Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: He does not dispute that George Floyd's killing was a straightforward murder. There's no second guessing at all. He doesn't even talk about it as if there's a question about it. But he will very quickly move on to here's the problem with the left's reaction and he does that over and over again. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: I will be toning it down on the passages I share for a little bit, just to give you a break. And I'm going to try to summarize what I think he's saying. 

Michael: Thank you. Jesus Christ. 

Peter: So, he starts off this book talking about the political climate leading into 2020. And then, he talks about how some of the elements of Covid were racialized because they were disproportionately impacting black communities. And then he says that after George Floyd, this gave way to a “Full blown moral panic about race that touched on every facet of our collective mediated existence and spawned a vicious counterreaction from the authoritarian right that further erodes our liberal democracy.”

Michael: But you can't call police violence a moral panic if you're also saying that it is real. That's not what a moral panic is. 

Peter: He thinks that the racialization of these things is overblown. He says that the most distinctive element of George Floyd's life was not his race, but his poverty and addiction issues. 

Michael: Right, but this is such a narrow point. 

Peter: I agree. 

Michael: It's like oh, police didn't kill him because he's black, they killed him because he's poor. But what is your actual evidence for that? We don't see that in the statistics. 

Peter: He says that the point of the book is, “A broader analysis of the evolving manners, mores, taboos and consequences of the recent American social justice orthodoxy, anti-racism or wokeness more broadly, that came in from the discursive margins and went global.” 

Michael: I forgot the beginning of the sentence by the time you finished it. Also, it's mores, Peter. 

Peter: Oh, yes, I always read mores. I always read mores. 

Michael: Boom. 

Peter: He starts off talking about the Obama era. And the initial framing of this book is that there was this moment where we were potentially going to get post racial for a minute, but everything unwound, everything fell apart. His thesis throughout the book is very wandering when it comes to race, but I think the most coherent version of it is that things have objectively, significantly improved for black people across a bunch of metrics, and yet at the same time, we've seen increased pessimism about race. 

Poverty rates for black and Hispanic Americans are at historic lows. Median income has risen dramatically for both groups since 2008. High school dropout rates have declined significantly to the point where we are nearing racial parity, and all that is true. 

The only caveat I'd provide is that median income for whites has increased during the same period. So, there's a substantial gap still. And on top of that, to use a quote that I had you read earlier, “A disproportionate but statistically small and decreasing number of unarmed black civilians were killed by police annually, typically between 15 and 25 per year.” Maybe slightly cherry picked because the raw numbers of people killed by police have gone up pretty substantially over the course of the last decade, but true. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: The basic premise of the opening sections of this book seemed to be that the amount of political energy being put into racial equity stuff is either irrational or disproportionate to the need. He tries to trace the origins of this race pessimism, as he calls it, and he sort of blames it on Barack Obama as well as a handful of activists and public intellectuals, namely Coates. 

Michael: But Obama went out of his way to discount the role of race. 

Peter: Oh, did he? We're going to talk. He focuses on a couple of Obama era incidents. The first being Henry Louis Gates, the black professor who was arrested after breaking into his own home. I'm going to read Obama's statement to you, the substantive part of his statement. Keep in mind this sparked a massive controversy, okay. He said, “I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry. Number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting someone when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident, is that there's a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.” 

Michael: These are all basic claims. And also, he had this Beer summit thing where he sat down with the cop and Gates to be like “Oh, let's all kind of come together like a kumbaya moment.” He wasn't like “Oh, tear down the pillars of policing in America.” What the story actually demonstrates is how fucking fragile and sensitive the right is about this stuff, where they will read racial radicalism into the most non-divisive reasonable shit that a black person says. Everybody lost their minds about this. 

Peter: Here is Chatterton's analysis. 

Michael: Many whites, conservatives, in many instances, but not exclusively or even mainly so, we did not need that, were appalled. How could the President adopt a stance on a case whose details were largely unknown to him? Why indeed was he even commenting on a case that involved local law enforcement? It was in no way a federal matter, and therefore the President rightly should have made no comment. To these white Americans, Obama's response seemed as crazy as if Bill Clinton had commented on O.J. Simpson's arrest in 1995 for the murder of his wife. But surely Obama was asked about this. He didn't just randomly issue a press release. This was a major story that people were really fixated on and he would have been asked about at a press conference and he needed to say something. 

Peter: I mean, look, Obama's statement was full of qualifications and was extremely inoffensive in general. I also want to flag a couple things from this paragraph because this is sort of our introduction to something that consistently happens where Chatterton will say some shit that is just not true or not supported or he hasn't supported it enough and sort of indicates that maybe he's talking out of his ass a lot. He says “Many whites, conservatives, in many instances, but not exclusively or even mainly so, were appalled.” So, I'm sorry, do you know that the people who were appalled by this were predominantly, what moderate or liberal? 

Michael: Right. 

Peter: Where's that from? 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: I'm also annoyed by “The Bill Clinton would have never commented on OJ's arrest thing,” because that's such a cherry-picked fucking example. There were two big instances of racialized police misconduct during or near Bill Clinton's presidency? 

Michael: Yeah. Right. Because Rodney King was happening too. 

Peter: Rodney King and Diallo, Amadou Diallo. Both of which Clinton did comment on. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: Clinton said that Diallo might not have been killed if he was white. Straight up. He also said that the officers in the King case used excessive force. And when the verdict came down, saying that some of the officers were not guilty, he said he disagreed with it. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: The president at the time for Rodney King was George Bush Sr. And he said that the beating was sickening and outrageous. So, what is this premised on? The idea that Presidents don't comment on such things, but they do. And this is such a Chatterton thing, he is always talking in these abstractions and then he dips into material reality for a second and it's just very clear that he's not very well informed. 

Michael: Also, is it even true that Bill Clinton didn't talk about the O.J. Simpson trial that went on for like a year? Surely, he was asked about it and said some things. 

Peter: I don't think that he had some substantive comment on his arrest. He's distinguishing between the arrest and the verdict. I didn't find any instances of him talking about the arrest. 

Michael: So, like he did comment on, he just didn't comment on the arrest. [laughs] 

Peter: I don't think it's a good comparator. But when you find those better comparators, Rodney King, Diallo, I mean- 

Michael: Yeah. Yeah. 

Peter: -again saying Diallo wouldn't have been shot if he was white, that's 10 times as like incendiary- 

Michael: Totally 

Peter: -as what Obama said. 

Michael: Right. But it's coming from a white person, so conservatives don't freak out in the same kind of way. 

Peter: They don't clock it. They don't clock it. 

Michael: Also, isn't he constantly saying that Democratic politicians should denounce these kinds of little nothing burgers? Like Kamala Harris should issue a statement on the Cracker Barrel logo. Like the Dr. Seuss people no longer publishing a racist book. He wants them to weigh in on this stuff constantly. 

Peter: Green eggs and ham. I thought eggs were white. [Michael laughs] All right, and now we get to Trayvon Martin, controversy number two for Obama. Trayvon Martin was a 17-year-old black kid who was walking home and was basically identified and stalked by George Zimmerman, who was doing neighborhood watch shit. 

Michael: He’s just a random guy. Not like a police officer or anything, just a random guy walking around. 

Peter: Zimmerman follows him around for a bit. The facts as they were understood by the jury in that case were that Zimmerman was following Martin. Martin got scared, jumped on Zimmerman and started beating him up because he thought that this guy was stalking him. Zimmerman pulled his gun and shot Martin. Ends up being categorized as self-defense. We'll talk a little bit about Rittenhouse later, but very similar in a sense that the immediate circumstances of pulling the gun and shooting it are self defensey in the classic sense, but everything leading up to it is the fault of the shooter. 

Michael: Right. Right. 

Peter: The stakes were escalated to that point by the shooter. 

Michael: And also, the role of race is inchoate and difficult to define like it's fairly, likely that he wouldn't have followed a white kid around. But also, you can't really prove that in any real sense. So, conservatives can always be like “Well, you don't know that it was racially motivated,” but this happens to black people far more than it happens to white people on a population level. 

Peter: I'm going to send you some Chatterton. 

Michael: He says, what was striking, however, even then was the flatness of the emerging narrative and the presentism and hyperbole of its historical connections. For example, the #Emmett Till was also appended in conjunction with tweets about Trayvon Martin, thus raising the stakes of the Martin tragedy from the specific to the eternal, placing it on the level of one of the most gruesome and reprehensible lynchings in American history. Activists were keen to “Argue that the fate that befell Martin, Till and those in between reflects the glaring continuation of anti-black violence and white supremacy.” 

