Thomas Chatterton Williams' "Summer of Our Discontent"

i've got the new mic setup it'll be a little louder i think you got your loud inner installed it was by the way remember how i i couldn't get it working last time it just like i was like hey i told everyone i'd like sent to the thing to the 540 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 like a button you press on the scarlet it's like the loudener button everyone's like you didn't press the button idiot they were sending memes they were sending memes about it maybe instead of a beverage center you should have gotten an audio center punk i will be writing off the beverage center i think it's a business now that we've mentioned it every new thing i purchased for my home i'm just going to mention on the podcast and that way i can frame it as a business expense so i've watched numerous youtube videos where i'm like you're only talking about this for the taxes aren't you all right let's go in all right i'm stealing this from someone in our discord but let's do it michael peter what do you know about summer of our discontent by thomas chatterton williams all i know is there's a reason people don't call him thomas thinkerton williams 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 like disproportionately influential to his talent and the other is that like i think that there is like a lingering reactionary narrative about 2020 that he's articulating here that needs to be addressed in some form it's very similar it is very similar to the covet revisionism stuff where people are just trying to make you ignore what you remember like from relatively recent history 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 yeah he has one black parent one white parent and so he is like a person of color who doesn't think we should be talking about race so much yeah right that's always sort of of interest to the yapping classes but also talking about it makes you sound hella problematic because you're basically calling him like an affirmative action hire in like the worst possible sense of the term but i think that is like part of his popularity it's a black guy saying this shit that coddles white people one thing we won't really talk about but does pop up pretty consistently throughout the book is that like he does not like ta-nehisi coates oh yeah and views himself as sort of like a counterweight and i sort of wonder whether that's true of the people who publish him too where they were like we need someone to balance this out yeah yeah and so they sort of both emerge at the same time chatterton i'm gonna be calling him chatterton because that's the funniest of his three names let's do it he's written two memoirs to this point in 2010 he published losing my cool how a father's hip-hop culture hip-hop culture resulted in him like physically attacking his girlfriend at the time when he was like 15 and he sort of like blames hip-hop for that i don't know are we gonna talk about his column where he said that like puffy was like the coolest rapper yeah he recently after like the diddy trial wrote a thing that was like i looked up to diddy yeah he was so cool we've lost diddy no money no problems is one of my favorite songs of all time but that that puffy verse my god i know then in 2019 he published self-portrait in black and white unlearning race uh this one is about how becoming a father impacted his view of race particularly when he had uh 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 sort of transcended at the personal level yeah i have not read his 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 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 like this is just not true like you can call somebody left-handed or canadian or tall or anything else yeah and it doesn't mean that's the only thing about them 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 right the sort of classic uh reactionary centrist argument there's only like seven magazines dedicated entirely to this argument i'm trying to book more 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 dude the thing is there's so many like little controversies surrounding him like i can't i i keep forgetting them all well this one is the funniest so i chose that emily ratajkowski for people who don't know model actress uh and she sort of like made herself be known because she like supported bernie okay usually when someone who's really hot starts doing podcasting she's like i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know people pay attention and so chatterton does an interview and like the whole premise is like that it's like whoa she's hot but also she's kind of smart has thoughts and feelings here's one bit i will say this is translated from french chatterton splits his time between uh new york and like the french countryside or some chateau in paris something like prepare to have this man talk down to you about what normal people want to hear all right here you go okay he says oh jesus look at this brick oh my god peter also it's very funny that he writes like this in french too okay 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 many ways is that she's not the only person she's ever loved 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 say that to give him some grace on the translation stuff like yeah yeah tricked out like kim kardashian's a little weird but i'm assuming that's like a translation thing it's very interesting how even in like this french context you can see m dashes how painful his writing is he has these digressions 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 in his defense he is putting this in a french publication okay it's a it's a pervert nation that's true you know what i mean and it's almost unfair that we're reading it at all here's another bit from this uh interview 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 just said i don't know 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 like trying to like flirt with her or something just wondering emily are you attracted to the worst writing in the world oh my god he's like while i'm talking her tits are there like that's what he's writing that's what he's writing i'm asking her a question and she's sitting there with boobs imagine me interviewing henry cavill or something and just like doing this the whole time like oh i'm staring at his clavicles just like talking about his dick outline yeah he's like he's rippling pecs as he spoke like 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 emily went on the twitter to be like yeah by the way this was a really uncomfortable experience and i told my husband about it after words because it was so weird he's like when did you start getting exactly the kind of attention that i'm giving you right now like when did men start leering at you like look at your low-cut neckline this is like median french publication yeah yeah yeah all right so this book summer of our discontent comes out to scathing reviews yeah brutal reviews from the times washington post vulture uh everyone's sick of this shit yeah and before so before we dive in there is one element that we need to discuss in advance and we've touched on it a little bit but i'm going to touch on it already this is the worst written piece of shit i've ever read in my life you texted me numerous times of like i can't do this he is a cumbersome writer his sentences are like long and winding they are packed with unnecessary adjectives and metaphors he uses m dashes to a crazy degree 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 i'm gonna have you read that actually and then it just says huh which i feel like is so fucking cold but also like no one at that excerpt would be like ah yes this is a clear explication of an idea okay so i i am going to send you the passage that was quoted in full in the new york times i do think like 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 all right here we go this is bad podcasting we talked about this before we recorded well it was a genuine concern for me how to do this episode because a big part of our format is that one person will send an excerpt and the other person will react and there will be discussion 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 yeah it's so tedious yeah first you can't dice 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 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 parentheses typically between 15 and 25 per year from a population exceeding 40 million according to the washington post's fatal force database end parentheses begin m dash and indeed other quality of life markers have been equalizing for significant numbers of black people since the civil rights movement and m dash the death of trayvon martin followed by michael brown parentheses regardless of the specific contingencies