Transcript
Speaker: Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
Speaker: This is Dr. Bennett.
Speaker: I'll just cut right to the chase.
Speaker: There is absolutely no question in the historical record as to whether or not J. Robert Oppenheimer was a Soviet spy.
Speaker: He absolutely was.
Speaker: It's very well documented.
Speaker: No one could get through even a cursory examination of his life and still believe that he was falsely accused of being a Soviet spy.
Speaker: So I saw the movie this week and I was just baffled.
Speaker: I mean, we'll get to what everybody knew at the time during Oppenheimer's tenure with the Manhattan Project.
Speaker: But today, we've got the letter from the head of KGB, Boris Merkulov, to the Soviet Minister of Internal Affairs, Lavrentiy Beria, saying, Oppenheimer is an unlisted member of the Communist Party of the USA.
Speaker: He reports to comrade Earl Browder.
Speaker: the head of the party, and it explicitly says that Oppenheimer informed the Soviet Union about the Manhattan Project from the start in 1942 and provided cooperation and access to research.
Speaker: He had confidential contact with the Soviet residentura in San Francisco from 1941, Grigory Kaifetz.
Speaker: He was known to have sexual relationships with numerous women whose job was to have sexual relationships with American nuclear scientists for the purpose of extracting nuclear secrets.
Speaker: We have the letter from Hacón Chevalier, who was unambiguously a communist agent, writing to Oppenheimer in 1964 saying, I'm going to write a memoir and I'm going to tell everybody that we were in the same secret cell of the communist party from 1938 to 1942.
Speaker: So, like, we can stop calling this, you know, one of history's mysteries.
Speaker: Like, we can close the book.
Speaker: He was a Soviet spy.
Speaker: And, of course, the movie's perspective is that he was this, like, misunderstood, naive patriot who, you know, loved his country but also loved his friends.
Speaker: And it was just loyalty and sort of his deep integrity that made him not give away all the Soviet spies who...
Speaker: pumping him for information on nuclear weapons.
Speaker: But that's all very much on the surface.
Speaker: Like, it's explicitly, like, handed to you.
Speaker: Like, other people say it about him.
Speaker: He's... What a patriot he is, and...
Speaker: And how he would never give away these secrets.
Speaker: But like none of the deeper sort of portraiture of this movie, the nuances, the examination of the details of his life, none of that points in that direction.
Speaker: In fact, all of it points in the opposite direction.
Speaker: And not to get too schizo here, but I actually think Christopher Nolan understands the story that he's telling here.
Speaker: I said something similar about the Batman, the Robert Pattinson Batman from a year or two ago.
Speaker: When you're operating in a heavily controlled media environment, sometimes the way that you make an effective case is by making the opposite case absurdly.
Speaker: So the Batman is just all about elite corruption laundered through NGOs and blackmail.
Speaker: It's essentially like QAnon the movie.
Speaker: And Batman learns that the mayor and every DA and every judge and half the police force is all on the take.
Speaker: And so his solution is to take the mob boss who's running the city and turn him in to the good cops.
Speaker: So the rule of law can be restored.
Speaker: And then it's like, alright genius, you got no judges and no DAs, so who's gonna try them?
Speaker: Like, how does your framework of rules apply here?
Speaker: And then at the end, when the extremist, angry white male school shooter villains...
Speaker: get mad about all the QAnon stuff that's happening and then randomly murder a bunch of civilians in a stadium.
Speaker: How that addresses or even targets the elite bad guys is unclear.
Speaker: But Batman's solution is to stop them and arrest them and then vote for the young progressive AOC clone who wants to start some new NGOs.
Speaker: And the movie up to that point is so clearly written by someone who's done the reading on the Clinton Foundation and Alex Jones and even like the knockout game.
Speaker: And having done all that reading, the movie's solution is like, what if we elected the first black woman mayor?
Speaker: Isn't it about time that we gave black girl magic a shot?
Speaker: And what if we supported our first responders?
Speaker: Isn't it really important that we support our first responders?
Speaker: And it's like such a non-solution, and it's so silly that I can't believe that it was not done on purpose.
Speaker: And I'll get back to Oppenheimer in a second, but if you were living in the Soviet Union, like 1928, and you needed to say some things about Stalin, and like how it's going, one way you could do that is to tell a story about Tsarist Russia and have...
Speaker: Like a Kulak head of the secret police who's picking up good, wholesome proletarian girls and raping them in the basement of the secret police headquarters.
Speaker: And maybe kids are being encouraged to turn their parents in for anti-Tsarist sentiments or unionizing a factory or something.
Speaker: And then you'd be like, ooh, man, I hate the czar.
Speaker: I guess we all should deepen our commitment to the five-year plan and make sure that we mine enough bauxite in the bauxite mines that we all collectively own in the worker's paradise.
Speaker: So anyway, I just completely don't believe that this is a movie about how bad the Red Scare was and how innocent the communists were.
Speaker: And ultimately, the reason I think that's the case is that this movie intimately understands manipulation of procedural outcomes.
Speaker: They don't use that phrase explicitly, but the villain of the movie, Louis Straws,
Speaker: Lays out exactly what manipulation of procedural outcomes is and I and this is why I wanted to talk about this on the exit podcast because this is a movie about Cancellation I hate that phrase but this is a movie about cancellation from the perspective of the people who currently do it as if they were the victims from a bygone time in which they understood themselves as the victims of this process and read in that way this movie almost feels like a confession and
Speaker: Like, yeah, the U.S. government and academia were lousy with open communists prior to the Red Scare.
