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19. Nightmare Chess Rotation
56 Plays2 days ago
Helen and Sarah look at Things That Matter, the racist and pseudointellectual best-of collection from Pulitzer prize winning op-ed columnist Charles Krauthammer.
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Transcript
Introduction to Charles Krauthammer
00:00:00
Speaker
In this episode, we talk about Charles Krauthammer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning racist and op-ed columnist who wrote for the Washington Post for over three decades.
Krauthammer's Writing and Themes
00:00:09
Speaker
We look at work from his self-selected Best Of collection, Things That Matter, which deals with his worship of denial, his false erudition, and his racial theories.
00:00:20
Speaker
Along the way, we learn about how op-ed columnists in America launder noxious politics into the polite mainstream. We're looking forward to showing you our most irritating subject yet.
00:00:33
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.
Hosts' Critique and Humor
00:00:41
Speaker
The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
00:00:48
Speaker
Is Trump to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! listen, you. I'll fuck you in your goddamn face and you'll stay
Podcast and Hosts Introduction
00:00:57
Speaker
plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
00:01:05
Speaker
some level of masochism.
00:01:09
Speaker
This is Helen. This is Sarah. Welcome to Odium Symposium, a podcast about the production of bigotry.
Promotion and Community Engagement
00:01:16
Speaker
First, we want to give a thank you to our new Odium connoisseurs. So thank you to Bit of Hope. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
00:01:24
Speaker
And thank you to Hazard Pay. Thank you.
Impact on Modern Journalism
00:01:28
Speaker
Just a reminder, you can join our Patreon at patreon.com slash odiumsymposium for $5 a month. We'll read your message on the show, you'll get early access to episodes, and we're going to continue to produce connoisseur-only episodes from time to time. Mostly, though, you're just being nice to us.
00:01:44
Speaker
Also, all listeners are welcome to join our Discord. You can find a link for that in the description. Helen, have you heard of Charles Krauthammer? No. Oh, okay. I'm excited. this is going to be so good.
00:01:57
Speaker
He is someone who mastered the op-ed form. His fame and acclaim as a practitioner of the op-ed form were such that if you pop open the Washington Post or in the New York Times or the LA Times or whatever op-ed page, the regular columnists you see are quite likely to owe at least a stylistic debt to him and probably an intellectual one
Krauthammer's Background
00:02:19
Speaker
as well.
00:02:19
Speaker
I only read op-eds from Adrian Childs, so i'm I'm going to just imagine that he's that kind of guy and be happy. and We can end the episode here, right? Absolutely. I'm so excited to disappoint you.
00:02:32
Speaker
Helen, I don't need to make your life any worse. Goodbye. Goodbye, sweet princess. yeah God, I love Adrian Childs. Like, I really, we should try to reach out. He would be great to have on the pod.
00:02:45
Speaker
you You know who I'm talking about, right? Yeah, yeah, I know who you're talking about. he's He's the guy who's like, I'm tired of hot dogs that are a little too crispy. Yeah, he's the guy. He writes incredible op-eds for like The Guardian, a couple other places. And he's he's really, in my mind, mastered the op-ed. The one that I always remember that's my favorite is, I have a question for delivery men. Do you need to use my bathroom?
00:03:09
Speaker
Yeah, there's like a gentleness. There's an everyday quality to everything he does. We're not going to get that here. No, i'm I'm imagining not. I mean, this is Odium Symposium. We should do Child's Symposium. That should be a thing. The Good Vibes podcast. Yeah, that would be like the the cozy core version of the podcast.
00:03:28
Speaker
All right. So the thing that got me interested in doing an episode on Krauthammer is this 2013 book,
Book Analysis and Commercial Success
00:03:34
Speaker
which I'm going to send you the cover of. Okay, I'm stealing myself. Oh my god. Okay, things that matter, three decades of passions, pastimes, and politics, and then a picture of a guy who, i don't know how to describe how this guy looks without like being unnecessarily mean. Like my first thought was like, if I saw this guy in a bar, I would like cover my drink and walk away.
00:03:58
Speaker
But he doesn't actually look creepy in that way. it's He just like looks like he's about to like explain something to me that I just don't care about. Yeah, there's something a little bit pretentious just to his appearance on this cover. He's looking at you directly at the camera with sort of like this smug look. He's got a big book, you can't tell what it is, open in front of him, and a notepad that he's been taking notes on the book in. He looks very conservative. He looks kind of stuck up pretentious. Yeah, like I don't think there's anything about his like specifically about his appearance except that he's like really trying to look important here. He's really trying to look serious.
00:04:34
Speaker
This book was definitely a hit. It sold over a million copies.
Writing Style and Influence
00:04:39
Speaker
It was the number one nonfiction bestseller for four straight weeks. Both of us spent a bunch of time just trolling around shitty used bookstores for material. All love to shitty used bookstores.
00:04:50
Speaker
I've seen several copies of this while doing that. This consists of about 350 pages of his past op-eds and also some speeches he gave.
00:05:01
Speaker
I did a lot of other reading about this guy, but I will almost exclusively present material that's from this book because this is his big retrospective at the end of his career and what he chooses to put or not put in it says a lot. So first I'm going to give you some background. He was born in 1950.
00:05:19
Speaker
His parents were both Jewish refugees from the Nazis. I couldn't find much about his mother's background, but she fled from Belgium to New York, and while she was, for some reason, in Cuba, she met Charles's father. His father was an originally Austro-Hungarian lawyer.
00:05:39
Speaker
I don't know exactly, like, where the money came from, but the family is filthy rich.
Political Views and Criticism
00:05:46
Speaker
So Charles grows up rolling in cash, and that just never stops for him.
00:05:52
Speaker
His parents go live mostly in Montreal, and he does his undergraduate at McGill. And it's there that he has his first experience as a journalist.
00:06:02
Speaker
So this is from the introduction to Things That Matter. My first published article was a short, a pompous editorial in the McGill Daily titled End of the Monolith, I got to write the equally pompous headline because I happened to be my own editor. It was a month into my senior year at McGill and my first day on the job as editor-in-chief.
00:06:22
Speaker
A week earlier, the student council had fired the previous editor on the grounds that the paper's mindless, humorless Maoism had rendered it unreadable. Yes, Maoism, Stalinism being too moderate and lacking in romance. This was after all the 60s. A search was launched for someone not loony left, the roulette wheel spun my way.
00:06:45
Speaker
By today's standards, I would have been considered a centrist, but on a 1969 campus that was considered a fairly exotic, somewhat reactionary political orientation, so I decided to issue a manifesto clarifying the new management's creed. It was simple.
00:06:58
Speaker
The paper was now open to all points of view. The Daily is under the present editorship because it is committed to publish a pluralist paper, I wrote. Not only would dissenting and critical analyses be actively solicited, but henceforth newsworthiness would be determined by no single ideological standard, or as I phrased it, by no one historical paradigm.
00:07:18
Speaker
Thomas Kuhn having made the notion of paradigm shift too voguish for any self-respecting 19-year-old to resist. Wow. It's so funny that these ideological diversity guys always somehow write exactly same thing over and and over. Like, you'd think that the ideological diversity could maybe produce some...
00:07:36
Speaker
wow it's so funny that these ideological diversity guys always somehow write exactly the same thing over and over and over like you'd think that the ideological diversity could maybe produce some actual diversity but it's always the same thing it's always the accusation of like the campuses are loony left i mean like even loony left like know it's really so boring you know what really jumps out at me here he's a conservative diversity ire Like from his very first experience, like they fired the head of the student newspaper because he was too left. And they were like, we got to go get a conservative to write opinions and edit for us. Is that not exactly how all these mediocrities get hired at like all the legacy media outlets?
00:08:23
Speaker
Yeah, but they're always pitched as, like, these diversity hires, but then it's, like, because you actually want that to be the only published point of view. Like, I don't... I don't know. I don't really buy that... I mean, okay, I'm not an expert in the history of McGill. Like, maybe somebody can say, like, actually, McGill really was whatever, whatever, but I don't really buy that, like, McGill campus in the 60s was actually this, like...
00:08:49
Speaker
powerhouse ideological powerhouse of Maoism to be clear when I say diversity higher what I actually mean is just like he was a recipient of wingnut welfare or just like you know the many benefits that accrue to someone who's willing to put like bigoted and conservative shit out there people who are higher than them in the power structure look down and they're like oh yeah this is the guy we want running stuff I already hate this guy.
00:09:14
Speaker
And like, you know, I feel like we actually both do have this like ideological diversity in people we talk to, right? Like I'll talk to like Maoists, but also Marxist-Leninists and also anarchists and Hoxists. Like there's all these different perspectives that I'll listen to. I'm not committed to one paradigm.
00:09:30
Speaker
But I doubt this guy could tell you, like, what the difference between Maoism and Stalinism is even now, right? Like, his his gloss on it is that Maoism is, like, more romantic, which is extremely racist, by the way, right? Like, to say that it's more romance, all you're saying is, like...
00:09:48
Speaker
There's this layer of exotic orientalism to it. That's not actually the actual difference between Maoism and Stalinism. This guy could not give you an account of the Sino-Soviet split, I guarantee that. So... Yeah, I don't know.
00:10:01
Speaker
Bullshit. I'm calling bullshit on this guy already. I didn't clip it, but he does have an article where he describes the French Revolution, which he's very opposed to, as essentially communist in nature. He doesn't actually say the word communism, but it's pretty clear there's just like one model of a society he doesn't like, and it's communism, just broadly.