Peter: This is a theme that he hits on repeatedly throughout the book. He thinks that treating these incidents as part of a single historical pattern flattens the issue and strips them of their individual nuances. The retort to this is relatively obvious. If you are putting things into their historical context, that adds nuance. It doesn't subtract nuance. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: Imagining that every incident isolated from historical context doesn't give you a better understanding of it. And using that analysis, someone could have said at the time that we shouldn't view Emmett Till's murder in the context of white supremacy. 

Michael: Yeah. Which many people did. Yeah. 

Peter: He seems to think that at some like indeterminate point between Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin, race and racism lost its descriptive value and it became counterproductive to talk about it. 

Michael: He also has this weird obsession with Twitter. A Twitter hashtag was going around. Okay, so random people were making a comparison that I guess you disagree with. 

Peter: Twitter appears 26 times in this book. Tweeted appears 20 times. Tweet eight times, Instagram seven times. A huge amount of this book is presenting social media discourse as if it is like the discourse, as if like this is what everyone's talking about. 

Michael: And also, if you were doing a one-to-one comparison, it's like okay, there was some hyperbole on the left. If you believe that's hyperbole, fine. Was there hyperbole about that case on the right? How prevalent was the hyperbole? Were they saying, “Oh, Trayvon Martin was a thug who deserved to die?” People are also fucking saying that. 

Peter: I’m leaving a little bit of this out. But he often will talk about the right's reaction, and he talks about the racist reaction from the right to Trayvon Martin. 

Michael: So again, he's admitting the basic reality of like “Oh, yeah, a lot of people on the right are straightforwardly racist, but I've dedicated my book to the problems on the left.” I'm so worked up, Peter. I don't know how you got through this whole fucking book. 

Peter: So, there's a statement that Barack Obama made in reaction to Trayvon's murder. Obama called for a thorough investigation. And then he also said that, “If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.” This caused a crazy flare up of racist, anti-Obama sentiment on the right. 

Michael: It never really died down on some level. 

Peter: Right. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: And here is Chatterton. 

Michael: With the benefit of hindsight, I'm convinced a genuine opportunity was squandered. We make our nation collectively, daily, we change our values, norms, customs, and linguistic habits and significations together. It is not the racists alone who get to determine our state of transcendence. It certainly should not have been a deal breaker. And too many Americans were too eager to receive Obama's comments with zero generosity. But it was a mistake for the president to personalize the killing and hypothesize about what his son might look like. This is his whole fucking thing. 

Peter: Right. 

Michael: It's like oh, well, yeah, they were being racist and completely deranged, but Obama could have chosen slightly different wording and that would have made a meaningful difference. 

Peter: He's saying that Obama squandered an opportunity to repair race relations just by saying this. If American race relations were hinging on Obama not saying that his son might have looked like Trayvon Martin, like safe to say were fucked, right? 

Michael: Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: All of these reactionary centrists seem to believe that it's the left's job to do emotional babysitting for the right. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: Anytime the right gets angry, it's cause weren't babysitting attentively enough. Ooh, shouldn't have said that. You made the little baby upset and now race relations are ruined. That can't be how politics is done. 

Michael: He's also making the same mistake that he accuses the far left of doing where he's using vocabulary as such a powerful signifier. 

Peter: Yeah, yeah.  

Michael: It's like oh, well, they had to be racist because his word choice was slightly off. I think his word choice was fine. But also, politicians are going to say things that are not perfect when they're speaking off the cuff. You can't just blame somebody for like, “oh, you slightly misspoke.”

Peter: And now you’ve ruined race relations in America. How do you feel? 

Michael: This just isn't how language works. They would have found some excuse. It's really obvious. And Obama's comments weren't even fucking bad. He's having an emotional reaction to this. 

Peter: And he's calling for an investigation. He always gives the caveats that they claim that they're interested in. Chatterton does not provide any polling data or anything. This is all vibes. If you look at Obama's polling data, there's noticeable change in his approval or disapproval ratings at this time. As much as he wants to view himself as a guy who tells hard truths to the left, this book is very detached from reality. His conclusions are almost never grounded in actual fact. 

Michael: Right.

Peter: If this was some really singular moment that disabled the hope for good race relations in this country, better race relations, surely, you'd be able to identify some data that you could cite in your book that you were working on for three years. By the way, he announced this book in 2021. So, he literally was writing this for three years.

Michael: Never Google. Never Google approval rating Obama. [laughter] Although, I think what happened with these scenarios is that at the time people looked at Obama's comments and were like “Yeah, that's fairly reasonable, whatever.” But then after a while your direct memory fades and then Fox News gets its hooks into you- 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: -And they start saying like “Don't you remember Obama's radical comments about Trayvon Martin?” And your brain kind of edits it. This is what happened January 6th, right? Everyone was so freaked out about it at the time. But then a couple months go by and then it's like “Oh, it was basically just like a picnic.” 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: I can see these things not being a huge deal at the time, because on the merits they're normal. But then after you get all this right-wing propaganda about how Obama was such like race separatist, you kind of forget what really happened. And Chatterton is repeating the exact same error. 

Peter: It lets the emotional right-wing babies dictate the terms of the historical record. Like, “Oh, this is when he lost us, is it? To keep the babysitting analogy alive. This is a little kid throwing a tantrum in a supermarket asking for chocolate and Chatterton is like “Well, why didn't you give it to him?” 

Michael: Completely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Peter: All right, here is his concluding thought in this chapter. And I'll warn you- 

Michael: This is going to be one sentence. 

Peter: This is not substantive. I just think that this is one of the most ungodly sentences I've ever read. 

Michael: [laughs] He says, “Nearly a decade after Obama's vacating office and Coates’ having largely abandoned the discursive arena, tu,after having thrust open the doors for a new, less tortured, less equivocal, less modest, less literarily inclined, less powerful class of racial gurus.” 

Peter: No, especially more powerful class of racial--

Michael: Ah, you make me fucking start over. 

Peter: Yeah, [laughs] from the top. 

Michael: I'm going so slow because I know I'm going to have to repeat these things, “After having thrust open the doors for a new, less tortured, less equivocal, less modest, less literarily inclined, more powerful class of racial gurus, experts, thought leaders, indulgence sellers and doomsayers. Identity has become the single most potent prism through which all matters of discussion and dispute, certainly political and cultural, but even scientific, are now unceasingly filtered,” For fuck's sake. God, is he paid by the noun. 

Peter: This is a crazy sentence. What are you doing? 

Michael: You've got the doors of a discursive arena being thrust open, but then also a prism in the same sentence. 

Peter: It's wild. 

Michael: I feel like I'm learning the rules of a board game. 

Peter: Chapter 2, titled “Trump and the State of Exception.” It's about Trump's first term, but it's focused, of course on how social justice narratives made people on the left act irrationally. He starts off talking about election day 2016. He goes to see an art exhibit, and then he leaves himself a voice note about the art exhibit that he publishes info in the book. 

Michael: [laughs] Really? 

Peter: Yeah. In that voice note, he misattributes the origin of the term “All Black Everything” to 2011's Jay Z Kanye collaboration, Watch the Throne, when actually it was 2009's The Blueprint 3 first appeared in Run this Town. You just got fact checked by the king.

Michael: You got off the dome, Peter. 

Peter: You think that the New York Times caught that? No, I did. 40-year-old white man fact checking a black guy about rap. Maybe race isn't real. Maybe he's right. He starts off talking about Trump derangement syndrome. I imagine you can define Trump derangement syndrome for us. 

Michael: Yeah, it's like you hate Trump so much that it makes you lose all of your critical faculties. And no matter what, even when Trump does something good like sort of ending the state and local tax deduction, you're like “Meh, I hate this because that's Trump.” 

Peter: Right.

Michael: What is it called? Negative polarization. 

Peter: He has two primary examples. One is the Covington Catholic Kids in Washington DC if you remember that. And the other is Jussie Smollett. 

Michael: Oh, yeah, really, what? Okay.

Peter: So, Covington Catholic, if you don't remember a bunch of Catholic kids, high schoolers in MAGA hats were filmed in a situation where it seemed like they were mocking a Native American guy. The initial video clip made it seem like these kids are just being racist. The narrative got a lot more complex as more footage was released. It turned out that they were being antagonized by black Hebrew Israelites. And the initial video clips, whatever you thought of them, lacked some context. 

Michael: And the protagonists were like 16 years old, which always makes me a little uncomfortable going after literal minors. 

Peter: Yeah. Yeah. For sure. 

Michael: And so, yeah, I actually think that is like an example of the left getting over at skis on Twitter. 

Peter: I agree.

Michael: I think that was an embarrassing episode. 

Peter: His whole complaint in both these cases is about the initial reaction was too strong. And I think it's correct, the initial reactions to this were too dramatic. We should better about reacting to contextless video clips, right?

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: I also think that this is basically something that applies across the spectrum, that there's no real political valence to this. This happens on the right all the time. 

Michael: All the fucking time. 