Speaker: And yeah, good Americans trusted us when they shouldn't have.
Speaker: And yeah, we had competing ethnic and ideological loyalties that we advanced in direct opposition to America's interests.
Speaker: And yeah, when American foreign policy stopped serving those interests, we immediately jumped ship.
Speaker: And yeah, when they started to get wise to what we were doing, we threw a big fit about how nasty and unfair that was.
Speaker: But we have no principled objection to ideological purges because we supported the communist government, which did them way more intensely at the time.
Speaker: And we are currently doing an ideological purge to you right now.
Speaker: Like you personally, as just a random American citizen listening to a podcast like this, maybe you follow some edgy people on Twitter, you personally...
Speaker: are under way more scrutiny than the director of the Manhattan Project, who was a known communist and a prolific womanizer and a guy who just exhibited, like, horrendous judgment at every stage of his life, who lied admittedly and repeatedly to army security about what he was doing and who he was talking to, with essentially no consequences.
Speaker: I mean, what he did was a hanging offense.
Speaker: And what he got was he got his security clearance revoked.
Speaker: Which he was no longer like by his own choice.
Speaker: He was no longer participating in the nuclear weapons program anyway.
Speaker: He wanted the security clearance as a media figure to establish his credibility in weakening America's foreign policy position against the Soviets.
Speaker: Like a Q clearance isn't a knighthood.
Speaker: You don't get to keep it just because you want it, just because it's personally useful to you.
Speaker: They give you one so that you can be read into conversations that you need to contribute on.
Speaker: And they didn't even revoke his clearance, which they should have.
Speaker: They just declined to renew it.
Speaker: And so it's framed as this anti-communist or anti-Semitic paranoia, this fever of looking for communist monsters under the bed when it's almost...
Speaker: the opposite.
Speaker: It's a story of people and institutions being just incredibly, implausibly naive and patient with a person who just demonstrates over and over again that he can't be trusted.
Speaker: Now, I don't actually think that his American handlers were that naive.
Speaker: And in fact, one of my friends, Degree Studies, mentioned that there's a more interesting version of this movie, which would be from Matt Damon's perspective, the Oppenheimer's wasp babysitter, where he knows perfectly well that his whole program is staffed with communist traitors.
Speaker: But the boss ordered a bomb and he's the only guys who know how to build it.
Speaker: and the sort of psychological battle of managing not only communist traitors, but communist traitors with Asperger's.
Speaker: To have to, like, pretend not to see through these just unbelievably childish attempts at deception.
Speaker: And then the third act being managing the pivot and the purge.
Speaker: How the hell do we get rid of all these communist traitors when they've been steering policy and running the media for the last 25 years?
Speaker: How do we level with the American people and admit that this is a problem without copying to how bad we let it get?
Speaker: And I guess, you know, to be fair to Olapi, the Roosevelt administration was so enamored with the Soviet Union and Stalin in particular, and the military, industrial, and scientific cooperation with the Soviets, meaning...
Speaker: Us sending them factories, us sending them tanks, literally ordering American inventors to open the books for Russian engineers to steal and duplicate American inventions.
Speaker: Like it's not impossible to imagine the Roosevelt administration just telling Oppenheimer to open the books to the Soviets.
Speaker: And so if there is anything, you know, unjust or hypocritical about the Red Scare, it's not really that communists didn't have their civil rights respected or whatever.
Speaker: It's that the people who went down during the Red Scare were essentially taking the fall for what had been
Speaker: More or less official American policy for four terms of the FDR White House.
Speaker: So yes, he and all the rest of them were unambiguously traitors to their country, but they were also, as he says in the movie, good New Deal Democrats.
Speaker: When George Orwell in 1984 talks about, we have always been at war with East Asia...
Speaker: He was, of course, referring to the immediate pivot from, you know, good old Uncle Joe and we're all in this together and, you know, look at this man.
Speaker: He's your friend.
Speaker: He fights for freedom.
Speaker: Seen that propaganda poster with the Russian soldier.
Speaker: He wasn't talking about some far future, you know, dystopian...
Speaker: He was talking about what he actually lived through and saw.
Speaker: And of course, Orwell was himself a socialist.
Speaker: So this confusion about who are we fighting and why and who are we allied with and what does that alliance mean?
Speaker: That was something that he had actually gone through himself during the Spanish Civil War when he joined up with a communist but anti-Stalinist militia that then got actually hunted by the Soviet-backed forces when Trotsky fell out of favor.
Speaker: So like even back then there were, you know, real communism has never been tried communists.
Speaker: But the type of communists that Oppenheimer hung around with and was married to and had sex with on the side, they were card-carrying, common-turn communists.
Speaker: It's actually kind of amazing the extent to which the Soviet government managed to make themselves the only game in town in left-wing politics.
Speaker: If there was any significant donations to left-wing causes like the Spanish Civil War or media campaigns or even activism like the American Civil Rights Movement, the Soviet government was just incredibly effective at just cornering the action or at the very least having intimate visibility on the inner workings of pretty much every left-wing political group.
Speaker: And maybe the best that can be said for these guys and for Oppenheimer is
Speaker: Is that they'd done what they were doing without consequences for so long that they had come to maybe the reasonable conclusion that America was a communist country.
Speaker: And so cooperation with the KGB wasn't really so beyond the pale because Roosevelt was cooperating with the KGB and the New York Times was carrying water for the KGB.