of that case end parentheses 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 generally speaking try to avoid being too critical of people's writing as like a lot of people do it a lot better than me don't lie peter but that is that is a parenthetical straight into an m dash also the first two-thirds of this all he's saying is that the number of like non-white people in the population is growing and police killings of minorities are relatively rare right that's all he's saying i started just collecting the worst bits of his writing that i could find and then i had to stop because it just it was becoming a distraction for me as i was doing the episode and i was like it was like every other page i was i was just like copying and pasting into a separate document that document reached like 12 pages before i was like well i have to stop this we have to do like an extra as like a bonus episode where we just read all this shit if there's time at the end i'm just gonna rattle off like five of them it's like blooper outtakes at the end of like a romantic comedy it's like we just have like all right another one i will send you some of his clunky metaphors uh they're a little bit shorter but they are funny uh here's one 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 up with which i will put uncountable on ramps into which we do not always realize we are merging here is how he described the moments after we all learned about george floyd's murder 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 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 dude it's it is unreal so i want to die 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 and what is he saying here so he's talking about floyd himself midwestern golgotha the christ-like dimensions of that horizontal crucifixion oh because he was lying down because george floyd was lying down 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 gonna say yeah it's sort of like jesus also golgotha that's not the hill that's a cheese they put on pizza so this is the this is the opening sentence of the prologue so like the beginning of the book all right keep that in mind there's no doubt that the initial animating spirit of black lives matter me too 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 dude peter why are you referencing maslow's hierarchy of needs in your opening sentence oh my god what are you doing 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 like the activist demands were roughly reasonable this is a very interesting thing that chatterton does almost a little more serious than what he's been doing for the past few years and i think it's really important for us to think about that in a way where we don't think about it in a way where we don't think about it in a way where we don't think about it in a way where we don't think about it in a way where we don't think about it in a way where we don't think about it in a way where we don't think about it in a way where we don't think about it in a way where we don't think about it in a way where we don't think about it in a way where we don't think about it in a way where we don't think about it in a way where we don't think about it in a way where we don't think about it in a way where we don't think about it in a way where we don't think about it in a way where we don't think about it in a way where he will very quickly move on to here's the problem with the left's reaction and he does that over and over again yeah 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 thank you right jesus christ so he starts off this book talking about the political climate leading into 2020 and then you know 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 quote full-blown moral panic about race that quote touched on every facet of our collective mediated existence and spawned a vicious counter-reaction from the authoritarian right that further erodes our liberal democracy 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 he thinks that the racialization of these things is overblown like he says that the most distinctive element of george floyd's life was not his race but his uh poverty and addiction issues but this is such a narrow point i agree it's like oh police didn't kill him because he's black they killed him because he's poor but like what what is your actual evidence for that we don't see that in the statistics he says that the point of the book is quote a broader analysis of the evolving manners more as 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 i forgot the beginning of the sentence by the time you finish it also it's mores peter oh yes i always read mores i always read more he starts off talking about the obama era and the initial framing of this book is that like there was this moment where we were potentially going to get post-racial for a minute but everything unwound right 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 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 yeah the basic premise of the opening sections of this book seem to be 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 yeah and he sort of blames it on barack obama as well as a handful of activists and public intellectuals namely coates but so obama went out of his way to discount the role of race oh did he we're going to talk he focuses on a couple of obama era incidents the first being the black professor who was arrested after breaking into his own home right 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 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 these are all basic claims and also he had this like beer summit thing where he sat down with the cop and gates right 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 it's like what the story actually demonstrates is how fucking fragile and sensitive the right is about this stuff right where they will read like racial radicalism into the most non-divisive reasonable shit that a black person says everybody lost their minds about this here is chatterton's analysis many whites conservatives in many instances but not exclusively or even mainly so we did not need that we're 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 oj simpson's arrest in 1995 for the murder of his wife but surely obama was asked about this he didn't just like randomly issue a press release this was like a major story that people were really fixated on and he would have been asked about at a press conference he needed to say something 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 sort of not true or not supported or he hasn't supported it enough and sort of indicates that maybe he's talking out of his ass a lot right he says many whites conservatives in many instances are not supportive of this and he's not supportive of this and he's not supportive of this and he's not supportive of this and he's not supportive of this and he's not but not exclusively or even mainly so we're appalled what so i'm sorry do you know that the people who were appalled by this were predominantly what moderate or liberal right where's that from yeah i'm also annoyed by the bill clinton would have never commented on oj's arrest thing because that's such a cherry-picked fucking example there were two big instances of racialized police misconduct during or near bill clinton's presidency right yeah right because rodney king was happening to rodney king yeah and diallo amadou diallo right both of which clinton did comment on yeah clinton said that diallo might not have been killed if he was white straight up 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 yeah the president at the time for rodney king was george bush senior and he said that the beating was sickening and outrageous yeah so what is this so what is this 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 also is it even true that bill clinton didn't talk about the oj simpson trial that went on for like a year surely he was asked about it and said some things i don't think that he had like some substantive comment on his arrest like i he's distinguishing between like the arrest and the verdict i didn't find any instances of him talking about the arrest so like he did comment on he just didn't comment on the arrest i don't think it's a good thing i don't think it's a good comparator but when you find those better comparators rodney king diallo i mean yeah again saying diallo wouldn't have been shot if he he was white that's 10 times as like incendiary as what obama said right but it's coming from a white person so conservatives don't freak out in the same kind of way they don't clock it yeah also isn't he constantly saying that democratic politicians should like denounce these kind of little nothing burgers like kamala harris should issue a statement on like the cracker barrel logo yeah like the