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4chan: The French Connection
59 Plays15 days ago
In this "theory and practice" episode, Sarah and Helen read a text about bigotry, then apply it to some actual bigotry. The philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre turns out to have a lot to say about 4chan, the notorious Nazi news site the Daily Stormer, and the affect of the modern right as a whole.
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Transcript
Introduction to Postmodern Mentality and Racism
00:00:00
Speaker
There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. it live.
00:00:16
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! Now listen, you... Let's get... Let's stay plastered. I was to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
Discovering Mein Kampf and Reflections on its Importance
00:00:32
Speaker
level of masochism
00:00:36
Speaker
hi i'm sarah and i'm helen and this is odium symposium we examine bigoted historical texts usually misogynist ones but it varies how has this week been for you Not too bad. So on Friday, i visited two different thrift stores, and I mined them for material.
00:00:59
Speaker
I had an interesting experience. So I went to a Goodwill. While I was in the back, I saw this bin with this book underneath a piece of paper. So I'm going to send you a picture. Okay.
00:01:11
Speaker
Okay, Helen, what do you think is the worst thing that could be under that piece of paper? Ooh, okay. So just, I love playing these visual games on our audio medium here. Okay, the worst thing that could be under there, it's too long to be the transsexual empire.
00:01:27
Speaker
Is it just Mein Kampf? All right, I'm sending you a pic. Nailed it. Yes, it's actually fucking Mein Kampf sitting under there, like this monstrous like black beetle or something. That's so fucking funny. So this was just like at a thrift store.
Introduction to Sartre's 'The Anti-Semite and the Jew'
00:01:44
Speaker
oh my god. Yeah, it's like face down and open as if somebody was like saving their place. Yeah, how much were they asking for it? I don't know. Honestly, I didn't want to get caught reading it. I felt like I just wandered into the back and i encountered the Necronomicon.
00:01:59
Speaker
Yeah, there's this really funny relationship to Mein Kampf in particular that like some kind of liberals have, right? and And you can like this publication of it, like, it's all black, and it's just the title, right? There's nothing on it. And it kind of, it's the same approach to like, like a cigarette pack design, right? Like, you're not allowed to put anything like enticing or alluring, right? There's the suggestion that this thing is important, and we need to have it. But like,
00:02:26
Speaker
to understand. I also don't know how much actual text is in the book. Maybe it's large type. Maybe it isn't. But like, that's a big fucking book. That is thick. You can pound nails with that thing. I don't think that that is a large type edition.
Analyzing Antisemitism and Bigotry
00:02:40
Speaker
That is a long book. Really adds to the forbidding aspect. I don't know if you've poked around at all, and honestly, i don't know if i want to reveal that I have, but if you've poked around at all on Grokipedia... know how every entry is so long?
00:02:56
Speaker
Actually, i don't, because hi I don't poison my mind with that kind of shit, Helen. Every entry of Grokipedia is like five times the length of like a Wikipedia entry.
00:03:08
Speaker
Partly, it's because it's all AI generated, so they can just do that. But it's partly because... I think a very similar reason, which is like, there's nothing to it.
00:03:20
Speaker
So you just fill in with grievance and rambling and ranting and whatever. That's my impression of what is in Mein Kampf as well, right?
00:03:32
Speaker
There was that recent thing where JK Rowling kept quoting it And the ostensible context was like, oh, I'm quoting it to draw comparisons with like extremists. Right. Don't you see how the trannies are just like Hitler?
00:03:45
Speaker
Yeah. I want to show you that the TRAs, right, that's what they're calling us these days, are just like the Nazis. And so I can show you that the rhetorical strategies are the strategies laid out in Mein Kampf.
00:04:00
Speaker
But it was over and over to the point where it's like suspicious. Like, why are you so familiar and conversant with this text? It certainly opens questions. And this is exactly this thing where it's like some people have this idea of, oh, it's important to understand these atrocities. It's important to understand these figures. So there is a place for reading these texts. And I don't necessarily fully disagree with that. But I also am very skeptical of a claim that this is going to be an integral part of understanding Nazism.
00:04:29
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you could read works by people who are critiquing Nazism and related ideologies like anti-Semitism, for example. Exactly. so who are we talking about today? Today, we're doing a little bit more experimenting with the format.
00:04:46
Speaker
We're examining two texts a today by different people. The idea is that this is theory and practice. So we pair a text about bigotry, which we expect to like,
00:04:57
Speaker
with an example of the kind of bigotry that is examined in the text. Our first text is by noted philosopher, playwright, critic, pedophile, John Paul Sartre.
00:05:10
Speaker
So this is The Anti-Semite and the Jew, which was originally published in two parts starting in 1945. When picked this text, first off, I had only seen a few snippets.
00:05:26
Speaker
all of them concerning the anti-Semite, who is just like one character in this text. Second, I naively thought that this was going to be kind of the final word on the topics it addressed.
00:05:42
Speaker
I wasn't expecting to have much disagreement because the excerpts I'd seen were really good. It turns out that I like a lot of the stuff in this text, and a lot of it I think is kind of shitty and in fact anti-Semitic.
00:05:57
Speaker
Yeah, one thing that we thought going back and forth after we agreed, okay, we're going to read this because we thought, okay, if we're going to read something that's theory to help break down the bigoted text, we should both read the full theory text in advance of the episode. So we've both read all of this book.
00:06:14
Speaker
So we're kind of familiar with, okay, this is a possible framework to use to apply to understanding antisemitism.
Sartre's Philosophy and Critiques of Bigotry
00:06:20
Speaker
Definitely when I've seen clips of this around, it hasn't been only used to talk about antisemitism.
00:06:28
Speaker
It has been used to talk about all sorts of different bigotries, although I think not generically just bigotry. I think it is talking about a more specific... phenomenon than just a generic sense of like prejudice.
00:06:41
Speaker
I definitely agree that there's some things that gets a bit wrong. There's some things i think it's missing. I don't necessarily want to just do a full breakdown of this book right up the top, I guess. But I'm sure as we dive forward with the bigoted texts today, we'll run into kinds of places where this has some gaps that are that are worth looking at.
00:07:06
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think the parts of the book that I liked most and that the are the most well thought out are ones that generalize pretty well. It tends to be more when he gets into anti-Semitism as something specific to the Jewish experience that it kind of goes off the rails. Yeah, I would agree with that. And I think he's attempting to write about anti-Semitism in a certain level of abstraction and failing, I think, kind of in two different ways. One is that it is too abstract because he is failing to pick up specific situations and he's trying to be specific at times, but it's always like, and actually the introduction of the version I think we both have with
00:07:55
Speaker
We both read a version with a preface by by Michael Walter, and he talks a bit about this. Sartre didn't go into this with a studying anything about Jewish religion, anything like that. And all the examples are this Jewish person he knew, right?
00:08:11
Speaker
He'll say, oh, this one friend I knew, this one guy I knew, this one guy who was a writer, this one. And that's not totally incorrect to do, but to generalize about Judaism from that or the Jewish experience,
00:08:24
Speaker
or the experience of Jews more broadly, is very dangerous, right? Because it is not paying attention to the fact that actually these these experiences are going to be a lot more diverse than you realize. And then I think on the other hand, while it is attempting this kind of broad abstraction, it is much too specific in the sense that This is really about the experience of Jews in a particular milieu in France, very much in 1944 when he's writing it. And I think some of the places where it really doesn't hit are a misanalysis of anti-Semitism. And some of the places where it doesn't hit are because Judaism has changed a lot and the Jewish community has changed a lot.
00:09:02
Speaker
Let's look at our our first specific excerpt. So this is right at the start of the book. If a man attributes all or part of his own misfortunes and those of his country to the presence of Jewish elements in the community, if he proposes to remedy this state of affairs by depriving the Jews of certain of their rights, by keeping them out of certain economic and social activities, by expelling them from the country, by exterminating all of them, we say that he has anti-Semitic opinions.
00:09:30
Speaker
The word opinion makes us stop and think. It is the word a hostess uses to bring an end to a discussion that threatens to become acrimonious. It
Freedom, Choice, and Identity in Sartre's View
00:09:40
Speaker
suggests that all points of view are equal.
00:09:42
Speaker
It reassures us, for it gives an inoffensive appearance to ideas by reducing them to the level of tastes. All tastes are natural. All opinions are permitted. Tastes, colors, and opinions are not open to discussion.
00:09:56
Speaker
In the name of democratic institutions, in the name of freedom of opinion, the anti-Semite asserts the right to preach the anti-Jewish crusade everywhere. He's introducing us first off to his first character, which is the anti-Semite.
00:10:12
Speaker
He's going to proceed with this psychological examination of the anti-Semite. This anti-Semite, I think we can see from this, is not just someone who indulges in a little bit of casual bigotry. He has harsh words for that kind of person too.
00:10:28
Speaker
This is someone who is really proactive, perhaps excited about being bigoted. Second, this presentation of anti-Semitism anti-Semitism just a matter of opinion, something that in polite company is allowed to slide perhaps, is something that's pretty familiar to us today. It's a very common internet argument. Opinion is for like, what kind of mustard do you like? It's not for whether minorities are allowed to have human rights.
00:10:59
Speaker
There's that. But also we have to remember that this being published in 1945 being written This is right at the end of World War II.
00:11:11
Speaker
France has not exactly covered itself in glory during this, and there was a major collaborationist element in France. Active antisemitism in France has been allowed to pass unnoticed and is being allowed to pass unnoticed as he's writing this, and he's speaking out against that.
00:11:32
Speaker
Yeah, and I think this is absolutely something that very much exists today. Reading this book, and I think this is going to come up again and again, so I'll introduce this kind of early on. One of my takes about this book is that as he's describing both antisemitism and the experience of antisemitism and the experience of the Jew, it doesn't really resonate with me as a Jewish person today. I've definitely faced antisemitism.
00:11:57
Speaker
i think in a lot of ways, his analysis is much closer to an analysis of the way transphobia and homophobia work today.
00:12:09
Speaker
i don't think you can really, in a lot of places, get away with the same idea of, oh, this guy, he just has opinions about the Jews. That sort of doesn't fly in a lot of circles, at least I think the circles we both have been in But certainly, oh he just has questions about...
00:12:27
Speaker
trans people, trans kids, the rights of trans kids to transition, the rights of trans women to play sports is something that's absolutely rampant. you know As a Jewish trans woman, I'll say like this hits much more about like how it feels to be trans versus how it feels to be Jewish in contemporary society. I found a lot of resonance with this in the trans experience. I'm, unlike you, I'm not Jewish, although I am planning to convert to Judaism in order to undermine Israel by criticizing it from the inside. So we'll get to talking about the inauthentic Jew later.
00:13:04
Speaker
Right, right. Actually, like the next three excerpts I pulled are so pertinent specifically to the trans experience. Helen, do you think off the top you could just give me a quick description of who Riley Gaines is? She is this kind of poster child for a certain kind of transphobia that is...
00:13:25
Speaker
gaining political momentum where she was an athlete who was okay, lost to a trans woman, and has now turned her career into a campaign against trans women in sports.
00:13:40
Speaker
Yes. I actually saw a headline and complained to you about it the other day. She made $25,000 the other day for speaking to a group of Republicans. It's so depressing.
00:13:52
Speaker
It's really maddening. Okay, so if you could read this excerpt. A classmate of mine at the Lyce told me that Jews annoy him because of the thousands of injustices that Jew-ridden social organizations commit in their favor.
00:14:06
Speaker
A Jew passed his aggregation the year I was failed, and you can't make me believe that that fellow whose father came from Krakow or Lemberg understood a poem by Ronsard or an eclogue by Virgil better than i But he admitted that he disdained the aggregation as a mere academic exercise and that he didn't study for it.
00:14:25
Speaker
To me, this this competition is like pretty directly an analogy with the sports competition that we're talking about with Riley Gaines, and that's going to come into even sharper focus with the next two excerpts.
00:14:38
Speaker
As a matter of fact, he will in time manage to justify his past laziness on the grounds that it really would be too stupid to prepare for an examination in which Jews are passed in preference to good Frenchmen. Actually, he ranked 27th on the official list. There were 26 ahead of him, 12 who passed and 14 who failed.
00:14:56
Speaker
Riley gains loss to a trans woman, but famously, and this is used as a point of dunking on her endlessly, It's not so much that she took second place to a trans woman, she finished fifth.
00:15:09
Speaker
yeah And the mere presence of a trans woman ahead of her on the list, in her understanding, or at least in the understanding that she projects financial gain, invalidates the whole result.
00:15:23
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it is interesting to note the comparisons here. And this is one of the parts where I did feel, okay, this actually does have a lot to do with like racial prejudice.
00:15:36
Speaker
This is the way people still talk about affirmative action. And this is the way people talk about dei programs. Absolutely. And it's not that there's nothing to criticize about various corporate DEI programs. Yeah.
00:15:50
Speaker
But this kind of criticism is on its face hypocritical. And I think this is one of the things Sartre was really pointing out is this hypocrisy. And one of the places where I think he is doing something interesting and good is that this is used to dunk on Riley Gaines a lot.
00:16:10
Speaker
people also make these arguments about all the anti-affirmative action people. Like, well, look, you're saying like, oh, all the places are going to these people of color, these women or whatever, whatever it's, whether it's college admissions or jobs or whatever. But then you're saying, oh but you didn't even try. Oh, well, there's no point in trying because they were all going to go to these diversity ad admits or hires or whatever. And it's, there's a level of hypocrisy there. And that's a good place for the beginning of analysis and ah terrible place to end your
The 'Democrat' Role in Antisemitism
00:16:40
Speaker
analysis, right? If this were the end of the book, like if he were just doing the dunk of saying this is hypocritical, that would be pretty bad.
00:16:47
Speaker
But I think one of the reasons it's really worthwhile to go back to this book is this is the opening. He says, here is a problematic, here's the beginning of an analysis, which says, look, notice this is hypocritical, but you still have to do something with that. And so this is one of the things I enjoyed about reading this is I'm getting kind of tired of seeing that dunk on Riley Gaines over and over and over because she knows. And this is one of the things that actually later excerpts of Sartre are used in these conversations is to point out, yeah, she knows. She knows she's being hypocritical. This game is being played in bad faith.
00:17:14
Speaker
Stop falling for it. You have to stop falling for it. Right, right. Yeah, and he uses this to lead directly into analysis as well rather than just stopping there with the dunk.
00:17:26
Speaker
So the next answer, which follows almost immediately, the final sentence is almost one of his thesis statements. To understand my classmate's indignation, we must recognize that he had adopted in advance a certain idea of the Jew, of his nature, and of his role in society.
00:17:44
Speaker
And to be able to decide that among 26 competitors who were more successful than him, it was the Jew who robbed him of his place, he must a priori have given preference in the conduct of his life to reasoning based on passion.
00:17:59
Speaker
Far from experience producing his idea of the Jew, it was the latter which explained his experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.
00:18:09
Speaker
Yeah, so he's trying to say... what is the source of anti-Semitism? It's not an opinion, right? In the first excerpt, he talks about, oh, this idea that anti-Semitism is some kind of opinion.
00:18:23
Speaker
And he really wants to counter this idea that you still see very much in a lot of these liberal circles today that maybe this guy has some unsavory opinions, but he's still fundamentally a good guy. Or this is something which you can hold as an opinion and which maybe tarnishes your standing as like an upright person.
00:18:40
Speaker
but is is not something fundamental about you. And he's trying to say here, no, this is actually not an opinion, or this is not something which is just like one attribute, one opinion.
00:18:51
Speaker
Antisemitism is something that fundamentally structures the way antisemites react with reality, and it's a much more fundamental decision about the way they're going to engage with the world. Yeah, it's not like, oh, he had some experiences and then he adopted some opinions. It's a much more fundamental choice that he is making about how to interact with the world.
00:19:11
Speaker
In 2016 twenty sixteen or so My mom went fash. She kind of kept this under wraps for a while. I didn't know that this was happening.
00:19:22
Speaker
But one of the warning signs was that i was an undergraduate at the time. We would be talking. She would keep bringing up affirmative action in admissions and asking me things like, wouldn't you be upset if you as a white person were edged out because of your race?