Peter: It's an artifact of social media. 

Michael: The Libs of TikTok is like an entire account dedicated to taking things out of context and melting down about them. 

Peter: He says that these like overwrought left wing social media reactions empower the right. 

Michael: No. 

Peter: I don't understand why right-wing social media doesn't get the same analysis. So, yeah, Libs of TikTok, extremely popular right-wing account. The entire purpose is to strip away context. They lead to insane things like bomb threats to children's hospitals, but no one ever says they empower the left. Why aren't they responsible for our radicalization? But we are responsible for theirs. 

Michael: I've always said with this whole cancel culture panic thing that it's silly to deny that people do not get into these Twitter mobs. This has always been a real phenomenon. However, you need to look at it in context. This is something that is less severe, less prevalent on the left and there is a corrective mechanism. 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: Because the way that I learned the more context thing about the Covington Catholic thing was from I forget what, but it was like a liberal podcast that I listened to that is like “Hey, we should probably talk about this when we got over our skis on this one.” There are liberal podcasts that do this and will actually question groupthink on the left, there's nothing like that on the right. it's all just radicalization all the time. 

Peter: He basically makes the same point about the Jussie Smollett situation. Jussie Smollett, of course, the former Empire actor who appears to have faked a hate crime. That was like very dramatic. He said that he was attacked by two guys wearing MAGA hats who called him the N-word and the F-slur and put a noose around his neck and dumped bleach on him and it was just like a crazy story. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: So, Chatterton points out that all of these various as politicians and celebrities put out these statements. And then of course, it's revealed that they were all duped. It was a hoax. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: I do think again that this involves a lot of people jumping the gun a little bit. I'm mostly concerned about journalists. 

Michael: Yeah. Yeah. 

Peter: There was some criticism that some early coverage of this dropped the term alleged. And that's terrible journalism.

Michael: Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: But this is, I think, in my mind, a slightly weird example because like yeah, he lied and a lot of people believed it. I don't think that's that weird. 

Michael: Right. 

Peter: He's like there was no counter narrative, but it's like “Okay, were you about to publish a story that's like ‘I don't know about this?’” 

Michael: Yeah, exactly. Black people lie about being attacked for their race, like is that what you wanted. In a context of incomplete information, you basically have two choices. You can like as a default, believe the victim or as a default, not believe the victim. And so, I think in general, for me personally, when I see somebody making a claim of rape or a hate crime or something, in general, I believe the person unless they're totally not credible. 

Peter: Right. If he’s point is like wait, then sure, but there was no counter narrative, it's like okay, what would that look like exactly? 

Michael: Because the actual argument would be like institutions are too quick to believe these people. Maybe locking up somebody who was accused of this crime with no actual evidence they did, that would be a real problem. But if what you're really talking about is people on social media being like “Wow, this is like really horrific,” I don't know that's like that big of an issue. It's like he can't actually point to any bad outcome here other than there was 72 hours of people siding with this person. 

Peter: If what he's saying is like people just jump too hard on this stuff without context, then I do agree. I just don't think that, again, this is just not something that has a real political tilt to it. 

Michael: Right. 

Peter: He says none of the celebrities and politicians who had voluntarily hyped the well-connected performers stunt, which the New York Post accurately described as a social justice inflected 21st century version of a 1980s abducted by aliens’ story issued public apologies or corrections. 

Michael: I honestly don't remember seeing all that many, to be honest. I do remember the story like getting debunked. 

Peter: I don't know that I saw apologies exactly because a lot of them probably just viewed themselves as being duped sorry, I got mad, but like corrections, yeah. Kamala Harris said she was disappointed in Smollett and that fake allegations make things harder for real victims. The Biden White House said it was shameful after the verdict came down against Smollett. What Smollett did? SAG-AFTRA put out a statement saying it could lead to people disbelieving hate crime reports. The ladies on The View criticized him publicly like he was blocked on like the Daily Show. 

Michael: And also, he's been completely abandoned as a cause celeb by social justice people. Nobody says like, “Oh, he was wrongfully accused of faking it.” Everyone was like “Ooh, fuck this guy.” 

Peter: Outside of a few total nut job radicals, no one supports him anymore and his career is over. So, what do you need here? 

Michael: Cause ultimately, what Chatterton's argument boils down to is like I would like people to wait slightly longer on social media before amplifying bias claims. 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: Okay. Is that really a problem in the nation that we need a whole book to address? It's sort of like his actual argument here is-- So, it's such a narrow point. 

Peter: Yeah. And if the broad criticism in this chapter is that people latch onto anecdotes that confirm their priors, I agree. But also, that is what Chatterton is doing right now. 

Michael: Yeah, exactly. 

Peter: He's just locating anecdotes that confirm his belief about liberal ideology and putting them forward as the seminal examples of how social justice works.

Michael: Because there are also hate crimes that did in fact happen. 

Peter: Right. And by the way, as we move on to the next chapter, I want to be clear that what we just discussed was his entire chapter on Trump's first term. 

Michael: Wait, really? [laughs] 

Peter: Yes. We've now passed Trump's first term. 

Michael: What do you remember about 2016-2020? Eh, Jussie Smollett. 

Peter: He's like “Let me fucking tell you, Jussie Smollett.” All right, Chapter 3, The Plague, and it's about Covid. 

Michael: It’s about Covid, good. 

Peter: The initial theme of this chapter is that he enjoyed the early stages of lockdown. There was a sense of solidarity. He was in the fucking French countryside, so, I bet he did. And then images of American right wingers acting like babies, sort of like break the spell and things start to spiral. But then he very quickly starts to focus on the hypocrisy of Black Lives Matter protests happening during lockdowns. 

Michael: Because you were against the anti-mask, anti-vax protest, but you were for the anti-racism protests. You change your mind? I remember this. 

Peter: He says, “In the space of two weeks, and without really thinking it through, we went from shaming people for being in the street to shaming them for not being in the street.” This is another one of those arguments where he's operating from vibes when he could be arguing from data. This is a very common right wing talking point, like why was it okay to attend these crowded protests when we're otherwise locked down? But whether or not protests worsened the spread of Covid is a measurable fact that there is research. So first, there was no spike in overall Covid cases around the time of the protests. 

There was a paper that was first published as a working paper in 2020 that found no impact from protests, which likely because one, protests were outside and participants were actively mitigating, and then two, protests actually decreased riskier activities like bar and restaurant attendance. 

Michael: Oh, interesting. Yeah.  

Peter: So, even if protests themselves were riskier than staying home, which they almost certainly were, they reduced even riskier behavior. 

Michael: Right.

Peter: I also think it's totally fine to accept that people were willing to expose themselves to some risk, and maybe even irrationally so, following a few months of lockdown, but the risk that they were exposing themselves to does not appear to have been very high based on what we know. 

Michael: Yeah. This is also the weird thing of like people pretending that they have no outcome preferences. It's all process preferences. Yeah, it was a calculated risk to go be in a crowd in summer of 2020. People decided it was not worth the risk to go to a fucking anti-vax AR-15 rally at the Michigan State House. It was worth the risk to protest a real phenomenon, black people being killed by police. 

Peter: Right.

Michael: I don't really think that's hypocrisy to be like one kind of protest is good because it's based on reality, and another kind of protest is bad because it's based on a lie. 

Peter: Well, I think his concern is just like lockdowns overall. So, he's like “Why can't I go to a restaurant then?”

Michael: Also, you could go to a restaurant in summer of 2020. [laughs] 

Peter: God. Here's his sort of big picture take on this. 

Michael: He says, “It is a statement of basic fact that as the direct consequence of lockdown and quarantines, many millions of people around the world lost their income, depleted their savings, missed farewells and funerals of their loved ones, postponed cancer screenings, never experienced graduations and proms, at times went without human touch entirely and generally put their lives on pause for the indefinite future.” Again, so many examples. “They accepted these sacrifices as awful, but necessary when confronted by an otherwise unstoppable virus and then from one day to the next they were told with a straight face that this had all been done in vain.” People were not told this. 

Peter: In vain? In vain? It's very poor sometimes when reading this book to pause and process that he is actually very stupid in that he is actually just not good at coming to accurate or defensible conclusions based on the information he has. Even if you think people were absorbing too much risk here, that doesn't mean that prior mitigation was done in vain. 

Michael: Right.

Peter: Every time he tries to describe material reality, he just butchers it. It's wild. He also says that experts lost their credibility with the public. And as part of that he says that they were attempting to push “Unproven vaccine.” 

Michael: Wait, really? He's really in it deep to be flirting with anti-vax stuff is wild. 

Peter: You see this all the time from the right end, like the center right, the sort of Covid skeptics. Unproven vaccine, like what do you mean by proof? 