Speaker: And the quantity of military secrets and engineering secrets that were just pouring out the door from DOD and the universities toward the Soviet Union was so immense that they probably knew better.
Speaker: They probably understood in their heart of hearts that the bomb was something different.
Speaker: But you can at least see why they thought they might get away with the spirit of the law is that we cooperate with the Soviets because we're trying to defeat fascism.
Speaker: And there's also the angle that among the American intelligentsia, funny side note, intelligentsia is a Russian word popularized in English because of the number of elite Marxists in America during this time period and before.
Speaker: But among America's academic and cultural elite, there was this clear sense that the Soviet Union was sort of the testing ground for the next phase of human progress.
Speaker: And I think maybe we have like a mistaken image of who the communist collaborators were in this time period.
Speaker: Sort of imagine weird, countercultural, beardy, like bad smelling kind of people who are communists today, like hammer and sickle communists.
Speaker: kind of unemployable sex criminals.
Speaker: And you definitely had those guys, but the people involved with Lendlease and even, you know, decades before that in the 1920s, Stalin's massive subsidized importation of American engineers and industrialists to build factories in the Soviet Union, this represented kind of a dream project for a lot of these industrialists.
Speaker: Ironically, because there were constraints on the deployment of capital,
Speaker: in the U.S. that didn't exist in the Soviet Union.
Speaker: Like, what's the biggest single ironworks and steelworks that you could possibly build if you had no quarterly investor call to answer to and an infinite army of slaves or prisoners with jobs?
Speaker: And that's essentially what Magnitogorsk was, this massive centrally planned
Speaker: prison colony in the Urals that was intended to be a carbon copy of the steelworks in Gary, Indiana and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Speaker: And these weren't just like toy projects.
Speaker: It wasn't just like, you know, let's see if we can do it.
Speaker: The thinking was that if you could overcome some of the short-term thinking and the competitive character of capitalism, that you could access efficiencies and economies of scale that would actually make everything cheaper and better.
Speaker: You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.
Speaker: Like nowadays, most of us think of the competitive character of capitalism as really important to
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Why would we silo intellectual property and innovation across half a dozen companies that can't talk to each other and can't share insights when we could just pool everything and grow faster?
Speaker: How much more efficiently could a company grow if it was less concerned about making distributions to shareholders or to the capital owners when all of that money could just be reinvested in the business?
Speaker: Like the broader...
Speaker: philosophical orientation of all this was that the economy as it stood at the time was this very messy, inefficient, organic process that could be rationalized.
Speaker: That instead of letting the market run itself, you could have experts run the market.
Speaker: It's the same mindset behind eugenics, that there were just a lot of bad, short-sighted, inefficient decisions being made and that we'd all be a lot happier if we left these things to the experts.
Speaker: So, you know, there's nothing new under the sun.
Speaker: This agglomeration of capital, this centralization of authority, telling everyone they need to defer to the experts, and even the phenomenon of megacorporations colluding with ostensibly anti-corporate, anti-capitalist ideologues is not really something new.
Speaker: It's a return to form.
Speaker: And I think the reason that we're seeing that right now is this massive improvement in
Speaker: in computing power and surveillance technology that makes the prospect of centrally planned economics working out a lot more plausible than it was in the 1950s.
Speaker: And I don't just mean surveillance technology in terms of like state security and like rounding up dissidents.
Speaker: A huge part of the problem with centrally planned economics was just the inability to see what you were doing, to monitor millions of different inputs at once and then observe their impact on a million other outputs.
Speaker: And simultaneously, as social media decentralizes the conversation, more people can be heard.
Speaker: We're all realizing the extent to which our culture and our discourse is dominated by the expectation that everyone will just defer to the experts.
Speaker: Like it used to be the case that only the experts had the microphone.
Speaker: And so everybody could believe that in theory, they had the right to be heard same as anybody else.
Speaker: When in fact, it was the same elite consensus that existed today.
Speaker: everywhere else throughout all time.
Speaker: It was just guarded by a technological moat.
Speaker: And so you didn't need explicit political censorship.
Speaker: The golden age of Twitter from like 2008 to 2016 was this shining moment where you could clown on anybody and everybody and everything that they cared about with no consequences.
Speaker: And basically 2016 was the regulatory apparatus catching up with the technology.
Speaker: So anyway, all of this is to say that particularly among the elite, particularly among the academic class that Oppenheimer was part of, communism was not this foreign import, this barbaric custom that was anathema to everything Americans believed in.
Speaker: If there's any comparison that you could draw in the modern world, it's a lot more like the way that Arabs viewed Al-Qaeda after 9-11, or even in the early days, the way some of them viewed ISIS.
Speaker: It's like, yeah, maybe they're a little more extreme than me.
Speaker: They're trying to make an omelet.
Speaker: They broke some eggs.
Speaker: But ultimately, they're the vanguard of this experiment whose ultimate objective, at least, I agree with.
Speaker: And like, no, we're not going to send them money directly, but we're going to fund some NGOs, and those NGOs are going to fund some schools, and those schools are going to sell baked goods to buy rocket launchers in Afghanistan.
Speaker: And so if I'm some functionary in the Saudi government, I know that if an American journalist or an American military functionary calls me, I'm supposed to say, oh, we like America, we love America, Betty Boop, what a dish, Betty Grable, nice gams.
Speaker: And of course, we disavow Al-Qaeda and our thoughts and prayers go to the victims of the obscene and horrible terrorist attack.