00:19:42
Speaker
Something like that. My mom was not interested in returning to college. And when she was talking to me about all this, I was already in college.
00:19:53
Speaker
I already passed whatever gate was present. And so this was something that was only of the most theoretical interest to either of our lives. But it was important to her because she was moving into this reactionary worldview.
00:20:09
Speaker
And as such, she needed this sort of thing to complain about. She needed a topic like this in order to reinforce the new understanding that she was arriving at.
00:20:19
Speaker
Yeah, and I think this notion of the limited relevance is an important one. One of the figures that I think it's not going to be a surprise that I'm considering doing in a future episode is William F. Buckley, who is featured in our little intro, clipped calling Gore Vidal a queer and saying he's going to punch him in the mouth.
00:20:42
Speaker
because Gore Vidal kept calling him a crypto fascist. One of the the pieces that I really want to look at is his book, God and Man at Yale, which is sort of this originary text about how colleges have gone woke, except it was the 60s, they didn't call it woke.
00:20:56
Speaker
And there's a certain extent to which it's hard to cover this, because even before unpicking all of the different anecdotes and ideas and hypotheses and conclusions and all the things he's saying, there's a certain level at which None of this shit fucking matters.
00:21:14
Speaker
It's not that there's no relevance to the culture at elite colleges. There's something to be said about, okay, what are students at these places? you know What are they thinking? what it Where is culture going? right there's There's maybe something there, but this focus that culture has had for decades on Stanford announced a syllabus change that you were going to be able to fulfill a classics reading requirement with other texts than just
Jewish Identity and Sartre's Existentialism
00:21:40
Speaker
Plato or whatever. And the whole country lost their fucking mind about how we're like destroying education and we're destroying the canon. And it was like, how does that matter? Right? Like, I went to Stanford before that change. And let me tell you, they woke if I had been quite effectively.
00:21:54
Speaker
like a couple students at Oberlin got mad that they kept getting served dog shit sandwiches, called then they kept being called banh mis or something. And, and I had, and i read like,
00:22:06
Speaker
I didn't even actually read many. I had people tell me, different people in my life all tell me about different articles they had read about their takes on the fucking cafeteria at Oberlin serving banh mis.
00:22:17
Speaker
And it's like, i don't give a shit if some students decided to complain to their dean that the banh mis at Oberlin are shit. I don't care, right? Maybe they are shit. Good for those students if they want to organize because they feel like...
00:22:32
Speaker
Pretty clearly, the only reason people are actually interested in this stuff is because access to the cafeteria at Oberlin is shorthand for access to Oberlin, and access to Oberlin is shorthand for access to the elite. Yeah, exactly. But that second connection of Oberlin to elite is such a much more complicated one. And the history of admissions, all these things, it's it's it's so much more complicated than then all of this. And I don't know, there's a certain level at which I don't want to spend any energy litigating. We're going to spend three hours on the Oberlin banh mi, whether you like it or not, Helen.
00:23:10
Speaker
I know we are. I know you're going to find some article and you're going to make me read about fucking banh mi's, but it's just... We're not doing that tonight, though. No, we're not.
00:23:21
Speaker
Okay, I should shoot you an excerpt. Otherwise, we really are going to go down the banh mi rabbit hole. It is not unusual for people to elect to live a life of passion rather than one of reason. But ordinarily, they love the objects of passion, women, glory, power, money. Since the anti-Semite has chosen hate, we are forced to conclude that it is the state of passion that he loves.
00:23:43
Speaker
Okay, so I don't think that this is actually an example of Sartre criticizing fascism, and in particular, Nazism instead of anti-Semitism. But I do think this is a nice illustration of one reason those two things tend to intersect, to be fascist is to think of politics. I mean, it is other things as well, but it is to think of politics in aesthetic and passionate terms.
00:24:15
Speaker
And what he's saying here is that this is also an important part of bigotry. Yeah, I think here is one place where I want to give a little more context about Sartre's ideas. And it's one place where I was a little less than 100% buying his argument. I think largely this is correct.
00:24:37
Speaker
You know, there's that idea and it's from it's from Walter Benjamin, but he's credit he has this idea. he's one who wrote about fascism is the aestheticization of politics. And his answer is sort of so communists need to politicize art that we need to engage with the political aspects of art to kind of come out of this fascist transformation of culture.
00:25:00
Speaker
i think, okay, in order to, I think, fully understand this text, you have to know some a little bit of something about Sartre's sort of philosophical commitments. Just two years before this came out a year before he starts writing it, he comes out with probably his most famous work of philosophy, being in nothingness.
00:25:18
Speaker
which is this sort of abstract metaphysical consideration of existence and kind of setting out this program of existentialism.
00:25:29
Speaker
And especially as we go on in Antisemarindu, he starts talking about like authentic freedom and authentic versus inauthentic Jews. And some of that reads very weird. And some of it is just his kind of cottage uses of these terms, authentic and inauthentic. And for Sartre, like you know the the sort of the very bare bones of like existentialism as a philosophy is the idea that okay, for most things that exist, like the the purpose of what they're for is kind of what delineates their existence. So a chair is kind of defined by being for sitting, and a book is kind of defined by being for reading.
00:26:04
Speaker
So for Sartre, the idea is that the essence of something precedes its existence, that there is a certain chairness that precedes the existence of a particular chair, and what makes something a chair is its ability to be sat in.
00:26:18
Speaker
For humans, his claim is that it's the other way around. That for people, our existence precedes our essence. That there is no fundamental essence of what it means to be human other than the fact that we exist as humans and we have a sort of radical freedom in choosing what that means.
00:26:39
Speaker
He's sort of skeptical of a lot of these other theories that are gaining ground at the time. He's skeptical of like some of the 20th century developments in Marxism. He's skeptical of Freud's theory of the unconscious.
00:26:50
Speaker
He does get a little into psychoanalysis in this book, and he's willing to accept that there's sort of pre-conscious emotions. There's things that you feel and you notice and that feel bad and you process those in your mind.
00:27:01
Speaker
But in some level for Sartre, he's committed to this idea in this book that you're in command of all these decisions in your life. You have this freedom, and part of that freedom is actually an understanding of your own cognition that you might be doing things in bad faith, and you might be even in bad faith with yourself.
00:27:20
Speaker
But he is kind of rejecting this idea that there's something called the unconscious. When he says this thing about ordinarily, people who've chosen this life of passion love the objects of passion. Since the anti-Semite has chosen hate, we are forced to conclude that it is this state of passion that he loves.
00:27:35
Speaker
I think there's a lot of people who would object to this idea that there actually is a way of living a life of reason that is different than a way of living a life passion. I think his model here for what it means to live a life of passion is kind of a suspect one. And he is kind of taking as given that there is such a thing as living a life of reason, and that that's something we should be striving for in some sense.
00:27:59
Speaker
Personally, like I don't know anyone who lives that way. Well, even if we don't buy this sort of rational, passionate life distinction, i don't think we necessarily need it to take something away from this passage and agree with it, just on the the most direct textual level.
00:28:19
Speaker
He is talking about people who spend a lot of time obsessing over something that they really, really seem to dislike. And that bears examination. That makes you think that actually they really enjoy looking at this thing they dislike.
00:28:34
Speaker
Once again, we come back to the fact that the person being examined is kind of us here on some level, like what we're doing with this podcast.
00:28:45
Speaker
I could see that. I hadn't really thought about that. I could understand that perspective. Like we are also sort of obsessing with this thing. The only possible conclusion is that the obsession itself is enjoyable for us or it's important to us somehow.
00:28:59
Speaker
Yeah, that's true. there is this gratification that seems to happen that anti-Semites are getting out of their anti-Semitism.
00:29:10
Speaker
But I guess I think it's just more complicated than he maybe wants to believe or wants to argue this relationship between getting that gratification, the choice to live that kind of life.
00:29:24
Speaker
There's a lot of theory crafting here that's kind of unsupported. Just going off half-cocked, I would say. How can one choose to reason falsely? It is because of a longing for impenetrability.
00:29:37
Speaker
The rational man groans as he gropes for truth. He knows that his reasoning is no more than tentative, that other considerations may supervene to cast doubt on it. He never sees very clearly where he is going. He is open.
00:29:52
Speaker
He may even appear to be hesitant. But there are people who are attracted by the durability of a stone. They wish to be massive and impenetrable. They wish not to change.
00:30:03
Speaker
Where, indeed, would change take them? We have here a basic fear of oneself and of truth. What frightens them is not the content of truth, of which they have no conception, but the form itself of truth, that thing of indefinite approximation.
00:30:18
Speaker
It is as if their own existence were in continual suspension, but they wish to exist all at once and right away. They do not want any acquired opinions, they want them to be innate.
00:30:29
Speaker
There are going to be four characters that are discussed in this text. And for three out of the four, he's going to, almost immediately after introducing them, describe what they fear and describe them as motivated by that fear.
00:30:47
Speaker
this is This is the fear motivation for the anti-Semites. He has this model of, oh, here's this person who feels this fear and then makes this choice. And then this choice allows all these things. Because he wants in this section to talk about how antisemitism isn't a choice that the person, it's not, sorry, it's not an opinion. It is this free and total choice that actually structures who they are.
00:31:06
Speaker
But then it becomes something really foundational to identity. And so if you're saying this is a person who is making this choice to be anti-Semitic, there's like not a person there before the anti-Semitism because you're showing how fundamental it is to their psychology. You're pointing out a little bit of a chicken and egg issue here. Yeah, he's kind of positing this.
00:31:25
Speaker
preconceptual ego that is making all these choices in response to these stimuli, and then they're having these effects and then giving these abilities. But the relationship between, i mean, in some sense, it is very psychoanalytic. The relationship between the id and the ego and the superego is more complicated than that.
00:31:42
Speaker
Well, unfortunately, he is going to discuss the origins of anti-Semitism in a person in terms of economics, and his analysis is going to be absolute dog shit.
00:31:53
Speaker
He kind of falls off the rails with some of his class analysis of the origins of these things. Okay, let's get to the most famous excerpt. Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies.
00:32:11
Speaker
They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge, but they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.
00:32:22
Speaker
The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.
00:32:32
Speaker
They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument, but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced.
00:32:51
Speaker
They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment, their hope of winning over some third person to their side. I have had so many conversations like this.
00:33:03
Speaker
especially when it comes to talking about trans issues, I feel like I have conversations like this all the time. Because no matter what, there is this ability for respectable liberal cis people to just answer any objection to like cis supremacist society. If they get annoyed with it, they can just go, oh but come on, like you know like you are a bunch of trannies, right? There is this underlying, and people talk about this in terms of things like the Overton window or whatever, right? But there is this underlying sense of
00:33:38
Speaker
the ability to just kind of... i'm I'm speaking especially about the second half of this part here, where they will abruptly fall silent loftily, indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is passed. You kind of raise these objections to make things sound ridiculous, and then you go, oh, but come on, you know you're being kind of ridiculous, right? And it's the Oberlin-Bahn-Mee thing again, right?
00:33:57
Speaker
Because once you start defending students who are complaining about Bahn-Mees, you sound fucking crazy, because it doesn't fucking matter. But I'm not the one who ever cared about... like The students at Oberlin can do what they want with the cafeteria. Why did the New York Times have any op-eds that ever mentioned what sandwiches were being served at Oberlin?
00:34:15
Speaker
But then when you start trying to defend these students, like, oh, you're crazy. You you actually care about students. It's like, it's so maddening. oh man. All these news articles in this past year that have been like subtextually.
00:34:28
Speaker
Is Zoran Mamdani going to destroy Israel? Oh, my God. Yeah. the job he's running for being mayor of New York. Yeah. You're, you're being brought into an arena of discourse in which the stakes and the matter under discussion have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
00:34:48
Speaker
And then you've proven yourself to be unworthy of the discussion, really, because you've bought into the level of ridiculousness that's on display. I think one one thing for me that was really lucky early in my transition was that one of the first books I read as I was thinking about my gender, and actually, to some extent, it made me start thinking about my gender and blah, blah, blah. The Caitlyn Jenner biography.
00:35:12
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. No. um
00:35:16
Speaker
Is Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Danny Lavery. So it's ah it's a transition memoir. he talks about sort of having this feeling all of a sudden at
00:35:29
Speaker
What if you were a boy, sort of, and having this like completely, like not knowing what to do with this sudden feeling that that seems to have come out of nowhere, which was largely very much how I experienced my transition also around that same time in my life.
00:35:43
Speaker
And, and then the book is kind of this weird, it's sort of a memoir, but it's sort of just essays about stuff. And there's some cultural criticism in there. And it's all weaved together in this weird way, exactly to appeal appeal to like freaks like me, it's got all these literary references and like biblical shit. And also, it's got a whole essay about mean girls. It's like, it's it's very weird.
00:36:01
Speaker
I love it a lot. He's got this i essay about rapid onset gender dysphoria, where it was good for me to like read this and get very early on. like One of the first things I understood was just how dumb this game was, because he said, you know, he started talking about his transition, and then people would ask, you know, what do you feel about all these kids who suddenly start adopting new pronouns and and feeling weird about their gender, and they all get weird haircuts at the same time. like You could easily get caught in these conversations, right? This kind of conversation happens all the time of like, okay, what do but what do you think about like kids who all decide they're trans together, and they all get like their haircut or whatever?
00:36:39
Speaker
You start having arguments about trans kids, but as you know and as Danny Lavery points out in this thing, like they never have specific... There's never specific child they're worried about. They never have an understanding of what interventions are actually available.
00:36:53
Speaker
right and And I've had these conversations a lot, and and and they're exactly of this kind where people start talking about, oh, these kids are getting mutilated, they're getting these like surgeries done. and it's like, well, no, like that's not really happening.
00:37:05
Speaker
To the extent that kids are or are not getting access to various different medical interventions, like the people who are having these conversations are never aware of those facts. And that's not even really the point of it. They just want to play this game of like, oh, you know, I can make you sound ridiculous by just like heaping up all these objections that don't really make sense together. And then at some point I can be like, oh, well, you know, you sound crazy because now you're arguing that a kid should be allowed to have, you know, irreversible surgery. And it's like,
00:37:31
Speaker
Yeah, so so I felt very lucky that i I saw like, oh, this is a thing that I'm going to encounter. And then I did and I knew exactly how to be like, oh, you're just, you don't actually know anything about what's happening. You're just, and I think it's important to to be aware of that and not fall into these traps because they it happens all the time.
00:37:47
Speaker
I will say the first time I read this excerpt, it forever structured the way that I talk to bigots, because i do like to talk to them. But I am not interested in doing it in any sort of a structured format.
00:38:02
Speaker
I don't like to talk to them in any format in which I am expected to presume that they are acting in good faith. And really, my only goal in a conversation with a bigot is to make that fear in the last sentence realized, quote, they fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment, their hope of winning over some third person to their side, end quote.
00:38:27
Speaker
For me, that is the only productive purpose of a conversation with a bigot is to get them to reveal how ridiculous they are, how disgusting they are, and then to exit the conversation, having allowed them to put themselves on display for third parties. That's all that matters.
00:38:48
Speaker
Yeah. And I would take it even a step further and say, not only third parties, but to themselves. And yeah, I'm trying to decide. Like, I have a lot of examples because I, my older brother, I think i've talked about is like hugely fascist now. And this was like a long process so of this. And I definitely grew up having arguments with him.
00:39:06
Speaker
And a lot of them had this kind of character, especially in our childhood. And then were like when we were teenagers, like my parents were especially the like, personification of that, like, oh, you should you know explain things and b you know you should you should follow these kinds of rules of discourse. And it was through a lot of trial and error that I think I adopted a very similar strategy to conversations with him and then sort of conversations with other people. Yeah, with enough of these kinds of interactions, like...
00:39:34
Speaker
You make the person feel bad about these things. And even to themselves, they start to realize like, oh, I'm being ridiculous. And in moments where I have, you know, I don't think I've ever been like full scale, this kind of bad faith playing games and and being a bigot. But I've definitely it's moments where my mind has changed. and I realized like, oh, I hold this belief that is not good.