00:10:21
Speaker
When he talks about the loony left, he really does mean like the left wing of the National Assembly in the revolutionary France, right? Yeah. He goes on a little more to describe how he arrived at his enlightened centrist point of view.
00:10:37
Speaker
This devotion to pluralism reflected my aversion to the politics of certainty, so prevalent at the time, and in particular to the politics of the extreme. I had learned that lesson early. At McGill, I witnessed a mass rally to turn the university, then considered by the left a bastion of Anglo-imperialism, into a French-speaking school for the local proletariat.
00:10:57
Speaker
At the head of the march, linked arm-in-arm were two men, McGill's most radical Marxist professor and the leader of a neo-fascist anti-immigrant popular front. It was for me a seminal moment, visual, tangible evidence of the ultimate convergence of left and right, an object lesson in the virtues of ideological moderation, and my goodbye if there ever was a hello to political romanticism.
00:11:19
Speaker
I set my own political course toward philosophical skepticism and political tolerance. That didn't mean splitting differences or straddling some ideological midpoint. It meant viewing certainty with suspicion and acknowledging with both regret and resolve the imperfectibility of man, the fallibility of institutions, and the tragic rather than redemptive nature of history.
Career Shifts and Privilege
00:11:38
Speaker
Okay, I don't want to trust his account of what happened, but... This idea of the populist sort of push towards turning McGill into a French proletarian school that's also linked to this anti-immigrant sentiment, like I do think that you can talk about the overlap between these kinds of Marxist and these kind of nationalist tendencies.
00:12:02
Speaker
Like there is something to be studied here, right? It's not necessarily so clear-cut. Yeah, it's a real thing. But I mean, like one of the lessons you can draw from it is like, yeah, some leftists suck. And notice, by the way, that he's talking about this neo-fascist and this Marxist professor marching together as the fusion between right and left. And implicitly, what we're to understand from this is that you want to condemn the left and as well as the right but the right just starts off sucking ass that's part of the assumptions behind this whole scenario and like yeah he doesn't reflect on that at all he doesn't think about that he's just like yeah i see i see some elements of the left that like reflect what is going to be his side oh that makes the left bad
00:12:52
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's exactly, it's like, there's this idea of what he wants to do is totally depoliticize it and just say, like, oh, this is about, like, extremism and certainty, right? And these guys love to talk about how, like, oh, it it's certainty is really the problem, right? Like, and it's like, no, there are actually some things that I'm certain of, right? And I think that we actually, like, have to have a politics of certainty about some things, such as, for instance, being, like, pro-immigrant, like, that is but that is a matter of certainty, right? Like, the dignity of human life, that is a matter of certainty, right? Like, It's totally empty to just be like, oh, you have to understand like radical uncertainty, right? In some ways, that's the terror of the like postmodern neo-Marxist that these guys are always talking about is this like complete relativism, right? Like that's actually a really extreme point of view to take such a like everything is uncertain, everything is relative position.
00:13:42
Speaker
But of course, that's not what he means. He just means like, I'm better than these people and I'm smart and cool and these people are stupid and I have a reactionary tendency, but that's because like I'm better than everybody else. So I'm seeing this guy's game.
00:13:55
Speaker
This is the end of his writing career for a while. After he graduates, he goes to Oxford and he studies political theory for a few years and then he doesn't phrase it this way.
00:14:06
Speaker
He puts it rather loftily. He gets bored. And so he decides, I'm going to go to Harvard Medical School, which he can because he's filthy rich. So he goes.
00:14:18
Speaker
didn't pack. I left immediately to take up what I was sure would be my life's work, the practical, the real, the indisputably worthy work of medicine. There I spent the next seven years, a nice biblical sum. Oh,
00:14:32
Speaker
You okay there? Just like huge jack off. Like, oh my God. i aite Oh my God. A nice biblical sum. Four as a medical student. Three as a psychiatric resident at Massachusetts General Hospital. Oh my God. Psychiatry? Okay. Okay.
00:14:48
Speaker
Medicine had not been my first choice. I had long preferred the graceful lines of physics to the ragged edges of biology. But at 16, I'd come to the realization that I didn't have what it took to do important work in theoretical physics, namely genius. Ugh.
00:15:05
Speaker
Alright, hang on, i need to pause here. This is by far our most purely annoying subject for the podcast so far. i hate this fucking guy so much. He's so obnoxious. He's so smug. He's so pretentious.
00:15:19
Speaker
A friend in my special relativity class who had come to the same awful conclusion about his own intellectual capacities told me that he was changing his major because he didn't want to end up testing steel for General Motors.
00:15:31
Speaker
The great physicist Max Planck did once tell John Maynard Keynes that he had thought of studying economics but decided it was too difficult. That I take as an exercise in either humor or good manners. Not thirsting to test steel, I chose medicine. i have no regrets. It was challenging and enlarging. I absorbed more knowledge in those seven years than at any other time in my life, although it did turn out that I wasn't quite the perfect fit for psychiatry either. In my first year at Mass General, I discovered that all freshman residents were required to attend a weekly group therapy session. Seeing this as pointless, I refused. This did not go over well with management. Around week seven, I was called into the department chairman's office. He asked me why I had not been attending.
00:16:09
Speaker
Because I came here to give therapy, not get it, I said. You're just in denial, he protested loudly. Of course I am, sir. It's the best defense mechanism ever invented. Why, I'm a master of denial. I should be a professor. I could give a course in denial.
00:16:22
Speaker
I was enjoying the riff, but the chief was not. He cut me short. Attend the sessions or leave the program. Having few marketable skills and fewer prospects, I attended. But for the remaining 20 or so weeks, I said nary a word in the group.
00:16:33
Speaker
I was occasionally asked why.
Therapy Views and Self-Awareness
00:16:35
Speaker
i am in denial, I explained. This is like so annoying. The reasons that psychiatrists and therapists in general, psychologists, like, need to attend therapy themselves seem obvious.
00:16:49
Speaker
You need to be aware of your own shit in order to, like, be able to, like, do therapeutic work. And... Like, it can be upsetting to be a therapist. And if you are processing your own stuff that you haven't thought about or dealt with in therapy, that is like while you're trying to give someone else therapy, like that's really bad. So you need to like actually like be aware of yourself in some way. And in a way that this guy doesn't seem to be at all. Alternative explanation of the situation. You can just be snotty.
00:17:18
Speaker
You're rich. You can get away with it. What is he talking about? Having few prospects. I felt like I had to stay in the therapy group. He doesn't need prospects. Well, okay. When he says prospects, he doesn't mean like, I'm going to be on the street starving. There's no way that would happen, right? What he means is that he doesn't want to be a fail son.
00:17:39
Speaker
And he's like running out of time. He's already tried a bunch of things. He's tried like being a physicist, right? He's like realized like, oh, if I try to do something and it turns out that I'm just kind of shit at it,
00:17:51
Speaker
and don't do so well, like, I'll be a fail son, and then I'll feel bad about myself. So, like, that's why he went to Harvard Medical School, because, like, that's important work, right? Like, he means few prospects to not feel like a piece of shit.
00:18:03
Speaker
He did feel his study of political theory at Oxford didn't have enough impact in the world, that sort of thing. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, okay, cool, man. You know, one way I think about this excerpt, I'm amazed that he doesn't mention Feynman very much in this book, because he is absolutely doing a Feynman
Storytelling and Self-Image
00:18:22
Speaker
bit here. Yeah, he really is. I'm thinking a lot of like the map of the cat.
00:18:27
Speaker
Like it's it's exactly that shit. feynman In his book, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, which when I was an annoying undergraduate, I read the first half of and I was like, wow, this guy is so cool. and then I read the second half of and like luckily he gets so over the top obnoxious that I was like, oh, wait a minute, never mind.
00:18:45
Speaker
But i there was a brief period where where I was like, ooh, Feynman, this guy's so cool. And basically, like he just tells a series of anecdotes that are centered around making him look like hot shit. And so one of them is basically he like started taking this graduate biology seminar while he was doing graduate physics.
00:19:03
Speaker
And he had to like present this paper and so he goes to the library to ask for like oh I need to like get the anatomy of a cat but he calls it the map of the cat and the librarian is like oh you mean an anatomy and he was like well I thought it should be called a map and like he's just like being a shit to everyone and then he does the presentation and he like starts drawing the anatomy and they're like yeah dude we all know this and he's like and now i understood why i was able to so easily join the class because like they all spent all this time like wasting all this time memorizing shit they didn't need to know and it's like i don't know dude like they're biologists like they probably should have i don't know like it's just like stories designed around making him look cool that if you just like think for 10 seconds you're like oh actually you know there's like a really good reason why that's set up that way
Journalism and Speechwriting
00:19:48
Speaker
After these seven years, he gets bored. Again, this is not how he phrases it, but it's pretty clear that's what happened. One of his professors is going to Washington to work for the National Institute of Mental Health.
00:19:59
Speaker
Charles begs to be taken along, and it works. Somehow, while he's in Washington, he schmoozes and meets Marty Peretz. So Peretz, who I don't want to say too much about because he's a probable future episode subject,
00:20:15
Speaker
was the editor for the left liberal publication, The New Republic. And he was famously a hardcore racist imperialist.
00:20:26
Speaker
Consequently, The New Republic was, and I really have to emphasize this was the perception of the time, famously racist. And Krauthammer starts writing for them. Soon thereafter, he gets hired as a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter's vice president, Walter Mondale.