Speaker: But if my buddy, who I know has some edgy politics and has no good reason to be asking, has some technical questions about some foreign intelligence intercepts, say, and I give him that information, I'm not thinking of myself as a traitor to my country or...
Speaker: even really at odds with the policy priorities of my boss, my leadership.
Speaker: And even there, it's complicated, obviously.
Speaker: There's factions, which was also true of the American government during the 20s through the 40s.
Speaker: A guy who wanted to help a friend like that would have to be careful.
Speaker: And that's all anybody ever says to Oppenheimer.
Speaker: That's all they ever accuse him of.
Speaker: It's not...
Speaker: It's like they make this huge deal out of whether or not he was an official member of the Communist Party, but everybody knows he's a communist, even in the internal narrative of the movie.
Speaker: They don't really explore what that means, but they never really question his...
Speaker: ideology.
Speaker: Everybody's just varying degrees of upset with him for being careless about it.
Speaker: And they take this, one of my favorite parts of the movie is they take Ernest Lawrence, who's looks like a physicist.
Speaker: He's a nerd.
Speaker: And they turn him into this like Josh Hartnett, California meathead so that he can be like, why do you care about theory, man?
Speaker: Why do you care about being a communist when you should play football?
Speaker: And even he's not like being a communist is a bad thing to be.
Speaker: He's just like, we have a job to do.
Speaker: Would you stop trying to unionize the physicists at Berkeley?
Speaker: And what's kind of sad about that is that in real life, Lawrence was a Republican.
Speaker: He was an anti-communist.
Speaker: He believed in what the House Un-American Activities Committee was doing.
Speaker: And he was also really good friends with J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Speaker: Which I think just gives the lie to the idea that anti-communists at the time were fanatics, that they were monomaniacal, basically everything they're depicted as being in popular culture.
Speaker: Like this was a guy who genuinely believed that communists had the right to speak their minds in America.
Speaker: They just didn't have the right to infiltrate and subvert America's nuclear weapons program.
Speaker: Like, it's just taken for granted in the movie that, like, all sensitive young men, all feeling and thinking human beings understand who the good guys were in the Spanish Civil War.
Speaker: But, like, Oppenheimer just had some friends who weren't quite as thoughtful as he was.
Speaker: And they create this minor side villain out of Boris Pash who served in the White Navy during the Russian Revolution and hates communists.
Speaker: But they're constrained by the actual events of history, which are that Pash didn't recommend that Oppenheimer be removed from the Manhattan Project.
Speaker: He just said people should follow him.
Speaker: In fact, he gives Oppenheimer a lot of credit for integrity, basically.
Speaker: Says, you know, the fact that he gave his word to keep his mouth shut ought to be enough.
Speaker: I'm reading here from Manhattan, the Army and the Atomic Bomb.
Speaker: On 29 June 1943, Pash submitted his conclusion that Oppenheimer may still be connected with the Communist Party.
Speaker: He offered three possible courses of action.
Speaker: To replace Oppenheimer as soon as possible.
Speaker: To train a second in command at Los Alamos as a possible replacement.
Speaker: Or Pash's recommendation to have Oppenheimer meet with General Groves and Strong in Washington so they could brief him on the Espionage Act and its ramifications and also instruct him that the government was fully aware of his communist affiliations, that no leakage of information would be tolerated, and that the entire project would be held under rigid control.
Speaker: So essentially this foaming, rabid, homicidal anti-communist recommended that they give Oppenheimer a talking to.
Speaker: But, he adds, he's of the opinion that Oppenheimer's personal inclination would be to protect his own future and reputation and the high degree of honor which would be his if his present work is successful, and consequently that he would lend every effort to cooperating with the government in any plan which would leave him in charge.
Speaker: And he suggests that Oppenheimer be assigned a counterintelligence security detail to keep him safe from the Nazis and also keep an eye on him.
Speaker: Which, like, yeah, maybe that seems a little invasive if you're thinking of him as a civilian, but he's not.
Speaker: He's the head of the American Nuclear Weapons Program.
Speaker: Having a two-man security detail on a guy like that doesn't seem crazy.
Speaker: All right, let's talk about Louis Strauss, the big bad, the big villain of the third act of the movie.
Speaker: He was a Jewish businessman who had spent an awful lot of his career in the interwar period trying to get help for Jewish refugees in Europe and fighting essentially a constant battle to convince people that Judaism and Bolshevism were not synonymous.
Speaker: And there's this throwaway remark in the beginning of the movie when he corrects Oppenheimer on the pronunciation of his surname, Strauss, as opposed to Strauss.
Speaker: And he says it's the southern pronunciation of the name.
Speaker: And Oppenheimer makes this comment like, well, no matter how you pronounce Oppenheimer, everybody knows I'm Jewish.
Speaker: To sort of imply that Strauss was being somehow underhanded or sneaky about his Jewishness.
Speaker: When in fact, the dynamic between the two men was precisely the opposite.
Speaker: Strauss was a devoutly religious, observant Jew who was extremely active in Jewish causes for his entire career.
Speaker: And Oppenheimer, even his friends, Robbie, who was played by Bernard from the Santa Claus, he's sort of the jolly, fat Jewish guy who's always telling Oppenheimer to eat.
Speaker: He's quoted as saying, What prevented Oppenheimer from being fully integrated was his denial of a centrally important part of himself, his Jewishness.
Speaker: He tried to act as if he were not a Jew and succeeded because he was a good actor.
Speaker: You know, when you can't integrate yourself and you're trying to distance yourself from your roots, you can become conflicted.