00:39:54
Speaker
and I need to think about it and change it. It has been moments when somebody has made me feel bad about holding that belief because they have correctly pointed out, like, you're being a shithead here.
00:40:05
Speaker
I think that's like an important kind of interaction to have with people. There's the classic, like, I had to become a racist because everyone kept calling me a racist, right? Like, that's ah that's ah a pathway we see a lot. And it's like, well,
00:40:17
Speaker
Okay, if everyone's calling you a racist already, you're probably already a racist. If everyone's calling you racist, you should take a step back and and think about that. The anti-Semite readily admits that the Jew is intelligent and hardworking.
00:40:30
Speaker
He will even confess himself inferior in these respects. This concession costs him nothing, for he has, as it were, put those qualities in parentheses, or rather, they derive their value from the one who possesses them.
00:40:43
Speaker
The more virtues the Jew has, the more dangerous he will be. The anti-Semite has no illusions about what he is. He considers himself an average man, modestly average, basically mediocre.
00:40:55
Speaker
There is no example of an anti-Semite claiming individual superiority over the Jews. Okay, so this is just wrong. I'm not saying he's wrong in every case.
00:41:07
Speaker
Right. I think this is a type of guy. Definitely. But I don't think, quote, there is no example of an anti-Semite claiming individual superiority the Jews is is correct at all. And in fact, like we're watching...
00:41:20
Speaker
noted bigot and anti-Semite Elon Musk like made a robot specifically to claim individual superiority over everyone else in the human race on every front. Right like right now, as we speak, if you ask Grok who would win in a whatever contest, literally anything, like people have been asking like shit-eating contest or Holocaust contest, it'll write like a three to five paragraph response about how Elon Musk would clear Yeah, I need to clarify to the listener in case they're like, just not online enough. But Helen is not exaggerating here. Elon Musk chat pot absolutely loves to claim that he can, for example, suck more dicks in a day than anyone else in history. that He's a better artist than Leonardo da Vinci, etc. Yeah, and the the eating diarrhea thing, is like that's not an exaggeration either. There is a gross three-paragraph description of why he would be the best at that. He's an innovator, if you need a hint.
00:42:19
Speaker
It's all like, oh, because he eats so much shit from his critics all the time that like real shit is nothing to him. It's so pathetic. Why do I read all this shit? Oh my god, maybe I have decided to live a life of passion. Maybe I do need to... Yeah, you clearly love passion itself, Helen.
00:42:36
Speaker
Either that or shit-eating, which i don't know. I'm not here to judge. Anyway, so that's clearly wrong. And I think that also will come in later because he he does also have this commitment to... He places anti-Semitism as like fundamentally like a bourgeois middle-class phenomenon and then claims that like the wealthy capitalist is manipulating anti-Semitism but is not anti-Semitic himself.
00:43:01
Speaker
And i do think a lot of that actually originates in this failure to properly consider like actual Marxism and psychoanalysis. But yeah, this is part of that same flaw here, because he's saying, oh, it is this sort of mediocre person who is aware of his own mediocrity and is actually, to some extent, dealing with some negative feelings in relation to his own mediocrity that at least he knows he is sort of automatically better than the Jew. And that guy definitely exists. Okay, well, maybe we should skip ahead a bit to the economic material.
00:43:35
Speaker
The bourgeois, in fact, does not produce. He directs, administers, distributes, buys, sells. His function is to enter into direct relations with the consumer. In other words, his activity is based on a constant commerce with men, whereas the worker in the exercise of his trade is in permanent contact with things.
00:43:52
Speaker
Each man judges history in accordance with the profession that he follows. Shaped by the daily influence of the materials he works with, the workman sees society as the product of real forces acting in accordance with rigorous laws.
00:44:04
Speaker
His dialectical materialism signifies that he envisage envisages the social world in the same way as the material world. On the other hand, the bourgeois, and the anti-Semite in particular, have chosen to explain history by the action of individual wills.
00:44:19
Speaker
Do not the bourgeois depend on these same wills in the conduct of their affairs? They behave towards social facts like primitives who endow the wind and the sun with little souls. Intrigues, cabals, the perfidy of one man, the courage and virtue of another, that is what determines the course of their business.
00:44:37
Speaker
That is what determines the course of the world." Antisemitism, a bourgeois phenomenon, appears, therefore, as a choice made to explain collective events by the initiative of individuals.
00:44:50
Speaker
Okay, let's just be straightforward here and say that he is claiming that antisemitism is a consequence of email jobs. Yeah, it's sort of. That's basically what he's saying.
00:45:01
Speaker
That's not true. I don't want to rehash also what are the limits of bourgeois versus working class versus capitalists. I don't want to get into arguments about whether an adjunct professor is bourgeois, right? like This is something that people argue about on the internet endlessly, and it's dumb. Yeah, an adjunct professor is clearly ruling class. They rule over your grades. Hello.
00:45:25
Speaker
Sorry, I took some slack.
00:45:29
Speaker
First of all, yeah, this distinction between like bourgeois, someone who deals with individuals and workers deal with things already is breaking down in the fortyties certainly is totally proven wrong by the fact that so much of our economy in the US where anti-Semitism is seeing resurgence is a service economy.
00:45:48
Speaker
You couldn't make a claim that like working in a store, like having a customer service job, isn't dealing with individuals. This kind of workers are dealing with objects, and so they're used to thinking about things in these very material ways, and that's why they've adopted materialist Marxism.
00:46:09
Speaker
right And so they're making the error of thinking people are objects. Meanwhile, the bourgeois are making the error because they only deal with people. They're making the error of thinking objects are people. It's a very weird and completely incorrect read on what separates bourgeois from working class, what separates like what dialectical materialism is. i don't know. It just it doesn't hit at all. This whole section is like, exactly. You just think email jobs cause antisemitism because people who are writing emails are dealing with people all day, and so they think everything is people. like That's such a weird claim, right? They behave towards social facts like primitives who endow the wind and the sun with little souls.
00:46:49
Speaker
I think what's happening here is that he's just projecting his own person-to-person social experience where he's interacting with a lot of people who have interacting with people jobs, and a lot of those people are anti-Semites. Yeah.
00:47:02
Speaker
He's taking that and just like expanding it out into a theory. Not in this exact passage, but around this point in the text, he is also dealing with a lot of his own anxiety about being bourgeois himself, but wanting to be one of the good ones. Yeah, it's really noticeable. There's actually a point where he quotes someone who told him that it's okay to be bourgeois as long as you are on the right side of the class war.
00:47:29
Speaker
And it's just very funny because, sure, like that's true. like That's fine. You don't need to include that in your book about entusemitism. It feels out of place. Yeah, no, it's really more suited for your future discovery of psychoanalysis. Yeah.
00:47:45
Speaker
The ruling class barely shows up in this text. There's like a brief little mention of how they aggravate anti-Semitism for their own purposes. But the story of how anti-Semitism comes about for him really is just a matter of people interacting with their individual social positions and work tasks. There's so little recognition of the role of larger social structures in it.
00:48:10
Speaker
Yeah, so this is one thing I think is interesting because he's complaining about they behave towards social facts like primitives, right? This idea that all things have little souls. He's kind of doing this here, right? He is kind of talking about social facts in this animist way.
00:48:25
Speaker
i think this is also where you he eventually does start calling himself a Marxist. And there's an interview later that he gives where he like looks back at some of his earlier work and he looks at this statement that sort of everyone is totally free, right? You're you're within your situation, you're within your historical situation. And that kind of defines a lot of who you are is this historical situation you're in, but on some level you have this total radical freedom to do whatever you want.
00:48:52
Speaker
But he says, I can't believe that I thought that. There's this relationship between people, and it's not only at the level of the things they can do, but it's the level their consciousness, their experience of the world.
00:49:04
Speaker
And this is the thing that that Sartre is really rejecting in a lot of his early philosophy, because this idea that it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness, like that is sort of antithetical to his early philosophy.
00:49:20
Speaker
existentialist project. Yeah, so that's really where he where he's at. And I think it is contributing to why his class analysis is so bad, because he fundamentally doesn't want to accept how much of a trap, like what social class you're in actually is, like how much it actually determines not only the choices you can make, but what you can conceive of, like your imaginary, like all these things.
00:49:44
Speaker
He doesn't want to fully grapple with the limits of that. Well, it's kind of funny because what he was saying earlier is what you're expressing now. His understanding of the freedom of choice that everyone has is kind of naive.
00:50:00
Speaker
But what he's saying in this excerpt is that having an email drop turns you into an anti-Semite. Yeah. So he's he's contradicting himself. Yeah, doesn' it just doesn't quite hold up.
00:50:11
Speaker
So this is the anti-Semite's understanding of the Jew, to be clear, the excerpt about to read. Thus, the Jew is assimilable to the spirit of evil.
00:50:23
Speaker
His will, unlike the Kantian will, is one which wills itself purely, gratuitously, and universally to be evil. It is the will to evil.
00:50:34
Speaker
Through him, evil arrives on the earth. All that is bad in society, crises, wars, famines, upheavals, and revolts, is directly or indirectly imputable to him.
00:50:46
Speaker
The anti-Semite is afraid of discovering that the world is ill-contrived, or then it would be necessary for him to invent and modify. I said at the beginning that a lot of this book hit more as an analysis of transphobia than it did as anti-Semitism. And then a lot of the excerpts we've looked at so far, we've talked about diversity, we've talked about affirmative action, all these other kinds of bigotry. And I think this is one where it really circles back to transphobia for me. Like this is how I think contemporary transphobia, especially in like the US functions.
00:51:18
Speaker
The phrase that gets used of transgender ideology to refer to just trans people is, i think, part of this process where you don't want to just understand there's people out there who want to transition. It's actually more than that. It's an ideology, right? It is like a it is a will to destroy the world. And you get transphobes talking about how transgender ideology is actually this like antichrist or this... There's some incredible quote where someone accuses...
00:51:50
Speaker
transgender ideology of being a kind of, I think they said Hegelian like Gnosticism that like wants to fundamentally destroy society. right But it's like fundamentally, it is this claim that you know what we want to do is not just live as women, but actually like we want to fundamentally destroy society and we have a will to evil, right? Like I think, especially in contemporary transphobia, I think it's the trans community that is accused of having this will to evil.
00:52:18
Speaker
The Trump administration is constantly bringing up trans people just randomly when it's like it it's not relevant to be like, oh, we got rid of... woke or they're talking about we made our military strong again because we got rid of the pronouns or whatever.
00:52:31
Speaker
You have this understanding that everything bad fundamentally circles back to trans people and you're constantly talking about pronouns. It's like a verbal tick at this point often. This is the thing that is structuring their understanding of evil in the world is the existence of trans people.
00:52:46
Speaker
For a lot of these people, yeah, they're afraid of discovering that actually they' the world, and in particular their patriarchal understanding of what gender is and how it works, is not correct.
00:53:00
Speaker
It's bad, and they're also wrong about what it is, and they need to actually grapple with more complexity in the world than they're aware exists. And they don't want to do that. So they just do this. But I think this is really a part where it feels like this is talking about transphobia today.
00:53:15
Speaker
Could not agree more. Okay, another excerpt. a destroyer in function, a sadist with a pure heart. The anti-Semite in the very depths of his heart, a criminal. What he wishes, what he prepares, is the death of the Jew.
00:53:29
Speaker
To be sure, not all the enemies of the Jew demand his death openly, but the measures they propose, all of which aim at his abasement, at the humiliation, at his banishment, are substitutes for that assassination which they meditate within themselves.
00:53:42
Speaker
They are symbolic murders. Only the anti-semite has his conscience on his side. He is a criminal in a good cause. Yeah, again, looking at transphobia today, it's so easy to draw comparisons.
00:53:54
Speaker
You have the people who are outright saying trans people need to be eradicated. There's people who will deny that what they want is anything close to something that you could call genocidal, but who are interested in restricting resources, the ability to be in public, all these kinds of things, where the only end goal of that is eradication.
00:54:18
Speaker
Probably the podcast that this podcast is most directly inspired by, although you wouldn't know it, is Knowledge Fight, which is a podcast that examines episodes of The Alex Jones Show.
00:54:30
Speaker
I've been listening to the most recent episodes when they come out, and I've also slowly been working my way through the archives from the beginning. And there's quite contrast, because he's almost bigoted in a playful or a cute way at times at the start.
00:54:48
Speaker
It's easier to laugh at, I think. Now, he'll do things like just scream six or seven times into the mic that you need to kill them all, referring to trans people, that sort of thing.
00:55:01
Speaker
I think there's a tendency, especially in liberal circles, to... anti-catastrophize, you could say extremely politely, or downplay the extent to which all this bigotry on the right is straight up murderous. It really is death of marginalized people that they contemplate and that they wish to enact and that they are proceeding toward enacting.
00:55:27
Speaker
I don't think we should lose sight of the reality of that situation. And Sartre is going to talk about that later in the book. He directly talks about this tendency towards anti-catastrophizing, this tendency towards smoothing things over in the name of national unity, which I think is exactly the same as we're seeing now, always in the name of we got to be a big tent. you know We got to accept all these different people. We got to come together. We got to fight you know as one. And it's like, okay, but you're you're using that language of unity and coming together to talk ah about which groups of people you think don't deserve rights right now because their rights are making other people unhappy somehow, right? And and it's it's totally it's totally what Sartre was describing.
00:56:13
Speaker
Yeah, listen, we need to invite the murderers into the tent. Yeah, because it should be a really big tent. We talked about, okay, he's writing this 80 years ago. Things have changed.
00:56:23
Speaker
The situation for and facts about the Jewish community have largely changed hugely in the last 80 years. And I want to be very clear that actually, i think the fact that he doesn't tackle homophobia and transphobia in this book is a serious lacuna.
00:56:40
Speaker
I think it is a serious flaw with this book that he doesn't actually tackle this, because those are groups of people which were also targeted by the Holocaust. I also don't think it's a parallel bigotry of like, oh, the Nazis were anti-Semitic and they were transphobic and homophobic.
00:56:56
Speaker
In the Nazi imaginary, those two things were very intertwined. They saw things like Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexology, which that has I love the German name, Institute for Sexualwissenschaft.
00:57:11
Speaker
They saw this as a Jewish degeneracy. and I'm not under any illusion that Jews were not also very transphobic at the time.
00:57:22
Speaker
But I think the failure to pay attention to the kind of homophobic and transphobic dimension was a huge social failure at the time after the Holocaust.
00:57:33
Speaker
I think we probably both know this and a lot of other queer people that I've talked to know this, but largely like straight cis people that I talked to do not know that after the Nazis lost and like the camps were liberated,
00:57:45
Speaker
a lot of the people who were thrown in camps for being gay were re-imprisoned. People who managed to make it out were largely silent about their experiences because it was still illegal to be gay and they didn't want to be thrown into prison. So there's a lot of survivor stories that we straight up do not have.
00:57:59
Speaker
In Eastern Germany, they released these people from prison in 1968, another 20 years in prison after being in a Nazi concentration camp. In Western Germany, do you know what year it was that they finally released all the people and they ended this?
00:58:14
Speaker
I do not. I'm going to guess it's late 70s. 1995. Oh my god. So I think this failure to look at this thing and notice this dimension to what he's describing, like it's not solely a fault of Sartre, but reading this, I just couldn't stop thinking about...
00:58:35
Speaker
How much he's talking about transphobia here, even at the time, drives me crazy to like think about this stuff. And it's so blackpilling. So I think it's a serious lacuna in the book. I don't think it's properly speaking an example of like, oh, things have changed and now there's this new thing. I think it is something that the book and that Sartre is not aware of and that he should be aware of and would make his analysis a lot stronger. And he's not.
00:58:56
Speaker
It's not just a matter of his analysis, it's a matter of the project of the whole book, right? Because a lot of what he's trying to address here is this French denial around their own culpability, French denial about the problem of antisemitism in France.