Michael: Yeah. What were proven-- [crosstalk] 

Peter: Because many scientists worked to determine the efficacy and safety of the vaccine. And obviously this was a different type of vaccine than usual vaccines, which was necessary if we wanted to have it quickly, if you didn't want to still be in lockdowns for fucking years on end. But it cracks me up to see some fucking half employed debutante call a vaccine unproven. What was the proof you had of the MMR vaccine before you took it? The only proof that someone like Thomas Chatterton Williams has ever had for any vaccine that he's ever taken is that a scientist told him it would work, that's it. The details are irrelevant because he couldn't parse them with a gun to his head. So, what do you mean by unproven vaccine? 

Michael: Also, yeah, they came up with the vaccine in like April of 2020, very early and then they tested it. The reason it took so long was testing it for safety and efficacy. It wasn't actually developing the vaccine. That was like a weekend. And the reason why trust fell in experts was because of both the right and reactionary centrist constantly fucking saying things like they're pushing an unproven vaccine on us. 

Peter: Right. 

Michael: That's why people don't trust experts. It's not the experts fucking up. 

Peter: He says even obvious and commonsensical speculations and responses such as the likelihood of a lab leak or the very serious need to prohibit travel- 

Michael: Knew it. 

Peter: -from China were dismissed as incorrect and even xenophobic as the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi put it when articulated by the president. 

Michael: I was just going to be like “Read me the fucking lab leak shit. I know he's going to go there.” 

Peter: By the way, I actually couldn't find a source indicating that Pelosi ever said the term xenophobic in this context. It's hard to be exhaustive, but I actually think he got her mixed up with Biden, who said it about the China travel ban. 

Michael: Okay. 

Peter: I think there probably were people in Democratic circles and critical of the initial China travel ban, which, by the way, wasn't aggressive enough. 

Michael: Yeah, this definitely was bouncing around the left. Even if Pelosi didn't say it, this was an argument that you heard at the time. But it's so weird to me that this had become such an article of faith among reactionary centrists and on the right that it was leftist overreach in March of 2020 to constantly be hurling around these accusations of xenophobia, but at the time, Trump was calling it the Wuhan flu. 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: Peter Navarro, who was on Trump's Covid task force, wrote a book called Death by China. 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: People were talking about like a Chinese bioweapon at the time. This kind of polite version of the lab leak did not exist for another year. 

Peter: Right. 

Michael: So, the lab leak theory at the time was pretty openly driven by xenophobia. 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: It's just so striking that they never even bother to show that the left is wrong or that it's an incorrect claim. They just think that any accusation of racism is kind of, on its face, ridiculous. 

Peter: Chapter 4, It's about the reaction to George Floyd. Again, not a George Floyd revisionist or anything horrific like that. His focus here is how the incident leads to the popularization of certain social justice principles that he does not like.

Michael: Like don't kill people. [laughs] 

Peter: Look, some of this I kind of agree. He starts off with White Fragility. It's a book that we've considered covering on this show and whose author, Robin DiAngelo, I consider to be grifter adjacent. 

Michael: Oh, does he go into Kendi as well? Ibram Kendi. 

Peter: He talks about Kendi, [crosstalk] who wrote How to Be an Antiracist, which I know less about, but I've seen similar critiques. I think Chatterton's criticisms are overwrought here, but there's a coherent argument in here that people with weird ideas about race were elevated and praised and probably got way too much money for programs that don't verifiably work. 

Michael: Yeah. We've talked about this. The DEI sector doesn't have great empirics behind it, but also the moral panic around DEI is very obviously like a racist moral panic and an excuse to dismantle all of this shit and push minorities out of prominent positions. 

Peter: DEI now is just a catchphrase for conservatives when they see a black person on TV that they don't like, they're like “DEI.” 

Michael: Yes. 

Peter: He also includes anecdote that I'd forgotten about, but I actually think is pretty good. In September 2020, Princeton University's President put out a letter about addressing systemic racism, where he said things like “Racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton, as in our society, sometimes by conscious intention, but more often through unexamined assumptions and stereotypes, ignorance or insensitivity, and the systemic legacy of past decisions and policies. He also said racist assumptions from the past also remain embedded in the structures of the university itself. This prompted the Department of Education to open an investigation into potential violations of Title VI,” the law requiring that schools don't engage in discrimination, and then of course, Princeton denies doing so. Now this is under the Trump administration. This is a very cynical ploy by the Trump administration. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter: But I do think that it prodded at elements of this like performative antiracism at these big liberal institutions, right?

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: And a lot of these critiques about performativity are frequently made by the left, but Chatterton doesn't really seem to engage with that. There are very large segments of the left that hate this shit. 

Michael: It is. I mean, man--

Peter: What? 

Michael: If these like factors in American life and these threads are so prevalent, it's like why does every one of these guys talk about the same two fucking people? 

Peter: Yeah, yeah. 

Michael: it's Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi. Okay, well surely if everyone is entranced by this ideology, you have more than two books and the same anecdotes, my God, I feel like he's going to have a whole chapter on the breakup of the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen. We're going to re-litigate that for two hours. 

Peter: Chapter 5, “Reply All.” 

Michael: [laughs] Jesus Christ. 

Peter: And then he gets to defund the police, and here we go.

Michael: All right. He says, “Back in Minneapolis, for one eye catching example, less than two weeks after the death of George Floyd, a veto proof nine-member majority of the city council stood before a crowd of hundreds gathered in sunny Powderhorn park and pledged to dismantle their police department and create a new system of public safety for the community.” What happened then, Thomas? What happened after that? 

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

Michael: The only city where that happened because they defunded their police. 

Peter: And then people lost their appetite for reform. Here's what he says about the murder rate spike. 

Michael: He says, “The majority of that violence occurred after the killing of Floyd and the subsequent push to end policing as we know it. A rhetorical gambit that led, according to the city's Latino chief of police, Medaria Arradondo, to more than 100 officers vacating the force. a figure more than twice the annual rate.” Okay, so people quit. 

Peter: Yeah. And he seems to be implying that the 2020 murder spike was maybe caused by anti-police rhetoric, which is just another thing where it's like I think you're going to need evidence actually. 

Michael: Yeah. Yeah. 

Peter: I don't want to get into wonky details here, but I just think it's worth noting that he doesn't talk about the policy of defund at all. He has no interest in it. He has very little interest in policy in general. And he also hand waves away the contradictions. He wants you to believe that this cultural vibe shift was so significant that it permeated our politics. But then he doesn't have a coherent explanation for why it didn't actually lead to any major policy changes in any major city. And he's like well, the murder rate spiked and then people realized that they shouldn't defund. Yeah, maybe, but you just described the city council as a veto proof majority. 

Michael: Right and he keeps saying that leftist ideology is overriding basic realities, but then why are the basic realities changing people's ideology in this case? 

Peter: You're talking about this ideology that dominates on the left so substantially that you needed to write a book. Democrats are in charge of every single major city in the country, basically, and you can't find one that defunded, why? Why?

Michael: As usual, he also totally misreads the power dynamics here that like we have police who basically did a work stoppage starting in that summer, like a little tantrum that they've never fucking started doing their jobs again. We still have police that refuse to enforce the law. That's a huge problem. They're also super right-wing fucking radical pilled. A lot of them are Covid deniers. This is actually a huge problem. 

Peter: It is. Clearance rates have gone down. I was just talking about this on 5-4, but like police and their accoutrement like police unions, the fraternal order-

Michael: That’s so bad.  

Peter: -they're just this giant right wing- 

Michael: So bad. 

Peter: -political operation that gets public funding. Yeah, I think that's an important thing you're calling out because he does not have a framework for understanding right-wing political power. He mostly understands the right as a political force that reacts to the excesses of the left. So, he cannot see police unions and lobbying groups and police PR departments and how they've been learning to respond to protest movements since the beginning of Black Lives Matter over a decade ago. We've talked about this before, but police budgets for PR shot up after 2014 and 2015, and he just has no vision into that. No knowledge of it that I can see. And so, everything that happens, happens based on whatever is going on the progressive left. 

Michael: And also, I know this antedates the book, but they did just dismantle the Department of Education. It's not like the radicalism is exclusively on the left on this stuff. 

Peter: That's what is going to radicalize Chatterton, that he no longer gets federal funding to teach some 21-year-old about Camus or whatever. 

Michael: Yeah, fly him out to Oberlin or some shit. Yeah. 

Peter: I was on his social media feed. He's being flown all over the world for stupid bullshit. 

Michael: Yeah, dude. I know. 

Peter: He's one of the luckiest people in America. It's crazy. No wonder he doesn't believe in race. 

Michael: He's like “[unintelligible 0:54:05] this money then?” [laughs]  

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

Michael: Then why am I on Peter Thiel's jet right now? Explain that, SJWs. 

Peter: All right, Chapter 5, “Media in the Age of Moral Clarity.” 