Speaker: And this interview with the Jerusalem Post sort of implies that what Oppenheimer calls his continuing smoldering fury about the treatment of the Jews in Germany was partly driven by or at least substantially colored by his sort of personal rejection of the label.
Speaker: Which, like, you know, who cares if Oppenheimer was proud to be Jewish or not?
Speaker: But what's interesting about it is that the movie just tells this completely obvious lie.
Speaker: It's the opposite of the truth.
Speaker: And it's intended to depict him as the more authentic or the more, like, down with the struggle of the two, which was not the case.
Speaker: In fact, it seems to me that Strauss was basically the type of person that the film depicts Oppenheimer as being.
Speaker: The fact that he's Jewish obviously informs his opposition to the Nazis, but he also consistently acts like an American patriot, somebody who actually buys our story about who we are as people and what we believe in.
Speaker: He wasn't a Zionist or a Jewish nationalist.
Speaker: He believed that he was an American of Jewish religion and believed that Jews ought to integrate in the societies in which they live.
Speaker: So yeah, unsurprising for a guy like that to be skeptical to the point of hostility of a guy like Oppenheimer who embodied so many of the stereotypes that made problems for guys like Strauss while at the same time sort of shirking his responsibility to rep the set.
Speaker: And they frame that hostility as if it was something that was sort of revealed over time as a betrayal, but there appears to be almost no evidence of that.
Speaker: Basically, they were at loggerheads from the beginning, with Oppenheimer treating Strauss as an intellectual lightweight, a dilettante, and Strauss just gradually noticing that
Speaker: The only consistent principle underlying Oppenheimer's decision-making is that everything he does and everything he recommends just somehow seems to serve the interests of the Soviet Union.
Speaker: In the movie, this is all depicted as, like, professional disagreement and Strauss sort of resenting being verbally outmatched.
Speaker: And there's probably some of that.
Speaker: Strauss was an amateur physicist, and he was clearly in awe of Oppenheimer and Fermi and all these...
Speaker: geniuses that he got to spend time around.
Speaker: But the idea that he just burned down Oppenheimer's career out of resentment and pique just ignores the fact that Straws caught Oppenheimer over and over again.
Speaker: Lying to him, lying to army security, lying to the American public.
Speaker: And then when Strauss called him out on it, essentially swinging his dick around about how Strauss couldn't possibly understand.
Speaker: And there are a few moments in the movie where Strauss gets some licks in.
Speaker: The paper that he holds up.
Speaker: showing that the Soviet A-bomb test had been successful.
Speaker: That was apparently an argument that really happened.
Speaker: Oppenheimer had argued that they didn't have the bomb and they were way behind and trying to downplay the threat.
Speaker: But it had actually been at Strauss' urging and against Oppenheimer's objections that that atmospheric testing had been conducted in the first place.
Speaker: Oppenheimer had argued that it wouldn't work and...
Speaker: And then argued that the H-bomb wouldn't work, and then argued that the H-bomb would work, but it'd be immoral to design one.
Speaker: And then he's saying, well, we've got to dismantle all these nuclear weapons, which, you know, he had zero moral objection to designing the nuclear weapons.
Speaker: And in fact, in response to a play in the 1960s that depicted him as filled with horror and regret, apparently the script has him saying, we have done the work of the devil, and he responded, that's the very opposite of what I think.
Speaker: I had never said that I regretted participating in a responsible way in the making of the bomb.
Speaker: He said, you may well have forgotten Guernica, Dachau, Coventry, Belsen, Warsaw, Dresden, and Tokyo.
Speaker: I have not.
Speaker: So the third act of this movie where he's hallucinating little girls with their skin melting off because he's so torn up about using the bomb is not only a confabulation, a misrepresentation, but it's one that he actually personally denied decades before this film was made.
Speaker: He didn't oppose the development of nuclear weapons.
Speaker: He didn't oppose the use of nuclear weapons.
Speaker: He just thought they ought to be used on Germans.
Speaker: And in fact, the film pretty much lays out his intentions for nuclear weapons after the war in this essentially throwaway line where he says that nuclear weapons could introduce a golden age of international cooperation and somebody else is like, you mean one world government?
Speaker: And he's like, yeah, under the United Nations, obviously.
Speaker: which is not the kind of thing that New Deal Democrats were saying out loud to the American people, but totally in his part of town with his friends who did not think of themselves as radicals, a normal thing to say and believe.
Speaker: And it's one of the more honest moments of the film where this is a guy who has Asperger's and doesn't understand that he said anything wrong.
Speaker: And so his innocence is not in the fact that he's, you know, really an American patriot or really not a communist.
Speaker: It's that he just has no internal indicators for why he shouldn't say commie shit out loud.
Speaker: And there seems to be this idea in the way the film is framed that because he had the right to free speech and his job was primarily, you know, talking as a policymaker, as a manager of people,
Speaker: that he had an unlimited right to pursue his own policy objectives.
Speaker: And in making that case, the movie, intentionally or not, exposes some of the complications in what we think of as academic freedom and freedom of speech.
Speaker: When your job is to have ideas, you know, we can't make it so that everybody has to like your ideas, but if we're paying you, somebody's got to like your ideas, right?
Speaker: So anyway, Oppenheimer can't get traction on disarmament, so he pivots to, well, we've got to be transparent with the American people.
Speaker: We've got to tell them all about how many weapons we have and their capabilities, etc.
Speaker: And Strauss says, no one could make sense of the data on the quantity of weapons or the rates of production unless they also knew the requirements for such weapons in American war plans.