00:59:14
Speaker
What you're describing is him in playing out this heroic role, in fact, enacting his own analog of that failure. Time to to move on to the Democrat, but before we do, i want to mention that he himself indicates that the anti-Semite here is a social role that can be filled by opposition to other minorities. I'll just quote it myself. He says, The Jew only serves him as a pretext.
00:59:45
Speaker
Elsewhere, his counterpart will make use of the Negro or the man of yellow skin. Now, onward to the Democrat, who is a figure that I think we'll recognize.
00:59:57
Speaker
The Democrat, like the scientist, fails to see the particular case. To him, the individual is only an ensemble of universal traits.
01:00:07
Speaker
It follows that his defense of the Jew saves the latter as man and annihilates him as jew There are no Jews, he says. There is no Jewish question. This means that he wants to separate the Jew from his religion, from his family, from his ethnic community, in order to plunge him into the democratic crucible whence he will emerge naked and alone, an individual and solitary particle like all the other particles.
01:00:32
Speaker
This is what, in the United States, is called the policy of assimilation, Immigration laws have registered the failure of this policy and on the whole the failure of the democratic point of view.
01:00:43
Speaker
How could it be otherwise? For a Jew conscious and proud of being Jewish, asserting his claim to be a member of the Jewish community without ignoring on that account the bonds which unite him to the national community, there may not be so much difference between the anti-Semite and the Democrat. Okay, so is that familiar, Helen?
01:01:01
Speaker
It's very familiar. It's very funny that it's the Democrat. Because the reason that this guy is called the Democrat and the reason that our Democratic Party is called the Democratic Party are largely different. It's sort of a coincidence, but he's sort of cooking the Democratic Party here. He really is. Yeah.
01:01:18
Speaker
We've seen this kind of colorblind approach to racism and especially like the 2000s. I feel like it's kind of falling out of favor now. I haven't talked to someone in the last maybe decade who has really seriously tried to do the I'm colorblind thing.
01:01:34
Speaker
My older brother used to say stuff like that a lot. And at one point tried to I forget what the argument was about because this was over a decade ago, but it did at one point try to justify that he couldn't be bigoted because he had taken some personality quiz online that told him he wasn't bigoted. That's incredibly funny. Like appeal to authority, but it was like a quiz on some, I think it was like a news website of some kind. it wasn't CNN. it was It was something like that. Was it the Daily Stormer?
01:02:02
Speaker
It was not the Daily Storber. Oh, I see. he He draws this conclusion. So I don't want to say that we're doing some fancy reading here when I say this is tied into that anti-catastrophizing thing, right? He's basically saying, okay, there's people who want to tackle this by just kind of saying, there's no such thing. Like Jews don't exist, right? Which is a little bit of an extreme way of putting it. I don't know how much people are actually saying Jews don't exist, but really there isn't a problem because...
01:02:28
Speaker
Jews are fundamentally the same as everyone else. It's a very wishful thinking approach. And in a lot of ways, it's true. Jews are the same as everyone else, but there's ways in which it's not.
01:02:40
Speaker
Jews don't celebrate Christmas, for example. And that might feel like a specious, like just surface level thing. But I think a lot of maybe people who are Christian don't realize the extent to which Christmas is such a national holiday in a lot of places, right? Like it's so much part of ambient culture that it does feel weird to be excluded from it. And you do actually, there is a difference there, right? Something to pay attention to. I remember back in undergrad for this big project I was doing, I had a interview with the head of Hillel at the time, I forget his name.
01:03:19
Speaker
but he talked about growing up in the UK and then moving at a relatively young age to the US. And as a kid, he loved Thanksgiving because he was like, finally, like a big holiday that I could like celebrate with my friends at school and not have it be like in opposition to who I am and my family.
01:03:38
Speaker
To bring it back to the Democrat, the role of the Democrat in what you're describing is to look at you and just assume that it doesn't matter to you that you don't celebrate Christmas. Exactly. you are submerged into the universality of their default.
01:03:55
Speaker
And of course, their default is not actually universal in a meaningful sense. It's this cultural backdrop that they're imposing. Exactly. Yeah. Actually, reading this got me thinking about our prior discussion of white people and the weird jealousy that a lot of us have of the N-word pass. Oh, yeah. You get this a lot from the right wing. And in that case, I really think it's just that they really want to say the N-word because they think racial slurs rule and they want to be mean to black people.
01:04:24
Speaker
But it's also a thing that you really do hear from centrists. I think in that case, It's exactly what Sartre is describing, which is a discomfort with other people having their own identity, which is distinct from yours as opposed to universal.
01:04:41
Speaker
Yeah, and with having something which doesn't properly belong to you, right? it's There's this sort of anger at the almost uppityness that these young Asian students might object to you calling your soggy, shitty sandwich a banh mi.
01:04:58
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly. i can't believe I've managed to work in so much Oberlin discourse. It started as like just the thing I thought of, and now I'm like, how can they make this about the Oberlin banh mi? I don't know. You know how everyone is Barry Weiss? Maybe you are Barry Weiss.
01:05:13
Speaker
I think I might be. I think i I need to take a step back and think about so many choices I've made recently. All right. Well, if this is the last episode of our podcast, you guys know why? It's because I lost my fucking mind.
01:05:30
Speaker
The myth of national unity still exerts such an influence over the French that they are ready for the greatest compromises in order to avoid internal conflict. especially in periods of international tension, which are of course precisely those when antisemitism is the most violent.
01:05:45
Speaker
Naive and full of goodwill, it is inevitably the democrat who makes all the concessions. The antisemite doesn't make any. He has the advantage of his anger. People say, don't irritate him,
01:05:56
Speaker
They speak softly in his presence. In 1940, for example, many Frenchmen went over to the side of the Patin government, which did not fail to preach unity. We know with what reservations. This government initiated anti-Semitic measures.
01:06:10
Speaker
The Patinists did not protest. They felt extremely ill at ease, but what was to be done? If France could be saved at the cost of a few sacrifices, was it not better to close one's eyes? Certainly, these people were not anti-Semites.
01:06:23
Speaker
They even spoke to the Jews whom they met with commiseration and politeness. But how could these Jews not realize that they were being sacrificed to the mirage of a united and patriarchal France?
01:06:34
Speaker
He sees this direct line, and I think he's this is a place where he's being really insightful, between insisting on this kind of universal subjectivity that is not, you know, it maybe has some these cultural influences decorations to it, but fundamentally these people are all the same, right? This commitment to the idea as related to this commitment to this idea of national unity, because if fundamentally there's no such thing as Jews, right? There's people who practice a different religion and there's people, but but fundamentally these people are all French in the same way that everybody else is French, then the right thing to do is to deprioritize their rights as Jews
01:07:12
Speaker
in order to save the nation of France, right? And again, like, it couldn't be more relevant talking about contemporary transphobia. We see this over and over, Democrats talking about And now I'm talking about, you know, people in the Democratic Party today talking about, okay you know, maybe maybe privately I think trans people should have rights. Maybe privately I think we shouldn't force every trans child to go through years of conversion therapy before admitting that maybe such a thing as a trans child exists. But will the electorate like it? What about unity?
01:07:48
Speaker
Exactly. We got to have a big tent, right? I'm thinking now of Sarah McBride saying that we need to be a bisexual party that goes both ways, right and left. actually don't think I'd heard that quote before. That's incredible. Yeah. She literally was like, we need to be a big tent. We need to be bisexual. We need to go both ways. And it's like, again, there's this dimension of sexuality to everything, which Sartre is totally missing. Yeah.
01:08:16
Speaker
Okay, so here's the start of Sartre's worst line of reasoning, I think. If it is true, Hegel says, oh my god, I love people who are about to who quote Hegel are either about to like go off and cook something incredible or about to say something just terribly stupid.
01:08:35
Speaker
It's always like such a funny sign that something is coming. If it is true, Hegel says, that a community is historical to the degree that it remembers its history— then the Jewish community is the least historical of all, for it keeps a memory of nothing but a long martyrdom, that is, of a long passivity.
01:08:53
Speaker
What is it then that serves to keep a semblance of unity in the Jewish community? To reply to this question, we must come back to the idea of situation. It is neither their past, their religion, nor their soil that unites the sons of Israel.
01:09:07
Speaker
If they have a common bond, if all of them deserve the name of Jew, it is because they have in common the situation of a Jew. That is, they live in a community which takes them for Jews. In a word, the Jew is perfectly assimilable by modern nations, but he is to be defined as one whom these nations do not wish to assimilate.
01:09:28
Speaker
So yeah, bringing in Hegel and then cooking something kind of mid with it. I mean, I would say at this point, he's veering into anti-Semitism, for sure.
01:09:40
Speaker
It's interesting because i would agree. i think he really wants to elucidate this idea of the Jew is something that is constructed by anti-Semites. Like the concept of the Jew is constructed by anti-Semites. And this is something that he says early on, and he's kind of getting back to here. And there's a problem for him, which is that there really is a religion called Judaism.
01:10:04
Speaker
Right. He just doesn't know anything about it or care to learn anything about it. And i do think there is an extent to which the way the concept of the Jew functions in the mind of the anti-Semite is as he's describing.
01:10:23
Speaker
Because anti-Semites also don't know anything about Judaism, usually. To the extent that they do, it's kind of not relevant to their anti-Semitism. And the problem is but doesn't mean that being a Jew doesn't mean anything. No, no, it doesn't.
01:10:38
Speaker
This is really just him taking his own ignorance and spinning it out. i don't know. this is, this is Matt Iglesias level. I don't know if i think it's as bad as Mataglasius.
01:10:49
Speaker
like I think there's something to be rescued here out of this this idea, okay, if they have a common bond, if all of them deserve the name of Jew, it is because they have in common the situation of a Jew.
01:11:02
Speaker
That is, they live in a community which takes them for Jews. Again, I think part of the problem is, again, this existentialist framework that he's thinking about everything in, right? People people live in this thing called a situation, right? Like for Sartre, situation is almost philosophical jargon.
01:11:19
Speaker
I do think there's something to be said for, okay, there is an element of identity making here that comes from this situation, and he's correct, but But the relationship of that to the real practice of Judaism is more complicated, because of course, the other thing is, there are lots of secular Jews. There's a lot of Jews who don't really practice Judaism in a kind of very observant way, especially this was the case in the first half of the 20th century in Europe.
01:11:54
Speaker
and then a lot of Jews died, and and the this fundamentally changed kind of the shape of Jewish experience and Jewish culture. But like the fact that a lot of people both called themselves Jewish, but also didn't really believe in Jewish scripture, and were sort of inconsistently observant, and also there was this kind of diaspora, right? So there's all these different communities that are very different in their different practices and the ways they relate to this thing called Judaism doesn't mean that there's no such thing as Judaism, which is kind of what he's saying here. He's saying, oh, you know, ah community is historical to the degree that it remembers its history.
01:12:30
Speaker
Well, what does it mean for a community to remember its history, right? That's sort of a complicated question. and the the claim that this makes the Jewish community the least historical of all is,
01:12:43
Speaker
highly suspect to me. I mean, so much of the practice of Judaism is about studying the history of the Jewish people. And you might say that, oh, the history of the Jewish people in terms of like being sort of founded by Abraham and then you know all these different things, the construction of the temple and the fall of the temple and all these things, a lot of that might be sort of mythological, but I don't know if it's that much more mythological than history of the French people as understood by the average French person.
01:13:12
Speaker
I think I've said this every episode so far. I think you're being way too generous to him, to be honest. He did literally no research for this. What I want to get out of it is just, I guess partly because I do think this is another place where I see resonance as a trans person today, that people talk a lot about the trans community in a way that I also find highly suspect. And I find that his analysis here has more to say, I think, about like being trans than it does about being Jewish in the sense that
01:13:44
Speaker
There really is a huge part of being trans that is dealing with the fact that other people just think you're trans. A large part of the construction of transness as an identity is that it is outside of the sort of gates of cisness, right? It is sort of structured by this...
01:14:02
Speaker
being put in a situation. That again, I think this is a very weak reading, but I think that you know this is another place where underlined and I was like, you know damn, I wish he could have read Butler, right? He would have had a much more advanced understanding of this kind of identity formation by the kind of lines of subject and abject. But you know that's... Especially with how much of the discussion later is going to be about how much the gaze of the other structures the self. Exactly.
01:14:27
Speaker
I guess part of what bothers me about this is that since he wrote this, there has been a dramatic rise in the degree to which Jewish studies is a recognized academic discipline.
01:14:43
Speaker
I don't know. I just get the same feeling I get whenever someone snubs an academic field that has done work that is so relevant to what they're talking about, even though I recognize that temporally it doesn't exactly work to fault him for not citing material that's going to be like accessible only in the future. Yeah, I don't want to diminish at all this idea that he's totally ignorant of what Judaism is, and he should pay a lot more attention to what that is before he starts talking, especially before he starts talking about the Jew. And he has a lot to say about how Jews should or shouldn't handle these situations later in the book. And that stuff is
01:15:18
Speaker
really questionable. the The thing I would rescue out of this is there is a distinction to be made between Jewish people and Jews as like an actual identity that exists and has culture and has a history versus the figure of the Jew that exists in the mind of the anti-Semite, which has nothing to do with that. And he is kind of doing anti-Semitism by not recognizing that But there are sort of two different concepts here that are both being called the Jew.
01:15:42
Speaker
And he kind of isn't bothering to really make a distinction because he doesn't really want to have to learn about you. or i don't know if he doesn't want to, but he just hasn't gone about learning about Jews. And so he's just kind of using this second concept, which is a real thing and worth studying.
01:15:55
Speaker
And they're related, but it's a lot more complicated than just... well, Jews aren't really, they don't really have a unity. They don't really have a unity of history or unity of culture. So they don't really exist. Their only unity is anti-Semitism.
01:16:08
Speaker
it's kind of It's kind of weak sauce. That's so much of what's painful about this book is that he has these poignant insights. And then periodically, he'll seem to embody the role of the anti-Semite or the Democrat without really understanding that he's doing that.
01:16:24
Speaker
Yeah. And I think part of it is this commitment to this abstract philosophical framework. He wants to define things by a kind of unity. And it just that's just not how concepts work, especially these kinds of social constructions, right? The Jew is a social construct, and it's complicated, the dynamics of how social constructs come to be. And they're related to historical facts, and they're related to biological facts, and they're related to material facts. But It also takes place in in the context of discourse. And in the same way that you don't want to fault him for not knowing Jewish studies, I don't want to fault him for not having read Derrida.
01:17:00
Speaker
But like yeah, like it's just kind of weak sauce, dude. So Sartre goes on to provide a I would say, mostly accurate and often very painful portrait of the suffering that belonging to a stigmatized minority entails.
01:17:16
Speaker
He talks about the sense that one is constantly labeled. The sense that one's status in society is contingent and subject to revocation. The sense that one has to constantly prove oneself to be a worthy member of society, the sense that one is answerable for the actions of other members of the minority.
01:17:33
Speaker
These are all still very contemporary issues and things to point to. Because Sartre, Jewishness is negatively defined, that is defined by the existence of the anti-Semite, essentially, he doesn't actually have to put that much effort into describing the interior of of a Jewish person. He mostly just describes the reaction to oppression of a Jewish person, which is not quite the same thing so like his big example of someone thinking about like what does it mean for me to be jewish is someone whose parents conceal the fact of their jewishness from them i am glad that he doesn't try to opine about the interior life of jews because i think that's whenever he starts talking about anyone's interior life i think is when it gets a little weaker for me at least
01:18:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, part of that is just like, he's trying to analyze the psychology of pretty broad class of people. And that's just not something you can do, you can analyze the psychology of people who hold a particular strong set of beliefs, but that's that's not how he's thinking of Jewishness. So like what he's doing kind of works for the anti-Semite. It doesn't so much work for his portrait of Jewish people.
01:18:53
Speaker
From here, he gets into his conceptions of authentic and especially inauthentic Jews. Here's his definition of authenticity. Authenticity it is almost needless to say, consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks that it involves, in accepting it in pride or humiliation, sometimes in horror and hate.