Michael: Oh, my God. 

Peter: We were just talking about the phrase moral clarity in our Bret Stephens bonus episode, but there's this argument that comes from reactionary centrists a lot where they say the problem with people on the left is like their sense of moral clarity. They're too certain of their own moral correctness. 

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

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: I don’t like them personally. 

Peter: I don't agree with you, but you’re real-- Rather than argue with you, I'm going to say that your problem is that you're too confident in your own correctness. 

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

Peter: So, this chapter centers around The New York Times Tom Cotton Op-Ed-

Michael: Oh, God- 

Peter: -in the summer 2020. 

Michael: -do we have to talk about this again? Jesus Christ. 

Peter: Tom Cotton publishes an Op-Ed in The Times called “Send in The Troops” about the need to deploy federal troops to quell the riots across the country. 

Michael: It’s so tedious. He's just relitigating a bunch of Twitter controversies. It's unbelievable to dedicate a whole fucking book to this. 

Peter: How dare you describe this book as the relitigation of a bunch of Twitter controversies. Twitter is only mentioned 50 times in 200 pages. And you think that this is all about Twitter? 

Michael: God, it's just like find some other fucking anecdotes, do some work. These are all so well-trodden. I've read 300 articles about this fucking Tom Cotton thing. 

Peter: Also, the paragraph that I sent you is literally just about a Twitter post. [laughs] 

Michael: Oh, my God. He says, “What happened next was highly unusual, on Twitter, beginning on June 3rd, 2020, the day the Op-Ed ran. A number of high-profile Times journalists and staffers began to share a short, eyebrow raising, declarative sentence above a screenshot of the Op-Ed's headline. Running this puts black people, including black New York Times staff in danger, the tweet alleged. The reasoning was as logically unpersuasive as the phrasing was prefabricated and strategically coordinated to initiate a specific response from the company's management.” Ooh, they were coordinating. “The realm of intellectual, political and journalistic disagreement had been forsaken. This was now, however implausibly, a matter of physical safety, and therefore it was non-negotiable,” But it was negotiable. It was negotiated. 

Peter: Also, he started off the book by saying that dignity and recognition are higher in Maslow's hierarchy [laughter] of needs than physical safety. Interesting. So, it's very clear that he thinks that the idea that this Op-Ed endangered Times staffers is a total fiction, total bullshit. Worth noting, journalists would be covering the protests and riots. So, the presence of the United States military, there is a pretty direct concern. And also, if the military is deployed, yes, there are going to be concerns about people getting hurt. He might not think that's enough to warrant an objection, but have the balls to say, like if someone's talking about deploying the military to United States cities and he's like “Oh, they're making it a matter of physical safety.” It's like, well, yeah. 

Michael: Also, he's doing this thing where that they always fucking do, where he's implying that certain acts of speech are suppression of speech. So, for a black person to say, “Hey, this makes me unsafe,” that's suppressing speech. However, a sitting senator writing an Op-Ed calling for widespread violence, that's not suppressing speech. 

Peter: One thing that James Bennett, The Times, the editor of The Opinion section at the time, always hangs his hat on is like well, Cotton wasn't calling for the deployment of troops against protests. He was calling for it against the riots only. And it's like right, do you understand how this would have gone down? 

Michael: Right completely, yeah. 

Peter: Absolute schmuff. 

Michael: Also, they were classifying peaceful protesters as fucking rioters. It was really obvious what was going on. 

Peter: All right, here's some Chatterton. 

Michael: There was also the thing of James Bennett didn't even read it before it was published and he had [crosstalk]. 

Peter: Wo-oh. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. 

Michael: Okay, fine. [Peter laughs] 

Michael: Why do we do this to ourselves? 

Peter: I'm dying at how mad-- I spent two weeks just wanting to absolutely just like run my head into a buzzsaw, and you finally get to just experience a little bit of it, it's great. 

Michael: He says, “48 hours later, he'd lost his nerve entirely. And James Bennett, the editor of The Opinion section, resigned under immense pressure. By June 7th, The Times had issued a bizarre apology, stating obliquely and for reasons that contradict its own stated values that the piece did not meet our standards.” Yeah, he didn't read it before it was published. 

Peter: This is what Chatterton doesn't really address at all. Bennett admitted that he did not read the Op-Ed before publication, which is his fucking job. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: And he also says this “In what has always been an extremely hierarchical institution. The paper's history does not include an equivalent episode of staffers, a significant number of whom were not even journalists, but rather digital media technicians and producers-

Michael: Oh my god.

Peter: -mutinying their bosses at times in openly ad hominem and patently insulting terms in order to exact punishment on a top figure for doing what had been fully within the purview of his job, publishing a widely held perspective articulated by an important political actor.” 

Michael: No, we talked about this in our Bari Weiss bonus episode. This was not a widely held view. The only way you get to that is by misrepresenting polling data where it was asking people like, “Are you okay with the National Guard supporting local law enforcement?” It was not the view of the population that the military should be sent in to crack down on protests. 

Peter: Yeah, polls are not exactly super reliable, nor do I believe the fact that an opinion is held by a senator means that the New York Times has to publish it. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: Go fucking tell the President, whatever. I think that this reveals like the fundamental frustration of the anti-woke set about 2020 in that like it reflected a bottom-up accountability that they felt powerless to discipline, and that really just pissed them off.

Michael: Yeah. That's also the obsession with social media. It's just like normal ass people can go into Bret Stephens mentions and be like “You fucking bedbug,” like that's the anxiety that's driving all of that stuff. Yeah. 

Peter: It's also worth diving into the background here, which Chatterton leaves out. Bennett had joined the paper a couple years prior and he explicitly said that part of his MO was to challenge his readership by publishing views that readers find objectionable, “Provided they meet the same tests of intellectual honesty, respect for others and openness.” 

Michael: Wow. 

Peter: Well, I mean if there's anything that characterizes the Thomas Cotton’s [crosstalk] Op-Ed, it's respect for others and intellectual honesty. So, in other words, he wanted to publish more conservative views. And that aggravated a lot of people at the times and they felt like he was willing to publish low quality pieces just because they felt contrarian. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: Let me send you this final bit and I'm sorry, it continues to be distracting how bad of a writer he is, but there's nothing I can do about this 

Michael: He says, “On another, more enduring level, the Bennett firing was much more than a pressure releasing communal sacrifice. It was illustrative of a power struggle between competing versions of what most fundamentally journalism itself is supposed to be. What this controversy so potently entailed was the literal embodiment of legacy media, capitulating in the face of coordinated mobs of junior staffers who, though they psychologically and cathartically might have benefited from the social killing of one high-level competitor, were even more decisively vying to fundamentally reshape journalism's marquee institution according to their newfangled conception of the trade and inevitably biased narrative vision.” But this is all just like about their motivation. 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: This thing of like oh, they were doing it performatively, they were doing it as a powerplay. I think people believe what they say. I think when people say that they're offended by police killings, they're offended by police killings. We don't need to see that as a powerplay. 

Peter: Is it really crazy to believe that people found it objectionable to publish a senator saying that we should send troops to major American cities? I know that it's happening now, so maybe it seems normal, but there was actually a time a few years ago when it wouldn't have been normal. 

Michael: And I do think that people were trying to shape the institution, but also that's normal institution. 

Peter: It's not weird. 

Michael: Like every NGO I worked at has a five-year strategy and a ten-year strategy and you try to influence those things. 

Peter: Very normal. 

Michael: He can't really debate this up on the merits, so he has to say that their motivation was bad, which he has no proof for. 

Peter: The way that he frames it is that he thinks that “Times should remain neutral on debatable issues.” And he says that the social justice types wanted The Times to abandon neutrality. 

Michael: Not remotely true. 

Peter: That like fundamentally misunderstands what's happening here. Bennett himself did not aspire to neutrality. He openly wanted to challenge his liberal readership, which means he was making an effort to publish conservative opinions. It was also revealed in the course of this that The Times actually reached out to Cotton about this Op-Ed. He didn't pitch them. They reached out to him.

Michael: Yeah, that's even worse. 

Peter: How can you claim you're institutionally neutral when you're literally soliciting certain opinions? And why is publishing an opinion neutral while not publishing it is biased? They have to remain neutral. What are you talking about? How many pitches per day do you think New York Times- 

Michael: Exactly. 

Peter: -get? They can only publish a subset of them. How do you remain neutral? What does that even mean in that context? You have to make choices. 

Michael: He's like James Bennett has fallen, [laughs] like a single tear rolling down his cheek. It's like they replace it with someone else exactly the same. 

Peter: Exactly the same. And also, James Bennett is now just Editor in Chief at The Economist or something. [laughs] 

Michael: Yeah, yeah. There're no actual stakes to any of this.  