Speaker: And he said, while the numbers would not be meaningful to our public, they are of the greatest significance to the general staff of an enemy.
Speaker: So this was 1953.
Speaker: Strauss had just proven that the Soviets had tested a hydrogen bomb when Oppenheimer had said they were four years out and it'd be wrong for us to try to build one and
Speaker: The test won't work anyway, and we should tell them where all of our bombs are to be sporting and fair.
Speaker: And then Oppenheimer starts using his pull within the bureaucracy to actually stonewall the testing and production of the H-bomb.
Speaker: And that's pretty much where Strauss runs out of patience.
Speaker: He tells Oppenheimer that because of some new screening criteria, his security file is being re-evaluated and his clearance suspended.
Speaker: He gives Oppenheimer the opportunity to resign.
Speaker: Oppenheimer says no, he wants an appeal.
Speaker: And in the movie, this is treated like some kind of four dimensional chess move to embarrass Oppenheimer.
Speaker: But it's actually the opposite.
Speaker: Oppenheimer wants to go through this process and declare himself the aggrieved party and then go take it to the court of public opinion.
Speaker: And then he does and it works.
Speaker: And Strauss's career gets nuked and they basically put Strauss on a bus thereafter.
Speaker: He's a political non-entity from then on.
Speaker: So yeah, Strauss hated the guy, but who wouldn't?
Speaker: And interestingly, Robert Downey Jr., who plays Strauss, takes the same view.
Speaker: He says he told Christopher Nolan, I'm not sure in some ways that Strauss isn't a bit the hero here, which kind of raised an eyebrow on Chris.
Speaker: I half-jokingly challenged him on whether Admiral Strauss hadn't done everything that any patriotic American would have done.
Speaker: And apparently Nolan said, well, that'll be a wonderful ongoing dialogue.
Speaker: Won't that be interesting?
Speaker: So Robert Downey Jr. Based?
Speaker: Anyway, if I'm being honest, I just wanted to talk about this movie because it made me mad.
Speaker: I hate communists.
Speaker: All the takes that I'm seeing about what this movie is about, what Christopher Nolan's trying to say, seem to be about the reawakening of mutually assured destruction and the...
Speaker: the specter of Pootler.
Speaker: But I actually don't think that's what this movie is about really at all.
Speaker: To the extent that it is, it's not very interesting.
Speaker: Like that's the origin of that meme where he's looking so shocked and horrified that his nuclear bomb exploded and killed a bunch of people like he designed it to do.
Speaker: Everybody was ready for that to be the story and to think it was silly.
Speaker: Because it is silly.
Speaker: And that's not the way he felt about it.
Speaker: But I suspect that that reading or that take is sort of the hamburger meat that Nolan concealed the pill inside.
Speaker: This is a movie about losing your country, about all the institutions that you thought protected you suddenly becoming hostile to you, and all the rights that you thought you had becoming meaningless.
Speaker: Or just the ability that powerful people have to redirect the venue of your punishment to a place where those rights don't obtain.
Speaker: And like, I guess the commies probably still feel bitter and resentful about the Red Scare, but it's hardly a salient concern for them in their day-to-day lives.
Speaker: They control all the institutions.
Speaker: People who agree with them run everything, and in fact it's illegal to disagree with them on any of the topics they really care about.
Speaker: So you can read this one way and say that it's about the shit libs bringing out the greatest hits, you know, reminiscing about a time when they really were the underdogs, or at least felt like they were.
Speaker: And that's maybe how the movie got made, but who's the movie for?
Speaker: And I'll just say, I know what it's like...
Speaker: to walk into a room where you've already been found guilty and there's nothing you can say about it.
Speaker: I know what it's like to wonder how far they're going to take it.
Speaker: There's all these little jokes in the movie about assassinating non-compliant scientists.
Speaker: And Matt Damon goes, ah, just kidding.
Speaker: He hates me.
Speaker: He doesn't hate America.
Speaker: And that, I think, is basically who 20th century Americans were.
Speaker: That's the quality of his paranoid right-wing persecutors.
Speaker: We don't need to agree on everything.
Speaker: You just can't hate America if you want to work on America's nuclear weapons program.
Speaker: And that's not how communists operated back then, and it's not how they operate now.
Speaker: They don't have the same patience for weirdos that the famously stodgy, conservative, country club wasp establishment had in the 1950s.
Speaker: So how far are they going to take it?
Speaker: They'll definitely get you fired from one job.
Speaker: Will they let you look for another one?
Speaker: How long are they going to keep track of you?
Speaker: Will they let you drive for Uber?
Speaker: Or are you going to have a disparate impact there?
Speaker: What if somebody recognizes you on the street and they decide to pick a fight and then the actions you take are litigated in the national media in the context of things you said on Twitter?
Speaker: I know what it's like to think about those things.
Speaker: And because it's not a trial, it's not even a security hearing, there are no real bounds on what might happen to you.
Speaker: We live on a country road down a really long driveway.
Speaker: There's really no reason for a stranger to come up our driveway, certainly not on foot.
Speaker: And about two weeks after I got doxxed, there were these kids, 20, 25-year-old kids, walking up and down our driveway.
Speaker: They weren't doing anything, certainly nothing aggressive.
Speaker: But it's like there's not so much as a gas station for five miles.
Speaker: And you know, the people who doxed us, they posted pictures of my house, pictures of my family, and nothing like this had ever happened before or since.