01:19:20
Speaker
So this is really like this is another big like existentialism idea, right? This is something that he writes about. And it's funny that he says it is almost needless to say because elsewhere- I know, I was going to highlight that too. Hundreds of pages. The reason he's saying it's needless to say, I think is not because everybody already knows this.
01:19:38
Speaker
I think it's because everybody who's read other Sartre he He wants you to go read his other shit, right? he He's written like hundreds of pages about what authenticity means, and so he's like, I i don't need to say any more.
01:19:52
Speaker
Uncharitably, i would say he's maybe hoping the reader feels a little stupid and is motivated to go read his other work because that. I think so, too. And also, uncharitably, I think he's a little full of himself. Yeah.
01:20:03
Speaker
I'm so cool. Everyone already knows all my shit, right? I don't need to, i don't need to, it's not needless to say I've already, I'm already setting the zeitgeist. People already know my concepts. And to some extent, unfortunately, he was kind of correct. He was like hugely, like very widely read. And and I hate when people like this can back it up.
01:20:19
Speaker
Yeah. But yeah, this is like a big part of his thing is that, you know, the thing that that's real freedom, like what is real freedom? What is authentic freedom? Is this freedom to actually fully recognize truly the situation you're in and and accept it.
01:20:36
Speaker
And again, like you said, situation is a term of art here. Exactly. Your situation is like the material circumstance that structures your surrounding And I think this is the part, right?
01:20:48
Speaker
That's not the part that really conflicts with sort of more Marxist critical theory views, right? I think he shares with Marxists this notion that like humans are in a situation and we're structured by history.
01:21:00
Speaker
But he maintains this possibility of authenticity, which is like seeing past your ideology. And that's something that I think I am hugely suspicious that that is a thing that you can do.
01:21:13
Speaker
Be fully aware of that situation and look out and and see reality not mediated by ideology. And that's exactly the thing that other contemporary critical theorists, but especially later philosophers and like Foucault and Butler and all these people that I was talking about before will call into question is not that there's no such thing as reality, right? This is the other thing. This is the other, right? Dennis Prager in our intro saying there's no such thing as truth.
Understanding Postmodernism and Authenticity
01:21:39
Speaker
That's the postmodern. There's no such thing as the real.
01:21:41
Speaker
That's the postmodern mentality. That's kind of the wrong reading. That's the vulgar, like bad reading of what these people are saying. It's not that there's no such thing as reality or truth. It's that It's not something you can like directly perceive. It's not something you can be like, oh, I'm going to interpret my situation, my historical position, free of any of these ideology things, right? I'm just going to look i'm just going to look around and see what's happening and understand it directly without having to be mediated by a framework of understanding.
01:22:12
Speaker
And this is what he means by authenticity. And i think a good proof that that authenticity is not a great concept is what he does with it in this book. His vision for how Jews should live is not great and not one that as a Jew, I would want to adopt. I'll just say that. like To be clear, I can and do view reality unstructured, unfiltered, free of ideology, free of all this bullshit. But I'm built different.
01:22:42
Speaker
Motivated by all this, he proceeds to create another one of his questionable dichotomies. This one is between the authentic and the inauthentic Jew, and we are now introduced to the inauthentic Jew.
01:22:56
Speaker
In a word, the inauthentic Jews are men whom other men take for Jews and who have decided to run away from this insupportable situation. The result is that they display various types of behavior, not all of which are present at the same time in the same person, but each of which may be characterized as an avenue of flight.
01:23:16
Speaker
Okay. I'm not saying it's a one-to-one mapping, but the picture of the inauthentic Jew that we're going to end up with is pretty similar to the picture of the pick-me.
01:23:29
Speaker
I actually underlined and wrote pick me like all over this section. like it. With him, anxiety often takes a special form. It becomes a fear of acting or feeling like a Jew.
01:23:41
Speaker
We are familiar with those neurasthenics who are haunted by the fear of killing, jumping out a window of uttering obscene words. Certain Jews are in some degree comparable to these people, though their anxiety rarely attains a pathological level.
01:23:53
Speaker
They have allowed themselves to be poisoned by the stereotype that others have of them, and they live in fear that their acts will correspond to this stereotype. think it's interesting because I think he is talking about pick me's, but I think right here he's kind of missing the mark.
01:24:10
Speaker
The principle behind this drive towards assimilation is an excellent one. The Jew is claiming his rights as a Frenchman. Unfortunately, the realization of this enterprise rests on an inadequate foundation. He wants people to receive him as a man, but even in the circles which he has been able to enter, he has received as a Jew.
01:24:27
Speaker
he is the rich or powerful Jew whom it is absolutely necessary to associate with, or the good Jew, the exceptional Jew, with whom one associates in spite of his race. So I think that second part is correct.
01:24:39
Speaker
When he compares this impulse towards running away from your situation as a Jew to like people with these kinds of neurotic obsessions, right he's almost talking about intrusive thoughts, not in the... like watered down TikTok version of, oh, the intrusive thoughts won. I bought myself a latte or whatever, but like actual, you know.
01:25:03
Speaker
Yeah, this is like actual OCD style stuff. And he wants to say there's some anxiety there and it's the same kind of anxiety. And I actually don't think that's what it is. In the Christian French culture,
01:25:16
Speaker
people are socialized to construct their subjectivity by being proper Christians. And Jews growing up in that culture are going to be in that same society, and they're going to have that same subconscious tendency to form their subject around being proper French citizens.
01:25:33
Speaker
And because anti-Semitism is built into that, you get this desire to prove you're not one of the bad ones, right? The impulse to be a pick me is I think a just more visible version.
01:25:47
Speaker
Like people who do the same thing, but who aren't part of the marginalized group are not called pick me's, but they're doing the same thing. Like a log cabin Republican who wants to show that he's not being one of those freaky homos is fundamentally doing the same thing as a straight dude who says no homo.
01:26:03
Speaker
They're both structuring their subjectivity and their position as in opposition to the freaky homos. And I don't think it's fair to say that one of those is pathological without recognizing that they're both pathological. And it's actually not pathological because that means that you're sort of exceptional in some sense. Really, you've just pointed to some way that human psychology is structured and you can just see it because you know that the freaky homo is wrong about not being a freaky homo, but the straight guy is not incorrect.
01:26:34
Speaker
Although a lot of those guys are also homos. We're about to skip over a lot of discussion of the inauthentic Jew. It is such a huge block of this book.
01:26:45
Speaker
And a lot of it I really don't think is so great. And to be honest, I feel like maybe isn't so worth discussing. There's a lot of discussion of race that seems to me to be nakedly self-contradictory. He'll say in one breath that the reality of the Jewish race is undeniable, and he'll also say quite emphatically and unequivocally that he just doesn't believe in race and present arguments tearing down the concept of race.
01:27:18
Speaker
He'll often place racial categories like Aryan and quotes. It's very confusing, and I don't really think it's a failure of my perception.
01:27:30
Speaker
I just don't think he's consistent. I agree. I think there's parts where he tries to kind of stake out this notion of race. He does say at some points race is this syncretic idea. that's It's nodding towards this social constructionism idea.
01:27:46
Speaker
which is why I keep keep bringing in Butler's because that's like their work is really where I go to to try to understand the way that these things work. But he really is missing a way to reconcile the fact that things can be socially constructed and real at the same time. In fact, things that are socially constructed are real in the sense that they are constructed socially, and and often there are real ingredients to those constructions. And it's not just a matter of saying, oh, it's all fake. How And so he wants to say race is fake in the conception of the racists because they think race is this
01:28:19
Speaker
transcendent category that makes you who you are, that's not true. But then he doesn't really know what to do with the fact that there are biological elements that make up the concept of race.
01:28:33
Speaker
I think one interesting thing to point out here is that this book is called Anti-Semite and Jew. It's spelled anti-Semite. This has kind of fallen out of fashion, usually when we talk about antisemitism.
01:28:47
Speaker
It's written today in one word, and the S is not capitalized. And this reflects a transition from understanding Semite as some racial category towards antisemitism is is an attitude, is a is a thing you do, but it's not anti-Semitism, right? There's no Semitism that it is in opposition to.
01:29:10
Speaker
and I think largely that is something that has come out of work that's been done after Sartre, right? People starting with some of these ideas and and developing more and more, and they understand, okay, there really isn't this Jewish race in this conception, even though there are Jewish people and it is more than just a religion. There is this complex interplay of things, and he doesn't really know how to handle that.
01:29:33
Speaker
Also, a lot of this section is addressing and explaining by way of countering various stereotypes about Jewish people, some of which are non-current enough that I don't even know the relevant associations.
01:29:48
Speaker
There's this whole bit about and defending Jews against the charge that they use their hands to vigorously when speaking. or this discussion of Jewish people supposedly lacking tact or getting naked too easily. These aren't really current.
01:30:06
Speaker
I think the nugget of interest in a lot of these sections is he he wants to do an analysis to show when you look at a Jewish person and you are expecting to see these things, you either see them and then that confirms it's not just that you have found somebody who uses his hands vigorously or who doesn't have tact.
01:30:26
Speaker
you have found a Jew who does that. And it's it's because of their Jewishness. And that's somebody who's non-Jewish, who lacks tact and uses his hands vigorously. That's just that guy But if a Jew does it, then it's is Judaism. And then if you find a Jew who doesn't do it, well, he's conscious of that. And so he's not doing it on purpose.
01:30:45
Speaker
So there's something there. there's There's a real dynamic there that he's finding that I found interesting. But It's too many examples and they're weird examples. Yeah.
01:30:57
Speaker
Finally, he gets into this concept of the authentic Jew. Jewish authenticity consists in choosing oneself as Jew, that is, in realizing one's Jewish condition. The authentic Jew abandons the myth of the universal man. He knows himself and wills himself into history as a historic and damned creature.
01:31:15
Speaker
He ceases to run away from himself and to be ashamed of his own kind. He understands that society is bad, For the naive monism of the inauthentic Jew, he substitutes a social pluralism.
01:31:26
Speaker
He knows that he is one who stands apart, untouchable, scorned, prescribed, and it is as such he asserts his being. And once he gives up his rationalistic optimism, he sees that the world is fragmented by irrational divisions.
01:31:38
Speaker
And in accepting this fragmentation, at least in what concerns him, and proclaiming himself a Jew, he makes some set he makes some of these values and these divisions his. He chooses his brothers and his peers. They are other Jews.
01:31:52
Speaker
It reads to me a little bit like what he's saying is that to be an authentic Jew is to be a good existentialist who is in the situation of being regarded as Jewish. Yeah, exactly.
01:32:04
Speaker
it's It's very, if only they understood my theory By the way, i haven't read all of Being a Nothingness. I did try to read it in college. It is very long. There's something funny about claiming that the solution to this social ill is that everyone needs to understand your thousand page tome on the nature of being. like That's an incredibly philosopher thing to say. It's such a philosopher approach. And there's a part of me that really loves philosophy. and really But you've got to be a little more cognizant of the limits. If your solution is everyone in society needs to understand my complicated
01:32:45
Speaker
like vision, that's not going to happen. like Okay, we should be clear that he's saying that understanding understanding the works of Sartre might be the best way to go about being Jewish, but he doesn't indicate that that's a solution to society's problems for Jewish people to choose that. He he's specifically calls out that the oppression of Jewish people is, air quotes, our fault, not, air quotes, theirs.
01:33:21
Speaker
Yeah, so it's really everyone else who also needs to read all of Sartre. Yeah, I guess that's true. Yeah, he says you need a socialist revolution along existentialist lines.
01:33:33
Speaker
Yeah. And it's interesting because even as he says at at certain points that, oh, the the Democrat has this rejection of like Judaism as such, or this rejection that like Jews exist, he does at other points voice this idea that sort of in the ideal society, which is another very philosopher move to Argue about the way things should be fixed by having this future moment when we're going to have the ideal society and that's what things are going to fix. And in that society, we are going to realize that like Judaism is like not relevant and neither is Christianity and we're going to get rid of religions. But until then, here's how we deal with Judaism in the present. It's it's kind of a weird way of going about it
01:34:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, his stopgap solution is he proposes the establishment of basically a French anti-defamation league, which is odd because it just seems like such small potatoes.
01:34:31
Speaker
At first, he really opposes these ideas. He talks about oh, we have to be careful because people have freedom of thought and speech, right? Like he is talking about at at various points, it is improper to try to restrict these things by law. And he does have voiced this kind of free speech fetishizing view.
01:34:55
Speaker
Later, he does, I think, get more sophisticated with it and says, look, you can't pass laws making anti-Semitism illegal because anti-Semites don't respect laws and they will always view themselves as like the real society as opposed to the fake legal society. And I think he's absolutely cooking there. i think he's absolutely correct. Like, oh man, I, did I just forget to clip that or did I skip over it? Because he makes this absolutely brilliant point about the way that anti-Semites in viewing themselves as representing a true society of true laws that exists beyond the momentary society of laws that actually governs them.
01:35:38
Speaker
They become criminals and yet justify themselves in that criminality when, in fact, they're very right-wing. They're very into hierarchy. it's It's a little bit of what we were talking about actually last episode with Powell where we said, when Powell says, my constituents are telling me all these things about immigrants...
01:35:55
Speaker
it's not only a way of saying these people are concerned, that the citizens are concerned with this situation. it's It's also a way of saying one of the things it means to be a citizen is to be concerned with this. And and Sartre really elaborates this idea of when the anti-Semite says this is the way society should run and and blah, bla blah, blah, they're not talking about like a real the real actual legal France that you walk around in and pay taxes to and receive welfare from and vote in and do your business in. They're talking about this
01:36:31
Speaker
mythical France that has a sort of questionable ontology that exists in their minds as the thing that they are protecting from the evil, real France that actually exists.
01:36:43
Speaker
It addresses this very strange and urgent contradiction in our own society today, which is you have all these fascists who are in a sense anti-cop, anti-government,
01:36:56
Speaker
And yet they're jerking themselves off to like ice deportation montages each night. We've all seen thin blue line police flag punisher skulls.
01:37:07
Speaker
Right. it's that That is the contradiction. I've actually seen thin blue line police flag American flag punisher skull sticker next to thin blue line police flag Mexican flag punisher skull sticker.
01:37:22
Speaker
that's so fucking funny. That one was the most confusing ideology. I love Southern California. It's such a strange place, but that's exactly the thing he's saying. And I think he's absolutely correct that that means there's a real limit to legal recourse here.
01:37:41
Speaker
So let's get into our second text, which we're going to try to apply a little bit of what we just read to.
The Rise of Andrew Anglin and Far-Right Extremism
01:37:47
Speaker
This is by Andrew Anglin. Do you know anything about Andrew Anglin?
01:37:51
Speaker
Nothing. He was born in Ohio in 1984. He was vaguely liberal until about his sophomore year of high school, but he was very erratic. He had all kinds of beliefs and odd directions, if that makes sense.
01:38:08
Speaker
Okay. And so some of them were left-wing. His behavior was like, it's a little strange to me that in reading accounts of it, it doesn't raise more alarm among like the adult figures in his life.
01:38:22
Speaker
Because he's doing things like beating his head against walls, just like whenever he gets upset. He's homophobic, but also he kisses boys after his high school girlfriend was raped at a party and called him.
01:38:38
Speaker
He broke up with her and started a harassment campaign against her. He's a piece of shit, but he's also a piece of shit who has like a lifetime of weird and inconsistent behavior behind him.
01:38:50
Speaker
Wow. Sophomore year of high school, he gets really into Alex Jones. So on the off chance that any of our listeners don't know who Alex Jones is, he's a conspiracy theorist and...
01:39:04
Speaker
right wing demagogue who has been broadcasting for decades. Yeah, he's the guy in our intro who talks about Trump making political succubus with goblins and open and wondering whether Trump will have babies with a goblin and turn on us like Darth Vader.
01:39:24
Speaker
Yes. That's Alex Jones. that's That's a great summary of Alex Jones. So he gets really into Alex Jones, very into conspiracy theories and such.
01:39:35
Speaker
And that is being into Alex Jones that gets him to start being super online. Within a few years after graduating from high school, he gets really into 4chan.