00:20:43
Speaker
In the upcoming election, Mondale gets obliterated, but it's too late for the rest of us. At this point, Krauthammer's pundit career has reached escape velocity.
00:20:55
Speaker
Seven years into it, he wins the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. And he spends the rest of his life writing for tons of different publications, but in particular, the Washington Post.
00:21:06
Speaker
I don't think I ever realized before that there was a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. That's so funny. We're giving you an award for having takes. like The look of despair on your face when I mentioned that, it was very real, Helen.
00:21:19
Speaker
Okay, yeah, that's that's bad. i I wish this guy had like gone to therapy and taken it seriously or something. Not that that would have made him a better person, but maybe he wouldn't have ended up as a pundit. Okay, so he continues with this, I have no ideological presuppositions business for a while.
00:21:36
Speaker
But eventually, it becomes undeniable that the guy is just super right-wing.
Shift to Conservatism
00:21:42
Speaker
And honestly, it's kind of bizarre that he managed to keep up with the facade. at all? In a bunch of his columns, he'll describe incidents where other writers for the New Republic are like, dude, you're clearly like secretly right-wing. We know. and he's just like, oh, but I hadn't had my awakening into the true ideology yet.
00:22:01
Speaker
This was fake the whole time. In this false self-mythologizing, he has to explain how he went from the New Republic and Mondale to just being openly right-wing, which is where he'll end up settling.
00:22:14
Speaker
I feel like we need a new classification system for our guys, right? Like we have this like big system, but really there's just like, there's two types of bigots. One of them is Barry Weiss. The other one I haven't figured out yet, but this guy is just Barry Weiss again. Like how is like half the guys we do are just Barry Weiss? Like, okay.
00:22:31
Speaker
The Cold War contingent of the Democratic Party essentially disappeared. As someone who had never had any illusions about either communism or Soviet power, I gave up on the Democrats.
Ideological Influences and Critique
00:22:40
Speaker
On foreign policy, as the cliche goes, I didn't leave the Democratic Party, it left me. You can't say it's a cliche and then say it like you're doing the cliche. Like, it's a... Why is it a cliche? Oh my god. Not so on domestic policy, the Democratic Party remained true to itself. I changed.
00:22:58
Speaker
The origin of that evolution is simple. I'm open to empirical evidence. The results of the Great Society experiment started coming in and began showing that for all its good intentions, the war on poverty was causing irreparable damage to the very communities it was designed to help.
00:23:12
Speaker
Charles Murray's losing ground was one turning point. Another more theoretical but equally powerful was Manker Olson's The Rise and Decline of Nations, which opened my eyes to the inexorable institutional sclerosis that corrodes and corrupts the ever-enlarging welfare state.
00:23:29
Speaker
The 80s and ninety s saw the further accumulation of a vast body of social science evidence produced by two generations of critics, from James Q. Wilson to Heather MacDonald, writing in the Public Interest, the City Journal and elsewhere, on the limits and failures of the ever-expanding Leviathan state.
00:23:44
Speaker
This is wild. This is like actually crazy. Like, holy shit. I right? I became right wing because I saw the effects of the growing welfare state in the 80s and ninety s Like that's not what was happening in the 80s and 90s.
00:24:04
Speaker
look the 80s and 90s saw this huge propaganda push to create all of these different like racist and classist narratives about why welfare doesn't work.
00:24:15
Speaker
And he's describing like the effects of that propaganda by like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, but also like, I mean, Charles Murray, who I'm assuming you might have something to say about Charles Murray, like He's describing that as empirical evidence when it's like it's not empirical evidence. He's talking about like a body of political propaganda that was like very openly crafted. Oh, my God. This is just terrible. Menker Olson is like he is basically respectable as far as an economist goes. I think he's actually in there to distract from the other three people he named Charles Murray, James Q. Wilson and Heather MacDonald.
00:24:49
Speaker
Those are white nationalists. Yeah, didn't want to step on your toes glossing those because I figured you probably had a gloss for those three. But like, that's a crowd. That's a real, you know. Holy shit. Okay, so Charles Murray wrote the curve. They have their own table at the Odium Symposium. Yes, absolutely. They're in the corner there. They're sharing a bowl of wine. They're not letting anyone slightly dark skin near them. Boy, stay away from the sangria bowl.
00:25:14
Speaker
Charles Murray wrote The Bell Curve, among many other racist tomes. He is a straight-up race scientist. Heather MacDonald. I don't know if you can even call her a race scientist. Does she even pretend to be a scientist? I'm not sure, but like, she works for Christopher Ruffo right now, like, if you you want to get a sense of what her fucking deal is. James Q. Wilson is the originator of broken windows theory.
00:25:40
Speaker
I looked up an essay by that guy on black crime rates and let me tell you, Helen, it was not good. i didn't realize he was like the originator. Like I knew he was like ah like a racist policing guy, but I didn't know he was like he invented. That's crazy. I love that.
00:25:56
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. This is just like... This is a symphony of dog whistles. But yeah, tying that all together, like this is there was this like cultural push and movement to tell these narratives about the links between race and crime, how to handle poverty, like all these different things. And then to say this was the growing empirical evidence is, i mean, it's just straightforwardly wrong. Like it's just obviously stupid. And yeah this this is wild.
00:26:27
Speaker
This is really out there. This is a few pages into the book. I hit this and I was like, oh, he's a white nationalist. Like he's crypto. But like he just is. Do you think his public reception reflects that?
00:26:39
Speaker
No, because the thing is that because he says he's not ideological and because he says he's a centrist and he resists certainty, it would be rude to call him a racist, first of all. And second of all, ah he's probably doing politics the right way, if you know what i mean. Yeah.
00:26:56
Speaker
Okay, I'm going to play you a clip. I was trying to find one of his appearances on The Daily Show, and this was the best I could dig up, which is Laura Ingraham playing a clip from The Daily Show.
00:27:10
Speaker
And that actually kind of works better....show that I had not seen until just before this show tonight. I'd like your reaction and your thoughts. Let's watch. Thirty years.
00:27:23
Speaker
Do you ever look back on some of these writings and think, What was I thinking?
Media Appearances and Rhetoric
00:27:28
Speaker
It's worse than that. and The worst part of writing the book was going all the way back and reading the million words i've written. i couldn't believe I'd written some that so that I'd stop. So what's what's the growth process been like? The growth process? yes Well, I was once a liberal.
00:27:50
Speaker
So the the early writings showed hope. Yeah.
00:27:55
Speaker
And then came change. um i mean Okay, so first off, there's Jon Stewart being his usual, like, you know, brutal interviewer cutting right to the heart of the matter. Just doing a little playful banter with this guy, you know? Don't be under the impression, by the way, that the interviews you see on, like, The Daily Show or whatever talk show are unscripted. They are absolutely scripted. God. ah Second, you can kind of see in miniature this whole dynamic where Charles Krauthammer is talking to, like,
00:28:32
Speaker
some lib guy, and they're exchanging pleasant bon mots. And then over on the conservative show, they're playing the video and they're laughing at the fucking liberal for being taken in by all this shit, for getting owned by like the obvious correctness of this guy's like crypto white nationalism. Yeah, it's pretty bleak. But that's what I mean. That's why I was saying like, oh, they're doing politics the right way, right? Like that's like Ezra Klein's line about charlie kirk speaking of just like liberals being taken in by white nationalists but yeah like this this commitment to like having a conversation and like you know respectfully like being in dialogue or whatever is just like it's the achilles heel of the liberal right like that that's the shit they love it doesn't matter how much you're like oh yeah here's a list of racists who i think produced empirical evidence about why we need to like lock up all of the black people right like
00:29:23
Speaker
Well, Helen, I hate to tell you this, but liberals actually have two Achilles heels. I mean, they're kind of all heels, but... Yeah. The other one is, I think, suggested a little bit by this introduction.
00:29:38
Speaker
This is how the book starts, okay? What matters... Lives of the good and the great, the innocence of dogs, the cunning of cats, the elegance of nature, the wonders of a space, the perfectly thrown outfield assist, the difference between historical guilt and historical responsibility, homage and sacrilege in monumental architecture, fashions and follies, and the finer uses of the F word,
00:30:01
Speaker
What matters? Manners and habits, curiosities and conundrums, social and ethical. Is a doctor ever permitted to kill a patient wishing to die? Why in the age of feminism do we still use the phrase women and children? How many lies is one allowed to tell to advance stem cell research? What matters?
00:30:21
Speaker
Occam's razor. Fermat's last theorem. The Fermi paradox. In which the great man asks, with so many habitable planets out there, why in God's name have we never heard a word from a single one of them?
00:30:36
Speaker
These are the things that most engage me. They fill my days, some trouble my nights, they give me pause, pleasure, wonder, they make me grateful for the gift of consciousness, and for three decades they have occupied my mind and commanded my pen.
00:30:50
Speaker
I don't claim these things matter to everyone, nor should they. I have my eccentricities, I have driven from Washington to New York to watch a chess match, twice.
Intellectual Style and Criticism
00:31:00
Speaker
That's not, like, does he mean DC? That's not that far of a draw. Okay. I've read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time also twice, though here as a public service to reassure my readers that this most unread bestseller is indeed as inscrutable as they thought. All right, so that second Achilles heel of the lib is pseudo-intellectualism.
00:31:19
Speaker
God, and like emphasis on the pseudo. Oh my God. Yeah.