dr seuss people know longer publishing a racist book he like wants them to weigh in on this stuff constantly green eggs and ham i thought eggs were white all right and now we get to uh trayvon martin controversy number two for obama oh my god 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 he's just a random guy not like a police officer or anything just a random guy walking around and he's like i don't know what's going on i don't know what's going on zimmerman follows him around for a bit the facts as they were sort of understood by the jury in that case were that zimmerman was following martin martin got scared jumped zimmerman 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 like the immediate circumstances of pulling the gun and shooting it are like self-defense in the classic sense yeah but everything leading up to it is the fault of the shooter right like the the stakes were escalated to that point by the shooter and also the role of race is sort of inchoate and difficult to define like it's fairly likely that like 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 like this happens to black people far more than it happens to white people on a population level i'm gonna send you some chatterton 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 hashtag emmet 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 quote argue that the fate that befell martin till and those in between reflects the glaring contention that there was a continuation of anti-black violence and white supremacy 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 right if you are putting things into their historical context that adds nuance it doesn't subtract nuance right yeah imagining that every incident is isolated from historical context doesn't give you a better understanding of what's going on in and using that analysis someone could have said at the time that we shouldn't view emmet till's murder in the context of white supremacy yeah which many people did yeah you know he seems to think at that at some like indeterminate point between emmet till and trayvon martin race and racism lost its descriptive value right and it became counterproductive to talk about it he also has this weird obsession with like twitter like a twitter hashtag was going around okay so random people were making a comparison that i guess you disagree with twitter appears 26 times in this book tweeted appears 20 times tweet eight times uh instagram seven times a huge amount of this book is presenting social media discourse as if it is like the discourse right as if like this is what everyone's talking about and also if you were doing like a one-to-one comparison it's like okay there was some hyperbole on the left if you believe that 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 were also fucking saying that i'm leaving a little bit of this out but he often will talk about the rights reaction and he talks about the racist reaction from the right to trayvon martin so again he's admitting like the basic reality of like oh yeah a lot of people on the right are like straightforwardly racist but i've dedicated my book to the problems on the left right i'm so worked up peter i don't know how you got through this whole fucking book 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 quote if i had a son he'd look like a trayvon this caused a crazy flare-up of racist anti-obama sentiment on the right that never really died down on some level right yeah and here is chatterton 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 right it's like oh well yeah they were being racist and completely deranged but obama could have chosen a slightly different wording and that would have made a meaningful difference he's saying that obama squandered an opportunity to like repair race relations just by saying this and like if american race relations were hinging on obama not saying that his son might have looked like trayvon martin like safe to say we were fucked right yeah yeah all of these reactionary centrists seem to believe that like it's the left's job to do like emotional babysitting for the right anytime the right gets angry it's because we weren't babysitting attentively enough right shouldn't have said that you made a little baby upset and now race relations are ruined right that can't be how politics is done he's also making the same mistake that he accuses the far left of doing where he's he's using like vocabulary as such a powerful signifier yeah but 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 like politicians are gonna say things that are not perfect when they're speaking off the cuff you can't just blame somebody for like oh you you slightly misspoke and now you ruined race relations in america how do you feel this just isn't how language works like they would have found some excuse it's really obvious obama's weren't even fucking bad he's having an emotional reaction to this and he's calling for an investigation like he always gives the caveats that that they claim that they're interested in chatterton does not provide any polling data or anything this is all vibes like if you look at obama's polling data there's no noticeable change in his approval or disapproval ratings at this time as much as he wants to view himself as like a guy who tells hard truths to the left this book is very detached from reality yeah his conclusions are almost never grounded in actual facts right if If this was some really singular moment that disabled the hope for like good race relations in this country better race relations surely you'd be able to identify some data that you could cite in your book that you were working on for three years by the way he like he announced this book in like 2021 so like he literally was writing this for three years never googled never googled approval rating obama also i think what happened with these scenarios is that at the time people sort of looked at obama's comments and were like yeah that's fairly reasonable whatever but then after a while your your direct memory fades and then like fox news gets its hooks into you yeah and they start saying like don't you remember obama's radical comments about trayvon martin and in your brain kind of edits it this is what happened january 6th right everyone was so like freaked out about it at the time but then a couple months go by and it's like oh it was basically just like a picnic yeah i i can see these things not being a huge deal at the time because on the merits they're kind of 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 and chatterton is repeating the exact same error it lets the emotional right-wing babies dictate the terms of the historical record like oh this is when he lost us is it right you know to keep the babysitting analogy alive this is a little kid throwing a tantrum in a supermarket asking for chocolate and chatterton's like well why didn't you give it to him yeah completely yeah yeah yeah yeah all right here is his concluding thought in this chapter and i'll i'll warn you this is gonna be one sentence this is not substantive i just think that this is uh one of the most ungodly sentences i've ever read he says nearly a decade after obama's vacating office and coates's having largely abandoned the discursive arena after having thrust open the doors for a new less tortured less equivocal less modest less literarily inclined less powerful class of racial gurus no it's actually more powerful oh sorry you make me start over from the top you i'm going so slow because i know i'm gonna 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 this is a crazy sentence like what are you doing you've got the doors of a discursive arena being thrust open but then also a prism in the same sentence it's wild i feel like i'm learning the rules of a board game chapter two 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 on he he starts off talking about election day twenty sixteen he goes to see an art exhibit and then he uh leaves himself a voice note about the art exhibit that he publishes in full in the book really yeah in that in that voice note he misattributes the origin of the term all black everything to two thousand eleven's jay-z kanye collaboration watch the throne when actually it was two thousand nine's the blueprint three first appeared and run this town you just got fact checked by the king but he off the dome peter what you think that the new york times caught that no i did forty year old white man fact checking a black guy about rap maybe 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 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 man i hate this because that's trump right what is it called uh negative polarization he has two primary examples one is the covington catholic kids in washington dc if you remember that yeah and the