Peter: Of course, it's not even landing on his feet. He just like does a perfect cartwheel into The Economist, whatever. Now, Chapter 6, titled “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests.” 

Michael: Okay, he admits they're mostly peaceful. 

Peter: Again, classic Chatterton, because he does acknowledge, very briefly, the people who were responsible for most of the violence were not meaningfully related to the protests, which were largely peaceful. But then he also just pivots into extended descriptions of the violence, businesses burned and stuff like that. He says, “Small, frequently minority owned businesses in cities around the country were being reduced to ashes, their proprietors beaten to the brink of death, bodies twisted up like discarded coat hangers for having the gall to attempt to safeguard their livelihoods.” 

Michael: What is he talking about? That sounds like some Clarence Thomas shit. The most lurid description. 

Peter: That whole like bodies twisted up thing is referring to an incident in Dallas where a man rushed a group of people wielding a machete before the crowd got the upper hand and severely beat him. 

Michael: Okay. 

Peter: He refers to this guy as the proprietor of a business who was safeguarding his livelihood, which is not true. Police confirmed a few days later that this guy showed up with a machete to protect his neighborhood, but did not have a business there. 

Michael: Okay. 

Peter: The idea that he was a business owner and is just something that came out of right-wing Twitter posts from the time. 

Michael: Yeah, just like laundering him into someone like noble and good. Yeah. 

Peter: So, Chatterton took that image. What happened to one man who rushed a crowd with a machete, lies about the circumstances of it, and straightforwardly says that it's happening to business owners around the country. 

Michael: Right.

Peter: This thing that happened once-

Michael: One incident. Yeah. 

Peter: -and not to a business owner. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: It's so dishonest. He gets mad about reactions to social media where he's like you're overreacting to this one thing you saw, context free. Meanwhile, he's had fucking five years to figure out that that is not true. He also complains that NPR published what he calls a wildly credulous interview with the author of a book called In Defense of Looting. 

Michael: Oh, God. 

Peter: He describes the author as a young, white, trans author. No reason to mention that she's trans, by the way. He just doesn't. In her book, she basically argues that property rights are a tool of white supremacy and therefore looting as a tool for dismantling white supremacy. 

Michael: So basically, I found a book I don't like by someone I don't like.

Peter: Yeah, well, so if Thomas just said, “Hey, that's stupid,” I would be like “No doubt, bro.” [laughs]  

Michael: Yeah, whatever. Yeah, someone publish a book I don't like, fine. 

Peter: He says, “This is the discourse being promoted even in our most vanilla of mainstream media outlets.” 

Michael: So, you're complaining about essentially an Op-Ed. You just wrote a chapter about how people shouldn't complain about a fucking Op-Ed. 

Peter: We're fresh off the Tom Cotton Op-Ed chapter. 

Michael: So, do you want debate or not dude? 

Peter: He was just talking about the perils of letting your journalism be dictated by ideology and the need for neutrality. But now NPR is covering an idea he does not like. And he within a matter of pages, it's just like this is the discourse being promoted. And now he understands that platforming an author is a form of promotion. Now he seems to understand that it's not inherently neutral. 

Michael We shouldn't air these ideas that are fundamentally making people unsafe. Oh, really? Thomas? Wow okay.

Peter: And now we get to Rittenhouse, Kyle Rittenhouse. I almost skipped this because I don't think he has a ton of interesting stuff to say, but it does include one of the funniest sentences in the book, so I'm going to-- God, it's so funny. [laughs] 

Michael: Oh God. 

Peter: I think about the sentence all the time. 

Michael: He says, “When a doughy 17-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse, too young to purchase the AR-15 assault rifle he'd armed himself with, ventured from his home 20 miles away in Antioch, Illinois, into the flaming streets of Kenosha, he was doing many things simultaneously.” 

Peter: It's so funny. 

Michael: What is doughy doing there? 

Peter: It's so funny to call him fat right off the bat. 

Michael: What the fuck?

Peter: And he was doing many things simultaneously. Yeah, aren't we all dude? What are you talking about? That's like “Yeah, when I went to the grocery store, I was doing many things simultaneously.” 

Michael: Kyle Rittenhouse is a land of contrasts. 

Peter: His basic position on Rittenhouse who, and for people who don't remember, this kid goes to do community defense armed with an illegal assault rifle. 

Michael: He drives from his home like many miles away to go defend. 

Peter: Like 20 Miles away from his home in Antioch, Illinois. He was doing many things simultaneously. And that's what I always say about Kyle Rittenhouse. 

Michael: He specifically got a gun and sought out this city he doesn't live in to “Defend it,” and then he ended up shooting somebody. 

Peter: And yeah, very similar to Zimmerman, Trayvon, where he gets off the hook. There's a not guilty verdict eventually, mostly because the immediate circumstances of the shooting look like self defense. Chatterton doesn't take a position on this either way. He seems to be to think it's reasonable minds can defer situation. In fact, he says that pretty explicitly. 

Michael: That's because he would have to read about it and learn something about the details. 

Peter: His actual complaint is, of course, how liberal institutions reacted. He says that they did not react with the appropriate level of nuance. He complains about administrators at UC Santa Cruz putting out a statement saying that they were dismayed by the verdict. 

Michael: Who fucking cares what UC Santa Cruz did? Jesus Christ. 

Peter: He also says such statements and interventions were boosted by journalists and thought leaders across the social and traditional media, as though conveying uncontested truths that were self-evident. And then he cites negative reactions to the verdict by four people, Elie Mystal, who writes for The Nation, Nikole Hannah-Jones at The Times, Al Sharpton and Kathleen Belew, who's a historian I haven't heard of before. 

Michael: Whose book is really good, yeah.

Peter: Yeah, but it's just-- Wait, hold on. So, okay, universities can't take a position because reasonable minds can disagree and you don't think that this is their role in our society? Okay, I don't know that that's right, but it's coherent, I guess. But then also, these journalists can't- 

Michael: Have an opinion. [Laughs] 

Peter: Again, his whole spiel is like civil discourse and disagreement. But then he repeatedly criticizes the media for holding or promoting views he doesn't like. We're skipping Chapter 7. It's bullshit, even by this book's standards. 

Michael: What's it about? 

Peter: I don't remember. [laughter] 

Michael: Just not in your notes. Just a blank hole. 

Peter: I have a thing that's like skipping Chapter 7 and then I went back. 

Michael: Wait, look it up, look it up. 

Peter: Okay, this is-- Yeah, it's-- Chapter 7 is “We Are All Americans Now. Anti-Racism Goes Global in the Age of Social Media.” 

Michael: Oh. 

Peter: I will not be talking about other countries during this episode. 

Michael: [laughs] During this entire podcast. 

Peter: Bad enough that I have to talk about America. Chapter 8, “Cancel Culture and its Discontents.” 

Michael: Oh, no, he's actually saying it, we're doing this, fuck.

Peter: Yeah, you thought this whole thing was about cancel culture, but no, there's actually a specific chapter. 

Michael: I'm getting visions of myself at like 90 years old, like relitigating the same four fucking anecdotes. Did the professor get fired for doing blackface or not? God.

Peter: So, the whole chapter revolves primarily around the Harper's Letter, which Chatterton coauthored and spearheaded in summer 2020. 

Michael: He's like “I was a hero. I was actually a huge hero for that.” 

Peter: You know about the Harper's Letter? It's a little letter published in Harper, signed by a bunch of authors and thinkers titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” Here's a passage, “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture. An intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.” 

Michael: It's such perfect TCW.

Peter: I know. I had nothing entirely clocked that he wrote this whole thing. Once he said he coauthored it, I went back and read it and was like “Oh, that's why this thing sucks.” 

Michael: Cause he's like “Well, the fascists are like super fascists, but we have some very minor complaints about people on the left that we're going to dedicate the rest of this document to.” 

Peter: So, yeah, he's basically just hashing out his beefs about this. [Laughs] 

Michael: Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: And you can tell that he's really pissy about it because he starts straw manning the arguments really badly. I'm going to send you a couple. 

Michael: He says, “Critics of the letter, a variety of whom were also leading advocates for the shift to moral clarity in theory and anti-racism in practice. Reality itself is biased, therefore, debate must be restricted and we should be the arbiters of what is permissible.” No one said this. 

Peter: Who said that? Who said that? Like this pisses me off so much. Find me one person who says “Reality itself is biased.” I guarantee you that person is like a 20-year-old, who's mentally ill on Twitter. 