00:31:26
Speaker
Helen, how many how many deep thinkers do you think are spending their nights tossing and churning and thinking about Fermat's Last Theorem? A few mathematicians in the world. And actually, they're not doing it anymore because Fermat's Last Theorem has been resolved. but God, there's just like a lot you could say here. and It's just it's he just so annoying. It's just so frustrating. Especially given his like, oh, I wasn't enough of a genius to do physics.
00:31:52
Speaker
This willingness to just opine on physics. a range of things, right? Like part of the problem with the pseudo intellectualism this thing about like why in the age of feminism do we still use the phrase women and children like lies in advance to tell stem cell research, right? He's talking about like real political real political questions that like affect people's lives that he thinks it's like his place to just sit and you know philosophize about right and he thinks like oh like i don't have i don't have the genius to do theoretical physics well maybe that's because like in theoretical physics we have like actually enough of a of a structure where somebody can like say like hey that thing you're saying doesn't make any sense right but like somehow he's found the the realm where you're allowed to just like say whatever bullshit you want here's the start of his op-ed the pariah chess club
00:32:38
Speaker
I once met a physicist who as a child had been something of a chess prodigy. He loved the game and loved the role. He took particular delight in the mortification older players felt upon losing to a kid in short pants.
00:32:50
Speaker
Still play, I asked? Nope. What happened? Quit when I was 21. Why? Lost to a kid in short pants. The Pariah Chess Club, where I play every Monday night, admits no one in short pants. Even our youngest member in his 20s wears trousers. The rest of us are more grizzled veterans, numbering about a dozen, mostly journalists and writers, with three lawyers, an academic, and a diplomat for ballast. We've been meeting at my house for almost a decade for our weekly fix.
00:33:15
Speaker
Oh yes, the club's name. Of the four founding members, who two were social scientists who, at the time we started playing, had just written books that had made their college lecture tours rather physically hazardous. I, too, sported a respectable enemies list. It was the heady Clinton years, and we figured that the fourth member, a music critic and perfectly well-liked, could be grandfathered in as a pariah because of his association with the three of us.
00:33:38
Speaker
Pariah status has not been required of subsequent members, though it is encouraged. Being a chess player already makes you suspect enough in polite society and not without reason. Any endeavor that has given the world Paul Morphy, the first American champion who spent the last 17 odd years of his life wandering the streets of New Orleans, and Bobby Fisher, the last American champion who now descended John Nash-like into raving paranoia, cannot be expected to be a boon to one's social status.
00:34:03
Speaker
Wow, there's a lot going on here. I mean, one thing that's kind of sad is like, you can just play chess, you don't need you can just like do stuff because it's like fun and fulfilling. And you don't need to like, convince everyone that it's this like, noble thing that like, only genius physicists do, right? Like, i don't know, like, we like to have this vision of the like, epoch defining genius level, you know, intellect that like sits down and like plays chess and right, but chess is just like a thing you can practice and get good at if you want to.
00:34:31
Speaker
It's just a game and you're just like allowed to play games. You can do that. You don't need to be annoying about it. And it's like also wild to be like, oh yeah, you have to be a pariah. Like also this turn halfway through, oh yes, the club's name. Like, oh, I know you were wondering about that. Like, oh yes, like the club's name. Like, oh, aren't we clever? Like, no, I already was annoyed when you first said it. I knew exactly what you meant as soon as you wrote the pariah chess club where I play. Like, Yeah, you've got this huge martyrdom complex. It's obvious. You don't need to then be like, oh, you you noticed to my, you noticed our little joke. You noticed our little bit of cleverness. Oh, ho, ho. and it's like, no, like you're annoying. You're so fucking annoying. You were probably wondering why we called this the canceled pundits chess club.
00:35:11
Speaker
Yeah, and it's also just like, it's the most like, don't know, like, you know the opening of a movie, right? Like the opening of a trailer or something where they'll show you like, you know, some crazy scene and then like freeze frame, that's me. You're probably wondering how I got here. Like it's that same aspect. Like it's just so like annoying. And it's just like, oh my God.
00:35:30
Speaker
I really liked, by the way, another dog whistle to race scientists here. Two were social scientists who had just written books that had made their college lecture tours rather physically hazardous.
00:35:41
Speaker
I know exactly what the books are. Yeah, I don't doubt the sincerity of his fandom of chess. This is like actually like a pretty consistent thread for him, but this was just so painful. I honestly just presented this to you to make you mad. Yeah.
00:35:59
Speaker
Here's what he writes about Woody Allen and Mia Farrow's custody battle. oh
00:36:07
Speaker
My channel surfing was arrested by the news reporter at the Manhattan courthouse recounting the day's doings at the Woody Allen Mia Farrow custody fight. Testimony today, she said, focused on Woody Allen's lack of parenting skills. By this, she meant that on the witness stand, Allen had admitted that one, he could not name a single one of his children's friends. Two, had never taken the children to the barber or given them a bath. Three, did not know who their dentist was. Four, had never attended a parent-teacher conference or the son's satchel.
00:36:36
Speaker
In fact, the three children whose custody he seeks had never spent a night at his apartment. Lack of parenting skills, one might as well say that Jeffrey Dahmer lacked interpersonal skills, or that Robespierre could have used some sensitivity training.
00:36:50
Speaker
The problem here is not some absence of technique, it is an absence of something far more basic, an instinct, a feeling, the normal bond that ties the average parent to his child. Alan's problem is self-absorption taken as with most everything in his life to the point of parody. Here is the artiste so jealous of his autonomy, so disdainful of attachment that his children may not spend the night at his apartment, though this should not prevent the court from awarding him custody.
00:37:14
Speaker
Of course, given the alternative, the hysterical Miss Farrow, whose narcissism expresses itself not in a detachment but in a self-indulgence that acquires children like stray pets, Alan may turn out to be the better choice.
00:37:25
Speaker
The sight of these two vying for custody, of that pathetic brood, makes you wonder how a society that requires licenses for drivers manages without requiring them for parents. Okay, I feel like we just need to start off by saying that Woody Allen, who has was in the Epstein files 17,000 times. I feel like I never get over this fact, first of all. Woody Allen was in the Epstein files 17,000 times. Yes, he's... 17,000. One of Epstein's closest friends.
00:37:52
Speaker
He also... One of these kids, like... He raped one of these kids. Like, that's when the, like, Dylan Farrow, like, oh my god. That seems really important to this narrative and is missing. He's married to his stepdaughter.
00:38:08
Speaker
Like, this is this I could see, besides the extreme misogyny on display in that last paragraph, I could see this op-ed sort of, like, making sense at the time as something to write.
00:38:27
Speaker
Again, this is in his 2013 end-of-career, like, best-of selection. He chose this. By then he should have been well aware, and I'm sure he was well aware of the reality of what Woody Allen is. Those are like the big things. I also feel like this this take on like, oh, Woody Allen is like self-absorption to the point of parody, like also is a misunderstanding of he's confusing Woody Allen, the person, with Woody Allen, like characters that like Woody Allen writes or like the version of Woody Allen that exists in like Woody Allen's sort of surreal standup comedy. Like, this is not to put any judgment on, like, whether that stuff is good or not, but it's just, like, it's also... You're kind of baby-brained if you're, like, looking... If you're watching a movie and then you're like, oh, that... Like, okay, sure. Like, it's a dude who is... He is playing off his personality a bit, right? It's not quite... But, like, you know, watching Annie Hall and being like, oh, that main character, Alvy Singer, like, that's literally Woody Allen and, like, that's who he is as a person.
Historical Comparisons and Critiques
00:39:35
Speaker
Like, no, that's a movie he's making. Like, you actually need to, like... You got the fucking Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Like, don't you understand how criticism works? Don't you know what, like, a novel is? Like, don't you know what a movie is? They didn't just, like, follow Woody Allen around and then cut that together. Like, he actually wrote that. That's actually scripted. Like, he's telling a story. You're kind of an idiot.
00:39:54
Speaker
Putting that aside, I think Robespierre is very misunderstood. And I think comparing him to Jeffrey Dahmer. is kind of insulting. Like, sure, did Robespierre go too far in some places? Yes. But he was right that the revolution was under attack by threats from without.
00:40:13
Speaker
Like, he made a lot of good points. Okay, he has an essay about how he hates the French Revolution in here, so I think he's a little biased. Okay, where do you think this op-ed goes from here?
00:40:25
Speaker
Okay, it's got to be something misogynist because he's doing this turn towards misogyny more directly at the end. Let's say, okay, this thing about like requiring driver licenses for drivers but not parents, there's going to be some kind of like eugenics type misogyny argument happening, but I don't know more specifically than that.
00:40:48
Speaker
right, let's see how your guest stacks up. The reason is that nature endows most people in all cultures with an instinctive parental feeling that translates into often clumsy, sometimes wrong-headed, but generally benign and beloved benevolent care.
00:41:02
Speaker
The fact that the grotesque absence of these qualities in Allen could be interpreted as a lack of parenting skills shows how far we've gone in the belief in the mechanization of ordinary human feeling. Sexual intimacy, for example.
00:41:13
Speaker
A skill like any other concludes Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Rhodes in his recent sexual autobiography. There are entire bookshelves of wildly successful manuals, How to Satisfy a Woman Every Time, 55 Weeks on the Bestseller List, to show how far from alone Rhodes is in this belief.
00:41:34
Speaker
Self-improvement through the acquisition of skill is, of course, hardly a new American theme. First, mass-marketed by Dale Carnegie, it owes its popularity to the marriage of two powerful American beliefs, human perfectibility and the power of technology.