Speaker: So why the hell are these kids in my driveway?
Speaker: And it turned out there was a perfectly harmless but weird explanation for why they were there.
Speaker: But it was just like, oh, this is on the menu now.
Speaker: This is the kind of thing they could do if they wanted to.
Speaker: One of these Antifa guys started calling and breathing into the phone and like using my wife's name and talking about where we lived and...
Speaker: And I don't want to like inflate my own importance here.
Speaker: In fact, that's kind of my point is you don't have to be important.
Speaker: As these enforcement structures become more and more sophisticated, the level of ruckus you have to make to rise to these systems' attention is getting smaller every day.
Speaker: It used to be they'd have to assign a special agent to tail your car and read your mail and dig through your trash and send you harassing letters.
Speaker: So you had to be like a nuclear scientist or an activist celebrity.
Speaker: Now it's essentially free.
Speaker: The surveillance is automated and all the harassment is outsourced to the unemployable sex criminals.
Speaker: But what's interesting about our situation is that all of these abrogations of our rights are being conducted through a handful of fairly narrow procedural channels.
Speaker: So the movie depicts Oppenheimer's peace activism as being derailed and discredited by this clearance process.
Speaker: That's the procedural angle that they had to shut him up.
Speaker: And yeah, as the system decays and grows more and more lawless, the constraints on how bad things can get, there's a lot of wiggle, a lot of flex in the system.
Speaker: But let's say right now.
Speaker: What can they do to you?
Speaker: Well, obviously, step one, they can get you fired.
Speaker: That's fairly easy to do.
Speaker: And without too much work, they can probably make you unemployable across the board in any corporation with more than, say, 100 employees.
Speaker: And we can see some evidence of where their constraints are in the fact that that's, for most people, as far as it goes.
Speaker: They're certainly not constrained by ethics in their treatment of Nazis, right?
Speaker: So obviously they're running up against some practical barriers.
Speaker: They can de-platform you, of course, which is only really an issue for content creators.
Speaker: They can embarrass you if you have a lot of lib friends and family.
Speaker: Beyond that point, all their levers are things that really only happen to you if you're
Speaker: either already a celebrity or associated with some national news event.
Speaker: Self-defense being the exception, of course, because they can turn that into a national news event.
Speaker: Stuff like getting debanked or punitively targeted by the IRS or put on the no-fly list.
Speaker: And that kind of thing usually requires a judge and it can be appealed.
Speaker: So they like to save that for the special people because it's expensive to do and it can get more expensive if you have to take it to court.
Speaker: To get much worse than that, they've got to charge you with a crime or they've got to sue your pants off like they did for...
Speaker: Doug Mackey or Alex Jones.
Speaker: And I guess if they really don't like you, they can whack you, but that's expensive in other ways.
Speaker: And so for most people,
Speaker: Certainly a critical mass of people, enough people to make a difference.
Speaker: The biggest obstacle is just the W-2.
Speaker: That's our biggest point of vulnerability, but it's also their biggest point of vulnerability because so much of their enforcement apparatus is dependent on us staying dependent on that.
Speaker: Because if you've got a W-2 job, they can knock out your livelihood, your health insurance, potentially even your mortgage with a phone call if you've said the right things on the internet.
Speaker: No due process, no real prospect of any lawyers getting involved.
Speaker: But as soon as you own your own income stream, own your own business, the cost of punishing you for saying naughty words on the internet goes up at least 50x.
Speaker: Because they've either got to raise a mob to harass you and keep that harassment up over time without making people feel sorry for you and turning you into a locus for right-wing activist attention, which is increasingly a problem.
Speaker: Or they gotta go after your bank or your taxes, which again involves lawyers.
Speaker: And for most of us, people like you and me and the things that we wanna say, they pretty much decide the juice isn't worth the squeeze and they leave you alone.
Speaker: Now again, as technology advances and as the stability of the system declines, it's gonna get harder and harder to predict ahead of time whose card they're gonna pull.
Speaker: Because increasingly everyone will be visible to the system, and the set of people whose thoughts and behaviors are acceptable to that system is gonna get smaller and smaller.
Speaker: And so it'll just be like the Eye of Sauron.
Speaker: Everybody trying not to be the main character, trying not to be the one who gets picked.
Speaker: Which of course will make the system look increasingly capricious and amoral.
Speaker: But that's actually good news for those of us who are already trying to build something on the outside.
Speaker: For starters, I have all kinds of friends now that I wouldn't have had five years ago.
Speaker: But also just the systems list of targets is going up.
Speaker: The number of people they're mad at is increasing, and their ability to identify those people is increasing.
Speaker: But their actual capacity to punish those people...
Speaker: the number of FBI agents and communist schizos on the internet, is not increasing.
Speaker: And so fewer and fewer people feel secure in their obedience to the system, and simultaneously it's getting safer outside the system, because they're having to deploy the same enforcement resources across a much longer list of enemies.
Speaker: So it's not only true, but increasingly true that if they can't disrupt your income stream and they can't disrupt your network, they're going to have a hard time getting to you.
Speaker: But it's all about buying flexibility and response time.
Speaker: Nothing's absolute.
Speaker: I've talked to both physical security and cybersecurity experts about the philosophy of securing your data, securing your valuables, securing your family, and
Speaker: And they always say the same thing.
Speaker: Any security measure can be defeated.
Speaker: It just takes time and energy.
Speaker: So what you're buying when you use a VPN or install a deadbolt or put a security camera over your garage is deterrence.