Michael: He then says, “For the critics scorning the Harper's Letter, concerns about fairness, openness, and tolerance of divergent viewpoints were not simply overblown. The phenomenon they attempted to address an atmosphere of censoriousness, did not even exist in the first place.” This is always the fucking thing. They won't even admit that like the left cancels people. These mobs on social media form, I've never seen anyone deny the basic reality that sometimes left-wing mobs happen and they get over their skis. They fire that Adidas lady for sending a racist tweet. Everyone knows the fucking examples of this. No one denies the basic reality. The problem is the interpretation of it. We are disputing the interpretation that this is a left-wing phenomenon and a sign of creeping totalitarianism on the left, which, looking back from 2025, is just not fucking true. Empirically, it's not true. 

Peter: One of the big criticisms of the Harper's Letter and concerns about cancel culture generally is that there's a thin line between what some people describe as cancel culture and what might be considered like basic accountability. So, he tries to tackle that to distinguish between cancellation and mere accountability, he uses a definition written by Ross Douthat in a Times column. Essentially, the Ross-- This is the Ross definition. 

Michael: All right here he goes. Cancellation, properly understood, refers to an attack on someone's employment and reputation by a determined collective of critics based on an opinion or an action that is alleged to be disgraceful and disqualifying.

Peter: Where is the clear delineation between cancellation and accountability here? 

Michael: Every attempt to define cancellation runs into the same problem, that either it's too specific, and it's like “Ooh, someone gets fired for challenging social justice orthodoxy,” and it reveals that it's just like an ideological project. 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: Or like this one, it's too generic. So Douthat is saying here that like any attempt by a collective of people to get somebody fired is cancellation and therefore bad, but there's millions of examples of groups of people trying to disqualify someone because they did something disqualifying.

Peter: Yes, exactly. 

Michael: This would include like the congregation of a church asking to remove a pastor because he embezzled funds.

Peter: How would you distinguish between this and what happened to Harvey Weinstein? 

Michael: Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: Obviously he was canceled under this definition. Attack on his employment and reputation by a determined collective of critics. So, are you opposed to that? I think it's notable that these guys who have built careers off of these Boogeymen. Wokeness, Cancel culture. They cannot provide a fucking definition of them, is that not notable? It's wild. In an interview for the New Yorker shortly after this was published, Isaac Chotiner interviewed him. He was asked for examples of what he considers cancellation. He gives them. And then the interview included bracketed descriptions of what actually happened in those cases. [Michael laughs] And I'm going to send you this. I can read-- Actually, I'll read Chatterton and you can read the bracketed descriptions.

Michael: Okay. I'm the editor's notes. Okay, great. 

Peter: There have been many academics who have been silenced. There was a UCLA professor who got in serious trouble for just reading letter from Birmingham Jail. 

Michael: William Paris, a lecturer in political science reportedly came into conflict with his students over his decision to read aloud the N word in King's letter and show a documentary about lynching. UCLA told The New Yorker that there was no formal investigation, but that the situation was being reviewed. 

Peter: There's an academic at the University of Chicago who questioned some aspects of the orthodoxy on Black Lives Matter. 

Michael: Harold Uhlig, a professor of economics, compared Black Lives Matter activists to flat earthers and creationists. A student then claimed that Uhlig had made racially discriminatory remarks in his classroom. The university conducted an investigation and found that there was no basis for further proceedings. 

Peter: That's it. Two situations where the issue appears to be that some students got upset and that's it. 

Michael: So, complete nothing burgers. It's like-

Peter: Complete [crosstalk] 

Michael: -basically somebody acted in class, arguably racist, and faced no consequences. So, it's actually evidence against his view that this is all out of control. 

Peter: And the institutions themselves that he believes are a little too caught up in all of this. Are in fact reviewing this stuff and being like “No, that's all right. You can do it.” 

Michael: Because UCLA didn't even start a formal investigation. 

Peter: Yeah, some students got upset and he's like “Shut up. Shut up.”

Michael: He says there have been many, many academics who've been silenced. 

Peter: Silenced. 

Michael: No one was silenced. 

Peter: Is your point that those people shouldn't be complaining? Because then who's the one being censorious, Thomas Chatterton Williams? 

Michael: Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: He also says that the James Bennett New York Times thing was cancel culture. And it's like okay, yeah, there was a large group of social media users attacking him, but the locus of that discussion wasn't just like “Oh, he said something offensive.” It was like “Was he doing his job properly?” That's the locus of that discussion. 

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: You can disagree with how it turned out, but it feels pretty reasonable for there to be a big public discussion about how the most influential newspaper in the world is handling its editorial section. That feels very reasonable to me. If I can try to force some good faith into this conversation. I feel like what they're really talking about, even though they can't say it, is proportionality. 

Michael: Yeah. Yeah.

Peter: If you're a random professor somewhere who reads the N word aloud in the context of reading Martin Luther King, and suddenly you're getting swarmed by hundreds, thousands of people online, that probably feels very overwhelming. But the reality of social media now like we've discussed, is that the amount of attention that we pay to a lot of things is disproportionate. One person will do something weird or bad on TikTok and there will be extended discourse about it. 

Michael: Just say Kendra. Just say Kendra, who's all known as psychiatrist. 

Peter: There is a lady who is 100%, I can say it with confidence from my armchair mentally ill, [Michael laughs] who is in love with her psychiatrist and believes that he was in love with her. To say that there's been extended discourse about it. 

Michael: Dude. 

Peter: This is one woman having a straight up mental health crisis, and people are just like “Have you seen this dumb lady?” 

Michael: Are they subject to like national attention? 

Peter: But this is what I'm saying, the way in which we pay attention to anything right now is just odd, and it's amplified by social media. Algorithms are pushing it. And I will say Chatterton knows this, he talks about how this is like intertwined with technology and social media. I don't know that he understands it as like almost entirely a function of that. He always talks about the political side of this, the extent to which this is part of the left's culture or whatever, and very rarely talks about the technology side. And it's like you're missing what I think is 99% of the story because we see these same exact things being replicated in completely apolitical arenas. 

Michael: This is always the grand tragedy of the cancel culture narrative is that it became about creeping authoritarian on the left when it's actually just a shift to social media, which has real implications beyond ideology and there's actually an interesting conversation there. 

Peter: Yeah. Yeah. 

Michael: That just became this dumb thing like the left is always canceling people, which just isn't fucking true. Everyone's canceling everyone. 

Peter: He says the only authentically liberal stance then is to resist cancel culture as well as its right-wing exploitation simultaneously. 

Michael: Post better, don't post. 

Peter: And it's like bro, how are you resisting the right-wing exploitation of cancel culture when you're literally covering it obsessively for years on end? This is a book about it. 

Michael: You've got to get your career to it. 

Peter: How are you resisting the right-wing exploitation? That little caveat in the beginning of every chapter before you spend the rest of it complaining about the left, that's you resisting?

Michael: It doesn't count when I do it because I'm telling you not to do it. 

Peter: I want to try to throw in some good faith here. There are some things he says that I agree with. He argues that the language of social justice is often limited to the educated classes. I think that's right, but then he says, are we be interested at all in the perspectives of those minorities within the minority? The Muslim with a critique of Islamism. The young white woman who is concerned about due process in the era of MeToo. The Black Ivy League professor who balks at the new anti-racist doctrine that reifies racial difference. Are these not also authentic points of view? 

Michael: Oh my God, we hear from these people all the time. You're a black guy who lives in France and you're complaining about America all the time. 

Peter: That's you, dude. This is your job. You're the professor who balks at the anti-racist doctrine and you're selling a couple thousand copies of each of your shit ass books and yet you have an entire career, you never think about why. Maybe someone very wealthy and influential is interested in propping up your view. 

Michael: He knows he's lying about this because he's clearly reading a lot of right-wing media. And one thing the right-wing media loves, it's like I'm a feminist. But the feminists have gone too far. I'm a Muslim, but Muslims are obsessed with violence. They love this narrative. 

Peter: He has a footnote here about how one of the signatories to the Harper's Letter was an Algerian journalist who criticized Islam in some interviews and then had a fatwa put on his head by what Chatterton describes as an obscure Salafist imam. And I'm like “I'm sorry, am I supposed to be able to do something about this, like what are you talking about?” 

Michael: It's just like religious right-wingers, basically like traditionalists 

Peter: [crosstalk] right-wingers.

Michael: He’s like “The left has done this.” [laughs] 

Peter: Now on to “Believe it or Not,” the most substantively outrageous chapter of the book. 

Michael: Oh, my God, really? 

Peter: Sorry. 

Michael: We've been recording for two and a half hours, Peter. This is the longest record session we've ever had. 

Peter: I told you it was going to be long. 

Michael: Oh, my God. 

Peter: Usually, I'm very good at condensing a book down into episode length. You're not good at it, but--

Michael: Yeah, that's true.

[laughter]

Michael: I'm like we're doing a three-part episode on the seven habits of highly effective people. 

Peter: [laughs] This is the one thing I bring to the table here that I can look at the entire half of a book and be like “No, we're not doing that.”