00:41:49
Speaker
Okay, I'm actually more confused about... What? Right? This seems to have nothing to do with the prior content. That's because it doesn't. He just did this, like, big topic switch up in the middle, and he extracts another page or so from the theme, and then he's like, okay, wrote my op-ed for the week.
00:42:07
Speaker
Yeah, I could see what you mean by, like,
Op-Ed Writing and Style
00:42:10
Speaker
contemporary op-ed columnists owing a kind of debt to this guy, because this is... This is like, this reads like David Brooks. Like this is basically how every David Brooks article I've read. And I've never finished a David Brooks article because he's the master at just like, they're so long. Like you can put stuff online these days. They don't even care about how many pages it is, I guess.
00:42:33
Speaker
That should keep scrolling forever. And he'll start by talking about some theme about how like kids these days are not spiritual enough. And it's because of the phone. And then... It just goes on and he'll talk about like five different guys from the 17th century and why women need to fuck him more. And who knows? Right. But like, yeah, this is this is classic. This is really. Yeah, this doesn't make any sense. Yeah, no, he's an originator of a hack form.
00:43:00
Speaker
is what's happening. There's all these other irritating little mannerisms. Like, he loves to end an op-ed with this punchy one-liner, this snotty quip, often in the tone of like, oh, really, liberals? You thought you could pull the wool over the eyes of the rest of us? Guess not.
00:43:20
Speaker
Yeah, the bit we talked about earlier, actually, I thought about it a little bit later, the like, oh, like the cliche goes and then saying something like strikes me a lot like Leacock citing a play to be like, oh, I'm scamming you like I'm a pseudo intellectual and you're falling for it. Right.
00:43:39
Speaker
And also like vibe for sure that little button at the end of the Jon Stewart interview of like, or i mean know the clip that we saw at least of like, Oh, you used to believe you used to your writing used to have a hope. It's like, and then came change, like, ha ha, like hope and change are like the Obama year things. First of all, like,
00:43:57
Speaker
incorrect. Like, okay, it's a joke, whatever, but like incorrect on the timeline, according to his timeline, he's saying that his true ideology started in like the eighties and nineties, not during the Obama years.
00:44:08
Speaker
Also like kind of racist. Like, i don't know, like if your objection to the Democrats started in the Obama years, like there wasn't really a big ideological change in the Obama years, other than they elected a black guy. Like, I don't know. Like it's, yeah, I'm getting a picture of this guy as a hack and a racist. And,
00:44:26
Speaker
I really just don't know. do you like do you have any
Editorial Freedom and Language
00:44:28
Speaker
more of this article? Are we going to get a sense of like, does he have a a thesis statement? No, he's just rambling. There's no thesis statement. Yeah. okay He's just padding out column inches.
00:44:37
Speaker
Amazing. All right. This is from the acknowledgements at the end. Special thanks to my editors at the Washington Post, Meg Greenfield and Fred Hyatt, the most admirable, fair-minded journalists one could possibly know who have given me liberty for decades to write what I want. And to the Grams, Catherine, and Don for their generous friendship and unwavering support.
00:44:57
Speaker
In 28 years of writing for the Post, only once did I receive a call about something I was about to publish. Sometime in the 90s, in a fit of linguistic provocation, I used the adjective gay as a synonym for happy. Meg called me the night before publication. I knew exactly why.
00:45:11
Speaker
So I couldn't slip it by you, could I? I said before she could get past hello. Nope, she laughed. You're about 10 years late. Having no particular enthusiasm for reviving this anachronism beyond making mischief, I put up no argument, nor were there any ever after.
00:45:27
Speaker
People still use gay as a synonym for happy. like that So like that doesn't that story doesn't hold up like Oh, Helen, that's not what happened. What happened is that he called someone he didn't like gay in an article, and he had the excuse preplanned that he was going to say, oh, I just meant it as in happy Just like every obnoxious high schooler tries to get away with calling someone gay.
00:45:53
Speaker
And then and his editor was like, don't do this, you fucking child. And that's yeah the only pushback he got in his entire career. It's nice to know that we have like liberal institutions that can do something, right?
00:46:05
Speaker
ah They saved us. In the end, they saved us. Democracy could have died in darkness, but instead we've got the halogen lamps on it. Yeah, exactly. God. All right, now we need to get into his views about Israel.
00:46:18
Speaker
do we Do we need to?
Antisemitism and Support for Israel
00:46:22
Speaker
I suppose if that's what's on the schedule, then we we have to do it. but Let's get there, Vian Nixon. The inner man, who cares?
00:46:32
Speaker
As Bob Woodward likes to say, he is the gift that keeps on giving. Richard Nixon, that is, and an endless source of amusement he is. We have all been having a great chuckle listening to Nixon again.
00:46:43
Speaker
More tapes, more titillation, most notably his ranting and raving about Jews. Quote, generally speaking, you can't trust the bastards, etc. As a Jew, I have been asked several times about these revelations. I am entirely unmoved.
00:46:58
Speaker
First, I wonder how anyone would fare who had an open microphone in his office for 3,700 hours running. Second, Nixon was suspicious and paranoid about everyone, so what else is new?
00:47:08
Speaker
Third and most important, I don't really care what a public figure thinks. I care about what he does. Let God probe his inner heart. Tell me about his outer acts. And what were Nixon's outer acts vis-a-vis Jews? Well, in 1973, he saved Israel from possible destruction with his massive weapons airlift during the Yom Kippur War. He even put the U.S. military on worldwide alert to keep the Russians from intervening on Egypt's behalf.
00:47:35
Speaker
Absolutely. Just an atrocious... This is so revealing about like the role of Israel. So let's take this like bit by bit. First of all, you could have a microphone. I mean, I don't want someone to, right? But if somebody were to record a microphone and like follow me around and everything I said, I just wouldn't say, you can't trust the bastards. like I am willing to come out and say...
00:48:02
Speaker
Like, I would never say something that bad because I just don't, because I don't, that's not a thing I believe. So this like- Don't you understand that everyone is secretly as bigoted as as me, a bigot?
00:48:14
Speaker
Exactly. Like I can think back to things personally that I'm like, oh, I regret saying that, or I was wrong on that, or, but like none of them get close to generally speaking, you can't trust the bastards, which is an insanely bigoted thing to say. Also saying that out loud is not an inner heart. It's an outer act. Saying you can't trust the bastards is an outer act. This is like one of my long running objections to like, people like to talk about how they have like internalized misogyny or internalized racism when they like, say something and they didn't process in their head that like that thing they thought was really misogynist and it's like it's not internalized if you're doing it externally to someone else like that's not what that means that just means you don't want to be held responsible for it right so this whole dodge of like the inner heart is so stupid nixon shut down you do not have internalized anti-semitism exactly leaving that aside for a second like this has been the role of
00:49:11
Speaker
I mean, not the role. This has been like part of the functioning of Israel in American politics. Right. And want to like separate that specifically from like a lot of other massive problems that Israel has. Right. But if we're talking about like the rhetorical role of Israel in American politics, it has functioned.
00:49:28
Speaker
for decades as this like you can do whatever like as be as anti-semitic as you want and as long as you like support israel like it's it's a get out of you know you get out of it right it's it's a way of saying like oh i'm not actually anti-semitic right i might say that like the jews are a bunch of rat bastards who are trying to steal our money and sleep with our women and poison the race right but as long as i give money to israel i'm not really anti-semitic right and like
00:49:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's just, it's so stark here that that's what's happening. oh my god. Let's heighten this. The excerpt continues. I feel about Nixon the way I feel reading about Truman's occasional ethnic lapses.
00:50:10
Speaker
Ethnic lapses. Ethnic lapses. That's really good, that's a really good euphemism. I gotta remember that In private, Truman was a man who still could use a word like slur for Jewish people, writes David McCullough, or in a letter to his wife, dismiss Miami as nothing but hotels, filling stations, Hebrews, and capans. So what? Truman remains a hero to Jews for having recognized the state of Israel at the crucial moment of its birth in 1948.
00:50:40
Speaker
Herb Stein, who died last month, was chairman of Nixon's Council of Economic Advisors. Reflecting on Nixon's Jewish problem, he wrote that he never felt anything but the utmost respect and friendship from Nixon.
00:50:51
Speaker
Whatever. Whatever Nixon's private thoughts, both in his personal relations and in his public actions as president, he was a friend of the Jews. Okay, this is like a joke, right? I can't be a disemitic. I put a Jew in charge of my money. Like, come
00:51:13
Speaker
feel like pretty easy answer that question.
00:51:33
Speaker
loyalty so who is the anti-semit feel like there's a pretty easy answer to that question Both of them? Yeah. Done.
Zionist Views and Criticism
00:51:43
Speaker
You can just recognize that there's a couple types of anti-Semite. But yeah, I mean, I guess like crucial here is that I don't think, right? Like there is this axiom that a lot of contemporary American Jews sort of just take as given that the existence of Israel as a Jewish state is like necessary for the the safety of Jews. And like, this is something that we are, we've been like talking about how to do an episode on for a while and like talking about Zionism as a concept in general. And like, how do we fit this into an episode? Because there's a lot to talk about and it's pretty bad.
00:52:18
Speaker
So without getting into like a whole conversation about Zionism, right, in this narrative where like supporting Israel is like actually supporting the Jewish people in some way, like this is the the argument he's making. It's just that actually supporting Israel is like not supporting the Jewish people and it's actually like supporting this this racist project.