Speaker: So like less motivated people will get bored and wander off or you're buying yourself time to respond.
Speaker: Time to get your data off that server, or time to get to the gun in the nightstand.
Speaker: Or in an extreme case, time to get out of town or get out of the country.
Speaker: And the inverse of that philosophy, if instead of wanting security, what you want is freedom, there's no absolutes.
Speaker: Your freedom is always going to be a function of what you want to do and how fast you can move and who's going to stop you.
Speaker: And it benefits from planning in the same sense that security does.
Speaker: And that's ultimately why I started Exit, because I had been in that situation of feeling completely defenseless and without options.
Speaker: I knew getting Doxton fired was a possibility for years, but I'd done basically nothing to prepare.
Speaker: I had no systems in place, nothing to give me any room to maneuver whatsoever.
Speaker: And so when I was sat down with the HR reps...
Speaker: I was essentially an observer.
Speaker: There was no practical reason to defend myself or justify anything I had said.
Speaker: I did a little bit just because I wanted to.
Speaker: But actually, the fact that nothing could be done kind of made the stakes feel low.
Speaker: Like I could have...
Speaker: thrown a Roman salute and yelled a bunch of slurs and I wouldn't have been any more fired, but I mostly just sat and listened to them unfold this maximally hostile interpretation of the things that I had said, watching my career essentially evaporate in front of my eyes with $100,000 in student debt for a credential that no longer means anything because the institutions that care about an MBA are the same institutions that care about what you say on Twitter.
Speaker: And you know, maybe Oppenheimer's naivete about how tolerant people should be of his communism, you know, maybe we're not that different.
Speaker: They weren't reading what I said charitably, but what I had said and what I meant were things that genuinely are completely at odds with their whole worldview and everything they're trying to accomplish.
Speaker: Like we are, in fact, ideological enemies.
Speaker: And the idea that we should get to feel like we are rebels and dissidents while still taking paychecks from people we despise and to whom we feel no loyalty, you know, maybe that was a little childish.
Speaker: And that's why I think it's time to build our own thing.
Speaker: And the Red Scare provides an interesting model for how that could be accomplished.
Speaker: The communists who were expelled didn't go live on a farm or dig ditches for the rest of their lives.
Speaker: They developed independent networks and maintained their connections with people on the inside.
Speaker: And they found ways to organize and build influence in places where either the commie hunters weren't looking or, by their own principles and the story they were telling the American people, they couldn't really afford to police.
Speaker: And for us, I think the broadest and simplest and most accessible domain where that's possible for us is entrepreneurship.
Speaker: And yeah, there are guys who need to stay at Google or stay at Facebook or stay in the military or stay in the intelligence apparatus.
Speaker: There are guys who need to be artists and essayists.
Speaker: But for those of us who aren't highly placed or influential, really, even just a handful of those guys in a major corporate structure,
Speaker: If they had enough earning power outside the job to push back, and if they could see each other and were connected enough to push back in concert, then maybe they could become influential.
Speaker: And even prior to that, we could make it so the next time one of our guys gets called into HR to justify his religious beliefs to some aging millennial gender goblin,
Speaker: He won't have to have that rock in his gut.
Speaker: He won't have to be afraid to go home and talk to his wife.
Speaker: He's going to know what the next moves are.
Speaker: And if he's not that far along and he doesn't know what the next moves are, he's going to come on a call.
Speaker: We're going to put him in the hot seat and he's going to have 150 guys to help him build something, help him pump his resume, whatever it takes.
Speaker: One of the guys quit his job this month to launch a startup and we were able to put him in touch with a backend developer, a web designer, a lawyer, an accountant, QA and a hundred thousand dollars in funding.
Speaker: And all from guys he can talk to guys who want to see the same kind of world who are trying to build the same kind of thing that he's trying to build.
Speaker: Another one of the guys launched a machine learning bootcamp this summer.
Speaker: And so he's taken our people from zero code through Python and SQL all the way up through neural networks and natural language processing.
Speaker: Another one of our guys just launched Pluribus, the cancellation insurance platform.
Speaker: We did an episode on the podcast last week.
Speaker: He found his entire team inside Exit.
Speaker: And Tyler had a pretty good idea of what he wanted from the group, but none of these guys came in with the final product.
Speaker: They've been in the group, on the calls, bouncing things off the guys.
Speaker: In some cases for almost two years.
Speaker: And I think that that's one thing that other right wing job boards or professional networks miss is that ideological alignment is a starting point.
Speaker: But in order for guys to launch businesses together, you have to create an environment where they can figure each other out over time.
Speaker: That's why we run nine calls every week where we talk over our projects and solve problems together and take responsibility for the next step.
Speaker: That's why we do an in-person meetup every month.
Speaker: We get the families together.
Speaker: We do something outdoors.
Speaker: The thing our people need is so much deeper than like, I'm a constitutionalist conservative.
Speaker: Are you also a constitutionalist conservative?
Speaker: We're looking for people with whom we can do something big and risky and
Speaker: both in terms of our ideological orientation, but also just in terms of starting a business takes time and money, and you have to put a lot on the line.
Speaker: These are guys who want to stay illegible because they intuitively understand that that's how they stay free.
Speaker: So for all those reasons, what we build has to be predicated on human judgment and personal loyalty.
Speaker: And that's what we're doing.
Speaker: So if you want to learn more about how we do it or what to expect, you can check us out at exitgroup.us or follow us on Twitter at exit underscore org.
Speaker: Thanks for listening.