01:39:46
Speaker
And later, he's going to tell a journalist that, quote, 4chan was more influential on me than anything, end quote. Do you think you could maybe give our listeners a brief description of what 4chan is?
01:39:58
Speaker
How do you even introduce 4chan? That's a good question. Think of 4chan as a kind of demon that haunts liberal fetishism of the marketplace of ideas. Ever since the beginning of the Enlightenment, there's this idea that not only does capitalism work so well to distribute resources, but actually the same principles, and and like John Stuart Mill writes about this, the same principles will mean that ideas should also exist in this kind of marketplace of exchange. And and the best ideas, right, sort of a survival of the fittest idea for ideas.
01:40:32
Speaker
We're all kind of familiar with this this concept, the marketplace of ideas. 4chan is the perfect example of why that won't work. Because, and it's not just 4chan, there's a lot of places that have tried the same formula. The idea is you make this place online, put no rules to what people are allowed to say.
01:40:52
Speaker
fourcha is a place where you can basically post whatever you want. They actually do have some rules. And so there's other places that are like even worse for a chance, even worse. Basically, there are places that people who think fortune chan is woke go post.
01:41:07
Speaker
And that's even worse. And actually, like, that's where a lot of like QAnon stuff got kind of accelerated. I think you and I kind of started on 4chan. Is that correct? It did. Yeah.
01:41:18
Speaker
um But pretty quickly moved to 8chan. It migrated to the really degenerate sites like 8chan, Reddit, ah Facebook. Right. But it it did have this moment on 8chan. And then it's the dynamics of how these things work is really complicated and interesting and for another time. But 4chan is basically a place where you can go post whatever you want.
01:41:44
Speaker
But the thing is that with no protections against harassment or hate speech, things like this, most normal people don't want to hang out there. Because if there's no way of saying, hey, you can't say that, like there's no consequences for profoundly antisocial behavior beyond maybe getting criticized, then there's I mean, in a way, as Sartre points out, like actually that getting criticized and that hatred and that state of passion, that's part of the gratification for a lot of the people who do this kind of antisocial stuff.
01:42:15
Speaker
So it really develops there. So that's kind of what 4chan is, I think, conceptually, or how how I think about 4chan. Yes, absolutely. I agree with all of that. The way it ends up operating in practice is that the whole site became subverted into a Nazi recruitment operation.
01:42:35
Speaker
Yeah. And so people go there because it's edgy, because there's no limits, because they want to see the wild side of the internet or whatever. The stereotype is a high schooler going there on the weekend or something because they want to they want to find shock content.
01:42:57
Speaker
I think there's also a huge draw of people who go there because they want to feel bad. Yes, absolutely. And i am speaking largely from like people I know in my direct experience here.
01:43:09
Speaker
There's a lot of like queer and especially trans communities on 4chan that go so they can face up to, quote unquote, the reality of their situation, which is basically people telling them like how hopeless their transition is, right? Yeah.
01:43:25
Speaker
Well, I wasn't going there for specifically trans reasons, but in like 2014 or so, I visited 4chan a lot and that became part of my future fascination with the far right. And it was basically because I was super depressed and super lonely.
01:43:45
Speaker
And i would go there and I would see people expressing pain and the way they expressed it And the way they turned it into hatred toward others was not something I found relatable. It was just the pure expression of pain that I found relatable.
01:44:02
Speaker
I know other trans people who have who have done this, and you can also see the way that this affects other trans discourse online, but it's absolutely not limited to that at all. There's a similar thing. Actually, the founder of 8chan talks about being drawn into 4chan because of disability and because feeling like he wants a place where people aren't. He he he objected to this kind of liberal condescension of like, oh, he's like, no, like my life is harder. There's a lot of hard things in my life. And so I want to go to this place where people are being real and telling me that my life is hopeless.
01:44:30
Speaker
And again, that's not really true. Like your, your life is not hope. And he has this different understanding now of his life, right He says, my life is not hopeless, but I really thought it was at the time. And so I appreciated people being real. And that's also a big dynamic behind like the incel movement that grows on these places where, you know, men feel alienated and unable to like talk to women and be social.
01:44:53
Speaker
um, A lot of liberals are like, yeah, you just need to kind of get over it. And that's kind of just true. They kind of just need to get over it. But the thing is, like saying, like, you look fine. There's nothing inherently wrong with your physical appearance.
01:45:03
Speaker
You kind of just need to maybe clean up your hygiene a little bit and get some practice talking to people and realize that, like, yeah, talking to other people can be scary, but you just have to do it.
01:45:14
Speaker
Like, no, that's hug boxing, right? They have this notion that that's hug boxing. If you tell me that I don't look like a troll, I'm going to prefer to go to this other place where they're going to tell me what's real, which is that I am sort of transcendently unable to ever have a relationship. You are broken.
01:45:30
Speaker
That is the fundamental message that 4chan offers to people who are in that kind of pain. And then people come in to scoop up the pieces, and those people doing the scooping are typically Nazis. Absolutely.
01:45:41
Speaker
So he gets exposed to these Nazi recruitment operations. And he kind of comes to understand they're working. And he gets exposed to a lot of this negative messaging that is not great for someone who clearly has mental health problems.
01:45:56
Speaker
His life at this time is pretty shit. He moves in with his grandma. He gets arrested repeatedly for DUIs. He's working like 50 hours at a warehouse and he still can't afford his own place.
01:46:11
Speaker
And finally, he gets sick of all this shit and he flies out to the Philippines. Which is, this is a particularly like fortune Nazi thing to do, actually. The people who ended up running QAnon after it switched sites, it's a whole thing.
01:46:28
Speaker
The Watkinses, they have a long history in the Philippines. And in general, like right wing men going out there and living it up, long history. He gets obsessed with Filipino purity. There's kind of like a noble savage thing going on with his thinking. He's all like, ugh, you can really see how like white influence goes around and just ruins places, which I don't disagree. But he's not quite coming at it from the same direction I would be.
01:46:54
Speaker
He comes up with a plan to hike out into the jungle and meet hostile Muslim tribes and lead them while running a website documenting this whole like white savior expedition.
01:47:09
Speaker
So he goes out into the jungle. And how do you think this ends up? Well, based on the fact that you haven't yet told me that he wrote the thing we're going to talk about, he doesn't get killed. Right, he survives.
01:47:20
Speaker
But that would be my first guess. My second guess is that he is like captured in a way and tortured and needs like the intervention of the US government perhaps to get him freed? So the answer is we don't know what happens. Oh my God. All we know is that in some not uncertain fashion, he was prompted to fuck off. Okay.
01:47:45
Speaker
So he comes out of the jungle, just defeated and so angry, so angry, and with a total commitment to white supremacy.
The Daily Stormer and Extremist Strategy
01:47:55
Speaker
And he promptly starts a site named Total Fascism. And Total Fascism does not exactly take off.
01:48:02
Speaker
But the next year, July 4th of 2013, he starts a site called The Daily Stormer. And the Daily Stormer does take off. We need to distinguish between three different things here. So first off, there's Der Stürmer, which is a weekly paper that was published in Nazi Germany. It was famously Hitler's favorite newspaper. There's the Daily Stormer, which is the site England founds.
01:48:27
Speaker
And there's a completely separate thing called Stormfront. Stormfront was a Nazi forum. It was the first big Nazi site. It only gets a few posts a day now, so it's even more irrelevant than Andrew Anglin.
01:48:39
Speaker
Just as part of like the research for this episode, I went there, and this is a sidetrack, but... There was a women's forum. So i I sorted myself into that.
01:48:49
Speaker
I saw one of my favorite things, which is Nazi women complaining about Nazi men. So I just want to send you a screenshot of that and have you read it. The poster is Dixie girl or like profile picture is this promise ring posts 2745. Okay. That's a lot of posts. Yeah. She's a power user for sure. Power user of this Nazi forum.
01:49:14
Speaker
Re, ladies, please, is the subject of the post. This is a thread encouraging the women in the forum to stop swearing because it's not ladylike. Every detail about this is hurting me in different ways.
01:49:30
Speaker
Read the post, Helen. Get in the back. I have...
01:49:35
Speaker
I have reported this one poster, but nothing has happened so far. Earlier, there was a post asking if anyone had ever had sex with a non-white before. It got completely deleted.
01:49:47
Speaker
Anyways, somehow the thread got into the topic of how the army should employ a brothel of local native women so soldiers can go blow off steam. smirking emoji this one poster was not only blatantly promoting prostitution he was he was also promoting race mixing as well then when i tried to argue with him he called me a man-hating feminist he also called confederate lady one as well confederate lady is another user
01:50:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's capitalized here. Like, I reported him and so did other posters, but nothing has been done yet. He was blatantly disrespecting and belittling women. I am furious and the thread just disappeared out of thin air, just as if it never existed.
01:50:38
Speaker
All of my reps for my posts in the thread are gone as well. It should have just been locked. I also received a couple PMs from new women members applauding me for arguing against them. They said they were a little freaked out by that thread and worried that all men on here were like that, and they wonder why there are so little WN women.
01:50:54
Speaker
What is WN? WN being, of course, white nationalist. Oh, of course. How could I... I feel dumb for even asking. That's so obvious. There's only one thing I can hold on to to not go completely insane, which is there is something satisfying about people facing consequences, their actions. Like this is like crazy that like all this is happening, but you couldn't ask for a better person for it to be happening to here. Right. like Absolutely.
01:51:26
Speaker
Okay. That's all we have from Stormfront. Oh my God. This idea of like, oh, the army should employ a brothel of local native women so soldiers can go blow off steam. like Basically, the army should formalize like rape as part of the... you know we should We should bring back more like raping and pillaging. Right. this is This is comfort women. That's what they're talking about.
01:51:50
Speaker
And saying, this is bad. We shouldn't do this, which I agree with, but her reasons are that it is sex work and race mixing. Right, those are her objections. That's the objection.
01:52:08
Speaker
This is excellent work, Sarah. This is some real odium. I don't know Thank you. I'm so glad you appreciate it. Okay, so the main text, though. The main text we're going to look at is the Daily Stormer has a style guide because it expands enough that it's not just Andrew Englund writing it.
01:52:26
Speaker
And this style guide gets leaked and published by the Huffington Post. That's the practice part of our theory and practice for this episode. I'm going to link you to an example article.
01:52:40
Speaker
And you don't need to read the article, but I just want you to like look at this page and describe a little what you're seeing, what the vibe is. We're going open this and in incognito. There's a lot happening here on this page.
01:52:54
Speaker
Already we're seeing, okay, the banner is this picture of George Washington, Winston Churchill. And I want to say that this is an IDF soldier, certainly someone, an observant Jew doing prayer. well And then i don't even know how to describe this guy, like someone that they took from a picture of a tribe somewhere. But the Daily Stormer, nationalism for all peoples.
01:53:22
Speaker
So this idea of like, oh, we're doing nationalism, but just not reminds me a lot of Powell, to be honest, right? Like it reminds me a lot of this like, oh, I don't like believe in racial hierarchy, although they do clearly believe in racial hierarchy. Just like we want our own nationalism. Everybody else gets to do it. Yeah. Maybe as an illustration of how insincere this is, you could read the title of the article. Right. And the title of the article is Tucker Carlson turns homosexual warg mongering psychopath Lindsey Graham into a lampshade. The homosexual psychopath Lindsey Graham entered the Tucker Carlson jungle last night and was brought to his shananananana knees knees in the jungle.
01:53:59
Speaker
full-on Nazi shit right here. Oh, yeah. I take the banner to be largely sarcastic, although I think the African tribesman might be specifically a reference to later films of Lenny Reifenstahl. Banner rotates pretty frequently when I look through the archives. It was definitely something where I could tell there was like some cultural context that I'm missing, but that is certainly like keyed into this like obsessive, like white nationalist mind. Like they would be able to say, oh, this tribe person and is this this picture because of this reason, like they they have their like weird obsessions always, right?
01:54:33
Speaker
Right. Okay. Just I want to read the second line of this article because I think it'll really give a sense of the absolute like this is not an article in the sense of like, oh, it is a Nazi like this isn't like, oh, we're reporting the news and we're doing it with like a white nationalist band. This is all it's something else. the second line is our article. So first, homosexual psychopath Lindsey Graham entered the Tucker Carlson jungle, blah, blah, blah.
01:54:55
Speaker
I have yet to witness a homosexual be forced into a concentration camp, gassed and turned into a lampshade like I saw in this YouTube clip. So, yeah. Yeah.
01:55:07
Speaker
Just on the off chance any of our listeners are not familiar, being turned into a lampshade is a reference to administrators of, well, actually a specific administrator of a Nazi concentration camp churning murder victims into lampshades.
01:55:25
Speaker
yeah Yeah, so it's rough stuff. The layout here is pretty similar to what you would see in just like a news site of this era. The Daily Stormer is distinguished from its predecessors by two things.
01:55:39
Speaker
First, it copies the presentation of liberal outlets, especially Gawker. So like the elevator pitch here is that this is Nazi Gawker. Second, and more relevant to us, Total Fascism, his previous site, consisted of earnest articles for already committed Nazis.
01:56:01
Speaker
And The Daily Stormer is intended to serve the same function as 4chan does and use the same layers of irony approach. It's intended to be an on-ramp to Nazism for young men.
01:56:13
Speaker
So you can see in the layout of this page already, you've got this big banner, big visual image. Then you've got the sidebar that's talking about joining the Stormer book club. And that's a big, bright, vivid image.
01:56:25
Speaker
There's the article title. Below that, there's a video. And then you start getting into the text. And further on down in the article, there's another video breaking it up. It's highly visual.
01:56:37
Speaker
It's very brief. Already, before we even get into the text of the style guide, you can see this stuff we were reading in Sartre about the object of obsession being the the hate itself, right? that You've picked this this passionate this life of passion, right? But instead of it being like, oh, I want to pursue money, I want to pursue right?
01:57:00
Speaker
You want to pursue this kind of gratification that comes from just openly feeling hate. And you can absolutely see that. I mean, that's why i wanted to read the the other line of the article. Like it is almost trying to demonstrate for you how to have fun with these really hateful images by by making jokes out of them, but in this way, which isn't really a joke, right? Yeah. Yes. Here's the first excerpt from the style guide.
01:57:29
Speaker
I'm not going to make any attempt to present the bits from the style guide in the order that they appear. Most of the style guide is actually just a guide to things like punctuation, how to quote things, how to format hyperlinks, that sort of thing. And this is where it gets into ideology a bit.
01:57:48
Speaker
morals, and dogma. It should be understood first and foremost that the Daily Stormer is not a movement site, it is an outreach site, designed to spread the message of nationalism and antisemitism to the masses.
01:58:01
Speaker
This has worked out very well so far, and the site continues to grow month by month, indicating that there is no ceiling on this. As such, though we do mean to keep readers who are already in the know informed and entertained, it should always be considered that the target audience is people who are just becoming aware of this type of thinking.
01:58:18
Speaker
The goal is to continually repeat the same points over and over and over and over again. The reader is at first drawn in by curiosity or the naughty humor and is slowly awakened to reality by repeatedly reading the same points.
01:58:32
Speaker
We are able to keep these points fresh by applying them to current events. I think one of the key words that really stands out to me in this section is the phrase awakened to reality.
01:58:44
Speaker
And I think it's one of the things that you know Sartre is so useful for talking about, but at the same time still fails, I think, to fully realize. In Anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre talks about, don't believe that the anti-Semite is working in good faith.
01:59:02
Speaker
Don't believe that he trusts words. Don't believe that he's actually arguing with you in this kind of real rational sense. But there is fundamentally this commitment to the idea that but they're correct. They've taken this different strategy of discourse,
01:59:17
Speaker
which isn't really anti-discursive, right? It's like against the notion of actually having a conversation and coming to any understanding. It is this kind of bad faith game. They do think that they are correct. They do have this belief that like what they're saying is actually the real way the world is.