00:52:37
Speaker
And, like, the reasons these guys have for supporting Israel is because, like, they believe in ethnostates, right? Like, yeah, there is this really interesting way that, like, Israel functions as this, like, hinge on which so much, like, contemporary contemporary liberalism is just lost into fascism, right? And, like, that's what we saw in the last election is, like...
00:52:54
Speaker
the Democrats were just unwilling to come out and say like, actually we're against genocide. And once you allow genocide into your heart, like you're just lost. like i So, you know, there is something to the idea that like, I care less about like the words and you know, like what's in someone's heart versus like their outer actions. Yeah, it's just like, I just don't give any stock at all to like supportive Israel is like ah as a saving grace. It just like makes it worse.
00:53:21
Speaker
This
Foreign Policy Influence
00:53:22
Speaker
guy is an Israeli propaganda machine, and unfortunately that is the least of his influence on foreign policy. There's a number of things I could cite here, but I'll pull out two. First, in 1990, he gives a speech called the Unipolar Moment.
00:53:39
Speaker
And the thesis here is that, well, the Soviet Union has just collapsed. And everyone is thinking, okay we're going to have the rise of various great powers, and the world is going to be multipolar, and there's going to have to be a balance of powers like existed in the early 20th century.
00:53:55
Speaker
But, he says, what if we can manage to keep the world unipolar for a while, and use that time very aggressively to spread our values, democracy, and so on, by being the world police? This is like, we have...
00:54:13
Speaker
Fukuyama end of history at home except like Fukuyama's end of history is also stupid so it's like the stupid version of something that already sucks I just want to annoy you by giving you a little excerpt from the speech oh god oh no I'm already reading ahead I shouldn't read ahead we are the unipolar power and what do we do In August 1900, David Hilbert gave a speech to the International Congress of Mathematicians naming 23 still unsolved mathematical problems bequeathed by the 19th century to the 20th.
00:54:45
Speaker
Had he presented the great unsolved geopolitical problems bequeathed to the 20th century, one would have stood out above all, the rise of Germany and its accommodation within the European state system. Similarly today, at the dawn of the 21st century, we can see clearly the two great geopolitical challenges on the horizon, the inexorable rise of China and the coming demographic collapse of Europe, both of which will irrevocably desequilibriate the international system.
00:55:13
Speaker
That's kind of amazing. Like, okay, I've got two problems. One of them is that I'm racist, and the other one is that, well, um'm it's also that I'm racist, but it's like a slightly different flavor of that, right? Like...
00:55:26
Speaker
the sleeping dragon is waking and our falling birth rates are threatening the future of our white children how many words is that i think i need to get it down in the 14 somehow yeah so we get the obnoxious sued element again and especially i want to focus on that last thing you mentioned which is the quote, demographic collapse of Europe argument. He's being a eugenicist there. That's what's happening.
00:55:56
Speaker
I think the most sympathetic versions of saying, like, we need to pay attention to fewer births happening, whatever, or, like, with an aging population, you need, like, healthcare system, whatever, blah, blah, blah, right? Like, there's people who talk about this, but, like, the phrase demographic collapse is, like, it's so telling, and it's so...
00:56:19
Speaker
Let's tie that back into the previous topic. In 1950, there were 5 million Jews in the United States. In 1990, the number was a slightly higher, 5.5 million. In the intervening decades, overall U.S. population rose 65%. The Jews essentially tread water. In fact, in the last half century, Jews have shrunk from 3% to 2% of the American population.
00:56:42
Speaker
And now they are headed for not just relative, but absolute decline. What sustained the Jewish population at its current level was, first, the post-war baby boom, then the influx of 400,000 Jews, mostly from the Soviet Union. While the baby boom is over and Russian immigration is drying up, there are only so many Jews where they came from. Take away these historical anomalies and the American Jewish population will be smaller today than yesterday. In fact, it is now headed for catastrophic decline.
00:57:09
Speaker
Stephen Boehm, director of Jewish communal affairs at the American Jewish Committee, flatly predicts that in 20 years, the Jewish population will be down to 4 million, a loss of nearly 30% in 20 years.
00:57:20
Speaker
Projecting just a few decades further yields an even more chilling future. Chilling. How does a community decimate itself in the benign conditions of the United States? Easy, low fertility, and endemic intermarriage.
00:57:35
Speaker
Okay, um... Yeah, that that that one took me second because I saw endemic intermarriage and saw red. I heard the Kill Bill siren in my head.
00:57:46
Speaker
The disease of intermarriage. So what if there are only 4 million Jews in in America in 20 years? Why is that bad, right? Like, if you could tell me a story about there's going to be a decline in the population of Jews because...
00:58:00
Speaker
There's persecution or there's an attempt to eradicate Jews, right? Like if you wanted to point to like discriminatory pressures that are actually leading, you know, there are things we should address and then you want to say that those exist and write you, right? But this is actually extremely racist to be like oh endemic intermarriage is like causing right like you're literally this is just race science like you're doing race science and you're doing zionist race science yeah oh but helen there is pressure there is cultural pressure
00:58:33
Speaker
Is it not risky to assume that current trends will continue? No, nothing will revive the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe and the Islamic world, and nothing will stop the rapid decline by assimilation of a Western Jewry. On the contrary, projecting current trends, assuming as I have done, that rates remain constant, is rather conservative. It is risky to assume that assimilation will not accelerate. There is nothing on the horizon to reverse the integration of Jews into Western culture. The attraction of Jews to the larger culture and the level acceptance of Jews by the larger culture are historically unprecedented. If anything, the trends augur an intensification of assimilation.
00:59:08
Speaker
It stands to reason, as each generation becomes progressively more assimilated, the ties to tradition grow weaker, as measured, for example, by synagogue attendance and number of children receiving some kind of Jewish education.
00:59:20
Speaker
This dilution of identity, in turn, leads to a greater tendency to intermarriage and assimilation. Why not? What, after all, are they giving up? The circle is complete and self-reinforcing. Consider two cultural artifacts. With the birth of television a half century ago, Jewish life in America was represented by the Goldbergs, urban Jews, decidedly ethnic, heavily accented, socially distinct. Forty years later, the Goldbergs begat Seinfeld, the most popular entertainment in America today.
00:59:45
Speaker
The Seinfeld character is nominally Jewish. He might cite his Jewish identity on occasion without apology or self-consciousness, but even more important without consequence. It has not the slightest influence on any aspect of his life.
00:59:57
Speaker
The dude can't understand media. Like, we're going to get to the yeah insane race science here. But I guess, okay, you could you could view Seinfeld as, like, the fact that Seinfeld is himself kind of an everyman figure in some ways in the show and the fact that that can be Jewish. and that the je Right? Okay, I guess whatever. I still think it's a stupid point. But it just strikes me, like, this guy keeps citing media, but he doesn't seem to actually understand, like, what it is, or, like, how media works, like, what fiction is. Like, he just, like, he thinks Seinfeld is a real guy, like, in the same way that he thinks, like, the characters Woody Allen portrays are Woody Allen.
01:00:35
Speaker
I don't know. Like, there's two things going on there. And one is him just straightforwardly saying, like, the presence of this piece of media indicates something about the changing nature of Judaism within the Jewish population in the United States.
01:00:51
Speaker
Okay. Whatever. i agree with you that I don't think that's a very strong argument. The other thing he's saying is, i have a line for who is and really is not Jewish.
01:01:05
Speaker
Anyone you might see on Seinfeld is on the other side of that line. They're not really Jewish. Sarah here, I just forgot to mention this during recording, but despite putting himself in the position of judge of who is and isn't authentically Jewish, Krauthammer himself was not only a secular Jew in the ordinary sense, but he also just described himself as not religious and not a believer in God.
01:01:32
Speaker
Also, this line about like Jews have never been more assimilated is not really true. There are quite a lot of examples of like Jewish communities around the world. I mean, including in Europe and including in Germany, like in the twenty s And there are quite a lot of stories of people who were Grounded up by the Nazis for being Jewish who had like previously never really thought of themselves as Jewish like this is not a new phenomenon bizarre We need to protect the Jewish race in this way like it is just race science. It's Zionist race science It's exactly the kind of thing we see where like Zionism is just like doing ethno-nationalism, but somehow it's woke because you're doing it for Jews Helen, do you remember a while back we saw this program for newly married couples where one of them had been raised Jewish and the other hadn't? It was called Togethering. Oh my god. And the deal is you get a subsidized vacation where they teach the two of you about being Jewish together. Yeah.
01:02:30
Speaker
After reading this, I understand the purpose of that program. I understand why that program specifically exists. It's an attempt to push back on exactly this endemic intermarriage, quote, problem, end quote.
01:02:44
Speaker
Okay, his second big foreign policy impact that I want to pull out here is illustrated by an article he publishes on September 2001.
01:02:55
Speaker
I'm not going to excerpt it, but it's an op-ed calling for an immediate declaration of war on Afghanistan. He is one of the biggest and most important boosters in the world for both Bush wars. And it is not until 2011 that he manages to suck it up and declare the Iraq war a disaster, although then he claims it's only because of Obama.
01:03:15
Speaker
And even then, he writes an op-ed, which is not in this collection, entitled, Overreaction to 9-11 Attacks? Not a Chance. And in it, he argues that the wars cost only $1.3 trillion, dollars or, quote, less than one-eleventh of the national debt, end quote. So he very much belongs to this rich, neoconservative tradition of just, like, pushing us into fucking disasters like the Iran War that has just ended, hopefully,
01:03:47
Speaker
as of this recording, and then just absolutely refusing to admit that you fucked everyone, that you killed a bunch of people, that the whole thing was pointless and miserable.