other is jesse smallett oh yeah really what okay so covington catholic if you don't remember a bunch of catholic kids high schoolers in like mega 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 sort of being antagonized by uh black hebrew israelites and the initial video clips uh whatever you thought of them lacked some context and the protagonists were like 16 years old which always makes me like a little uncomfortable going after like literal minors for sure and so yeah i actually i actually think that is like an example of like the left getting over at skis on twitter i think that was like an embarrassing episode his whole complaint in both these cases is about like the initial reaction was too strong right and i think it's correct the initial reaction was too strong to this we're too dramatic we should be better about reacting to contextless video clips right yeah i also think that this is basically something that applies across the spectrum that there's no real political valence to this right uh this happens on the right all the time all the fucking time it's an artifact of social media clips of tiktok is like an entire account dedicated to taking things out of context and melting down about he says that these like overwrought left wing social media reactions empower the right no but like i don't understand why right wing social media doesn't get this same analysis right yeah so like yeah libs of tiktok extremely popular right wing account yeah the entire purpose is to strip away context right they lead to insane things like bomb threats to children's hospitals but no one ever says they empower the left right why why aren't they responsible for our radicalization but we are responsible for theirs i've always said with this whole cancel culture panic thing that it's it's silly to deny that people do not like get into these twitter mobs like this has always been a real phenomenon yeah 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 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 there's like hey we should probably talk about this when we 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 he basically makes the same point about the jesse smallett situation uh jesse smallett of course the former empire actor who uh appears to have faked a hate crime that was like very dramatic like yeah he said that he like was attacked by two guys wearing mega hats who like 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 yeah yeah so chatterton points out that like all of these various politicians and celebrities put out these statements and then of course it's revealed that they were this is they were all duped it was a hoax yeah i do think again that this sort of like involves a lot of people jumping the gun a little bit i'm mostly concerned about journalists right yeah there was some criticism that some early coverage of this dropped the term alleged and okay that's that's terrible journalism right yeah 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 right 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 yeah exactly black people lie about being attacked for their race like is that what you wanted in in a context of incomplete information right 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 like rape or a hate crime or something in general i believe the person unless they're like totally not credible right if his point is like wait then sure but like he's like there was no counter narrative it's like okay what what would that look like exactly because the actual argument would be like institutions are too quick to believe these like maybe locking up somebody who was accused of this crime with no actual evidence they did that that would be a real problem right but if what you're really talking about like is people on social media being like wow this is like really horrific i don't know that 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 like 72 hours of people siding with this person 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 i don't think that's a real political tilt to it i don't think right all right 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 i honestly don't remember seeing all that many to be honest i do remember the story like getting debunked i don't know that i saw apologies exactly because like a lot of them probably just viewed themselves as being duped right like sorry i got had i but like corrections yeah like 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 after i 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 locked on like the daily show and also he's been completely abandoned as like a cause celeb by the way i don't know if that's true i don't know if that's true i don't know if that's true i don't know if that's true i don't know if that's true i don't know if that's true by like social justice people nobody says like oh he was like wrongfully accused of faking it like everyone's like oh fuck this guy outside of a few total like total nutjob radicals no one supports him anymore and his career is over so like what else yeah what do you need here because you're like ultimately what is what chatterton's argument boils down to it's like i would like people to wait slightly longer on social media before amplifying bias claims yeah 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 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. Yeah, exactly. 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. Right. Because there are also hate crimes that did in fact happen. 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. Wait, really? Yeah, we have now passed Trump's first term. What do you remember about 2016 to 2020? Ah, Jussie Smollett. He's like, let me fucking tell you, Jussie Smollett. All right. Chapter three, The Plague. And it's about COVID. It's about COVID. Good. The initial theme of this chapter is that he sort of like enjoyed the early stages of lockdown. There was like a sense of solidarity. He was in the fucking French countryside. So like, I bet you did. Yeah. And then, uh, 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. Because you were against the anti-mask, anti-vax protests, but you were for the anti-racism protests. You change your mind. I remember this. 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, this is another one of those arguments where he's operating from vibes when he could be arguing from data. Like 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 to the spread of COVID is a measurable fact. There is research. Um, so first there was no spike in overall COVID cases around the time of the protests. There was a paper that was first reported by the New York Times. It was reported by the New York Times. Protests were outside and participants were like actively mitigating. And then two, protests actually decreased riskier activities like bar and restaurant attendance. So even if protests themselves were riskier than staying home, which they almost certainly were, they reduced even riskier behavior. I also think like 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 I think it's totally fine to accept that people were willing to expose themselves but the risk that they were exposing themselves to does not appear to have been very high based on what we know. Yeah, this is also the weird thing of like people pretending that they have no outcome preferences. It's all process preferences. Like, 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. Right. Like, I don't really think that's like 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. Well, I think his concern is just like lockdowns overall. So like he's like, why can't I go to a restaurant then? Also, you could go to a restaurant in summer of 2020. Here's his sort of big picture take on this. 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 screening, and died. 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 in vain, in vain. It's very important sometimes when reading this book to like pause and process that he is actually very, very stupid in that he is actually just not good at coming to accurate or defensible conclusions based on the information he has. Like, even if you think people were absorbing too much risk here, that doesn't mean that prior mitigation was done in vain. Right. Every time he tries to like 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 a quote unproven vaccine. Really? Yeah. Oh, he's really in it deep. To be flirting with anti-vax stuff is wild. You see this all the time from like the right end, like the center, right? The sort of COVID skeptics, right? Unproven vaccine. Like, what do you mean by proof? 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 debutant call a vaccine unproven. What was the proof you had of the MMR vaccine before you took it, right? 