01:59:34
Speaker
Right. The thing they don't care about is words. Their beliefs are rock solid. And I think when we we get a lot of analysis of trolling, when people talk about trolling in the news and when people try to understand the growth of these extremist movements as being driven by this behavior called trolling,
01:59:53
Speaker
There is, and again, I think this is what Sartre says the Democrat is doing. There's this commitment to this idea of, oh, they're trolling. That means that they also kind of don't believe the thing. It's bad faith. And so it's not actually genocidal. He's just saying that when really it is genocidal. And in fact, it's worse than they're saying.
02:00:12
Speaker
It is interesting to see how much it feels like this could be written by somebody who read the Sartre book and was like, okay, I'm going to use this as ah as a manual to do antisemitism.
02:00:24
Speaker
This next excerpt, and in future excerpts, I have to warn you, are slurs. And so i suggest as you read, you go a little slowly and use some cautions about which ones you're willing to say out loud versus which ones you're just kind of willing to indicate a vague presence of slurness for.
02:00:44
Speaker
Okay. Oh wow. Profanity should be used sparingly. An overuse of profanity can come across as goofy. Okay, then they write out the n-word.
02:00:55
Speaker
Is okay to use sometimes, but shouldn't be used constantly. The following racial slurs are allowed and advisable. Okay, there are 18 slurs followed by, and then it says and others. So that's not an exhaustive list. It's just an example.
02:01:15
Speaker
you're I suppose you're meant to infer the other advisable slurs. But then there's a specific four that are not allowed. The following are not allowed. And then a specific group of four, three of them. Okay. So there's actually just two. And then there's one that just says any others relating to poop. So there's a couple that like involve references to poop and he just doesn't like that.
02:01:39
Speaker
Yeah. It's just a thing with him. This last one is so fascinating. Okay, I'm going to say this word because it's like not a slur. But I mean, obviously used as a slur, like it's it's used as a slur because but I'm learning about that. Okay, the word is mud, which apparently is a slur for something I don't even know. Yeah. And then he says parenthetically.
02:01:57
Speaker
Parenthetically, he says, I just don't really like this term. It seems too much like SF boomer talk. I have no idea what the fuck he's talking about there. While racial slurs are allowed slash recommended, not every reference to non-white should be a slur and their use should be based on the tone of the article.
02:02:13
Speaker
Generally, when using racial slurs, it should come across as half-joking, like a racist joke that everyone laughs at because it's true. This follows the generally light tone of this site. It should not come across as genuine raging vitriol.
02:02:28
Speaker
That is a turnoff to the overwhelming majority of people. Okay, I think it's complicated to like analyze this list of slurs because obviously we don't want to just say a bunch of slurs.
02:02:39
Speaker
I think it's worth saying if you were to sit down and try to draw up a list of slurs, I doubt you would hit half of these. These are so subculture specific.
02:02:51
Speaker
There's so many specific ones that There's one really fascinating one, which is taking Pakistani, shortening it, and then using that as an anti-Muslim slur is really common, especially in the UK. I mean, but like not really common in the UK. It's really common amongst racists and Islamophobes in the UK.
02:03:10
Speaker
And there's a specific note here that you should use it for non-Pakistani Muslims, because that's funny. So I think what's going on here is, first off, I don't really think he has that much awareness of how vitriolic the site actually does come across as being. That's part of what's so crazy is that the article you sent, like, probably people listening to this podcast can tell, like, it harshed the vibe. Like, yeah, I definitely was more serious for that because I was just like thinking about how horrible that was. Yeah, it's a gut punch. It's really awful.
02:03:46
Speaker
And yeah so see him saying later, you know, this shouldn't come across as genuine vitriol because that's a turnoff. It's true that vitriol is a turnoff. What is your conception of what you're doing now?
02:03:58
Speaker
Yeah, no, he has such an intense understanding of what a normal level of racism is that he genuinely thinks that the kind of content he's putting up on the site is like pretty chill.
02:04:11
Speaker
Yeah. And he thinks it is he thinks it's borderline chill, right? He thinks it's precisely... He thinks it to the extent that it is not chill. It is not chill in a way that is calibrated to be acceptable to normal people, but then radicalizing to just the right slice of people who are sort of ready to be radicalized. His understanding of the pipeline is people go from 4chan to his site.
02:04:37
Speaker
If we read... overwhelming majority of people as secretly saying overwhelming majority of people on 4chan, he is a little correct. Like, it sounds to us wild, the things he's saying, but maybe he doesn't realize, or maybe the thing he does realize and he isn't writing, or maybe he doesn't quite realize is he thinks he's gearing this at normal people, you know, broadly speaking, who are like ready to be radicalized.
02:05:04
Speaker
When really the type of person he's aiming this at is someone in severe mental distress, like we were talking about, right? Somebody who is on 4chan and is experiencing this website For reasons, it's complicated here because you don't want to get into the thing of saying like, oh, all these people who are racist, they're really just unhappy and we need to solve the male loneliness epidemic and if whatever, right? Like none of that is, a lot of that analysis gets kind of trotted out to to answer this kind of thing. And I think it's really weak and bad, but these are the people he's targeting this at, right? People who are isolated, alienated, really going through.
02:05:39
Speaker
he's targeting past Andrew Anglin. Yeah. Okay, here's another excerpt. Prime directive, always blame the Jews for everything. As Hitler says, people will become confused and disheartened if they feel there are multiple enemies.
02:05:53
Speaker
As such, all enemies should be combined into one enemy, which is the Jews. This is pretty much objectively true anyway, but we want to leave out any and all nuance. So no blaming Enlightenment thought, pathological altruism, technology, urbanization, etc. Just blame Jews for everything. This basically includes blaming Jews for the behavior of other non-whites.
02:06:12
Speaker
Of course, it should not be that they are innocent, But the message should always be that if we didn't have the Jews, we could figure out how to deal with non-whites very easily. The same deal with women.
02:06:22
Speaker
Women should be attacked, but there should always be mentioned that if it wasn't for the Jews, they would be acting normally. What should be completely avoided is the sometimes mentioned idea that even if we got rid of the Jews, we would still have all these other problems. The Jews should always be the beginning and the end of every problem, from poverty to poor family dynamics to war to the destruction of the rainforest.
02:06:41
Speaker
This is really interesting because actually one of the pit bits that we didn't talk about in the Sartre book, he explains that this is a big part of antisemitism is what he calls Manichaeism, which is this idea that once you've committed yourself to antisemitism, you are fundamentally saying that all problems in the world are the evils of the Jews.
02:07:00
Speaker
right there's that There's that famous saying that antisemitism is the socialism of fools, that you take this kind of critique of society that the ruling class is exploiting labor and blah, blah, blah, and we have to abolish the ruling class and abolish the class system.
02:07:14
Speaker
You can sort of misdirect that energy into a hatred of the Jews. And Sartre makes this, I think, really good analysis. It's a really good, a stronger point of his book is to say, look, There's a big difference between like Marxist analysis versus this, which is for a Marxist or for somebody who thinks that there's problems that need to be fixed, one of the things you have to do is actually think about how to construct society. You actually have to have like a positive project.
02:07:42
Speaker
Whereas antisemitism is an entirely negative project because it is predicated on this belief that once you get rid of the Jews, all these other problems will solve themselves. So you actually don't have to engage in any acts of constructing anything. You just have to talk about how you're going to get rid of the Jews. And it's interesting here because he seems to be ambivalent about the extent to which he really wants to assert that as empirically true. He just wants to say, we should avoid the idea that we would still have all these problems if it weren't for the Jews.
02:08:15
Speaker
It's not clear whether he actually thinks that you would still have all these problems. He does seem to think things like enlightenment thought, pathological altruism. i mean, okay, the phrase pathological altruism like is fascinating, right? but yeah, all these things which normally that, you know, I think when I encounter these ideas, the enlightenment, altruism, technology, right? These are largely positive values, right?
02:08:44
Speaker
mean, he clearly does seem to think, one, There's a critique of society to be made that the Enlightenment ruined everything, that altruism is ruining everything, the technology and urbanization are ruining everything, etc. But he's saying, downplay that and just blame it on the Jews. So there's like two levels here, because there's a level of his actual ideology, which is dog shit, and then his explanation of...
02:09:06
Speaker
how you should package that for people, which is not the same thing as what he thinks he actually believes. And that yeah, there's there's an interesting interplay between that. Also, when he says, as Hitler says at the start right there, like at another point in the style guide, he specifically says that his strategy and his way of thinking about this is influenced by a particular chapter in Mein Kampf, which you, the writer, should go read right now if you haven't already, which is a nice tie back to the start of this episode, I think. Yeah, that's kind of funny.
02:09:36
Speaker
Oh, another thing Sartre brings up when he is talking about this Manichian point of view is what we usually associate with that word, which is black and white thinking.
02:09:48
Speaker
And guess what the next excerpt is about? 100% black and white. Just as we mustn't present multiple enemies, we mustn't leave any room for nuance in any other area.
Humor and Irony in Spreading Extremism
02:09:59
Speaker
To the extent that it is possible, everything should be painted in completely black and white terms. The basic idea is that everyone on our side is 100% good, and everyone who isn't on our side is 100% evil.
02:10:11
Speaker
Of course, in real life, you can't exactly do anything 100%, but it should be as close to that as possible while still being coherent. Hardcore nationalist parties and activists should always be presented as a virtuous and heroic, while all opposed should be presented as disgusting and evil.
02:10:28
Speaker
The melodramatic nature of it also increases entertainment value. This isn't being dishonest, it is just acknowledging the practical reality that people cannot, as a rule, handle having doubt in their minds.
02:10:40
Speaker
This is an interesting self-conception of the point that Sartre makes about the allure of durability and the difficulty of grappling with real world complexity, where he actually thinks that what he's doing is taking a real situation and just flattening out nuance to make it more palatable.
02:11:08
Speaker
This ties into exactly what he's saying about This should be aimed at people who are ready to be radicalized, but are not quite far enough down the pipeline yet to be able to grapple with kind of the real world complexity. Right. When he says people can't handle having a doubt in their mind, what he really means is that proto-fascists can't handle having a doubt in their mind, which is exactly what Sartre is claiming.
02:11:34
Speaker
Yeah, that there's this hatred of dealing with real world difficulty. The interesting thing is I think places where my political beliefs I think engage with the least amount of nuance is what I think we should do to these people and how incorrect I think white nationalism and Nazism is as an ideology, right? I don't actually think it's the case that there's nuance in everything. I think this is straightforwardly bad and evil.
02:11:59
Speaker
And with very different views about how to approach this or sort of what it means or whatever, like, yeah, I think it is correct to say this is as an ideology, this is 100% evil. And the approach to doing this is 100% evil.
02:12:18
Speaker
So it's not that there's always nuance, but this is an interesting vindication of Sartre's point about this sort of purposeful decision to say truth is hard and uncomfortable.
02:12:29
Speaker
living in a pluralist society is hard and uncomfortable sometimes because there are people who are different than you and want to do things different than you. And you have to kind of come to this understanding of how you're going to live together, which is not always easy. And it's not always the case that conflicts are just one side is right and one side is wrong, right?
02:12:47
Speaker
So of course, for the anti-Semite, you just reject that and say, no, it really is not nuanced at all and just pin all of the evil on the Jews. Okay, this next excerpt to me is the ideological core of this document.
02:13:03
Speaker
The title of this excerpt is Lulls? spelled L-U-L-Z. The tone of the site should be light. Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, non-ironic hatred.
02:13:18
Speaker
The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as self-deprecating humor.
02:13:29
Speaker
I am a racist making fun of stereotypes of racists because I don't take myself super seriously. This is obviously a ploy and I do actually want to gas slur for Jewish people, but that's neither here nor there.
02:13:43
Speaker
Serious articles are fine and can be written and published with absolute seriousness. However, articles which take a serious tone should not include racial slurs or even rude language about other races.
02:13:57
Speaker
This line about the unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not, but I really do want to do genocide. People are still falling for this today. i think I told... it wasn't on pod. It wasn't on pod? Helen, I can't believe you didn't do it on pod. It wasn't on the podcast when I was talking about before the understanding of him as a crazy Nazi.
02:14:22
Speaker
Elon Musk had that biography. The Walter Isaacson biography came out, and I had like extended family members read it and say, oh he's a really interesting guy. He's really worth reading and knowing about his life. Certainly, he has some unsavory things, and specifically talk about places where he says he says stuff to be provocative. So this is like an example that's on the front of my mind, but This is something people fall for all the time. Oh, he's just provoking. he's just He's just joking. He's not being serious. And the absolute license that that gives you to say whatever because, oh, it's a joke, I think also explains why so many like stand-up comedians are also totally dog shit, right? like
02:15:05
Speaker
We've somehow created this society in which being a joke absolves responsibility for the meaning of what you're saying. And he's saying, yeah, we should do this because it it will give us this cover. And yeah, of course we want to actually do all this stuff. Like we're very serious about actually wanting to do this stuff. We should just make sure we realize that's not going to win us any points. We should pretend we're joking, or we should actually say it in a way where we're actually joking and we also mean it, because you can joke about stuff and mean it at the same time.
02:15:37
Speaker
Sartre's discussion of anti-Semites playing with language, I really wonder how core that was to people's understanding of the work at the time.
02:15:50
Speaker
It feels very heightened in relevance now. What we're seeing here, this irony is to some degree anticipated, but it seems so much more intense, so much more a core part of the right-wing strategy now than it has been at any prior point Yeah, that's where I think it's really, that's why I said earlier, like this reads like somebody read Sartre and then was like, I'm going to use this as a manual for antisemitism where obviously Sartre is making a clearly negative portrayal and criticism of antisemitism. I'm not saying that, you know,
02:16:25
Speaker
you you would obviously have to completely miss or just ignore Sartre's moral arguments about what the problems with all these things are. But it is interesting to see the way that this has become so just the text of what they're saying is this understanding that Sartre gives. And I think certainly I'm not an expert historically on right wing movements at the time, but I don't recall ever seeing this kind of direct owning of, yes, we're using, we're weaponizing irony in this way. We're weaponizing games with language in this way. Okay, next excerpt.
02:17:02
Speaker
Dehumanization. There should be a conscious agenda to dehumanize the enemy, to the point where people are ready to laugh at their deaths. So it isn't clear that we are doing this, as that would be a turnoff to most normal people.
02:17:14
Speaker
We rely on lulls. Again, if the article is entirely serious, it should not contain dehumanizing language. Dehumanization is extremely important, but it must be done within the confines of lulls.
02:17:28
Speaker
Yeah, so I didn't really elaborate on this because I'm assuming, you know, we're kind of assuming people know what it is, but lolz, this L-U-L-Z word is a like internet slang, right? That first originated as the abbreviation laugh out loud or l LOL and then kind of laughs are lulls and then you misspell that as lulls.
02:17:47
Speaker
But it does have this connotation of kind of emptiness and kind of just like a lightness ah and like this sort of ironic levity as opposed to like a real humor, if that makes sense. Like they're not saying use humor.
02:18:02
Speaker
There's a reason he's saying lulls and not humor. And it's because lulls doesn't exactly just mean jokes. It means this kind of just ironically detached internet attitude.
02:18:15
Speaker
And it has a hostility to it also that just lulls doesn't. If you look at, say, Encyclopedia Dramatica or some other chan or written description of what the term lulls mean, there' there's a specific phrase that they'll be into, which is, it's a corruption of LOLs.
02:18:37
Speaker
I think that's appealing for edgy reasons, but it's also a little bit revealing of what the term means. Interesting. This is our last excerpt, and then we're going to get into a coda, and then we're going to get into a coda to the coda.
02:18:52
Speaker
It's illegal to promote violence on the internet. At the same time, it's totally important to normalize the acceptance of violence as an an eventuality slash inevitability.
02:19:04
Speaker
I'm extremely careful about never suggesting violence. I go beyond legal requirements in America. However, when someone does something violent, it should be made light of, laughed at.
02:19:14
Speaker
For example, Andras Braevic should be forever referred to as a heroic freedom fighter. This is great because people think you must be joking, but there is a part of their brain that doesn't think that.