Personal Resilience and Mentorship
01:03:56
Speaker
All right, there's one last topic I want to address before we close.
01:04:00
Speaker
There's an incident that happens to him and has like a big personal impact on him. He only mentions it once in the book. One of his pieces is a memoriam to Herman Lisko, one of his professors at Harvard Medical School.
01:04:14
Speaker
As for me, well, he made my career possible. Toward the end of my freshman year, I was paralyzed in a serious accident. Herman, then associate dean of students, came to see me in intensive care. He asked what he could do for me. I told him that, to keep disaster from turning into ruin, I had decided to stay in school and with my class.
01:04:31
Speaker
If Herman had doubts, I would not have blamed him. No one with my injury had ever gone through medical school. He never showed it. He told me he would do everything possible to make it happen. He did. Within a few days, a hematology professor, fresh from lecturing to my classmates on campus, showed up at my bedside and proceeded to give me the lecture while projecting his slides on the ceiling above me.
01:04:49
Speaker
I was flat on my back in traction, but I'm sure Herman had instructed everybody to carry on as if such teaching techniques were entirely normal. He then went to work behind the scenes, persuading professors to let me take their tests orally with a recording secretary I did not learn to handwrite for another three years, getting me transferred for my 12 months of inpatient rehab to a Harvard teaching hospital so that I could catch up at night with my class's second-year studies and rejoin it in third year.
01:05:13
Speaker
Persuading, ordering, skeptical attending physicians to allow their patients to be cared for by the student in the wheelchair with the exotic medical instruments, the extra-long stethoscope Herman had made for me, was a thing of beauty.
01:05:24
Speaker
Herman did all this quietly, without fanfare. At graduation, he took not only pride, but a kind of mischievous delight in our unspoken conspiracy. We broke no rules, but we bent a few, especially the stupid ones. I'm sure he liked that.
01:05:36
Speaker
I found that in memoriam, I don't know, a little bit touching, even though he can't resist sneaking in a little, ain't I a stinker moment there at the end. Yeah, we bent the stupid rules. But also, like, I don't know, it's like so frustrating that it's always guys like this that get this support from professors. like Wait, this story is going
FDR and Historical Representation
01:05:55
Speaker
places, okay? Let me show you another article he wrote.
01:05:58
Speaker
Even as President Clinton officially opened the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial last Friday in Washington, the great controversy raged. The memorial contains no statue of FDR in a wheelchair. Should it?
01:06:10
Speaker
The arguments pro and con are by now well known. One side points out that when a man has over 35,000 photographs taken of him and exactly two show him in a wheelchair, we can fairly conclude that he was intent upon concealing his disability.
01:06:23
Speaker
How odd, then, to honor a man by portraying him precisely opposite to the way he wanted to be seen. The other side argues that Roosevelt was merely reflecting the prejudices of his time. He needed to hide his disability to achieve high office. Had he lived today, he would wear his wheels proudly.
01:06:39
Speaker
However, the whole debate seems to miss the point. The very question of what Roosevelt would have wanted makes no sense. It depends on which Roosevelt, the real Roosevelt, President of the United States, 1933 to 1945. The answer is obvious.
01:06:50
Speaker
He would not, he did not want his splendid deception undone. And if by Roosevelt we mean Roosevelt today, i e a Roosevelt who had absorbed all the self-revelatory cultural conventions of our time, well then, of course he would have he would bear everything. he would go on Oprah, indeed not just in a wheelchair, but hand in hand with Lucy Mercer. The point is not what some imaginary FDR would want, a question both indeterminate and unanswerable. The point is, which of these competing ideals, the restraint and reticence of the historical FDR versus the self-revelation and display of today's politicians, that we would impute to a contemporary FDR do we want to honor in a great national monument?
01:07:30
Speaker
All right, the op-ed is going to continue, but like, which side do you think he's going to come down on here? Well, given that he's given a correct argument in favor of not showing FDR in a wheelchair, by which I mean like he has correctly summarized the arguments that people who don't want to show FDR in a wheelchair, and then come created a total straw man by describing people who might want a depiction of FDR in a wheelchair as somehow like imputing today's Oprah culture, right? Like the little sneer of, oh, he'd go on Oprah. Yeah.
01:07:59
Speaker
Like, given his portrayal of the two sides, I think I know which side he's going to come down on and he's going to say we shouldn't show FDR in a wheelchair. I vote for reticence. The current statue, FDR in his wooden kitchen chair with casters, a great cape hiding the tiny wheels from all but the most observant visitor, captures perfectly Roosevelt's cloaking of his disability.
01:08:18
Speaker
At a time when our politicians are stricken with self-pity and given to sniveling, to quote Mary McCrory, what a balm is Roosevelt's attitude of defiant and dignified denial. This is an age in which both the Speaker of the House and the President of the United States cannot resist in dramatic televised addresses making pointed reference to their latest bereavement. This is an age in which the Vice President, in consecutive convention speeches, makes lachrymose use first of a son's accident, then of a sister's death.
01:08:47
Speaker
noted one mordant wit, at this rate his wife had better not walk near any play-class windows. In such an age we can use the example of a man who through four presidential terms dealt with the agony of a nation while keeping his own agonies to himself.
Cultural Conservatism and Emotion
01:09:01
Speaker
In an age in which every celebrity finds it necessary to bare his soul and open her closet, we need a monument to a man who would have disdained such displays, Why, even poor Bob Dole found himself going up and down America for months talking about how reluctant he was to talk about the war injuries he could not stop talking about.
01:09:21
Speaker
Okay, open her closet? Sorry, what does that mean? Honestly, I don't know. it might be some kind of like MTV reference, like, we went into a celebrity's closet and look what we found.
01:09:31
Speaker
I can only guess. That has absolutely no cultural attachment for me. I was wondering if it was some, like... Coming out of the closet thing? It might be. But either way, like, that doesn't really matter. Like, let's... Let's give him the benefit of the doubt that he's not also just being insanely homophobic here.
01:09:49
Speaker
It doesn't really change the fundamental objection, which is... This is just stupid. Like, this is just really stupid. And it's, you know, in contrast to his depiction earlier of how much it was important to his career that someone took seriously that even with physical disability, he would be able to, like, succeed.
01:10:11
Speaker
What is it he said in the previous thing? Like... no one with my injury had ever gone through medical school, right? Like, and what he demonstrated is that like such things are possible. And what it takes is like the support of the people around you. And the point of showing FDR in a monument, in a wheelchair, wouldn't be like to make some hypothetical FDR happy. Like he's dead. The point would be to like, to try to like create a society in which having disability isn't, isn't a curse the way that it is in like society today. Like,
01:10:42
Speaker
And like, he's correct that this like cynical use of personal trauma as a kind of way to try to portray yourself as heroic or noble, like, is bad. Like, it is pretty psychopathic to talk about the vice president milking his sister's death, by the way. Yeah, like...
01:11:04
Speaker
Noted one mordant wit, his wife better not walk near any plate glass windows. Holy shit, dude. Like, do you hear yourself? Did any of your editors hear you? Okay, this is going to continue, and this is going to continue to get worse. And again, this isn't his self-selected best of. Yeah, I guess before I read the next thing, like I'm thinking, right, of like Biden didn't make like knowing how to handle family, right? Having had family members die and having lived through these tragedies, like he did kind of cynically portray this as like uniquely positioning him to like heal America. Like this was part of like the Biden messaging and in a way that I did find pretty gross. I think it's perfectly legitimate to describe how personal tragedies in your life have informed people
01:11:49
Speaker
your ability to experience compassion and to create compassion in others. My issue with Biden was more that like, that wasn't real. Yeah. No, that's what I mean by like, stuff yeah, what I mean by like cynically using that is like to then go on and have the politics that he did. Like he's trying to sort of,
01:12:09
Speaker
portray it as if he has this compassion and then he's just like not actually doing that in any meaningful way. Right. But like, yeah, I agree. And I think that that would be the criticism, not like, oh, you should go back to, you know, having the same politics as Biden, but just like never talk about that other shit. Right. Like we shouldn't want our politicians to be compassionate is basically his claim here. Such is the style of the 90s.
01:12:28
Speaker
Fine. But who dares argue that it can match Roosevelt's for nobility? It is not just that we have no right to impose our sensibility on Roosevelt, we should be ashamed to. Leave Roosevelt out of a wheelchair, but not by saying condescendingly, well, he lived in a benighted time, let's make a concession to the attitudes he had to accommodate.
01:12:46
Speaker
After all, Roosevelt's deception did not reflect the attitudes just of his constituents. It reflected his own attitude to his disability. It is not just that he never discussed his paralysis with the voters, he never discussed it with his mother.
01:13:00
Speaker
The critics say that to fail to portray FDR in a wheelchair is to give in to his false, i.e. non-modern consciousness about disability. On the contrary, it is to celebrate his ethos of bold denial. Remember when he was like celebrating denial in the introduction?
01:13:14
Speaker
Denial is not in great favor today. It is considered unhealthy, an almost cowardly psychic constriction. The mantra today is that all must be dealt with, talked out, cope with, opened up, faced squarely. This may work for some, but it has become something of a religion, and if its priests are so correct about the joys of catharsis and the perils of denial, how do they explain how the champion denier of our century, franklin Franklin Roosevelt, lived such a splendid life? Roosevelt's denial of his disability was more than just a denial of crushing adversity, more than a jaunty, smiling, damn the torpedo's refusal to dwell upon and indeed fully acknowledge his physical reality. It was a denial of self, a strange notion for us living in this confessional age.