[laughter]

Michael: That [unintelligible 01:21:53] Liberal Fascism, we talked about like three chapters of that book. 

Peter: [laughs] That was a blessing, I promise you. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: But this one is brutal, and it's brutal for one very specific reason. So, we won't take that long on it, but I'm going to give you. This is a couple of paragraphs pieced together. 

Michael: It's the January 6th chapter. 

Peter: This is the January 6th chapter. 

Michael: He says, “The pathetic insurrection whipped up by the cheapest Internet conspiracy and the most outlandish lies and innuendo about a stolen election, all originating in the mouth of the entertainer president, was but a physical manifestation of the social media era's much larger and more serious and sustained assault on truth. There were many men and women in attendance on January 6th who were neither organized nor trained, but had been gorged on an outlandish diet of riots and looting in Ferguson, Minneapolis, Kenosha, Portland, Seattle, and many other theaters of open lawlessness and rebellion, besides all of which were frequently condoned.” 

Not. Oh, my God, Peter. [laughs] “The January 6th insurrection, far more symbolically destructive and politically dangerous, was nonetheless a gross apotheosis of the kind of increasingly common tendency visible on the social justice left for years now to make the country's politics in the street whenever feeling sufficiently unheard.” This is really egregious. 

Peter: January 6th is the fault of the left. 

Michael: Unbelievable. 

Peter: He says that “It is sown-right fantastical,” to say that the rioting in summer 2020 and the condoning of that rioting from the media did not influence January 6th. This is another when like-- The machinations of the American right are invisible to him. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah. 

Peter: January 6th was the culmination of extended planning by very, very powerful people. They had legal arguments. They coordinated with right-wing media to propagate lies about the election being stolen. We now know that from various lawsuits. And Chatterton is just like they were inspired by the riots of the left. 

Michael: Also, the voter fraud myth has been around for decades and has been stoked by elected Republican leaders all over the place. So, this was fertile ground for somebody to kind of take this further than it had ever been taken before. That's not remotely about the left. 

Peter: And, it was stoked by Trump after 2016, right? Like the idea that he had actually won the popular vote, if not for illegals, etc. Again, he has spent his entire adult life ringing his hands about a handful of like social justice activists on the left, and he has no ability to see the world outside of them. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: There's one theme that pops up throughout the book that I want to drill down on a little bit. We've talked about this before, but it's just a really glaring gap in his analysis. One of the first things he says in the prologue is that the upheaval in 2020, “Spawned a vicious counter reaction from the authoritarian right.” He makes his claim a few times throughout the book. I listened to an interview with him by Andrew Yang where he says that- 

Michael: Oh my God dear. 

Peter: -Democrats took their eye off the ball by pandering to activists and invited a reaction from the right, who says that Trump's win was easily preventable. 

Michael: With universal basic income is that what Andrew Yang said? He actually solved this? 

Peter: But the big problem with this, and we've talked about this before, is that the timeline is fucked up. Summer 2020 was really the height of all of this. 

Michael: Yeah. Yeah. 

Peter: Social justice activism and Democrats won. Right after all of this went down, Democrats won. So, if your theory of modern politics is that rhetoric is what led to Trump, you need to explain why he lost when it was at its peak. 

Michael: Right, right. 

Peter: Why did the protests in 2020 result in a Biden victory and then morph into a backlash that catapulted Trump into office in 2024. This is what he needs to explain the most. But there isn't even an attempt. You might be able to piece together some kind of explanation that's like well, 2020 was anomaly for various reasons, blah, blah, but you need to try. You need to actually try to explain that. And don't say Trump's win was easily preventable. You could have commandeered the Kamala campaign to victory or whatever. This guy splits his time between New York and the French countryside and just cited Camus seven times in a book about American politics, dude, fucking a feat little charlatan. You don't know what you're talking about. 

Michael: [laughs] People memory hole it because the backlash to this has been so severe. But I mean, Black Lives Matter enjoyed extremely high approval ratings for much of that year. 

Peter: Like I mentioned people, a majority of people, said that the burning down of the police precinct in Minneapolis was justified. That is wild. 

Michael: There was real injustice going on and people were responding to very real injustice and that's actually quite mobilizing for people. These were the largest protests in American history at the time. People were really fucking upset. 

Peter: You'd be at work, your normal ass job in 2020, and people were like “Here's someone here to talk to you about slavery.” 

Michael: [laughter] Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Peter: I'm not saying that was good. But if that was the most off-putting thing, then why wasn't there a consequence? Why were people still supportive? Yeah, because the fucking median American's position in summer 2020 was fuck the police. That's what was happening. 

Michael: Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. 

Peter: The afterword for this book- 

Michael: Thank God it's over. 

Peter: -is entirely about reactions to October 7th. He talks about the cancel culture elements on the right where you have things like Canary Mission, where activists just get doxed and people are coordinating to prevent them from being employed. 

Michael: To be sure, everything I've described in my book is worse on the right and yet I've written a book about this, great. 

Peter: Cancel culture on the right is like this coordinated moneyed operation. It’s like led by the richest people in the world. 

Michael: It's like but still. 

Peter: I'm going to send you what I think is his final thesis statement. 

Michael: Thank God. I've never wanted an episode to end so badly. [laughs] 

Peter: I've had two cold brews and a CELSIUS while we were doing this, and I'm still sort of wiped out. 

Michael: He says, “A remarkable and increasing number of Americans believe themselves not only justified, but entitled to resolve political disagreements by force if they sense themselves at an impasse. Genuine liberals, as well as their moderate and center right partners, have no choice but to reclaim the abandoned moral high ground.” He's claiming the moral high ground by saying like you're bad for protesting a genocide. “We must identify and disown the means of extremism, even when they manifest themselves in pursuit of ends we may agree with. That is the most basic prerequisite for democracy.” Yeah, this is what I was saying earlier, he wants a non-stop Sister Soulija moment. 

Peter: Yes. 

Michael: Every democratic leader just constantly complaining about whatever people are talking about on Twitter. 

Peter: Right. 

Michael: We must speak less about Kendra and her psychiatrist. I denounce the left for doing this. This is what he wants. It's electoral fucking suicide. And it's also stupid on the merits. 

Peter: I stand with Kendra. 

Michael: [laughs] 

Peter: Yeah, I don't think there's much to it. I just wanted to share the final statement. I think it's just the same shit over and over again. 

Michael: The extent to which these people have completely failed to read the political moment in the last five years is just so profound. 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: And the fact is that they're still fucking lecturing us on the same shit when like shouldn't you have seen this coming? You're a free speech person. That's your beat, free speech, look at what is happening now. 

Peter: It's so embarrassing. I'm going to send you a couple of terrible sentences. You can cut this, but it's just funny. [Michael laughs] I want to reiterate that the torture that I've been put through. I'm going to give you no context because it's irrelevant. Here we go. 

Michael: Okay. “The norms, rules, and behavioral guardrails, those informal structures that had been put to stress in the past, but in holding up had also been mistaken for formal truths, came crashing down around us with the swiftness of a new Copernican revolution, decimating an entire political, cultural, social, and intellectual cosmos in the process.” He's so happy about his little cosmos Copernican thing. It's a coherent metaphor, but it's not a coherent sentence. 

Peter: It's not a coherent sentence. Why the lists? Why the lists-

Michael: Yeah. Every fucking time.

Peter: In the middle of a sentence? Also, he says, the swiftness of a new Copernican revolution. 

Michael: That took like 400 years. [laughter] 

Peter: It was like literally centuries, dude. It was centuries. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: And here's the last one, I promise. Even though I have so many more, it would shock you. 

Michael: We were living in a techno dystopian fantasy. The Internet connected portals we'd come to rely on rendered the world in all its granular detail and absurdity, like Borges Aleph, yet we scarcely knew a thing about what it was were viewing. You just wanted me to say Borges wrong, Borges. 

Peter: I'm just like his references are so forced and painful. 

Michael: But also, what is he even saying here? We were living in a techno dystopian fantasy, but we scarcely knew what we were viewing. I guess what he's saying is like we see things out of context on social media. 

Peter: That's all he's saying. That's all he's saying. And that's what's so crazy about these sentences. 

Michael: Just cite an actual person who's an expert in this, not some Borges reference. 

Peter: He really thinks that these digressions in every sentence and these overwrought, forced metaphors are useful to your understanding and it's like no. I think I told you this. I think I texted you this at some point during the past week when I was doing this, but when Thomas Chatterton Williams goes to hell, [Michael laughs] he's just going to be made to read Hemingway. He was just like a professional professor, an English professor standing above him for all of eternity, being like “You can see how this is better, right?

Michael: And also, Peter, at the end of your life, when you go to hell, you're going to have to read Thomas Chatterton Williams for the rest of eternity.

[laughter]

[music]

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]