02:19:25
Speaker
When it comes to more immediate violent trends, I'm slightly more careful. The burnings of migrant centers is one of those things. I'm slightly hesitant to say patriotic heroes burn another migrant center, given that this could be construed as calling for more arson, whereas it can't be construed that I'm calling for Breivik to kill more brats.
02:19:45
Speaker
Dylan Roof I have labeled Diro, and though I offer explanations for what he did, i never condemn him. also think it is very funny to say that he was simply defending himself when he was attacked in a church by black... I don't know if this is a slur.
02:20:01
Speaker
Don't say it. Trying to steal his iPhone. um Yeah, that sort of silly humor really bites at the Jew pure evil narrative.
02:20:12
Speaker
I'm going to bravely say that I don't think it does bite at the pure evil narrative. I really don't think it does. Yeah, I saved this for the last because I think it's the most pure expression of the evil that Anglin and his vision represent.
02:20:31
Speaker
Just pure violence, pure contempt for the victims of that violence, pure hatred. It's all there. Yeah. And at the same time, there's such a stupidity to this. know, he's such an idiot.
02:20:47
Speaker
There is a kind of victim complex situation happening with a lot of people like this, with this kind of person, with this kind of consciously alt-right, consciously you know trying to recruit Nazis kind of person, which is this imagination that recruiting Nazis is something difficult or requires some kind of intellectual understanding.
02:21:13
Speaker
And the thing is, it really isn't. And this is, again, part of that Sartre thing about difficulty of truth and the temptation towards durability that you know, the the durability of the stone again, right?
02:21:31
Speaker
Which is that it's actually not that complicated. All of these games he thinks he's playing aren't doing the things he thinks he's doing, and he actually doesn't need to be as smart as he thinks he is in order to accomplish what he has, because there's a lot of different material forces that are driving people towards these extreme ideologies.
02:21:49
Speaker
and He thinks he's locked in this complex, difficult, ideological chess game when really he's just sort of playing.
02:22:03
Speaker
It's not a chess game. You know that game they have at arcades sometimes where you just like stack up coins and there's a thing that pushes them and then sometimes some coins fall over and it's just a matter of like putting enough coins that the coins tumble and it has nothing to do with like you or the strategy you're doing. It's just...
02:22:18
Speaker
There's a material force. It's much closer to that kind of game, which anyone with enough coins can play.
02:22:26
Speaker
That's what he's playing. And he thinks he's some brilliant. He does. He thinks he's a chess master. He thinks he's a spider weaving some elaborate web. And really, he is just the dumbest man imaginable, tricking ah bunch of equally dumb.
02:22:46
Speaker
Oh my god, I have so much contempt for these people. Here's the coda.
Charlottesville Rally and Anglin's Reflection
02:22:50
Speaker
The Unite the Right rally, which occurred in Charlottesville in 2017, was heavily promoted by the Daily Stormer.
02:22:59
Speaker
So this is the rally where you had people marching around with tiki torches yelling, Jews will not replace us. A Nazi killed a protester, Heather Heyer, at this event with a car and injured a bunch of other people.
02:23:14
Speaker
The president went out and said, oh, there were very fine people on both sides. And for a bit, it seemed like a huge victory for the far right.
02:23:25
Speaker
But ultimately, it turned out to be a complete disaster. It started a wave of deplatformings, of lawsuits, of law enforcement investigations.
02:23:40
Speaker
And these destroy the influence of a bunch of the most prominent neo-Nazis at the time. including Andrew Anglin. The Daily Stormer loses its hosting services, and it's now at a different yeah URL than it used to be.
02:23:57
Speaker
And its traffic, absolutely craters. He posted the following in February 2025. He's the only writer for the site now, by the way.
02:24:08
Speaker
This is a picture of Elvis? Yeah, late career Elvis. Late Elvis. And then the caption is, i think I'm ready to wrap this up. Yeah, so this is a post about how he's quitting the news business.
02:24:21
Speaker
And then a few days later, he puts this up. On Sunday, I wrote an piece explaining I was quitting the weekly news. That was just a big joke.
02:24:33
Speaker
I was just trolling you I'm just going to keep writing inane items about pointless news updates until I die in poverty from liver disease at the age of 61, at which point management of the website will be turned over to my brain tumor. Okay.
02:24:48
Speaker
In June of 2025, he posts this. Okay, the title is Thank You. Oh my god. There's a picture of him. He's in his living room, surrounded by, i don't know how else to put this, but weeb shit.
02:25:07
Speaker
um There's so many pink haired girls. Yeah, there's like that's too generic a term. Being a weeb doesn't make you a Nazi. i don't want to hate on weebs.
02:25:21
Speaker
There's like all these pink-haired... dolls and posters and like things on his wall that are all the kind of very intentionally young child-looking anime-style pink-haired girls.
02:25:40
Speaker
Did I mention he did some pedophilia while he was in the Philippines? I don't think I did. I don't think you did. i think I assumed that, though, on the basis of some of the other stuff you said.
02:25:52
Speaker
i know that there's probably a lot more specific terminology to describe what this is that I do not know. And listeners don't write in. i don't want to know.
02:26:04
Speaker
And then the text is, i just want to thank everyone and say sorry to everyone. i was given a gift and a lot of responsibility and I didn't do enough with it. I should have done so much more. I owed you guys more than I gave and I regret so much not giving more.
02:26:18
Speaker
I hope that people remember the good things I did. i think I did some good things. I am so thankful to God for any good he enabled me to do and anyone I was able to help in any way. Thank you. And I love you all.
02:26:29
Speaker
Okay. And then the next day he posts this. So it's a picture of him holding a cigarette next to a no smoking sign. Guys, I wouldn't troll you into thinking I'd killed myself.
02:26:40
Speaker
And this is a whole article about how he's actually too epic and based to even consider killing himself or joking about it. And anyway, if he joked about it, it would make people think that the The Jews were going to kill him or something, blah, bla blah, blah, blah. blah So the point is, he's clearly on this cycle of disgust, boredom, disappointments, posting, I fucking quit, fuck this shit, I'm out, and then walking it back. He has said in various posts that he no longer gets any income from the site, really.
02:27:10
Speaker
It's just his blog now. He gets to wallow in the triviality of it. The articles aren't really written in the house style anymore. The front page is no longer in the sort of gawker-ish format.
02:27:23
Speaker
I believe he's currently in hiding from various court judgments that would require him to turn over far more money than he has. So he's not doing great. Coda to the coda.
02:27:34
Speaker
I don't think this is powwow circumstance in our previous episode where our subject is defeated but wins a cultural victory. Andrew Anglin got his ass kicked in the cultural arena. But i would say 4chan won a cultural victory.
02:27:50
Speaker
The same style that Andrew Anglin derived from 4chan is now dominant in the right. Certainly, this guy is not even ah exercising a sort of outsider leadership influence, right? I think if he were, he would be a cabinet member now because we are seeing that like...
02:28:13
Speaker
that's That's where the podcasters who, right, they they lead the FBI now. that's like so But you're right, like this perspective on things is dominant in so many circles that wield a lot of political power.
02:28:30
Speaker
I wanted to play a clip that we both saw it earlier this week. What do you see as the greatest threat to Christian nationalism as it's, as it's trying to make its roots?
02:28:43
Speaker
Christians. How so? Christians are gay, fake and gay, uh, to be more precise. Uh, Christianity is a feminized religion. Yeah. This is exactly this perspective where you are saying something.
02:29:01
Speaker
I mean, and I, I, We talked about this and you were like this when he's saying Christians are fake and gay. This is a 4chan reference like this is like it's almost like in the same way that when Sartre uses situation, it's a term of art like for 4chan or is fake and gay is a term of art almost right. It doesn't mean absolutely fake and it doesn't mean gay. It means fake and gay. It's ah it's a it's a it's a combination.
02:29:23
Speaker
This is a clip from a trailer for a YouTube series about Christian nationalism. And the person saying that Christianity is fake and gay is Webin, who's a Christian nationalist. The usual term is dominionist preacher.
02:29:41
Speaker
Just as you're saying, he's signaling an allegiance the sort of 4chan style of the right wing. Okay, here's a funny thing. Even though the style is dominant,
02:29:52
Speaker
it is by nature alienating. You have to exist within a specific pocket of the right in order to be able to relate to people who are using this 4chan trolling style.
02:30:06
Speaker
So for example, Andrew Anglin would probably not listen to this clip and be into it, even though they use the same styles. And in fact, this clip got dunked on so hard by right-wingers that they ended up deleting the YouTube video and re-uploading it with this section taken out.
02:30:28
Speaker
Now who's faking gay? Right? Owned. Yeah, absolutely beautiful. Fascinating. He's part of this whole pocket of Dominionist preachers who use this meme lord style.
02:30:43
Speaker
And you have other Dominionists like Dreher who will like review their books and be like, I find all this meme shit really weird. If there is good news to be had, it's that the right wing is very invested in ah style that is alienating to people who are more than one trillionth of a degree away from them.
02:31:05
Speaker
Yeah. and I think all these guys will continue to have these same arcs. Like every time you read about people who were big in these movements a couple years ago, like they often have these same kinds of stories because again, yeah they think they are playing some big game where they're outmaneuvering and they're, and they're going to end up dominant.
02:31:28
Speaker
But really, they are just engaging in these easy critiques of society that it's easy to get people to follow, but to a certain extent, and then it's alienating to people, and then you get kind of churned through this machine and then spit out, right? I think part of the thing we like to talk about on this podcast of the reproduction of bigotry and how does it get reproduced, right? it It needs to burn through these guys to some extent, because society does change and things do change and the boundaries of what's acceptable move, whether that's in the good direction or the bad direction, these guys become incorrectly placed. And so they're they're sitting at this this right place, right time to engage in the right kind of
02:32:14
Speaker
emotive politics to get some followers for a while but you're gonna end up in your living room writing a suicide note and then writing the next day ha ha I was just trolling you over and over over and over forever and you are fooling you yourself if you think you can play this kind of game and not end that way Okay, so I think it's time to deploy our scientific rating system on our subject, Andrew Anglin.
02:32:40
Speaker
We rate the people whose texts we read on three-point scale, one to five. We rate their ferocity. We rate their... arrogance and we rate their gullibility so i would like to know where you think andrew england is on ferocity i think he's got to be a five we talked about the highest we've gone so far is four i've given three fours you've given actually we've both given three fours to leacock to cato and to enoch powell
02:33:13
Speaker
all of whom were pretty openly talking about the need for subjugation and the the necessity of taking away people's rights for control control in different ways.
02:33:23
Speaker
None of them talked about openly, here are the correct slurs to use in order to enact the project of putting them in gas chambers. So I think we need to go up from four. I don't know if I want to go to six yet, but certainly five.
02:33:37
Speaker
I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to break the six seal. Okay. I'm giving him a six. If you're going to break six, then I will join you. i will bravely stand by. Because I really think like it has to be it has to be at that level.
02:33:52
Speaker
Okay. Arrogance, Helen. I think arrogance is also a five. like He's not arrogant in the like British elitist way that we saw with Enoch Powell, or to some extent, although he's not British, with Leacock.
02:34:08
Speaker
He's not arrogant in the sense of like Cato. He's not a brilliant rhetorician, but he thinks he's outplaying everyone. He thinks in his style guide that he has written some brilliant, insightful manifesto for how to enact racism as opposed to a what it is, which is this like nakedly disgusting tract. So I'm also going five here.
02:34:32
Speaker
I agree. Five. Okay. And our final metric, gullibility, Helen. This one's a little tough for me because I think on some level he does model the cynical user of anti-Semitism or really the cynical use of bigotry and bigoted language towards the manipulation of other people that like a low gullibility score is meant to be But at the same time, think he's pretty gullible.
02:35:01
Speaker
i couldn't see going below a three for him, but I think I would go higher even. think I would say four. Okay, I think I'm going to give him a three on this. So this puts me at 15 for him, and it puts you at a 14.
02:35:17
Speaker
And want to be clear, one of the things we've been kind of waiting for is our first 15, but explicitly carve out that it doesn't count as ah as the first 15 if you're making up a deficit in one category by being a six on another. So we still haven't hit a perfect 15 yet.
02:35:33
Speaker
This is sort of a coward's 15. ah Agreed. But yeah, I just, I do think there's some awareness. I think there's some awareness of a cynical use of bigotry. He's not, right? Powell was a five. Powell just fully bonded everything he was saying. And he was committed to I am saying what I believe, I'm saying what I think is right. And you've just completely fallen for this horrifically racist view of the world. And now you're saying this horrifically racist things.
02:36:02
Speaker
eng England is carving out at times he he has some play with like, okay, here's the things I think we need to say. And here's the things I really believe. And so he understands to some extent that this is about tricking people.
02:36:13
Speaker
But it is largely towards right, it's it's not the kind of tricking people where it's, oh i don't really care about all this. I just want to manipulate, right? Like there's there's a certain level of low gullibility, right? It seems clear, like Leacock, I gave a one and you gave a two for gullibility. And I think both of us had this understanding that, yeah, what he's saying is really awful and bigoted and he is genuinely um misogynist.
02:36:34
Speaker
But there's a certain extent where it feels like he doesn't really care and he's really interested in his own power. and I think Andrew, with some of the asides about, oh, I really do want to gas these people is like,
02:36:45
Speaker
he He is genuinely falling for, he does actually think to some extent that the Jews are responsible for the downfall of of everything. I think he has a bipartite mind, to be honest.
02:36:57
Speaker
Yeah. It wouldn't surprise me if sometimes he experiences complete conviction and sometimes it's all about accruing power and he really doesn't have any sense of its truth or not.
02:37:11
Speaker
Yeah. And I think this is one of those interesting dynamics that we see. There's our there's a really good novel from probably his most among his most realist novels um from Kurt Vonnegut called Mother Night about a guy who was a spy for, i think, the English...
02:37:31
Speaker
who went undercover to write Nazi propaganda, who then after the war gets like put in the international court for being a Nazi propagandist.
02:37:45
Speaker
And saying, well, no, I was just pretending because i was a spy. I was really fighting for, you know, the good guys. And Vonnegut says like this, he's like, this is one of my few novels that has just a direct moral. He's like, most of my books are more complicated, but this one has a pretty direct moral. And he says it pretty early on. The moral is you are who you pretend to be. So be careful who you pretend to be.
02:38:06
Speaker
And this is one of the things that Anglin, I think, has fully fallen for. He thinks it's possible to maintain this kind of ironic distance to like pretend to be one person and really believe something else. And this is one place where Sartre is totally correct. Like these guys don't have any conception of what truth is because you don't just get to like know what the truth is and know it's bad. I mean, of the people who I've known who have more seriously used, like I've known some people who have used 4chan more seriously and then have sort of stopped, right? I know someone who pretty directly was like, yeah, i used to be a red pillar. And then luckily I kind of realized like, oh, that's terrible.
02:38:40
Speaker
And there's this belief that you can use it with this kind of ironic distance of, okay, I'm going on 4chan and I know it's terrible and I'll just keep in mind that it's terrible, but it's it kind of doesn't work that way. Like once you start cooking your brain with that stuff,
02:38:52
Speaker
you're doing it. and And there is such a thing as like irony and doing things ironically, but there are certain things that you just can't do ironically. And like being a misogynist, calling a woman a bitch, like if you yell at a woman that she's a bitch, there's no such thing as doing that ironically or not, right? You're just doing it.
02:39:10
Speaker
Okay, let's close out there. If you are interested in supporting the show and in getting us to produce bonus content, which we would love to do,
02:39:21
Speaker
or upgrading our sound quality, or otherwise improving our output, you should definitely check out our Patreon and subscribe to it. You should recommend this show to your friends.
02:39:32
Speaker
You should rate it on podcasting platforms. Anything else, Helen? I think that's it. ah If you do subscribe, we will release the episode early. So if you are dying to hear the next episode.
02:39:46
Speaker
We started this podcast on very important day, the anniversary Charlie Kirk's death. And now we're going to end this episode with another moment of respect for Charlie. We started it on the memorial of his death, which was his birthday, I thought. I don't give a shit.
02:40:03
Speaker
We are Charlie!
02:40:10
Speaker
We'll fight for the gospel