01:13:53
Speaker
when self, self-exploration, self-expression, self-love is paramount. Roosevelt's life had a grand outer directedness. He was not searching for the inner Franklin. He was reaching for a new America.
01:14:05
Speaker
It was the outer Franklin he cultivated, and it is that Franklin, the one who saved his country, that we honor and remember. At a time like ours, where every cultural cue is an incitement to self-revelation, we can use a solitary monument to reticence. Leave FDR as he is.
01:14:22
Speaker
This doesn't make any sense, though. Like, FDR was president in 1933 to 1945. That's after they invented interiority in 1914. We know.
Generational Critiques and Personal Stories
01:14:32
Speaker
Why are these, like, right-wing guys always trying to insist that, like, up until very recently, like, people didn't have a concept of the self? It's because to them, a self-regard and so on, all these expressions they use, are really euphemisms for escape from the heel of the hierarchy. Yeah.
01:14:51
Speaker
Yeah. So just for the listener who's not like keyed into like all of the specific like online brain rot that like is constantly running around in my head. Like the reference I was making before is to ah an interview recently where Mark Andreessen said like before 1914, no one had any...
01:15:07
Speaker
Or was it 1904? Before Freud, certainly, no one had any interiority, right? And like this insistence that like what made the guy who founded Walmart great was that he didn't wake up every day and think like, oh, and you know I'm worrying about myself. He just went out there and he kept building Walmart, which is like also...
01:15:24
Speaker
Very funny that that's like just a button. You just flipped the build Walmart button on every day. But it's another element of time washing machine to see him talking about this in the 90s. Because this is also something people say is like uniquely a Gen Z thing and then uniquely a Gen Alpha thing of like the narcissism, right? Like every generation says that the generation below is like the narcissistic generation, right? This was said about the baby boomers as well.
01:15:48
Speaker
I don't know. I feel like it's probably actually important for someone who might feel lost or, you know, someone who's like dealing with the fact that they're in a wheelchair and like, you know, whatever. Like, I'm just thinking about, you know, okay, let me...
01:16:04
Speaker
give this more personal context. So I have type 1 diabetes. I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when I was 15 years old, and this was a really scary experience. And it was actually important to me at the time to know that other people had had it and like gone on to like be successful and live like successful lives and do the things they wanted to do.
01:16:24
Speaker
And, you know, some of the people that everybody was telling me, like, oh, did you know so-and-so had diabetes, like, were not that inspiring. like everybody Like, everybody at all the pediatric diabetes clinics wanted to tell me, like, oh, did you know Nick Jonas has diabetes? And I was like, just kill me. I don't want to be Nick Jonas. But, I mean, at the same time, like, yeah, that was good to know. Like, it's not for FDR. FDR is dead.
01:16:45
Speaker
This isn't his grave site. This is you just totally missing the whole point. And this idea that, really, Roosevelt is this champion of denial like that also doesn't make any sense helen do you want me to make all of this make sense i'm so excited to show you the picture that is at the top of his new york times obituary okay wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute okay so this photo which was included in his obituary is him in a wheelchair
01:17:18
Speaker
Now, i want to emphasize, I kept this secret from Helen, but I didn't just do that because I desired to use this guy's disability as a twist.
01:17:30
Speaker
He did this too. Do you remember that interview we watched? There was no wheelchair, right? He did countless appearances on TV, gave speeches, all that sort of thing. And it was a precondition that his wheelchair not be visible.
01:17:45
Speaker
Hmm. He doesn't discuss being in a wheelchair in his column. He never wrote about the Americans with Disabilities Act, the foundation of legal protections for disabled people in the U.S. He kept this a secret in exactly the way that FDR did. When he's writing about FDR, he's writing about himself.
01:18:07
Speaker
But he thinks he's not writing about himself because he's practicing denial. Yeah, exactly. You get it. You see how all this ties together. And i found all these columns by people who were like, oh, he was an inspiration to me as a disabled journalist. But to be honest, for some reason, I had to go look up what disability he had. I didn't even i didn't even know.
01:18:34
Speaker
Or like, I found an op-ed on a website for people with spinal damage talking about how sad it was that he'd kept this concealed his whole life and making exactly the point that, you know, he could have helped people by being visible instead of concealing all this.
01:18:53
Speaker
The first time I learned that he was actually disabled, having read this book cover to cover, was when I tried to look up his relationship with Donald Trump, and I found Donald Trump mocking him for his disability.
01:19:06
Speaker
That makes his misunderstanding of the argument for depicting FDR in a wheelchair like much sadder. Because it's not the just generic conservative impulse to just not bother to learn it, right? Like, i you know, i would expect from, you know, William F. Buckley writing about this, like, how did he come to this position on, like, what the people on the other side of the debate want? Well, he just didn't bother to really think about it and just like, oh, they probably think some stupid shit like this, right?
01:19:35
Speaker
But this is clearly something he's grappled with a lot, and he's come to this pretty self-loathing position. This also like casts a new light on the dude who's like, no, you have to go to group therapy.
01:19:48
Speaker
No, I'm in denial. I'm practicing denial, right? Okay, but like, Cherry on top of that, extremely funny for the New York Times to then run his obituary with a picture of him in a wheelchair, where the wheelchair is extremely visible. Like, but also, like, that's the one thing where I feel like, okay, I actually do think they probably, like, I do think that's in bad taste to do that. Like,
01:20:13
Speaker
an obituary right i don't know like there's there's a difference between like like i do think an obituary is a place where you should probably think about like what does the person who's dead actually want or like would have wanted right as opposed to the monument fdr that we're talking about right so extremely funny that the new york times just managed to do it again i just the worst to ever do it like oh my god what a newspaper I don't know. I look at this photo and it makes me so sad.
01:20:43
Speaker
Not because he's in a wheelchair, but because seeing him in it when you so rarely see him in it, when you're like looking through photos. This is one of the very few photos ever published of him where you can tell that he's in a wheelchair.
01:20:59
Speaker
Like it gives him a sense of vulnerability it makes me think about the inner pain that he must have experienced through decades decades of studiously hiding this yeah but he doesn't want us to think of it as inner pain so i'm gonna move quickly past that and go like yeah this guy's a dipshit chud you want to do fag ratings let's do fag ratings On this show, we use the world's most advanced system for the measurement of bigotry.
Bigotry Scale and Columnist Role
01:21:30
Speaker
We rate each of our subjects on a three-part scale with a number from one to five for each. In exceptional cases, we might go up to a six or down to a zero.
01:21:39
Speaker
First, how ferocious are they? Second, how arrogant are they? Third, how gullible are they? Okay, so ferocity, i feel, is like pretty low.
01:21:51
Speaker
I don't get the sense. I mean, like he's a race scientist, so I'm not saying that he's not ferocious, but he doesn't seem to have really.
01:22:03
Speaker
wow I guess you said he did boost like going to war. in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like he's got a pretty bloodthirsty politics, he but he just seems like a little too lazy to have really like put up big numbers in ferocity, if you know what I mean, right?
01:22:22
Speaker
Like I'm thinking like a two. I think I'll go for a three based on the vociferous support for Israel and specifically Israel's oppression of Palestinians.
01:22:35
Speaker
Okay, arrogance has got to be a bit higher. I don't think I can actually go up to a five because I definitely don't think a five. I think there's too much insecurity to it. There's a good amount of insecurity, which like that can be contributing to arrogance. But I think also like like he was an op ed columnist.
01:22:53
Speaker
It's a little bit of a goes with the territory type situation. like I think I think he gets to a four. I think i'm going to go with a three. There's just so much self doubt I see in him.
01:23:04
Speaker
So gullibility, each of our subjects has a role in the production of bigotry. A higher gullibility score means that they're inhabiting that role without any awareness of doing so, while a low score means they're hyper-aware of their role. So I guess first we should say, like, what is his role in the production of bigotry?
01:23:21
Speaker
And it's kind of the role that a lot of op-ed columnists have. I think to kind of launder more extreme ideas into the mainstream, and to provide a model for how you incorporate just wretched nonsense into polite discourse, right?
01:23:35
Speaker
The average person might want to go around and say, we got to do something about there's not enough white babies around and there's too many brown babies around and how do we fix that? But that sounds bad. You can't be saying that in polite society. Luckily, what you can say is I'm worried about endemic intermarriage and demographic collapse, right?
01:23:54
Speaker
Like that won't, you know, get you in trouble. So, well, it might get you in trouble on some of those loony left college campuses as one person with, ah as one Morton DeWitt pointed out.
01:24:05
Speaker
And he was really good at that. He was really good at writing that line. For example, look at that one time that he got married. in trouble the trouble really just being like a call from his editor it only happened once in decades he knows what's up yeah i think he's a one honestly because i think he's aware of what he's doing yeah i think he's a solid one oh my god all the little dog whistles and just like winks at the camera being like by the way my friend here does a little bit of race science Our little canceled chess club where, you know, the race scientists like to hang out. And if you hang out with us, you don't have to be canceled, but it helps.
01:24:45
Speaker
He's so annoying. Any closing thoughts? No, this guy sucks and he's sad and I hate him, but he makes me sad. Yeah. Kind of a depressing story.
01:24:57
Speaker
He doesn't want us to be sad for him. So, you know, we can instead just laugh at him. God, what an idiot. All right. Well, bye.
01:25:11
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. Do it live.
01:25:26
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! listen, you can write a loving name. Let's get... Let's stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
01:25:44
Speaker
some level of masochism.