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, right? 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? Also, yeah, they came up with the vaccine like in like April of 2020, very early. And then they tested it. The reason it didn't work was because they didn't have the vaccine. So they didn't have the vaccine. And 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 like both the right and reactionary centrist constantly fucking saying things like they're pushing an unproven vaccine on us. That's why people don't trust experts. It's not the experts fucking up. 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 from China were dismissed as incorrect and even xenophobic as the speaker of the house, Nancy Pelosi put it when articulated by the president. I was just going to be like, read me the fucking lab leak shit. You know, he's going to go there. 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 this got her mixed up with Biden who said it about the China travel ban. OK, 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. 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 like at the time, Trump was calling it the Wuhan flu. Peter Navarro, who was on Trump's COVID task force, wrote a book called Death by China. Yeah, people were talking about like a Chinese bio weapon at the time. This kind of polite version of the lab leak did not exist for another year. Right. So the lab leak theory at the time was pretty openly driven by xenophobia. Yeah, it's just so striking that they like they never even bother to show that like 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. Chapter four. 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. Like don't kill people. Look, some of this I kind of agree with. Like he starts off with white fragility. Oh, right. It's a book that we've considered covering on this show and whose author, Robin DiAngelo, I consider to be grifter adjacent. Oh, does he go into Kendi as well? Abram Kendi? He talks about Kendi, who wrote How to Be an Anti-Racist, which I know less about, but I've seen sort of similar critiques. I think Chatterton's criticisms are overwrought here, but there's like a coherent argument in here that, people with sort of weird ideas about race were elevated and praised and probably got way too much money for programs that don't verifiably work. We've talked about this. The DEI sector is like, 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 like push minorities out of prominent positions. 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. He also includes an 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, 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 was under the Trump administration, right? This was a very cynical ploy by the Trump administration. But I do think that it sort of prodded at elements of this like performative anti-racism at these big liberal institutions, right? And a lot of these critiques about performativity are frequently made by the left, but Chatterton doesn't really seem to engage with that, right? Like there are very large segments of the left that hate this shit. It is. I mean, man, 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? It's like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi. Okay. Well, surely if everyone is like entranced by this ideology, you have more than two people. You have more than two people. You have more than two books and like the same anecdotes. My God. I feel like he's going to have a whole chapter on the breakup of the Bonaparte. Petit Test Kitchen. We're going to relitigate that for two hours. Chapter five, reply all. Jesus Christ. And then he gets to defund the police. And here we go. All right. 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? He then says that the murder rate spiked in 2020, which it did very substantially. The only city where that happened because they defunded their police. And then people lost their appetite for reform. Here's what he says about the murder rate spike. 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, to a new system of public safety for the community. Medaria Arandondo, to more than 100 officers vacating the force, a figure more than twice the annual rate. Okay, so people quit. Yeah. And he seems to be implying that the 2020 murder spike was maybe caused by anti-police rhetoric, right? Which is like, just another thing where it's like, I think you're going to need evidence, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't want to get into wonky details here. But I just think it's worth noting that like, he doesn't talk about the policy of defund at all. Like, he has no interest in it. He has very little interest in policy in general. He doesn't talk about the policy of defund at all. He doesn't talk about in general. And he also sort of hand waves away the contradictions. Like, 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, you know, 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. 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? Right. 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? As usual, he also totally misreads the power dynamics here. We have police who basically did a work stoppage starting in that 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 pill. A lot of them are COVID deniers. It's like, this is actually a huge problem. It is. Clearance rates have gone down. I was just talking about this on 5 to 4, about like police and like their accoutrements, like police unions, the fraternal orders. They're so bad. They're just like this giant right-wing political operation that gets public funding. Yeah. I think that's like 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 like police budgets for PR shot up after 2014 and 2015. And he just has no vision of what's going to happen. He's not going to be able to do anything about it. He's vision into that no knowledge of it that i can see and so everything that happens happens based on whatever is going on on the progressive left right that's why i know this antedates the book but like they did just dismantle the department of education it's not like it's not like the radicalism is like exclusively on the left on this stuff that's what is going to radicalize chatterton that he uh no longer gets uh federal funding to teach some 21 year old about camu or fly him out to overland or some shit yeah i was on his social media feed he's being flown all over the world for stupid bullshit i know he's one of the luckiest people in america it's crazy no wonder he doesn't believe in race he's like he's like why am i getting all this money then if racism is real then why am i getting flown from university to university then why am i on peter teal's jet right now explain that sjws all right chapter five media in the age of moral clarity oh my god we were just talking about the phrase moral clarity in our brett stevens bonus episode right but there's like 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 like their own they're too certain of their own moral correctness which again is just a long way of saying they're annoying to me on social media yeah i don't i don't agree with you yeah but you're real like rather than argue with you i'm going to say that your problem is that you're too confident in your own correctness if your tone wasn't so bad we don't want you to be too confident in your own correctness so we're going to talk about your own correctness so i'm going to tell you about a book called send in the troops which centers around the new york times tom cotton op-ed in summer 2020 again jesus christ 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 it's so tedious he's just re-litigating a bunch of like twitter controversies it's unbelievable to dedicate a whole book how dare you describe this book as the re-litigation of a 200 pages and you think that this is all about twitter god it's just like find some other fucking anecdotes do some work it's like these are all so well trodden i've read 300 articles about this fucking tom cotton also the paragraph that i sent you is literally just about a twitter post 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 oh 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 also he started off the book by saying that dignity and recognition are higher in maslow's hierarchy of needs than physical safety interesting so it's very clear that he thinks that the idea that this op-ed endangered time staffers is like a total fiction total bullshit worth noting journalists would be covering the protests and riots right so like the presence of the united states military there is a concern and also if the military is deployed yes there are going to be concerns about people getting hurt like he might not think that's enough to warrant an objection but like have the balls to say that like 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 right it's like well yeah 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 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 one thing that um james bannett the times uh 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 right completely absolute schmuck also they were they were classifying peaceful protesters as fucking rioters it was really obvious what was going on all right here's some uh here's some chatterton also there was also the thing of james bennett didn't even read it before it was published and he had a number let's not get ahead of ourselves let's not get ahead of ourselves okay fine why do we do this to ourselves i'm dying at how mad i've spent two weeks just wanting to absolutely just like run my head into a buzzsaw and you and you finally get to just experience a little bit of it it's great he says 48 hours later he 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 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 yeah and he also says this in what has always been an episode of staffers a significant number of whom were not even journalists but rather digital media technicians and producers oh my god 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 no we talked about this in our barry weiss bonus episode this was not a case representing 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 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 yeah yeah go fucking tell the president right whatever yeah i think that this reveals like the fundamental frustration of the anti-woke set about 2020 in that like it reflected a sort of bottom-up ability that they felt powerless to discipline and that really just pissed them off yeah right that's also the obsession with social media it's just like normal ass people can go to Brit Stevens mentions and be like, you fucking bed bug. That's like, that's the anxiety that's driving all of this stuff. Yeah. It's also worth diving into the background here, which Chatterton leaves out. Bennett had joined the paper a couple of years prior, and he explicitly said that part of his MO was to challenge his readership by publishing views that readers find objectionable, quote, provided they meet the same tests of intellectual honesty, respect for others, and openness. Well, I mean, if there's anything that characterizes the Thomas Kahn. Yeah. It's respect for others and intellectual honesty. Yeah. So in other words, he wanted to publish more conservative views, right? Yeah. 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. Yeah. 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. 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 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. This is this thing of like, oh, they were doing it performatively. They were doing it as a power play. 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 like a power play. 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. Yeah. So maybe. It seems normal. But there was actually a time a few years ago when it wouldn't have been normal. Right. And I don't I do think that like people were trying to shape the institution. But also that's normal. That's not weird. It's not weird. Most like every NGO I worked at has like a five year strategy and a 10 year strategy. And like you you try to influence those things. Very normal. He can't really debate this up on the merit. So he has to say that like their motivation was bad. She has no proof for the way that he frames it is that he thinks that time should remain neutral on debatable issues. That's a quote. And he says that the social justice types wanted the Times to abandon neutrality. Not. Right. Remotely true. That like fundamentally misunderstands what's happening here. Bennett himself did not aspire to neutrality. He openly wanted to challenge his liberal readership. Right. 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. Right. That's even worse. How can you claim you're institutionally neutral. Right. When you're literally soliciting certain opinions. And why is publishing an opinion neutral while not publishing it is biased. Like. Right. They have to remain neutral. What are you talking about. How many pitches per day. Yeah. Exactly. Times gets. They can only publish a subset of them. How do you remain neutral. What does that even mean. Yeah. You have to make choices. He's like James Bennett has fallen like a single tear rolling down his cheek. It's like they replace it with someone else. It's exactly the same. Exactly the same. And also James Bennett is now just like editor in chief at like The Economist or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like. It lands on his feet. There's no actual stakes to any of this remotely. Of course. It's not even landing on his feet. It's just like there's a perfect cartwheel into The Economist. Right. Yeah. It's whatever. Now chapter six titled Fiery but Mostly Peaceful Protests. OK. He admits they're mostly peaceful. Again classic Chatterton because he does acknowledge very briefly the people who were responsible for most of the violence. The protests were not meaningfully related to the protests which were largely peaceful but then he also just like pivots into extended descriptions of the violence businesses burned and stuff like that. He says quote 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. What is he talking about. That's also some Clarence Thomas shit like the most lurid description he's ever seen in a movie. That whole 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. OK. 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. The idea that he was a business owner. This is just something that came out of right wing Twitter posts from the time and just like laundering him into someone like noble and good right. So Chatterton took that image. What happened to one man who rushed a crowd with a machete lies about the circumstances of it. Yeah. And straightforwardly says that it's happening to business owners around the country. Right. This thing that happened one incident and not to a business owner. Yeah. 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. Right. Meanwhile he's had fucking five years to figure out that that is not true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He also complains that NPR published what he calls a wildly credulous interview with the author of a book called In Defense of Looting. Oh God. 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. Yeah. 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. So basically I found a book I don't like by someone I don't like. Yeah. Well so if Thomas just said hey that's stupid I would be like no doubt bro. Yeah. Whatever. Yeah. Someone published a book I don't like. Fine. He says quote this is the discourse being promoted even in our most vanilla of mainstream media outlets. 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. Dude. Dude. We're fresh off the topic. We're fresh off the Tom Cotton op-ed chapter. So do you want debate or not dude? He was just talking about the perils of letting your journalism be dictated by ideology. Right. And like the need for neutrality. But now NPR is covering an idea he does not like. Yeah. And he like within a matter of pages it's just like this is the discourse being promoted. Unbelievable. And now he understands that platforming an author is a form of promotion. Right. Right. Yeah. Like now he seems to understand that. That's not inherently neutral. We shouldn't air these ideas that are fundamentally making people unsafe. Oh really Thomas? Wow. Okay. 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. Oh God. I think about the sentence all the time. He says when a doughy 17 year old named Kyle Rittenhouse, too young to purchase the AR-15 assault rights. Right. 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. It's so funny. What is doughy doing there? It's so funny to call him fat right off the bat. What the fuck? And like he was doing many things simultaneously. Like yeah. Aren't we all dude? Yeah. Yeah. That's like yeah. When I went to the grocery store I was doing many things simultaneously. Kyle Rittenhouse is a land of contrasts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For people who don't remember this kid goes to do like community defense armed with an illegal assault rifle. He drives from his home like many miles away to go like defend. 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. He specifically like got a gun and sought out this like city he doesn't live in to like quote unquote defend it and then he ended up shooting somebody. Yeah. Yeah. Very similar to Zimmerman Trayvon. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He gets off the hook. There's a not guilty verdict eventually mostly because the immediate circumstances of the shooting look like self-defense. Right. Chatterton doesn't take a position on this either way. He seems to think it's a reasonable minds can differ situation and in fact he says that pretty explicitly. That's because he would have to read about it and learn something about the details. His actual complaint is of course how liberal institutions reacted. He says that they like. Oh my god. I'm going to be honest with you. skipping chapter seven and then i went look it up look it up look it up okay this is yeah it's chapter seven is uh we are all americans now anti-racism goes global in the age of social media oh i will not be talking about uh other countries during this episode during this entire podcast bad enough that i have to talk about america chapter eight cancel culture and its discontents oh no he's actually saying it we're doing this fuck yeah you thought this whole thing was about cancel culture but no there's actually a specific chapter i'm getting visions of myself at like 90 years old like relitigating the same like four fucking anecdotes like did the professor get fired for doing blackface or not so the whole chapter revolves primarily around the harper's letter which chatterton co-authored and spearheaded in uh summer 2020 he's like i was a hero i was actually a huge hero for that you know about the harper's letter it's a letter published in harper signed by a bunch of like 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 it's such perfect tcw i know i i was like i had not entirely clocked that he wrote this whole thing yeah once he said he co-authored it i went back and read it and was like oh that why this thing sucks because he's like well the fascists are like super fascist but we have some very minor complaints about people on the left that we're going to dedicate the rest of this document to so yeah he's basically just hashing out his beefs about this yeah yeah and you can tell that he's really pissy about it because he starts strawmanning the arguments really badly yeah i'm gonna send you a couple he says critics of the letter a variety of whom were also leading advocates for the shift to moral clarity in theory in anti-racism and practice i'm gonna send you a couple of them but i'm gonna give you a bunch of them and i'm gonna send you a bunch of them and i'm gonna send you a bunch of them and i'm gonna send you a bunch of them and we should be the arbiters of what is permissible no one said this who said that right who said that like this is this pisses me off so much yeah 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 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're like 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 like they fire that adidas lady for like sending a racist tweet like 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 like creeping totalitarianism on the left right which looking back from 2025 is just not fucking true true empirically it's not true one of the big criticisms of the harper's letter and concerns about like 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 yeah yeah so he tries to tackle that uh to distinguish between cancellation and mere accountability he uses a definition written by ross doubt that in a times column essentially the ross this is the ross definition 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 where is the clear delineation between cancellation and accountability here yeah every attempt to define cancellation runs into the same problem that either it's too specific and it's like oh someone gets fired for challenging social justice orthodoxy and it reveals that it's just like an ideological project yeah or like this one it's too generic so doubt that 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 like yes exactly this would include like the congregation of a church asking to remove a pastor because he like embezzled funds how would you distinguish between this and like what happened to harvey weinstein yeah yeah obviously he was canceled under this definition right right attack on his employment and reputation by a determined collective of critics so like are you opposed to that yeah i think it's notable that these guys who have built careers off of these boogeymen right wokeness cancel culture they cannot provide a fucking definition of them is that not notable like it's wild yeah in an interview for the new yorker shortly after this was published uh isaac chotner interviewed him he was asked for uh examples of what he considers cancellation he gives them and then he's like oh my god i'm not the interview included bracketed descriptions of what actually happened in those cases and i'm gonna i'm gonna send you this um i can read you actually i'll read i'll read chatterton and you can read the bracketed descriptions okay i'm the editor's note okay okay there have been many many academics who have been silenced there was a ucla professor who got in serious trouble for just reading letter from birmingham jail william paris a lecturer in political science reportedly came into conflict with his students over his decision to cancel a book called the n-word in king's letter and show a documentary about lynching ucla told a new yorker that there was no formal investigation but that the situation was being reviewed there's an academic at the university of chicago who questioned some aspects of the orthodoxy on black lives matter harold ulig a professor of economics compared black lives matter activists to flat earthers and creationists a student then claimed that ulig had made racially discriminatory remarks in his classroom the university conducted an investigation and found that there was no basis for further proceedings that's it two two situations where the issue appears to be that some students got upset and that's it so complete nothing burgers it's like 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 and like the institutions themselves that he believes are like a little too caught up in all of this are in fact reviewing this stuff and being like no that's all right yeah you can do it because ucla didn't even start a normal investigation right i mean yeah it's just some like some students got upset and he's like shut up shut up he says there have been many many academics who've been silenced silence no one was silenced is your point that those people shouldn't be complaining because then who's the one being censorious thomas chatterton williams yeah yeah he also says that the james bennett new york times thing was canceled culture and it's like okay yeah there was a large group of social media users attacking him but like 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 right you can disagree with how it turned out but it feels pretty reasonable for there to be like a big public discussion about how the most influential newspaper in the world is handling its editorial section like that feels very reasonable to me yeah 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 yeah 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 like 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 like one person will do something weird or bad on tiktok and there will be extended discourse about it just say kendra just say kendra who's all over the psychiatrist there is a a lady who is 100 i can say it with confidence from my armchair mentally ill who like who is in love with her psychiatrist and believes that he was in love with her yeah like to say that there's been extended discourse about it dude i mean this is one one woman having a straight up mental health crisis and people are just like have you seen this dumb lady are the subject of like national attention but this is this is what i'm saying like the way in which we pay attention to anything right now is just sort of odd and it's amplified by social media algorithms are pushing it and i will say chatterton knows it's like he talks about how this is sort of like uh intertwined with technology and social media i don't know that he understands it as like almost entirely a function of that right right he always talks about the political side of this the right the extent to which this is like part of the left's culture or whatever yeah and very rarely talks about the technology side and it's like you're making a lot of noise about it and you're making a lot of noise about what i think is 99 of the story because we see these same exact things being replicated in completely apolitical uh arenas this is always the grand tragedy of the cancel culture narrative is that it became about like creeping authoritarianism on the left when it's actually just a shift to social media which has real implications beyond ideology and like right there's actually an interesting conversation there yeah it just became this dumb thing like the left is always canceling people which just isn't fucking true everyone's canceling everyone he says the only authentically liberal stance then is that the left is always canceling people and the left is always to resist cancel culture as well as its right-wing exploitation simultaneously post better don't 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 you gotta get your career to it you're how are you resisting the right-wing exploitation like what right what that little caveat in the beginning of every chapter before you spend the rest of it complaining about the left that's you resisting it doesn't count when i do it because i'm telling you not to do it i want to try to throw in some good faith here there are some things he says that i agree with um he argues that the language of social justice is often like limited to the educated classes i think that's right yeah but then And he says, are we 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 Me Too, 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? 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. 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. 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 is 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. He has a footnote here about how one of the signatories to the Harper's letter was an Algerian journalist who criticized Islam. 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? It's just like religious right-wingers, basically like traditionalists. Yeah, it's literally just right-wingers. And he's like, the left has done this. Now on to, believe it or not, the most substantively outrageous chapter of the book. Oh my God, really? Sorry. We've been recording for two and a half hours, Peter. This is the longest record session we've ever had. I told you it was going to be a long one. It's going to be long. Oh my God. Usually I'm very good at condensing a book down into episode length. You're not good at it, but I. Yeah, that's true. I'm like, we're doing a three-part episode on the seven habits of highly effective people. 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. That is what you did with liberal fascism. We talked about like, three chapters of that book. That was a blessing, I promise you. Yeah. 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. It's the January 6th chapter. This is the January 6th chapter. 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. 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. January 6th is the fault of the left. Unbelievable. He says that it is downright fantastical, quote unquote, to say that the rioting in summer 2020 and the condoning of that rioting from the media did not influence January 6th. Right. This is another time. When, like, the machinations of the American right are invisible to him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. January 6th was the culmination of extended planning by very, very powerful people. Yeah. They had legal arguments. They coordinated with right-wing media, right, 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. Also, the voter fraud myth has been around for decades and has been stoked by, like, elected Republican leaders all over the place. 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. And I mean, 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, like he has spent his entire adult life wringing 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. Yeah. 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, quote, spawned a vicious counterreaction from the authoritarian right. He makes this claim a few times throughout the book. I listened to an interview with him by Andrew Yang, where he says that Democrats took their eye off the ball by pandering to activists and invited a reaction from the right. He says that Trump's win was easily preventable. With a universal basic income? Is that what Andrew Yang said? He actually solved this. 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, right? The social justice activism, and Democrats won. Right after all of this went down, Democrats won. So if your theory of modern politics is that that rhetoric is what led to Trump, you need to explain why he lost when it was at its peak. 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 an anomaly for various reasons, blah, 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. Like you could have commandeered the Kamala campaign to victory or whatever. Like this guy splits his time between New York and the French countryside and just cited Camus seven times in a book about American politics. Fucking a feat little charlatan. You don't know what you're talking about. I mean, 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. Like I mentioned, people, the majority of people said that the burning down of the police precinct in Minneapolis was justified. That is wild. There was real injustice going on and people were responding to very real injustice. And that's actually quite mobilizing for people. I mean, these were the largest protests in American history at the time. People were really fucking upset. You were, 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. I'm not saying that was good, but if that was like, if that was the most off, putting thing, uh, then why wasn't there a consequence? Why were people still supportive? Right. Uh, yeah. I mean, because the fucking median Americans position in summer 2020 was fuck the police. That's like, well, that's what was happening. Yeah. The afterward for this book, thank God it's over is entirely about reactions to October 7th. He does. He talks about the, uh, like cancel culture elements on the right where, um, you have things like canary mission where like activists just get doxxed. And, um, and, uh, people are coordinating to prevent them from being employed. 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. Right. Cancel culture on the right is like this coordinated money operation. You know, it's like led by the richest people in the world. It's like, but still, I'm going to send you what I, what I think is his final thesis statement. Thank God. I've never wanted an episode to end so badly. I've had two cold brews in a Celsius while we were doing this and I'm still sort of wiped out. 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. Most basic prerequisite for democracy. Yeah. This is what I was saying earlier. He wants a nonstop sister soldier moment. Yes. Every democratic leader just constantly complaining about whatever people are talking about on Twitter, right? 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. I stand with Kendra. Yeah, I don't be as much to it. I just wanted to, um, you know, share the final statement. I think it's just, uh, the same shit over and over again. The extent to which these people are not willing to do it. People have completely failed to read the political moment in the last five years. It's just so profound. Yeah. And the fact 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. It's so embarrassing. I'm going to send you a couple of terrible sentences. You can cut this, but it's just funny. I want to reiterate that the, the torture that I've been put through, I'm going to give you no context. It's irrelevant. Here we go. The norms rules and behavior. 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 like, it's a coherent metaphor, but it's not a coherent sentence. It's not a coherent sentence. There's why did, why the lists? Why the lists in the middle of a sentence. Also, he says the swiftness of a new Copernican revolution. That took like 400 years. It was like literally centuries, dude. It was centuries. Yeah. And here's the last one, I promise. Even though I have so many more, it would shock you. 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 we were viewing. You just wanted me to say Borges wrong. Borges. I'm just, like, his references are so forced and painful. 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. Yeah, that's all he's saying. That's all he's saying, and that's what's so crazy about these sentences. Just cite, like, an actual person who's, like, an expert in this, not some Borges reference. He really thinks that these, like, digressions in every sentence and these, like, overwrought forced metaphors, like, are useful to your understanding. And it's like, you know, and I think I told you this. I think I, like, texted you this at some point during the past week when I was doing this. But, like, when Thomas Chatterton Williams goes to hell, he's just going to be made to read Hemingway. He's just, like, a professor, an English professor standing above him for all of eternity being like, you can see how this is better, right? 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. You're going to have to read Thomas Chatterton Williams for the rest of eternity.